Introduction to "A POSTMODERN MOVIE MADE IN ROME AFTER CHRIST"
The Need for
Evolution and How the Romans Buried the Solutions
"A PostModern Movie Made in Rome After
Christ," an hysterical and disturbing slim volume, a stage play within a
screenplay, about Roman Gladiators in 33 AD. The narrative enfolds the
action of the Roman past within a film crew's production of a movie
about the gladiators.
The Manufactured life has fractured real life into random skirmishes
and pseudoscopic strife
The Producer looks down on the training ground. Below him, muscle
bound actors and body-builders are tight-packed into gladiator armor,
waiting for the lighting crew to do the final check. The mother of pearl
coated forged steel annealed with spikes, armament and pikes, sends out
a sheen of lights, on oiled bodies:
The Producer has two cell phones to his
ears, winks and
blinks and thinks this is all of it, almost weeping for lost
opportunity. The set is blue frame
against dirt ground, "The digital coliseum a post production nightmare
but at least it's a different budget," he says into one phone, "The
oddity of standing here, budgets in arrear." "But wait! Real life is like this,"
he says into the other, out with a banged wang and a
whimper," then to himself as he's waiting, a phone to each ear,
"forced into the manufactured life that perpetuates war and strife
as an economic dominant political device. Send in the standing army,
send in the government educated scholars, holler innocence, plaster
dollars, it'll be all right, they'll fight yet, bet, we'll manufacture a
reason. Treason! This megabuck movie, for one..."
Looking up at the bleachers full of
extras, the audience of the stage set, he kisses into one phone, shuts
it off and pockets it, saying into the other phone: "There
must be more to it than this? Scientific tests, evaluation, the
apparatus of synthetic elation, in our cups and cones on portable
telephones, looking down at the gladiators' training rehearsal as we
toss back beers and smoke and toke waste and paste our insides with
manufactured and extruded fats, fibrillating our great nation of nerves
and veins, ah, the vanity! The sheer inanity of our profanity creates
word walls around the very things that would save us."
we are all parasites on
the host country of our unaligned minds
A highly rated assistant
director and two producers were assigned to fill the bleachers. Naples
slums were combed, the tonsured extras were paid an additional fifty
dollars each, good money to that portion of Naples. Friends, pseudo
Romans, countrymen and women had been sitting on the cold hard marble
since seven A.M. (The entrance crush was filmed yesterday.) The woman
were dressed in holiday best dresses and togas, hair braided and
wrapped, many tucked with posies, now looking droopy, daisy petals
falling and roses curling their fragrant velvet against the damp braids.
Hot humid sun in the morning, guaranteeing those long shadow angles that
look so good on film, but are hell to match in editing. Then the wind,
practically hurricane gales, and now the chill air, sun long lost to low
clouds which squalled a cold shower, shortly before the lion. The
continuity man was ringing his hands, recommending a wrap for the day,
when the rain abruptly quit. They quickly decided to go for it. Everyone
was looking frazzled after a long day in the bleachers, swilling this
year's red, lots of tannin, togas stained, but a mile and a half of
crowd cutaways went a long way toward assuring great crowd footage.
Eight assistant and assistant assistant directors are now screaming
through portable megaphones at the crowds. Pepping them up, revving and
reviving them, prepping them for the final gladiator scene. One
assistant assistant director took his end, the south east end, through a
wave pattern to get them synchronized. "Now, everyone, thumbs up!" He
screams through the megaphone, and ten thousand thumbs stick up in the
sultry grey air while cameras whirr away large millimeter sprockets
rocketing dollars. "Thumbs, DOWN," he screams, and like a slow motion
dream ten thousand thumbs stick down, down to toga, down to marble, down
to dirt, down to packed earth.
Excerpts from "A PostModern Movie
Made in Rome After Christ" appear in print in
"The Tantric Cookbook of Nini
Tantrini."
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"The Tantric Cookbook" Now
