Turkey City
Thanks to my brother Jim, I’ve stumbled upon an awesome synchronicity. DOG is a cozy catastrophe! Yep, life is good after the apocalypse for white anglo saxons, especially with their lives shattered for comic effect. Do you miss black people? There’s a slice of mediatronics for you. I do have Clitandra on there as warrior princess, she’s a powerful voice. Should I make sure I hit all the right notes to prove my progressive credentials? Is Christina a feminist character? Is Gerry? Uncle Joe is what – managing brood mares?
After workshopping a couple of shorts with Jim, I was blown away by the unsuspected bedrock underlying my stories, the layering I didn’t even know about until I started talking about them and what I am trying to achieve.
So let’s see what I pull out of my ass to sanctify my cozy catastrophe.
First, this is a send up of apocalypse movies because EVERY apocalypse has happened, so of course it’s going to be a cozy catastrophe. You get that in the very beginning what with the Nuclear Waste Repository blown wide, (nukes) the dinosaur biting the motorcycle, (return of the saurians), the demon holes (hell unleashed) the cruise liner on the mesa, (tsunami) the tilted and drowned NYC skyline, (global warming, earth quake) space arc over the pictographs, (alien invasion) etc. Keep it coming. Uncle Joe in a suit on a BICYCLE. I mean c’mon. Clearly I am having fun with the apocalypse trope so of course it’s going to populated by nice white people, harmless, cute, kooky. Black people are scary. They are voices on the radio far away. I need one more virulent male presence, his voice calls to mind a well endowed mountain of a man surrounded by voluptuous valkyries or ebony amazons, maybe he’s a big gay buck! Could be he’s reading the primary exposition. Or organizing. Yep, so the harmless complacent white person trope is paired with the competent visionary black person trope. The ultimate racial riff – Uncle Joe is actually a black guy, yes! Peels off mission impossible mask or washes face to reveal… he’s the reader in the start of the story. Switches off scramble suit, ooh! Establish scramble suit in the beginning.