Muck Muckson and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
May 18th, 2008
Marcy and I arrived in San Ignacio, in the Cayo district of Belize near the Guatemalan border, by overland bus, and proceeded straight to the closest Internet cafe because our weekly About.com newsletter was overdue. That last plugged-in task taken care of, we chatted with a couple of Castaneda-quoting hippies looking to reenact Burroughs’ and Ginsberg’s Yage Letters– but all they’d been able to find so far were a few run-of-the-mill cow-patty mushrooms.
A wiry woman in a Jeep saved us: this was Phyllis, sole proprietor of the Ek Tun jungle lodge, and we were her only guests. On the bumpy drive to Ek Tun, we learned that Phyllis had theories: enzymes, raw food, Roswell, twenty-twelve, nine-eleven, you name it. We passed overgrown Mayan ruins that nobody gave a damn about — the entire countryside was littered with pre-Columbian artifacts, but only Xunantanich and Tikal had been excavated. Phyllis told us about a recent find, a massive city much larger than Tikal, and about the Mitchell-Hedges skull, an enigmatic crystal object found in the vicinity in 1926. According to Phyllis, the quartz skulls were likely to be ancient machinery constructed by the citizens of Atlantis as energy sources or time travel devices.
We took this in, met Phyllis’ dog Killer and her monkey Monkey, and spent the next day rubber-tubing, drinking Belkin beer, and looking for tucans.
That night, our host handed us a hand-drawn treasure map, and we were either too excited or too drunk to resist: we would go and find us a time-travellin’ crystal skull of our own! Here’s a scan of Phyllis’s map:
And off we went, ready for our whip-smacking jungle adventure. To misappropriate Francis Ford Coppola: we went into the jungle, there weren’t enough of us; we had no compass or flares or machetes or any equipment at all, and little by little, we went insane.
Phyllis’s map, it turned out, was completely useless in a place so fertile that any path grows over within minutes after it’s been cleared. Later, we found out that it had driven previous guests to extremes — one couple had apparently ruined all their possessions when hacking through the underbrush and swimming across the river seemed like the only way to safety.
Somewhere around the two-hour mark of our odyssey, we experienced a genuine Blair Witch moment when we inadvertently returned to a marker we thought we had left far behind. Darkness was coming, and the dense canopy of trees didn’t offer a hint of the sun’s direction. There wasn’t a village in miles and miles, and the cacophony of unidentifiable animal noises seemed to grow louder by the minute.
It took another two and a half hours of sweaty, confused, and increasingly despairing hiking before we managed, by deduction and pure luck, to find a path that led back to the cabin. Gone were the dreams of Spielbergian pop archeology and shiny artifacts. There was no crystal skull, and our Indiana Jones fantasy had turned into Aguirre, Wrath of God. We knew Werner Herzog was right: “We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess.” Here’s my mad Kinski impression:
Obviously, none of this would have happened to Indiana Jones, who, in the opening sequence of the new installment, loudly proclaims: “Compass! I need a compass! North! West! South!” — “East!”, Stalin’s favorite rapier-wielding psychic (Cate Blanchett) adds. Then, Indy braves the usual cliffs, waterfalls, ancient riddles, quicksand pits, convoy chases, outraged natives, sinister villains, creepy crawlies, and even an honest-to-god mushroom cloud. It’s a 100% recycled piece of superfluous brand-name fun, removed by rapidly multiplying levels of metafictional cross-references from anything resembling the vital exhilaration and mortal dread of even the most mundane mid-vacation adventure.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Steven Spielberg, 2008. ***
Apocalypto
December 1st, 2006
In February of 2005, I was in the Guatemalan jungle, on top of what archaeologists have designated Temple IV in the ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Tikal, standing next to the chamber where the priest-king used to gobble magic mushrooms. Sound Tribe Sector 9 was playing on the iPod.
You’ve seen the view from Temple IV before: it’s the jungle hideout where the rebels regroup for their attack on the Death Star in Star Wars. Tikal was a city designed specifically to align with the Maya’s advanced astronomical knowledge. Rumor has it Sector 9 arrange their setlists according to the Mayan calendar. At the base of the pyramid, our guide Daniello was waiting with far-out theories about the end of the Long Count on December 21, 2012.
Back in New York (a city specifically designed to allow immigrants to make it to work on time), I played around with a bizarre screenplay called Twenty-Twelve for a couple of weeks. Then there was news of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, and I read Daniel Pinchbeck’s follow-up to Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, a daring work that combines personal history with way-out ideas about the nature of time, the emergent noosphere, crop circles, the theories of Rudolf Steiner and Jose Arguelles, and the end of the Mayan Long Count. I shelved Twenty-Twelve.
Tonight I saw Apocalypto, and I’m absolutely dying to tell you what I thought–but Disney embargoed all reviews until the December 8 release, and you know how it is: when the Mouse asks, you don’t refuse–and you definitely wouldn’t want to get Mr. Gibson angry. The most I dare say is this: Apocalypto has nothing to do whatsoever with anything that interested me about Mayan culture in the first place, and Marcy might be wrong about Babel. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll bite my tongue for a week and leave you with some photos from Tikal and a video of Sector 9 playing Tokyo:
I’d love to know what Daniello has to say about Apocalypto.
Apocalypto. Mel Gibson, 2006. (No rating yet.)
[tags]sound tribe sector 9, film, mel gibson, maya, mayan calendar, time, guatemala, tikal, youtube, flickr, daniel pinchbeck, tikal, apocalypto, 2012, babel, star wars, quetzalcoatl, noosphere, rudolf steiner, jose arguelles, tokyo, crop cirlces, temple of the jaguar, temple IV, daniello, disney, mickey mouse, embargo, paramount building[/tags]
Muckworld Roundup
October 24th, 2006
In the onrush of the ever-churning hype machine, never-ending blogs, and the constant RSS-fuelled river of news, it’s hard to hold on to two or three related thoughts for much longer than it takes to hit post. To counteract the continuing blurbification of the culture at large and my head in particular, here are a few items that deserve a little more than whatever has become of Warhol’s 15 minutes.
Must-See Movies, Out Now
- Shortbus. Finally, in what has been a lackluster year at best, there are some serious contenders for film of the year. John Cameron Mitchell’s paean to post-9/11 New York is still very much in the running. Detractors like to point out the ramshackle filmmaking, but I think it adds to the film’s enormous charm. If the characters can be generous enough to share their lovers freely, shouldn’t we forgive when Mitchell crosses the line once or twice?
- The Queen. A more perfect piece of filmmaking than Shortbus, and only slightly less daring. It’s only a matter of time before I go see my girlfriend Lilibet again.
Must-See Movies, Coming Soon
- Pan’s Labyrinth. Guillermo del Toro’s masterful fairy tale won’t be out until after Christmas, but this is one film you should feel free to get excited about early.
- The Host. Ditto for Bong Joon-ho’s riveting marriage of monster movie and art house film. Scheduled for release in January, and I’ll be first in line to see it again.
- Woman on the Beach. No distributor, no release date, but I keep thinking about the sly wit and seemingly accidental elegance of this movie.
- Volver. Almodovar’s latest opens Friday, and I’ll leave the superlatives to Marcy.
- INLAND EMPIRE. My ankle’s not swollen any more, but Lynch still has a hold on my imagination. He’s releasing the film himself so perhaps an uncut version will arrive sometime soon.
Books
Been reading top-secret drafts of friends’ novels and J. Robert Lennon’s wildly amusing Happyland as serialized in Harper’s. I’m also halfway through Klaus Kinski’s amazing autobiography, Ich Brauche Liebe. (Of course it’s outrageous. More on this soon.) I keep encountering variations of ideas Daniel Pinchbeck presents in 2012, many of which I first heard about from Danielo at Tikal . Here’s a video of Daniel with Douglas Rushkoff. Like the snake that bites its own tail, this gets us right back to accelerating culture, Shortbus, and the permeability of a shrinking world.
Finally, a week after the paperback release, no round-up can be complete with another plug for Marcy’s stellar debut Twins. If you missed her reading at In the Flesh, I’ve got the video.
[tags]roundup, shortbus, film, coming soon, books, tikal, twins, 2012, pinchbeck, bong joon-ho, pedro almodovar, david lynch, stephen frears, john cameron mitchell, guillermo del toro, klaus kinski, j robert lennon[/tags]
