Glorious Revolutions Series

READ: The Whole Series To Present In Its "Glory" (reverse order)

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I still remember when the Wall fell. November 9, 1989. If you were alive, you remember.
A newscaster on the television, his image warped and tattered by static around the edges, was talking about the end of nuclear threat. It was a revolution of culture, some said. Then President Reagan appeared, and took credit for the fall of Communism.
Revolutions leave an indelible stamp on those lived through them. But how did a falling wall end the Cold War, let alone stanch the tide of violent revolution? This is the kind of rhetoric we are fed. We’re given the pieces to this puzzle, but never told what image they’re supposed to make.
If it wasn’t already painfully obvious in 1986, it certainly is now. No one should have thought that violent uprising was a thing of the past. The legacy of globalization has generally been more revolutions, not fewer. It’s as if, with every generation, we forget the lessons learned by those that came before. This “nightmare of history,” to refer to Joyce’s famous quote, calls to mind several essential questions. Are revolutionaries incapable of hearing the ghosts of the past? Is this forgetting itself the nature of revolutions? Finally, how can we keep others from using our own hopes and ideas against us? These questions are hard to answer, and any analysis is likely to sound irrelevant to those that have lived through the mute horror of violent conflict.
Still, we must wrestle with this legacy if we are to have any hope of freeing ourselves from it. The cycle of loss and vengeance itself is a crucible for revolutionary ideology.

Read The Series

What Is A Gonzomentary?

A Gonzomentary is a film or video that combines objectivity with pre-scripted fictitious events, or that creates fictitious characters but presents them through outside media as realistic in order to obscure a distinction between reality and fiction within the story.

Gonzomentary is a marriage of two words:

CLARK!

Gonzo, a type of subjective journalism that favors style over fact to achieve accuracy and often uses personal experiences and emotions to provide context for the topic or event being covered.
The word Gonzo was first used in 1970 to describe an article by Hunter S. Thompson, who later popularized the style. The term has since been applied to other subjective artistic endeavors.
Mockumentary is a type of film or television show in which fictitious events are presented in documentary format.

Plus, it sounds better than Gonzo Mocko. Or uh. Mockugonzoism. Because then there will be Post-Mockugonzoism. And that's just stupid.

Nevertheless, this means that a “Gonzomentary” is something so convoluted that it’s almost sometimes nearly impossible to even describe what it may or may not be maybe without inventing a new language for the purpose of translating it from another alien language which only surviving Atlanteans can interpret into English (but must first learn English) then unfortunately losing the original concept in translation. The only way you can experience it fully is to buy products from us. 


Or at least watch some of the initial episodes, supposing you have an attention span that's greater than a goldfish or small rodent. Here's the pilot: 

Living Your Myth 1: Mishima And Dying For Your Convictions

By James Curcio
Living Your Myth series.

To die for an idea is stupid, people say. Ideas aren't real.

Nowadays, the posture of choice is disengagement. Sure, we'll discuss ideas. Especially if it has any hope of getting us laid. But commitment to an idea or an ideal is so... passe. That was something that died with the 20th century, along with a lot of things that we can happily say we've left to rot in the past. Intellectual is a synonym with ineffectual. Art is a pretense by definition. The highest art now is art that makes fun of itself, or so says the co-creator of just such a piece.

Well, I've talked a great deal on this site about the ways that ideas-as-myths are living as much as we are. The ways that they enter into the world, enter into "reality," especially through our actions. The ways they real-ize ideas, and how we re-ify the world through them.

Sounds like a lot of bullshit ideas to me.

A writer deals in words. Words symbolize ideas. They can evoke emotions. But what's in a word, really? When is it time for action, and what is that action?

What is the greatest act a person can make? Is it the greatest sacrifice? And how many of you think your ideas are worth dying for? Certainly the suicide bomber has been convinced of this. We look away in discomfort or snub our noses at such fanatics. Mostly, I'd say, rightly so. They've been duped. They've been sold a unicorn and paid for it with flesh blood and mortar, and not all of it was theirs to sacrifice.

But there's another side to this posture of disengagement and apathy. It turns us to good cattle, good consumers. Good slaves who do our master's bidding because it is easier that way, easier than challenging and possibly facing death as the repercussion of our actions. Maybe this was the future that Yukio Mishima saw for his dying Empire; a future so bereft of honor and dignity that the only thing he could do in response was shove a blade through his innards. The death of a warrior, not a writer. His suicide could then be seen as a final transformation: writer into warrior. Thinker into actor. But this transformation is only complete when it resonates with a culture. When those ripples reach outwards across the years, transform entire civilizations. We all know the power of a martyr.

This was not Mishima's fate. He was a man in so many ways out of step with his time, a relic. To mix metaphors, if a man can become a metaphor, he was the final gasp of a dying mythology. The modern narrative on suicide, even in Japan, is not what it was. To the West, his was the death of a coward. We even sigh sadly at the thought of Hunter S Thompson blowing his brains out, a sound not unlike a book dropping heavily to the floor, or so said his son Juan. What poetry, the final sound for a writer to make. A book falling to the floor. Or perhaps Juan was doing a little myth-making of his own.