“Where do you put the Bayonet?”
-Chesty Puller, upon seeing a flamethrower for the first time.

In an effort to get myself to use this more, I’m adding a new feature: The weapon of the week. Every week I’m going to take a weapon and throw around some history, trivia, and whatever else comes to mind. Some may be meticulously researched, some may be off the top of my head. Either way, I’ll try to make it entertaining.

And with last night’s U.S. presidential election debates fresh in mind, I’m going with the Bayonet as our first weapon of the week.

Bayonets are kinda weird in that they’re an edged weapon that came about as a direct result of firearms (as opposed to say, a rapier, where introducing gunpowder was one of a handful of reasons for it’s evolution). Even as the arquebus became the musket, early guns were still single-shot weapons with short ranges and long reload times. And where they really sucked was in the defense. Muskets were good for reaching out and touching someone (by the standards of the time, anyway), but once you’d fired off your shot and surviving opponents were headed your way, life would suck.

(Note to self: find out the plural of “arquebus.” Arquebii? Arquebuses?)

Suckage was somewhat alleviated by forming mixed-use companies of musketeers and pikemen. Musketeers would fire a volley and reload while pikemen kept the enemy’s charging and ensuing suckage to a minimum. It worked, kinda, but it was clumsy and felt like it. The solution was to merge the 2 weapons.

Why they’re called bayonets is unknown for sure. Best guess I’ve heard is that they started to first crop up in Bayonne (France, not New Jersey).

The first bayonets were jammed into the musket barrel and called “plug” bayonets. Useful if you could only get off one shot, but it also meant everyone could tell that you hadn’t reloaded and weren’t planning to anytime soon (and if you had reloaded, it probably sucked almost as much to stand near you as in front of you). Some Scots called Jacobites once took advantage of British soldiers armed with plug bayonets by shooting a volley and charging. By the time the British fixed bayonets, they had a couple hundred pissed-off Scots in their midst with swords and shields, making their displeasure energetically known.

The problem: how to get the bayonet the hell out of the way so reloading could happen. The most popular method was called a socket bayonet. This was a blade attached to a twist-lock cylinder that fit over the muzzle of the musket. The blade stuck out to the side or under the muzzle, keeping out of the way of the bullet (and hopefully the hands of the gunner trying to reload.

There were other designs that cropped up over the years, which ranged from the workable (the spring-loaded bayonet, which folded under the barrel. The Chinese used a variant of this design on the AK-47 well into the 1980′s) to the bizarre (a trowel-bayonet, ostensibly designed by someone who figured soldiers would spend more time digging than fighting. While not necessarily wrong, it may well have been a case of misapplied engineering).

By the time multi-shot rifles came around, a trend cropped up of merging the bayonet with a camp knife, turning a weapon into another kind of weapon as well as a tool, because hey, you have to carry everything, and multiuse tools are always handy. The Russians went one step further and rigged up a nut-and-socket system with one of their bayonets, turning the blade and scabbard into a set of wire cutters.

So, that’s my look at the bayonet beyond the political quip. It’s been useful since they showed up, and I think it’s going to be around as long as blades and projectile or even energy weapons exist.

So, last Thursday, Madonna performed a concert at Denver’s Pepsi center. What makes it newsworthy in this instance was performing her song “Gang Bang.” The performance involved blood-splatter effects on the screen and much use of prop guns, at which point she chose to MUZZLE-FUCK THE AUDIENCE ON NO LESS THAN 3 OCCASIONS!

Definition time.

Muzzle-fuck, n. 1). To aim a weapon in the direction of another person the gun wielder (presumably) does not intend to shoot, violating the first law of handgun safety.
see also: “flagging”

The few bloggers who have picked this up are going more towards the possible insensitivity of performing this particular work in Denver, which is a stone’s throw from aurora, where a nutcase who I will not dignify by naming shot indiscriminately into a room full of theatergoers at a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises this past summer.

What disturbs me more is the incoherent babble of a statement she released once news started hitting over how many locals she pissed off with her antics. I literally can’t make heads or tails of it one way or another. What strikes me is this:

“It’s true there is a lot of violence in the beginning of the show and sometimes the use of fake guns – but they are used as metaphors.

I do not condone violence or the use of guns.

Rather they are symbols of wanting to appear strong and wanting to find

a way to stop feelings that I find hurtful or damaging.”

A metaphor can’t kill from a distance, ma’am. Neither do symbols. And it’s a damn shame you don’t condone the use of guns, because then you might have associated with someone who would have filled you in on the fact that you DON’T AIM A GUN OR ANYTHING THAT LOOKS LIKE ONE INTO THE AUDIENCE!

It honestly wouldn’t have changed the number all that much. 3 tweaks to the choreography, only pointing the muzzle at other performers, I would’ve been cool with that. That’s all it would’ve needed. But either nobody on team Madonna brought it up, or (more likely) nobody wanted to press the point with her and risk their job.

Which leads me to the other thing that chaps me about this: the casual use of firearms as art pieces while having no respect for them as tools.

A lot of Americans who don’t interact with firearms regularly have what I call a Lust-Fear relationship with them. The idea (or the symbol or the metaphor, to quote Madonna’s ramblings) is scary and cool and exciting, but the reality is unfamiliar and terrifying. The whole “ooh, a gun.. OHSHITITSAGUN!” reaction.

Unfamiliarity breeds ignorance which breeds fear. The end result is performers who wonder why there’s a slew of paperwork involved in bringing a firearm into their production while simultaneously advocating the Brady Campaign.

Madonna’s not the first anti-gun performer to use them when it’s convenient for her, (I’d go over the laundry list, but it’s a bit depressing) but she is the first to be so in a way that both illustrates her lack of safety knowledge (or willful disregard of it, hard to tell which) and garnered the attentions of the press for a short while about it.

Watching an onstage (or onscreen) gunfight happening can get very frustrating, very fast. Ask just about any operator, and they can probably name a film where they saw a gunfight and their response was a variation on the tune of “fucking bullshit! That never fucking happens in real life!”

I’ll admit to being annoyed at an action movie using the “have a star shoot a few blanks, have a few stunties fall down, instant badass” formula. It has a time and place, I’ll admit, but it just feels lazy.

The unfortunate fly in that jam is that it’s all too often not a case of impossibility, but (occasionally ridiculously) high improbability.

Bullets can (and occasionally do) go damn near anywhere. The axiom that covers this is as follows:

“Firearms are precision instruments by design. Humans are not precision shooters by design.”

There are exceptions, but overall, this applies. The action of a firing gun and the travel of a bullet to the target is a known, quantifiable, and trackable phenomenon that lies well within the boundaries of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics. Then you put humans into the mix and the fucking quantum shows up.

(I realize most of my work is aimed at actors, and I’m bringing in math and science. I’ll try to make it as painless as possible here)

The basic idea of that is that a firearm is designed to send a tiny projectile in a specific path in a specific way, and every variable that a shooter, a target, and the environment brings into the mix affects that path.

Take a laser pointer. Aim it at a spot on the wall. Now see how small a movement it takes to move the dot a foot to one side. Multiply that by all the excitement happening in a gunfight.

(And people don’t believe me when I say pistol shooting is a lot like smallsword)

There is training that compensates for this. But even that only goes so far.

So, getting back to the title of the piece, how this affects performing a theatrical or cinematic gunbattle. There’s a multitude of ways gunshot wounds (hereafter GSW’s) can occur and effect. But for acting purposes, we can distill these down into 5 categories. Organized by severity.

Instant Kill: This is one of the most debatable kinds of GSW’s, mostly for arguments over the definitions of “Death,” “life,” and “instant.” Truly “instant” death for purposes of this category involves massive trauma to the brain stem upon impact of the projectile. In short, the bullet hits a plum-sized target inside the skull, and everything stops.

Instant Shock: Often mistaken for an instant kill, Instant Shock in this case is a GSW that causes enough damage on impact to cause instantaneous loss of consciousness. Short version: getting shot causes enough damage for the victim to pass out instantly and die soon after.

Disabling wound: A wound that causes the loss of use of an extremity or mobility. Major joints and the spinal column are all targets that can result in a disabling wound. Short version: a GSW that renders a limb (or more than one limb) unusable.

Noticed wound: A wound that doesn’t cause loss of consciousness or use of an extremity, but does cause trauma, blood loss, ect. The most “playable” of GSW’s, as the victim is able to continue the scene with the widest range of possible choices, but still noticeably reacts to the wound as it occurs and through the remainder of the scene.

Unnoticed wound: The wound occurs, but is not visibly reacted to by the victim. This may be the result of adrenaline, shock, a supernatural nature to the character, or other reasons. The audience may see the shot occur, or it may be a reveal later in the scene.

As with anything involving firearms, introducing one rule will summon a legion of exceptions, but I’d like to think this at least provides some sort of broad, useable generalization.

Hey folks,

Entirely “real world” post for this one. If you’re here for the stunts, stage combat & action movie stuff, just scroll on past.

…those of you that remained, carry on.

The last couple of months have been an online shitstorm for the U.S. military on multiple fronts.

(not in chronological order)

One mensa candidate (a Staff NCO, no less) decided to wax poetic about Trayvon Martin while on the rifle range. Unspecified punishment.

Then some Army dipshit loses a comrade to an IED blast and takes it upon herself to tell said comrade’s wife that she’s now a widow… on Facebook. Unspecified punishment.

And the blogosphere loses its shit over a Scout-sniper team photo featuring an SS flag. Mercifully, cooler heads prevailed as the team’s higher-ups gave a “put that shit away and never bring it out again.”

One would think that with the educational power and scope of the internet, one could figure out that Scout Snipers, posing in front of a flag that said, “SS,” would realize they stood for the phrase “Scout Snipers,” as opposed to the Schutzstaffel. Then again, that may well fucking be vastly overestimating the average cognizance level of your typical internet user.

((Yes, yes I can use six-syllable words and “fuck” in the same sentence, thank you very much.))

Then a soldier in Afghanistan sends photos of his supposed war buddies posing with corpses and pieces of suicide bombers to the L.A. Times. The Times and the brass do the usual monkey dance of “please don’t publish” “we’re gonna publish just because you asked us not to!” And the internet is presented with posed-for-Facebook pictures of soldiers with pieces of their enemies.

And, lest we forget, video of Marines pissing on dead Taliban show up online.

And I’m not even going into the Qur’an burning bullshit, or the Secret Service prostitutes nonsense, or the Marine getting ad-sepped for talking shit about Obama on Facebook while active duty stupidity.

So, now that I’ve aired some dirty laundry of my comrades, where am I getting at?

One word: crackdown.

I guarantee you that U.S. military units around the world have, over the last few months, gotten word of “don’t let this stupid shit come from YOUR people.” Lectures have been given, PowerPoint rangers have wielded their laptops and spouted their bullet points, and yet another check-in-the-box class, probably with some fucking bullshit title like “social media sensitivity awareness” has already garnered a small commendation for it’s pogalicious author. The latest layer of ass-cover was knitted with precision, every stitch and fucking knot covered and aligned.

In a practical sense, this means that the default setting of saying anything of an active duty military nature online will be boiled down to silence. Yeah, yeah, yeah, OPSEC IS IMPORTANT. The potential embarrassment of your higher-ups shouldn’t be, but it winds up being so (to them, at least).

((Aside: yeah, I have friends that are higher-ups. And they know as much as I do that upper ranks make people political creatures. That’s the only way they last long enough to stay higher-ups. Doesn’t make them any more base or noble, just an aspect of their being. Fuck, “aspect of being?” Fucking liberal arts degree is showing again. I’ll cover that up with some rum later.))

So we hear less stories from the battlefield. We already are. It used to be that online stupidity happened already in the field, and was punished according to higher-ups’ discretion. (read “Just Another Soldier” by Jason Christopher Hartley for a good example of being fucked over for embarrassing your c.o.). Nowadays, incidents like the urination and the SS team photo are coming online well after the warriors in question are out of the battlefield (and in some cases, out of the military entirely) and the shitstorm still ensues.

I’m not going to debate the merits of any of these individual cases((one exception: I believe in treating the bodies of enemy dead with dignity and respect. That said, signing up to be a suicide bomber is probably the most blatant statement of “I-don’t-give-two-fucks-what-happens-to-my-body” that’s humanly possible. You may as well bequeath your un-vaporized bits to the FB photo collage of whoever has to clean up what’s left of your sorry ass. End aside.)), but I will say that this road leads to fewer war stories coming out.

And we don’t have many to begin with. I’ve already written in the past about how student veterans are being actively discouraged from discussing their wartime experiences. That’s only going to get worse as shit like this keeps cropping up.

So, what can you, humble citizen, do to alleviate this? Or at least help it not get worse?

#1: Fucking think. Before you comment, post, resend or what have you, think about what’s going on. And more importantly, think about WHY it’s happening.

#2: Do your fucking research. The Scout-sniper example above could’ve been averted if a few people could’ve stopped to realize something instead of screaming “NAZIS!”

#3: Recognize the actions of an individual as such.

Popping smoke,

~Jay

Let’s get a few things straight first.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a United States Navy SEAL. Take that for what you will.

I am, however, a United States Marine, a former infantryman, and a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Take that for what you will.

More recently, I left the warrior’s life and took up that of the storyteller. Fight choreographer, actor, weapons specialist, armorer, author, critic, probably a handful more I’m not thinking of right now. Nowadays, and likely for the rest of my days, I tell stories on a computer screen, a video camera, or onstage. Take that for.. you get the fucking point.

Act of Valor is, at least in my experience, a rather unique critter in the cinema world. It’s not the fun-loving early Michael Bay recruiting ad of Top Gun. And it definitely isn’t the sniveling bullshit of a recent Hollywood output that couldn’t put anyone in a modern American uniform without making them a PTSD-riddled victim of the Big Bad Bush or a sadistic baby-eating multiple rapist villain (or both).

Act of Valor‘s story is relatively straightforward: following an element of SEAL Team 7 along the course of a mission to stop a heavy-duty terrorism plot. I’d go so far as to say that the mission, rather than the SEALS, is the main character of the film. To call the SEALS characters may in itself be something of a misnomer: they are portrayed by active-duty SEALS, referred to and credited only by first names (which may or may not be their own. For the record, I personally don’t know, care less, and mildly doubt). We can see their faces, but watching them fade into their roles as part of a single unit is watching them as they are.

These SEALS aren’t actors. And they’re not (insofar as I can see) attempting to play themselves. They do more playing archetypes: members of a SEAL Team rather than any members in specific. This helps from the opening, as we’re spared the action movie cliches of being introduced to the team hillbilly, the team geek, and the other stock characters found in a military-based action film. There’s little to see of a three-act structure, the most bare-bones exposition and mercifully no author avatar-ish speeches on the nature of the world or some such bullshit.

The story moves from action point to action point, pausing only briefly to explain why, and always on the move. The camerawork on the fight scenes gives just enough disorientation to keep the audience unsettled, but never descending into the overedited mess that plagues so many fight sequences in recent films. What struck me was how much it did resonate with actual firefights: the audience knowing just barely enough of what the fuck was going on to keep up with the fighters. Odd angles, bad lighting, gunfire and explosions obscuring dialogue, all of it resonant with actual combat.

If I had to give a glaring exception to these scenes, it would be the soundtrack. The music distracted and took me out of the fights. Just in case anyone was wondering: up-tempo and heavy bass orchestral music doesn’t play during firefights, and that faux-Enya flute-heavy bullshit doesn’t drown out all ambient noise when people you care about die.

The film was made with the full backing of the Department of the Navy, which had final cut privileges of the film itself, and authorized showing the faces of active duty SEALS. (For the curious, this has never happened before. A SEAL’s identity revealed usually means that they’ve either left the teams or are dead). As far as OPSEC goes, the movie neither shows nor discusses actual operations. And with the Navy’s heavy oversight, I doubt classified SEAL tactics were shown. Might deliberate changes have been made? Probably. I’m not going to point any out for you.

Filming the various action scenes involved the SEALS involved planning attack scenarios, with the cameras following them, often in live-fire conditions. I’ve read at least one account of a Canon EOS 5 outfitted with an armor plating over the data card, for the express purpose of a SEAL shooting the camera in the course of a scene, leaving the footage intact.

As I write this, critics are panning Act of Valor across the country. Rotten Tomatoes currently calls the acting “stilted.”

Ahem.

THEY’RE NOT FUCKING ACTORS, YOU MISERABLE FLAMING BAG OF FUCKING DICKS! THEY’RE THE REAL MOTHERFUCKING MCCOY! GROW A FUCKING GENDER-IDENTIFIABLY APROPOS SET OF FUCKING GONADS AND MOTHERFUCKING RECOGNIZE THAT!!!!!!!!!!!

*cough*

Some particular acts of dumbassery below, with responses.

“Employing Navy troops as stars is a clever idea for an action thriller. But the soldiers’ awkward line readings are glaring enough to distract from the potency of the story.” – Claudia Puig, USA TODAY

They’re sailors, not soldiers. Since you’ve ignored that little detail, I’m not surprised you haven’t figured out that they’re not actors.

Roger Ebert spent a paragraph bitching about how he can’t tell performers from characters. The grand high pooh-bah of film criticism, completely missing the point. Stellar.

If I had nothing else good to say about this film, I would praise it for simply allowing modern-day warriors to BE fucking heroes, even though they’d likely kick the ass of anyone who called them such to their faces. The Rotten tomatoes consensus did the most to piss me off, claiming that “a jingoistic attitude that ignores the complexities of war.”

Well, fuck me, RT. But forgive me for reading “ignoring complexities of war” as “not having U.S. service members snivel in their skivvies the way my latte-sipping wannabe intellectual self does at the very fucking thought of coming close to having to do what they do on a regular basis.” Blow me.

I was asked when I came back from the theater how close the battle scenes were to actual firefights. Shy of the music, I’d have to say pretty damn close. Not in the exact details of tactics or sound or movements, but in little details that I can best describe as “could have been.” Little details like gloves chosen and worn by personal preference. One character, in a single shot, had a twitch in their cheek. I remember having an identical one. The little things resonated heavily.

But then again, I’m not a regular audience member. I’m part of the .45% (look it the fuck up). I’m someone in the industry who is sick and fucking tired of being shown on-screen as a monster or a helpless victim time and fucking time again.

In an ideal world, something like Act of Valor might open some eyes. I’m a bit more cynical than that. I saw this film in a packed house opening night, with applause at the end. The spell was broken by some young punks taking a few chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” and some shit-talk about Obama (I wanted to get through the day without hearing about his sorry ass. Oh fucking well). I watched the silhouettes of the punks walking by, one of them with an empty Gatorade bottle…

..And my mind’s eye saw another group of lanky young men with short hair, laughing at some stupid shit or another before business had to be gotten down to.

I can dream of an ideal world, can’t I?

Early Monday morning, a collaborator, co-conspirator, and dear friend passed beyond the vale.

Before this blog and this show ever existed, Tammie was a dear friend to both me and the extended Barbarian family.  Among other things, she worked tirelessly with The Lady Barbarian’s hair and makeup when the Lady and I married back in 2006.

And she continued to keep my morale up during multiple combat tours overseas.



(She’s the one on the upper right-hand corner.  Or for those of you who were just reading, she’s going by her alternate title “You Were.”)

When I was first working on the idea of a show based purely on weaponry and fanservice, Tammie was all for it.  As a part of Synical Samurai Studios, she helped out a lot during the filming of both “Front Vent” and “Dragonsbreath.” 

During the filming of “Dragonsbreath,” we found out that Tammie had never fired a shotgun before.  And with one “good” round of Dragonsbreath left over, we decided to remedy that. 

The shot, for various reasons, wasn’t included in the episode and was saved for the gag reel, which she never got to see.

Here it is.

Tammie’s Shotgun Work

Love you, babe. Go kick ass in the next world for us.

There’s been a good deal of travelling on my end over the last week.  This past Wednesday was the United States Marine Corps birthday, and Thursday was Veteran’s day.  As the old joke goes, awfully nice of Congress to give us jarheads a federal holiday to recuperate from the hangover.

Wednesday was also when my friend Mike was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross.

I won’t put down the full citation here, but his story deserves being told, so here I am.

March 22, 2009.  Now Zad was a ghost town in a wide valley.  It’s smack in the middle of Helmand province, and known for some of the bloodiest fighting since OEF (Operation Enduring Freedom) began.

I was returning to base from an early morning patrol.  From the gun turret I gave a noncommittal gesture that’s halfway between a wave and a salute at the foot patrol heading out just as we were coming back.  Near the front I noticed Mike, with his engineer and radio operator nearby.  I wouldn’t see him alive again.

As I was back in the base cleaning my gear, an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) exploded at Mike’s feet, severing his left leg.  His first reaction was to set his squad in the defense.  Sure enough, Taliban showed up and the shooting started.  Mike called in his own casualty report and kept leading his squad.  At one point he was calling in strafing runs from the arriving attack helicopters.  Reinforcements came, and Mike only let himself be evacuated when his entire squad was ready to move out.

He died in the casevac chopper.

This past Wednesday, the Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus presented the Navy Cross to Mike’s mother.  The stands looked like a mini-reunion of my old unit.  The ceremony itself was swift and meaningful.  The real reminiscence was later that night at a bar that was one of Mike’s preferred hangouts.  The shots came as smooth and plentiful as the stories.

It was on the plane ride that I started to really think about my dual professions of warrior and storyteller.  This wasn’t helped by the fact that my body has decided that having hangovers is all well and good now that I’m in my 30′s.  And eventually my thoughts ran to what pisses me off about so much of the movies and TV surrounding the wars I’ve fought in.  And by that I mean besides lousy scripts and lousier execution.

It boils down to two words: No Heroes.

Seriously, none.  Not a single film or television depiction of Iraq or Afghanistan to date depicts heroic actions by any of the actual players.  I can’t even make a case for the fictional characters as being heroes either.  When it comes to depicting Americans fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, film show them overwhelmingly as one thing: victims.

Go down the list of films made about Iraq and Afghanistan: Green Zone, Home of the Brave, In the Valley of Elah, Stop Loss, the list goes on.  At best, American troops are depicted as blue-collar schmucks stuck toiling away for the Big Bad Bush.  At worst they’re broken, crippled trauma victims who need a hug and adult, again, because of the Big Bad Bush.

I got one word for that: Bullshit!

Since boots landed on the ground in Afghanistan in October of 2001, Seven medals of Honor have been awarded.  An Eighth will be awarded in 2 days to Salvatore Giunta, which will make him the first non-posthumous award since the wars began.  Including Mike, 26 Navy Crosses have been awarded, along with 21 Distinguished service crosses by the Army and 3 Air Force Crosses by the Air Force.

That’s 58 recipients of the highest military honors for combat action from October of 2001 to today and you’re telling me that not a single one of these stories deserves to be told on the screen?  BULLSHIT!

Over 2 million troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan since the war began and none of them have committed any acts of heroism worthy of cinematic note?  BULLSHIT!        

And why is this?  I got three places to point fingers.

The first goes to whatever miscellaneous dickheads within the Pentagon fucked up big in their own depiction of American heroes.  The lies and bullshit spun about the capture of Jessica Lynch and the death of Pat Tillman effectively crushed any attempt to talk about the no-shit American heroes of this war.  Lynch herself called bullshit on the official tale of her capture before Congress.  I’m firmly convinced that those two incidents killed any Pentagon effort to tell the real stories of heroism coming from the Global War on Terror.

My next place is the global news media.  I’ve got a lot of bones to pick with you fuckers, but in this case I’ll start with your collective rush to be the first and the half-assed lip service you give to being accurate.  They may not have created the bullshit in the first place, but the most copious spreader of it during the Lynch incident was none other than The Washington Post.  And after the backlash you lot were even more skittish than the Pentagon about telling stories of American heroes.  It doesn’t help that with the possible exception of the Murdoch empire, you lot are all collectively a part of my third place…

The left of center and the hardcore Bush haters.  This one is probably going to piss off the most people, but right now I could fucking care less.

I’ll be the first to admit I have legions of friends, colleagues and loved ones who fit the description I just filled.  Some of my nearest and dearest are among their ranks.  Several have been bastions of help when I was deployed, and more made it possible for me to actually attend Mike’s ceremony, something that I’ll be grateful for the rest of my life.

But yeah, you guys have some of the blame here.  Part of it is the unabashed hatred for the Bush administration that was so full there wasn’t a possibility of supporting anything he did, including the war.

And part of it is the ultimate cop-out that is the phrase “Support the troops, not the War.”

Really?  Fucking really?  You know what troops do?

FIGHT FUCKING WARS!

And they’ve been fighting this one for going on a fucking decade!

As much as I know my loved ones who say it mean well, I can’t help but fucking despise the wishy-washy sentiment behind it.  It’s a branch off the same thought process that wants to win a war without killing anyone or breaking anything, and it’s as fucking ludicrous and naive as the thought of toning a muscle without breaking a sweat.  It’s the fucking epitome of wanting to have your cake and eat it too, and even when staring in the face of that impossibility, turning away and looking up pictures of cake on the Internet.  Fuck that phrase and fuck the pretentious, naive sentiment behind it.

I created this blog for lovers and creators of action art.  Hopefully, that’s most of who’s reading it right now.

You want to support the troops?

Tell their stories.

Find them and tell them.

Find the stories of Michael Ouellette and Brian Chontosh.  Find the stories of Michael Murphy and Jared Monti.  Find the stories of Paul Smith, Jason Dunham, Robert Miller and Salvatore Giunta.

You know names like Abu Ghraib and the Fort Hood Massacre.  You’ve heard incessantly of our humiliations, victimizations and fuckups.  Now get up off your fucking ass and hunt down the stories of the no-shit, flesh and blood heroes who fought, killed and died in far corners of the world so you could ignore what they’re doing to watch American fucking Idol.

These heroes aren’t going to tell their stories for you.  They’re in the next world beyond our ken, or in a comfortable tavern talking about the game on TV and not saying a damn thing about what they’ve done.  You have to find them.

The news media aren’t going to tell their stories.  They’re still digesting what celebrity gossip and political fuckuppery into five-second soundbites they can.  You have to find them.

Find them and fucking tell them.

I just gave you some of their names.  And for most of you reading this, it’s the first time you’ve heard of them.  Seek them out.  Find out what they did. 

Tell their stories.

So I’m doing utility stunts on this little indie movie, and it’s a fairly standard scene: our hero takes on a half-dozen walking pieces of sword fodder and proceeds to kick six kinds of ass. Your truly is goon #5. And on one particular take, the young lady playing goon #4 is either repositioned or didn’t clear the space quickly enough or any of a dozen other things, but the end result of which is the back of my noggin impacting directly with her tailbone. The first words out of my mouth when the director yelled “cut” is the title of today’s episode.

One of the most significant bits of news coming in lately was The Rolling Stone article featuring General Stanley McChrystal and his staff and the subsequent media and political shitstorm that ensued, resulting in General McChrystal resigning his command over U.S. forces in Afghanistan. General David Patreus is stepping down as commander of U.S. Central command to replace McChrystal.

I’ll admit I’ve steered somewhat away from this topic, as it relates to real-world combat and not to stage or screen, but an event like this that lit up the international media is definitely worth noting on here. So I’ll leave my commentary at this: However much of an incredible warrior and commander General McChrystal is, and how much his strategies have aided U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, he still serves at the pleasure of the President. And the President wasn’t pleased. For me to go into further detail would devolve this blog into the ramblings of yet another disgruntled veteran who needs to get more comfortable on his barstool.

The U.S. Supreme court has now ruled that the second amendment is a fundamental right by a 5-4 majority. This comes on the heels of a ruling 2 years ago that stuck down Washington D.C.’s handgun ban. The gun law that kicked off this decision was a similar ban on handguns held by Chicago and one of its suburbs. This is pretty much guaranteed to fire off a typhoon of litigation across the U.S. as different states, cities and counties determine how much regulation individual firearm use can be made, and for what reason.

Why is this a big deal? Because for those of us who make action art, restrictions on the ability to own and use weapons has major repercussions on what we can create. Look at the website of any weapons vendor online, and you’ll see a list of “cannot ship to” areas. And on each and every one of these sites, the same names crop up over and over: California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts. All states with restrictive weapons laws, whether on firearms, blades, or even imitation weapons like Airsoft. And all too often I find that the biggest hurdle between independent action artists and the tools they use to do the job isn’t their status as mental patients, convicted felons, or any of the “common sense” restrictions involved in some of the more sane gun control laws.

Instead, it’s money. Pure and simple. Liscences and fees and permits that will let someone cut through the red tape to have a blank-fire pistol on their stage or on their set. Doesn’t leave a whole lotta room for the would-be Robert Rodriguezes of the world with barely enough change in their pocket for film and blanks. Going over the pros and cons of heading out to L.A. or NY with my fellow actors, I pointed out that in my niche, I benefit from living in the south, with their more relaxed weapons laws.

I’m hoping that the recent SCOTUS decision will result in more thoughtful and reasonable weapons laws as opposed to simple blanket bans. Wishful thinking, I’ll admit, but it’s nice to imagine.

I’ll leave you with some more fun from the rockbox. A crossdressing Taliban commanderwas killed by ISAF forces in Afghanistan when he attacked troops.

Popping smoke,

~J~