Negative Space: satire
- Along came Ray
- Ray Stevens takes on the health care takeover!
- As reporters grow dependent on their regular drug-crisis fix
- Adam Paul Weisman writes about the “journalistic dream-world” where he “can write almost anything” and “nobody is going to call him on it”. From the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, September 26, 1986, p 21A.
- Being There
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Peter Sellers’ last and in my opinion best work, based on the story by Jerzy Kosinski (and with a screenplay written by him). This is a quietly funny, provocative, and touching film about “down to earth” philosophies.
- Better Than Sex
- “Confessions of a Political Junkie”. The world ain’t what it used to be, and before this thing is over, you’ll wish you weren’t either.
- Black Man as a Cash Crop
- According to Xona, America’s most profitable crop is the Black-American, reaped by the Criminal Justice System.
- Combat Monster
- A freeware generic game. Well, generic in the sense that you can beat people up in any genre. This one’s pulling your funny bone, folks, and then beating you over the head with it. Enjoy!
- The Complete Lewis Carroll
- Lewis Carroll’s work, like that of J. M. Barrie, is often disneyfied for children, but when read raw is complex and fascinating.
- Dark Star
- John Carpenter’s first movie release. Originally made as a student production, someone in Hollywood liked it and helped him release it. There are some very good ideas hidden among the beachball alien and “Phoenix Asteroids”.
- The definitional war on satire
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What is satire if it isn’t about current, hotly-debated events and puncturing overblown narratives?
- The Desert Peach
- Daniel Pinkwater described them as “Hogan’s Heroes with Homos” in the introduction to the first collection. This is, well, that’s probably the best description you’re going to get.
- Doonesbury
- Ever since I first read “The Doonesbury Chronicles”, I’ve rated comic strips by how well they compare to Doonesbury.
- DriveThruRPG: satire not appropriate for current events?
- DriveThruRPG has justified their action against the Gamergate satirical card game with a very strange take on the uses of satire.
- Drugs and Drug Abuse
- James Cassens wrote this for “The Christian Encounters” series. Some interesting information culled from a variety of sources.
- Drugs From A to Z
- Richard R. Lingeman compiles a summary of recreational drug terms and slang, and includes some interesting if anecdotal histories and other information.
- Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter Writing
- Charles Dodgson—AKA Lewis Carroll—gives us advice about writing letters that may be satirical but also might not be.
- Erewhon
- Samuel Butler’s Erewhon is a challenge to Darwin and a challenge to socialism. It holds its bite against the latter, but has become more of a prophecy of the future with regards to the former: Butler took Darwin’s theory, applied it meticulously to machines, and forecast the computer.
- The Exon Song
- A little Christmas ditty in response to the Exon Internet censorship bill.
- Fahrenheit 451
- A very good adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s science fiction novel of the same name. “Firemen” have evolved from people who put out fires to people who create them—in order to burn books. Fireman Montag begins to question this existence after a run-in with a young girl on a train.
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Perhaps the purest of Thompson’s searches for the American Dream because it is untainted by politics; or perhaps the most pointless for the same reason, as politics have tainted the American Dream since the Adams anti-sedition acts almost as soon as the country was born.
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
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Perhaps the purest of Thompson’s searches for the American Dream because it is untainted by politics; or perhaps the most pointless for the same reason, as politics have tainted the American Dream since the Adams anti-sedition acts almost as soon as the country was born.
- Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972
- This is a powerful look at the 1972 presidential campaigns, well worth reading, and recommended for anyone interested in a turning point in the Democratic Party.
- FlameWar: The Passion of the Electric Messiah (Official Site)
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“Seattle is Fallen. The words reverberate throughout the former United States. From Seattle to New York, the world can no longer ignore the Wiccan revolution that toppled a nation. In Seattle, barrista Megan Ley lives through revolution, a rising anti-Lesbian backlash, and the political aspirations of her girlfriend. In Los Angeles, blogger John Beat looks at the revolution from the other side, as controversial filmmaker Marco Leihome fans the flames of anti-Wiccan and anti-Homosexual sentiment.”
- Florence Foster Jenkins is Hillary Clinton
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There are too many coincidences to avoid the conclusion that Florence Foster Jenkins, the movie, is a satirical attack on the relationship between Hillary Rodham Clinton and her sexless partnership with the press.
- The Futurological Congress
- Stanislaw Lem is a brilliant author, and “The Futurological Congress” is perhaps his most prophetic work.
- Gamergate spreads to tabletop gaming?
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Gamergate has spread to DriveThruRPG, as OneBookShelf takes down the GamerGate card game after complaints by Evil Hat Productions.
- Gaming Humor
- Humorous, satirical, and comedic texts regarding role-playing games.
- Generation of Swine
- The “Tales of Shame and Degradation” are mostly the Bush-Dukakis presidential race (from the primaries to the bitter end) of 1988, not a good platform for gonzo journalism.
- Grand Island Nebraska too crazy for satire?
- How can you write satire in a world this crazy? Grand Island, Nebraska, school officials think that a deaf child’s name in sign language looks too much like a weapon, and tried to force him to change his name.
- The Great Shark Hunt
- From football to Haight-Ashbury, the Ali-Spinks match and the Freak Power uprising in Aspen, Thompson is one of the few people who truly understood what the hell was going on in the sixties and seventies while they were happening.
- Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- While a decent enough movie, this adaptation of Douglas Adams’ brilliant satire drops the satire and ultimately doesn’t do anything different than most other movies today.
- It Isn’t Murder If They’re Yankees
- “The true story of rural Virginia schoolteacher Carolyn Purcell, the small town of Walkerville, and the Washington, DC foolkiller known as the Quiet Man, as told by one of the Quiet Man’s famous victims.”
- Jerry Stratton
- Jerry Stratton is a writer, blogger, and reader. You can read his works at the blog, Mimsy Were the Borogoves, the satirical newspaper The Walkerville Weekly Reader, and everywhere fine words are bought and sold.
- Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
- Hidden beneath the Rocky Mountains, a long-lost civilization worthy of anything from Edgar Rice Burroughs toils in its paranoid mission to fight the communist anti-building.
- Mike Royko: A Life in Print
- Mike Royko, according to author and fellow newsman F. Richard Ciccone, was the heir to the Mencken responsibility of satirizing the powerful and protecting the weak. I believe he came close, but Ciccone’s book doesn’t show it.
- Mike Royko’s Opinions
- Mike Royko would have been almost gonzo if he’d been more Libertarian. Certainly, he was growing that way before he died, especially with his views on drugs and modifying his stand against gun control.
- Red and Sloppy Meat is Delicious
- once upon a time i was running through the forest…
- The Roll-Playing Game of Big Dumb Fighters
- A freeware fantasy game. “This game has been designed with gamers in mind, and we know what you want—sex and violence.”
- Satire in the vineyard: The parable of Lolita and the sheep
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Opposite stories in the New Testament are a lot like modern satire. When Nabokov tells the parable of Humbert Humbert, he is telling us that everything in the news is false. When Jesus tells the parable of the lamb, he is telling us that everything the world values is false.
- Satire isn’t comedy
- Satire isn’t comedy. It can be, and often is, but that isn’t what makes it satire.
- Scoop
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In 1935, Evelyn Waugh traveled to Abyssinia to cover the Second Italo-Abyssinian War for the Daily Mail. He found it absurd enough, up to a point, to be the basis for a satire and combined some of his colleagues into William Boot of the Beast.
- The Shopping Cart Graveyard
- “The Shopping Cart Graveyard” is the story of a young boy who runs away to live with the shopping carts in the shopping cart graveyard on the beaches of San Diego.
- The Siege of Harlem
- This is a strange artifact of the sixties. Written in 1964, published in 1965, it tells the story of when Harlem seceded from the Union and built its own government. The cover blurb says “Beneath the hilarity is a clear warning: ‘Laugh at your peril. It could happen.’”
- Songs of the Doomed
- “Songs of the Doomed” covers the decline and fall of the Reagan Empire: the eighties. From the strange power politics meeting in Elko, Illinois thru the Pulitzer trial and the Berlin wall.
- South Park Volume 1 through 6
- I was first introduced to South Park through the movie (which also kicks ass). The television shows are amazing. Variety, of all things, calls it “gloriously subversive art”. Yeah, whatever. It’s great shit that you must eat. I recommend buying the collected three-DVD sets. Make sure you check the pricing, however: at Amazon, the sets are more expensive than buying the individual disks! The first set, at least, contains nothing but the individual disks: there is no bonus to buying the set. (In fact, now that the second 3-pack is out, the pricing is all fucked up for South Park, so pay attention.)
- South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut
- Watch Parker & Stone take on the MPAA and lose the battle but win the war. More political incorrectness than you can beat down with a whip in this movie. Watching “Bigger, Longer and Uncut” finally got me to get out and see the television show it was based on, and I wasn’t disappointed.
- Team America, Fuck Yeah!
- Stone and Parker strike another satirical gold mine.
- Thank You For Smoking
- Satire is hard. Good satire is rarely balanced, and even the best satire is sometimes no stranger than the next day’s news.
- Wag the Dog
- The president is accused of molesting a child. The president’s guilt or innocence doesn’t matter. What matters is the election in eleven days.
- The Walkerville Weekly Reader
- Editor Carolyn Purcell’s vision is continued by friends Sam Lee and Shaheen Hamedi.
- The Walkerville Weekly Reader
- In the end times, one newspaper dared to call God to task for His hypocrisy. That newspaper was not us, we swear it. Not the eternal flames!
More Information
- Animal Farm• (paperback)
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“Animal Farm” is a critical look at anyone who wants to keep us down “for our own good”. It is brilliantly written and easy to read on many levels. (George Orwell)
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas• (paperback)
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Perhaps the purest of Thompson’s searches for the American Dream because it is untainted by politics; or perhaps the most pointless for the same reason, as politics have tainted the American Dream since the Adams anti-sedition acts almost as soon as the country was born. (Hunter S. Thompson)
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Criterion Edition•
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This DVD not only presents a great transfer of the movie, but it contains a lot of interesting footage of both Hunter Thompson and Oscar Acosta.
- South Park Season 1•
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I was first introduced to South Park through the movie (which also kicks ass). The television shows are amazing. Variety, of all things, calls it “gloriously subversive art”. Yeah, whatever. It’s great shit that you must eat.
- The Ruling Class•
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When Jack’s aunt asks him how he knows he’s God, Jack replies, “Simple. When I pray I find I’m talking to myself.”
