Troopers of the World, there is one Bug you can not beat: the Bug inside: STARSHIP TROOPERS, NAKED LUNCH, SCROOGED, GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933

(The following was written whilst whacked out of my gourd on withdrawal sickness (withdrawal: the best drug in the world) coupled to flu-like symptoms and twelveteen shots of knockoff brand Robotussin while trapped at brother Fred's house for Xmas. Phoenix is an armed camp, your majesty, in a deep unconscious trance born of desert wind chill, plentitude, and cordite. I was gonna scuttle it but wanted something to run next to my AMY review to provide the proper balance/perspective, to take any buzzkill taste out, like HEAD after LOST WEEKEND. So take it for what it is, a deep Xmas poem riddled with diseased insect sci fi poetic film references, enigmatic but revealingly pretentious typos, and a profound realization borne from watching NAKED LUNCH and STARSHIP TROOPERS off Fred's savvy Tivo on Xmas at 3 AM (after SCROOGED) And getting it now - As Bill Murray so egocentrically says "I get it now" Three films! One's about a man who has a religious experience after disgruntled employees put LSD into his Xmas gin; one's a literalization of opiate withdrawal's 'Kafka high' rabbit hole, wherein one's typewriter takes on insect features and moans when you press its throbbing keys; the third finds giant insect aliens learning our secrets through drinking our brains like milkshakes (instead of vice versa, as in LUNCH). In other words, beware your own response to the thing you squash, for you squash yourself next, with your giant arachnid claw! 1/27/16

-- If yrt terllin; me that there's a difference, a fundamd,emta;a diffferemce. netwntwwme starsjip stroppp[ers amd Naked lunch, er lust, yr a lawyer and and I;m tellin hyou so

Put it another way - if there IS a difference between STARSHIT TROOPERS AND NAKED LUNCH I MEAN LUST then it exists only in the minds of MINOLTA, a Japanese company, think about that, mr fareqwell to manzzianar,  mr sm,arty pants pbeamnenk vzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzn
IN SHORT THIS IS MY DAY AFTER XMAS SPECIAL:

Return of the Insectoid Meta Gaze (i.e. the projector watches you watch its projection with its 3-color projector eyes from top: WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), THE VISITOR (1973),  STARSHIP TROOPERS (eyes as projector beams), SCROOGED ("no eye in team" - eye in the glass)

STARSHIP TROOPERS NOTES: MILLIONTH VIEWING WHILE ROBOTRIPPING ALSO ON TEA WITHDRAWAL AND SERIOUS DTS, ENOUGH TO MAKE MURRAY'S SCROOGE LOSE HIS FRICKIN' HaIR AND CONSIDER AN EYE IN THE TEAM CUP A DRINKABLE ANOMALY BUT NOTHING TO GET HUNG ABOUT BY COMPARISON

Would you like to know more?

There's no correct answer, for we're going to, KNOW MORE, that is, regardless.

Starship Troopers - 1997

This post - present

Regardless: the whole terrifying endurance test of full awareness is coming. Strapped into the conveyor belt of fascist indoctrination as snug as if we were pinned to the tunnel floor by an arachnoid claw, awaiting the slow gurgling arrival of a brain bug on the 3D screen God or parents have convinced us is space-time continuum permanence, its row of inky black arachnid eyes beholding us in patterns similar to our urine-froth, noticed while gazing deeply at a party house toilet bowl, (and then later in the beer from the keg or the foam on your highball)  and forgotten, filed away under layers alcohol and potty training cover memories, now returned with a probe to suck our brains dry as a keg and we screaming all the while on the human conveyor belt: stop stop! At least hit pause!

Or PULSE

From top: NAKED LUNCH, STARSHIP, ENDER'S GAME

But the "like to  know more" button is hit again and again, purse-taken, for the brain bug WOULD like to know, like how to SWAT GOD and it knows just where to go for that knowledge, knows just what fleshy tendril to hit the button with, to slurp the brain slushy cup dry down to the ice with, rattling in its spinal column 'til clatter shatter and scatter.

Naked Lunch

Life is but Death's slow yawn, once it ends, he regains composure
does betwixt the columns flit
like some gay brain donor fancy free flitter
hitting the snooze button
agan and a LITE to NO MORE
button
NO MORE!!
LAW
NO MORE butTON, (is the hand that makes) WOULD YOU LIKE TO...please, NO MORE!!!

Starship Troopers

The NO MORE Know More LITE button (the hand that heals)
hit again ("Kiki come and see the parrots with me") LAW no more, slurps your soul's slug white glop from the gurgling straws pushed down into your sleeping head, my love, the sound of your own animal snore,
crashing like waves of liquid lead,
along Poe's obsidian shore, my little lovey glovey...

Vot ISS da LAW?

O'er the Grampian Hills beyond beyond, Harryhausen stops time to move another dinosaur.

(and once again, says weather on the one, we have cool conditions)

cool as the keeper
of the LAW
hung from a tree, his beard glued for hours,
a flag to from its prideful fascist twisting flee,

Weimar lock stock to Hollywood's larder, never believing Breen's censors could swastika snip their decadent art down even there.


The best thing about Verhoeven's ingenious and endlessly rewatchable masterpiece is the idea of an all service DNA imprint manual for fascist military mobilization. In America we didn't really get these until WW2. America's devout isolationism reflected greatly in all sorts of bitter anti-war tracts instead (such as the forgotten man pilots of John Monk Saunders) as far back as the easily seeable GUNG HO, or B-17 STORY OF A FLYING FORTRESS, with the end of high school and the end of other various key moments in life shared by the representatives of labor (lion, roughneck), intelligence (scarecrow, gestapo), and passion/drive or heart (tin man, flight school) and the way all of the Earth has been homogenized into a tract that could be at home as a Japanese anime, a Nazi recruitment film, an Army or National Guard recruitment film, or an anti-war satire of any genre or age. Verhoeven's sense of irony is very Dutch and very abstract, coming from an, how you say, "occupied" country with nothing but windmills and spies, easily tromped across like a neighbor's lawn to get to the hated French.


But this could also even be a movie for and about bugs--"we're in it for the species, people." We've been at war with those suckers since the dawn of time. Only when we're finally ready to start eating them in force will we have a ticker's tape of a chance. Children, I was on the front line in the war against the Japanese... beetle, that is, in the 70s and if it wasn't for DDT they might have won. I'd get a dollar per jar, all captured and dumped into soapy water, until the jar turned dark yellow and the squirming stopped. Quite a lucrative occupation for an eight year-old during a major PA infestation. Would you like to know more about the slight itchy pain when they dug onto my childhood fingers, the difficulty in getting them to let go? Did I learn a hint of masochism even then? I lay at night with a ten year-old's imagination conjuring turning the cute blonde girl Susan Salter in my class into an Amazon queen of the school and me her slave, crouching naked at her feet in chains. Weird but true...  I had my queen, and I her submissive consort, fit to die after mating if I ever found out what mating entailed.

Denise Richards, nailed to the cross of her passive viewing position - STARSHIP TROOPERS

My red state brother and his gun crazy family and friends as well as my liberal bleeding heart pinko east coast friends all agree on one thing, STARSHIP gets better with each viewing. No matter how many times you see it. Be it a satire or a genuine (as Heinlein apparently meant it) call towards dissolving of borders in favor of one global and eugenically fine-tuned communal military spirit, blessed with a conveniently abstracted enemy, an insect of the sort that may not be as evil as the higher ups paint (for a NWO hangs together by its extra-terrestrial foe, as Reagan said), at least if there's any ENDER'S GAME sequels, which I doubt. (its losses transcend comprehension: $100 Million Dead!)

The little tiny bugs inside your money

And the Song WE'RE IN THE MONEY.
I saw this time Ginger Rogers and company as sprites, bugs if you will, within the money, moving with the tick tock military march rhythm, like a click clock salvia divinorum revolution through the space-time continuum thread counts, as literal gold diggers --tick burrowing into the gold of coins themselves, literally little sprites 'in the money' behind every coin, the way the green fairy could be singing "I'm in the absinthe."

Where did the phrase 'in the money' come from and what are the similes 'in the cool of the evening' - 'in clover' - 'in love' not 'in the love' though, so more like some bumper crop, we're in the cotton, or we're in the game.

a money sprite oscillates her 12 legs to hypnotize unwary prey

For life is but Death's brief yawn, the chasm of blank urinal stare from which infant to elder crawling towards bathroom like flogged Christ doth breathe but brief; we in our robes like Lebowski, like Peter, Paul, and Prokofiev on his week off are but shadows that for awhile, while the byang root tea arrived on time, were comported almost like the barbarity that passes for civilized, but when the tea stopped we still had to fulfill because that of yawning Xmas mail irregularities chasm of need, that King Kong Emperor Jones clanging on his hollow huffalumpagus skin drum, chanting madly to the bloodstream like an anguished and unassailed suitor, begging for alms and change and unchanging, and the brief candle onceness.

Not getting the cosmic joke makes the joke on you, and that's the whole joke--it is all there is, that mirthless angry laugh as the flames consume Richard III, or any angry and despotic ego unwilling to surrender its uniqueness and become just another wAVE IN THE SEA-SKY CONTINUum rather than a separate and superior cloud. The mark inside is the one mark you cannot beat, would you like to know more, you brain bug behemoth tottering towards me now in the guise of a pit-bull?

Now, in the guise of the pit bull.
tomorrow the guise of the floor where she lay.
Form of an avalanche,
Form of a water glass
Form of the sailor who's drunk at sea and sleeps all day.

Booze's bars closed down hard upon him ("kerPLUNK" was the sound they made)
and with a drowning howl did he comply to the exit (hurrpy up plays- iTS's time)
and proceeded to haunt Davy Jones' Liquors, for it opened always to him.
Penny-eyed and seaweed wreathed, the early morning sunshine
on bottles glistening like DEEP morphine pearls
til scraping enough off his barnacle billfold
bought him a pint pocket of air... just enough to get him up to speed
a messy, sloppy speed... and
how he breathed this song:

Now, in the guise of a lilly
tomorrow the guise of the hay.
Form of a whiskey jar,
Form of an after bar,
Form of a drunk on the concrete, prostrate...
His saliva as thick as the oceans
to the tiny ass gremlins
and sprites in a sidewalk black chewing gum circle,
drown as he drools in his sleep.
(and were their concrete pock mark impressions on his cheeks when at last he arose?) 

Probably, man. He can't feel it.
Even drunk he comes to know more than we'd like to remember to remember ourselves.
Click the 'like' button not, the "to know more" or to click the snooze button, or click it to yourself, Bill. and member dis
dose
Remember me, Cloris in DEADLY.

Cuz of course only the Spectral Relief Pitcher of Self Annihilation so terrifies our Babe Ruth ego he finally says, here Pee-Wee (the nonegoic amorphous open-hearted self, the one vulnerable in its generosity, easily swindled by sad-eyed strait waif who keep the change tossed, and bring no fat goose to no Cratchett) you go ahead and bat this once and I'll sit out the inning, then, the mighty Pee-Wee lets fly and sends it out of the park, and the Pitcher vanishes! Freedom.

And if we've been a team dominated by its needy spotlight hog insecure star Babe Ruth ego all season, keeping Buddhist Pee-Wee on the bench permanently, then once Pee-Wee hits the homer, Babe Ruth comes running back to the field to take the credit for not taking credit. He needs to take that spotlight again and rant about how "we get it now."

He gets it now... no wait, NOW.... wait...

"I get it now," says Murray at the prolonged wearying climax of SCROOGED.

That ending has really dated badly but we used to LOVE it. In the 80s it was the kind of thing people just didn't say. This was the era before Dr. Phil and Oprah, before children became the equals of their parents, when they were meant to be heard only in the basement in a voice that wouldn't carry, until the haunted house was ready for the parents to be led through one at a time blindfolded, or failing that such time as we were called for one at a time to show some new trick. This was a time when therapy was still a shameful secret and a kid had to commit suicide successfully before his parents would consider it. That Leo Buscaglia love trip was strictly 70s naïveté. Scrape 'em off, Claire--that was the 80s rallying cry. Arnold Schwarzenegger was our spiritual leader in so many ways, steam roller paving the Hollywood politicians trail blazed by the mighty Paul Ronald Reagan Bunyan (though everyone knew her as Nancy), in a backwards Terminator motion, icing the Sarah Connor pro-drug 60s-70s with the kind of "NO" bumper stickers that Lennon worked so hard to flank with a "K" and a "W" in YELLOW SUBMARINE.