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‘I look into the eyes of Leo Fong and I see nothing but darkness.’ – Jay Bauman [with not bad German accent]

As usual, I can’t say Showdown is good, but it is entertaining, mostly cos of Leo Fong as drifter vigilante James Long and Werner Herzog as the biker gang leader.

Also, the ‘mafia retirement village as autonomous zone’ concept is insane.

Makes no sense whatsoever.

Note: it may be apparent from the constant namedrops of Count Menliff and Nevenka that I have also mixed in a bit of Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body. No special reason, I was just watching it at the time and felt that it could offer something that my normal brain state wouldn’t pick up on.

A lot of my Trash F-log pieces work that way. Random collisions. It’s quite liberating. If you’re a writer, you should try it [if you’re not already].

+++

Not the moon nor

Czechia nor

Ancapistan nor

Chernarus

but an isolated castle on the Eastern European coast inside a small retirement village enfolded within multivalent Texas where the law looks several other ways cos those ways are village ruin porn and the other way is primeval biker gang led by the eldest son of down-on-his-luck Count Menliff who’s just back from a really disappointing crack deal.

+

Atmos?

Down-on-his-luck Count Menliff is old and ritualised.

Everyone would.

The landscape is nobody.

+

Inside the Count’s car [yap min] lies an explosive device that will allow him to dimension hop. His youngest son is in fact his daughter who loves him very much despite the down-ish luck and shack habitat that he is malting away in [ga ma]. She will not see the car implode. The cavalry is lost in a poor excuse for a supermarket.

+

One day [itsuka], the retirement village wakes up mafia-shaped.

Microbe of kitsch, post-elderly, forgetters of how to garotte, gun is for white people dressed as Latino friend, enervated, drool all night, shit at cleaning.

Pathos?

Bones may be frail but

once

long ago [ho dor lin tsin]

they murdered for a living, for fun even, snuffing out bench-mensch with anionic detergent shots.

Everyone did.

The whole village.

Man, they’re not stupid.

It’s obvious the biker gang leans German.

But they are elderly now, just like down-on-his-luck Count Menliff, the old malt trying to escape the headlock of his eldest son, who has returned to the castle for epicurean reasons.

No problem.

In three weeks, Leo Fong will materialise, slaughter them all.

His car and talents are ambiguous.

He is already there [la]

with dinner in the fridge and

magnetism

from John ‘Mazzer’ Wayne’s Mongolia scare.

+

Elderly abuse?

I came to this autonomous glitch to feel something.

Again.

For the first time.

My legs are fibreglass.

Look at me move!

Dad?

+

The daughter of down-on-his-luck Count Menliff is on the cusp of freaking the fuck out but at the last second spots frazzled silhouette of HIS charismatic fold outside the penumbra of HER dilapidated car, the combination of which forces her to flee the retirement village and dally once more as an online witch in West Nollywood.

+

Come back green

illuminated

desperate to-

+

Leo Fong slits the throat of Atom Egoyan breakfast vibe.

He is tired, imperative.

After Low Blow, this is his piece-master, the clunkiest reason why, a dark preamble in our collective macula.

HE has not let us down yet.

+

Three months later [sam gaw yute zi hau], after flogging secretaries behind the curtain of Hell, Leo Fong hoovers up the fumes of pure Attaturk nihilism and confronts the eldest son of down-on-his-luck Count Menliff before losing track of him completely when he jogs somewhere off-camera.

‘Where is he, let’s go, tell me butch.’

It’s simple:

Leave where he was to ask where he is cos he is where he was and if he’s not there now then go back to where you were before and ask the guy you shot where he is and whether or not he’s still there and if he demurs then grab his neck and ask where he will be or might be if he’s not where he was at the start then drop that guy and go back to where he originally was to see if he’s there again and if he isn’t where he was before then run to the nearest car park and hope he’s where you think he could be and with a bit of luck that will be where he is and from there you can both go back to where you were previously and have rough sex against the furniture props.

+

How would you like a shovel head?

This is language abuse.

Shoot everyone [la].

Shoot the producer who said, ‘wah, are you sure this scene is-

+

Four witches appear [chut yin], strapped for crypto.

Foretell in tongues that Leo Fong might be king one day [itsuka].

King of this decaying thing.

Fumes of his own fumes.

Gravedigger for-

+

Inhaling vague cosmology, Leo Fong moves into shack habitat of down-on-his-luck Count Menliff. Changes name to Nevenka. Flogs himself on artificial beach. Pays Christopher Lee lookalike to say he always liked it the violent way. Shoots the radio. Goes to the rodeo. Cries. Moves back into producer pal’s trailer. Eats seaweed strip. Digests Mishima.

‘It is between him and me come on let’s go.’

+

Meanwhile, the daughter of down-on-his-luck Count Menliff returns to the retirement village to celebrate her own return.

Hmm.

Life seems new school.

The air smells like dandelion.

‘Mummy?’

+

In the hardware store, Leo Fong sits in the costume of a cartoon hammer, watching the biker gang watch Faces on a tiny projection screen.

There is beauty in Faces, he thinks, rubbing himself. My face. Menliff face. Woman face. Parent face. Dog face. Ottoman Face. Counter-factual face. Shotgun face. Mysticalists in Bali face. My favourite story of all time. I love it. Better than other stories. So good I split myself psychically and became a witch. Tried to. But never could. Love that story. So good. Friend face. Law face. Practical face. Gummi Bear face. Fuck face. Amish-

+

Outside [chut bin], things turn Glaswegian.

The daughter of down-on-his-luck Count Menliff has found down-on-his-luck Count Menliff at the local titty bar and this down-on-his-luck Count Menliff is dead.

As in his face looks Xerxes.

The second one.

[Wai] he’s not happy to see her at all.

Tells her the wedding is off.

Asks if she’s queer.

Leaks pus.

Confused [ho mai mong], she wraps herself in the Chinese for Pornographic Thief and crashes through trailer ceiling onto Leo Fong’s bed.

It is not a bed but a furnace.

She’s okay.

But Leo Fong is elsewhere.

Spying through a peep hole in the painting of Sorel as the eldest son of Count Menliff takes a shower with goat’s milk. It is as blunt as it gets. Leo Fong wants to rape everything including himself. But the eldest son of Count Menliff is running naked into the paper mill so Leo Fong as pure Attaturk nihilist has no choice but to slash at his dick and pursue.

+

Inside the paper mill are a series of jump cuts.

Figures being shot and figures doing the shooting.

The biker gang evaporates.

Heroic, Leo Fong starts the engine but forgets the car.

No one has a gun.

Hedonic, HE bunny-rides HER blood type.

Shambles the opposite.

+

Outside [chut bin] the Eastern European castle lurks a tax inspector who questions the number on the town’s welcome sign.

Later he is shot in the cortex.

Crushed by a lawnmower engine.

Stabbed by Leo Fong, who grabs the daughter of down-on-his-luck Count Menliff and demands to know where her cousin is.

‘You look like Jack Palance.’

‘Where?’

‘In a Haneke film.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Depressed.’

‘AAABJSAVHSDBVVVHHH.’

‘Is this a parable, L?’

+

That night, a fight breaks out.

The eldest son of down-on-his-luck Count Menliff is beaten to death by a black branch of the local farmer’s union [one eager farmer].

Leo Fong arrives, mails them to Delaware.

Poses by the corpse [la].

From under his wig crawls the reddest cat.

Red as Satanite.

The daughter of down-on-his-luck Count Menliff has little choice but to retaliate so she abandons her micro-chap and retaliates. Opens a strip club across town. Strips for everyone bar Leo Fong who has had enough of Ottoman castle whores anyway.

HE retreats to ruined car.

Reads the script for LOW BLOW.

Allows the reddest cat to climb up onto his dick.

‘This is finality,’ he states blank to the rotting corpse of Count Menliff tied up naked in the back seat.

Hearing the remark [teng gong], the daughter of down-on-his-luck Count Menliff throws on a sarong and wanders out of the strip bar, a cat o’ nine tails wrapped around her own neck. She should’ve known when she saw Leo Fong eating dog food off Nevenka’s chest but now that she does know she’s intent on knowing more.

To fuck a drifter in his prime, with a castle nearby [fu gun].

I love this struggle kitsch.

Or asceticism, as my gran used to say.

+

Spotting the advancing Lilith wretch [untranslatable], Leo Fong panics, joins a telesales start-up, uses rusty Cantonese to trick Indians into working as tarpaulin carriers on Cardassia Prime. Gets fired for low numbers. Sells car. Beats up engine. Finds a scrapyard and buries himself beneath layers and layers of metal scrap.

The metal scrap is in fact plastic scrap.

Guards dogs, papier-mâché.

The daughter of the dead and mutilated Count Menliff is annoyingly close by.

This feels like a sundown town [wor].

Leo Fong is not black

but

he is wearing Angela Davis

the face of her

as a makeshift face warmer.

+

[Black hole

friend

persistently translates

everything

grey

in OUR Oberiu magazine

ad.

+

RUN

to chapel-stroke-bartender lies

to Kurt the romantic love

to shit Japanese

to those who neglect the ideological nature of things

to yourself [ga ma].

+

Am I, Leo Fong, expressing the violence I’ve collated within myself?

Is this a fistula?]

+

Count Menliff returns from the dead as rabbit silhouette, says the entire concept of the piece is deranged, done-for [ga ma].

Where’s fiver, thinks Leo Fong, removing Angela Davis.

But he doesn’t say it.

The village is death-adverse. So is the town. The elderly are busy vacillating. Nevenka is flogging beggars outside the husk of HIS pathetic post office scam [for village morale].

Anyone can write.

Sex means ghost vape.

He wants it.

But his body died in the paper mill telesales explosion Friday last week.

This must end, L.

It won’t.

WILL NOT.

He’s been here three years already.

Fingering the pharmacy guy.

Degrading his dad’s car.

Submitting to magazines that are beneath him yet they offer cash so there he is submitting to them again humiliating himself.

Coffee tech?

Zi choi?

Maybe if the town’s population were six hundred, he’d be able to-