Wheel! Of! FISH!

Two-Gun Go, Joe!

2002-04-01 - 8:17 p.m.

After staying up and experiencing first-hand the magic of these wonderful new packaged stimupills they've started selling at the gas station [a proprietary blend of ephedra extract, kola nut extract, capsicum, ginseng, Sida Cordifolia, and citrus aurantium -- the more you know!] whilst toiling through the years of the First World War in the company of William Randolph Hearst, whose life I am slowly becoming certain I experienced a few decades ago (which would explain my fascination with yellow journalism and ostentatious glitz), I have finally hammered out the 90th page of my protothesis, and now I rest and recuperate while the bespectacled god turns his owlish gaze on my life's ambition and lovingly carves it into ribbons thin enough to read a blender warranty through.

Yes. One sentence. English has provided us with many gifts, in the forms of expanding clauses and flexible punctuation, which allow us to make one single sentence run on for longer than most marriages.

Three days, I have given myself, until I cast my gaze on that hateful chunk of facts and fallacy and footnotes once more. Three lovely daze. Today was spent in quiet contemplation of the way of revenge and the power of the pistol.

I decided to renew my juju with a slow flow of mojo ... two-gun, that is.

I'm still the victim of a civil war between a pugnacious force of guerilla stimulants and the body's natural hormonal reaction to an absence of rest, respite, and REM.

This, however, only enhanced my normally heavenly levels of delight during today's triple feature.

"Desperado" came first, because I had to watch it after listening to the soundtrack 53 times. The soundtrack, by the way, comes with the highest possible recommendation, particularly "Canción Del Mariachi" and "Bulletproof" by Los Lobos, and "White Train" by Tito & Tarantula. The movie is a brilliant series of fade cuts and wild jumps and bright blazing colors and brilliant background characters and eccentric, bloody cartoonish violence. And lots and lots of guns. So many guns. Marvelous guns.

El Mariachi, I must say, impresses me more with his purity and fluidity of style and mastery of the two-gun form than any of these Orientals with their strange Eastern philosophies and Zen forms and cheapjack swirling longcoats. El Mariachi fights in a leather mariachi jacket, and makes that ridiculous bit of haberdashery look unbearably cool. He snaps his pistols with his wrists as if cracking a whip with each shot, and he dives backwards off buildings, firing two-handed into the torsos of his assailants on the recently-abandoned rooftop.

Frankly, Actionhero and all you other slavish devotees of that poor man's Chinese Cary Grant, Chow Yun Fat, I heartily say that I would lay better-than-even odds on El Mariachi against Chow any day of the week. Any Chow. Even the flying one from "Crouching Tiger". Although in that case I would insist that El Mariachi have his band with him, to keep things on an even keel. Chow won't do much flying with a guitar-case rocket up his tuchus.

Well, he might, but it wouldn't be a very pleasant journey.

"Father, forgive me, for I have just killed quite a few men."

After soaking in the grandeur of Robert Rodriguez' epic -- and wouldn't it be great if El Mariachi and Carolina met Jules from "Pulp Fiction" while they were walking the earth? -- I moved on to a sentimental favorite in "The Untouchables".

There's a lot of things wrong with this movie, yes. Kevin Costner is a complete wuss whose acting range is defined only in terms of volubility. Sean Connery has a terrible death scene. And there's Mounties. But even with all these flaws, I still love this movie with an intense devotion. Brian de Palma's directing is always so swooping and visually dazzling that it helps ease any problems with the acting, and the script by David Mamet is largely excellent.

I particularly love when Connery is being stalked through his house by a Capone hitman with a stilletto, and in the last room the man has skulked behind him into, he suddenly turns around holding a massive shotgun.

"Isn't that just like a wop? Bringin' a knife to a gun fight!"

I closed the evening on what is for me the penultimate high note in terms of pistoleering delight. "Tombstone". Kurt Russell for once in his life manages to deliver a performance that is both intimidating and puppy-dog-eyed, each at the appropriate times. God-DAMN, he has some good moments.

"You gonna do somethin', or just stand there and bleed?"

But of course, it's Val Kilmer who carries that film. Which would normally be the gravest insult I could think of, since I've never even remotely enjoyed Val in any other performance. But he managed to capture Doc Holliday so perfectly that he has ingrained himself into my consciousness eternally as the penultimate rogue. For the love of God, I put the man's catchphrase on my business card.

"I'm your huckleberry."

And of course, there's the gunplay. The shots off the horses, Doc Holliday's quickdraw kill of Johnny Ringo (He DAMN sure ain't no daisy, Doc!), the up-close and personal gunnings of all those damnable nameless outlaws who we love to see go down in bloody and dire defeat simply because we know they pissed off the wrong Earp.

Ah, I've been enriched. Hot lead flies thickly through my veins and burbles into my cortex, and neurons flare wildly at each other from around corners, leaping out from the depths of the synaptic gaps with a neurotransmitter series in each ganglia, firing wild thoughts off into the great abyss.

Americans have a real problem with guns, greater than that of any civilized nation. And it's obvious that it's because we're all fantasy-deprived children raised with a cornucopia of violent imagery which finds its purest form in the barking flare of the gun, that magic wand that kills with grace and style and loudness.

So the only intellectual response is to combat this by immersing yourself in the Way of the Gun, and allowing it to thereby ascend to the realm of pure aesthetics.

"SEE the grace with which he smoothly skins that smokewagon ..."

"HEAR the draconic click as the metal sets of the spark which sets off the ROAR of dragon's breath"

"SMELL the cordite"

"FEEL the body flying ten feet backwards through a window."

Ahh.

Spiritually enriching, no?

...

No.

-Wheel

"Stop him, you fools! He's getting away!"