F is for Fire that Burns Down the Whole Town*

I climbed a high tower, looked over the land, and saw water where there should be no water, fire where there should be no fire, and a moon turned to blood.

Somehow, St. John on Patmos doesn't seem so delirious to me.

I'm going to admit something: I get a kick out of the apocalypse. Pure entertainment. That's not to say that I don't take the writings of John seriously. I do.

But man oh man does the book of Revelation inspire some cool stuff: big godzilla monsters coming out of oceans to join forces with, then fight and torture a beast-riding queen of religion and whoring, hailstorms of superbug disease cupcakes, trumpets rolling out the best of Count Basie in a syncopated rythym to beat the devil.

I'm translating loosely, but still. Hellhorses, 200 million man armies at war, blood to the bridles, falling stars, thirsty dragons.

Yum. But you've got to remember that I'm the sort of troll who gets a kick out of cleaning out hog lots and dining on chilli dog spaghetti burittos.

I'm thick in the skull, so I can only afford to spend most of my time just bowing my neck and pushing forward in the Word, and trying hard not to fight against the scarylove Ru'ach of Jesus. I've got to leave the real End of Days to brighter minds than mine.

But I do have fun looking in on the apocalyptic expressions of others:

Apocalypse Soon
Berean Call
The always hilarious* Rapture Ready (I hope those manuals never come in handy for me.)
The God Still Loves Us forums... where being crazy and wrong never felt so good and friendly.

Oh, there are a jillion of them out there. There is plenty of pop-apocalypse, both Christian and non, that borders on (or even bathes in) the asinine. For example, I'm pretty certain that, despite the contemporary protests to the contrary, neither Ronald Wilson Reagan (good ol' 666) nor Barack Hussein Obama fit the profile of the Antichrist as described in the bible.

But the links above are reasoned and worked at. Even if they don't get everything right (because, after all, who does?) they do a good job of citing actual sources and doing their level best to comprehend something as wild and incomprehensible as the End of Days.

*Thanks, Plankton. I feel tingly inside too.

**to those, like me, who find Johnny Cash/Shel Silverstein meditations on death to be a hoot.

St. John in Exile

I need to point out a stage performance that thankfully has been archived on DVD. St. John in Exile is an amazing one-man show, with Dean Jones in the lead. It has to be more than twenty years old, but I saw it again a few years ago and it hasn't lost a bit of its luster.

I wish the small film companies who are nobly dedicated to themes meditating on Christ would turn to this production format more frequently. Blow the talent budget on one outstanding, impeccable stage actor, put the rest of the money into set design and staging the production, and shoot it very, very well. I would bet that for about $500,000, give or take, you could develop outstanding, admittedly small, but profitable movies. I prefer that to a lot of the movies I see that stretch the talent budget and end up simply having to pay for at least one or two devastating casting missteps.*

Of course, I'm a sucker for televised one-man shows. But I would have to say that of that somewhat narrow genre, St. John in Exile is the funniest and most moving. I like it better, just on a production and performance level, than Nimoy's Vincent, James Earl Jones' Paul Robeson, Robert Vaughn's FDR and even Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain Tonight (which would be my second-favorite.)

In any case, track down a copy of St. John in Exile one of these days.

*Incidentally, I'd like to see everything take on Felicia Day's The Guild model, too. I think the studios should completely overhaul the pilot system, and break those pilots up into tiny webisodes. I think that would be a far more effective way of measuring audience response than a) either scheduling a pilot in a time slot when people aren't looking for it or b) killing the pilot before ever once testing it on an international audience.

I also would like to see the Guild people do a stage show, film it, and distribute it online (for cash up front. I may be a skinflint, but I'm no slavedriver! Sheesh.)

Holy canolli. I believe I just broke the "one idea per post" rule. With a hammer. And a nuke.