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Xangles: A Fuse of Creative Comedy and Philosophy-Science Truly bold and creative art doesn't just give us something new and fresh, but actually transcends the medium its presented in to use it in new ways, or even establishes an entirely new form of art. Modern poetry stems from the poets who toss their English dictionaries and poetry format handbooks out the window, brainstorm with a misprinted magnetic poetry set, then run all their poems through an inverse grammar checker to make sure nothing is correct once they're done. The modern film and television that really take us somewhere else and give us the most surreal and dizzying ride, are the ones that mangle the widely accepted standards of plot and character and camera placement and editing, and do something really odd and new. The Wizard of Oz, The Matrix, Being John Malkovich, The Twilight Zone, 24, Scream, and early Reality Television, devirginize us of the type of art they all introduce to us, making the sex with the endless stream of lame ripoffs to follow decreasingly worth our time. Foundation and Lord of the Rings yank us into the infectious worlds of galactic empires called Middle Earth and short pointy-eared psychohistorians which are still all the rage even after the deaths of Isaac Asimov and J.R.R. Tolkein. Tickle me Elmo set the ineffable standard for artificially intelligent baby ogres, to the point where even today, kids scrunch anything fuzzy and vaguely humanoid to see how many lines of general relativity it's familiar with. Michael Moschen set standards for all future jugglers by picking anything from a grain of strawberry Quik to a dead poodle, and studying the physics of how to bounce it around inside a giant plastic gerbil ball, leaving the carefully planned reaction of total bafflement at the gross and explicit waste of free time being displayed with ethereal pride. In comedy, of Shakespeare, Abbott and Costello, The Three Stooges, Mel Brooks, Monty Python, Airplane, Naked Gun, Douglas Adams, Homestar Runner, and Dude Where's My Car, at least two or three of these played with their medium in refreshing new ways that were core to their unique style of humor. But, since breaking from a cliche medium into something fresh and new has been done to death, we're now in need of something to save us from the monotony of breaking from the medium in all the exact same ways. Since originality is nothing new, the only thing left to do is take the ingenius leap of breaking from it, and rip everyone else off in ways never before concieved by man. Xangles is that attempt. The fracolic word "xangles" (pronounced "zangles") comes from "x angles," or the ability to see reality and art from infinite angles--any angle X. It's a principle of Franglic Phylo, where a frangle is a "fractal angle," "phylo" is a shortened term for "philosophy," and fracolics, frangles, xangles, and phylo, are all basically bullshit terms pulled out of the depths of the writers' Freudian ids to propose new science and fiction by smushing together known terms and calling it genius. The idea of Xangles is to attack and rip off not just writing, but creative science and philosophy, from multiple points of view and mediums, to get a better idea of the truth and balance of everything that's been done to death. It's also an attempt to fuse fiction and science. The greatest respect fictional sciences get is usually a book such as "The Science of Star Trek" or "The Philosophy of Battlestar Galactica," where a bunch of experts explain to us why no one will ever write a graduate thesis about anything founded on green aliens or giant shiny toy robots. When someone creates an entire language such as Klingon or Elvish, or explores an idea for a science in fiction such as Asimov's psychohistory, these are examples of creative efforts that exept for random chance, might have been respected as new scholastic fields of study. When ideas about philosophy or science surface in the mind of an individual, this can be applied in one of two ways: fiction, or non-fiction. It is rarely applied to both equally and simultaneously. Xangles is an attempt to be brain-manglingly prolific in the area of not just one, but both. To see and create new and old art and science and philosophy, from any and all angle X's. To write a serious, publishable philosophy paper examining reality from one angle, then integrate the same concept into fiction to the point where Barns & Noble has no idea whether to file it under Science, Philosophy, or Nerd Nonsense. Xangles uses humor as the medium of its fiction, because humor seems to be a bonus. Any story rich in plot and structure can then be turned into comedy with all the same depth and character development, except with frosting that even without the cake comprises its own self-sufficient treat that could stand on its own. And like cake and frosting, there are always a few messed up freaks that scrape off one to eat the other, but most people just eat what the hell they're dished out, because anyone running a party knows what everyone likes. Hence, Xangles dishes out new bold & old comedy-science, from every medium and every xangle possible, because that basically includes just about everyone who's ever laughed or been forced to read a book. New because at least two thirds of Xangles isn't directly plagiarized word for word, and old because just about anything anyone can write or type nowadays has all been done before. Right now all that's up is a little brainstorming, and the homepage of one of the writers, to give you an idea of our moronically eclectic attitude, and to give you something to read for lack of anything better to post at the moment. You're quite welcome to come back soon when someone around here has bothered to work their ideas into readable Xangles material, and of course, you're also quite welcome to just go the hell away. You know, whatever. But good luck finding your way out, because even brainstorming the rough idea of absolutely everything can make it hard to find the exit. << |