Who would win: leucism zebra or quagga?

The quagga was/is a type of zebra that gave up halfway going backwards. That is to say, only its front half has the zebra stripes, whereas its back half is a horse.

The quagga became extinct in the 1880s, but zebras have now been bred to look like it, so at least quasi-quaggas can be found on Earth today. But wait: a challenger appears!

Due to leucism, a pigmentary condition often confused with albinism, this zebra is like the quagga in reverse. It's like you have enough for a full horse and a full zebra, but spread across two animals. Maybe they're both pantomime horses whose operators mixed up their costumes. Other examples of leucism include this toucan:

"Kick A Ginger Day is NOT funny" - this toucan

And this peacock:

"Remember the name you all had for me when I was at internal affairs? What was it, Gordon?" - this peacock

I think the leucism zebra would win, because it has a more ostentatious mohawk. What do YOUM think? Let me know down in the comments.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Apocalypto!

The blue hippies from Avatar meet real Indigenous Peoples (1502, colourised).

Apocalypto peaks so hard in the cast-of-thousands city sequence that the third act, consisting of a few guys chasing one another around a forest, feels more like an extended cooldown than an escalating climax. I know we're supposed to care that our hero gets back in time to save his family from drowning, but the whole time I just wanted to get back to the city, because it's the one time on film this criminally underused aesthetic has been let loose in its Mesoamerican maximalist glory. A fun game to play is to pause at any point during the crowd scenes and see what the incidental extras are wearing, and make reaction images of them:

>mrw ____

Mayan cities tended to rise and fall somewhat cyclically due to location, resources and their eventual exhaustion. A city might form around a subterranean cenote, thrive for a time, and then collapse from overlogging and desiccation of the soil. So much for the cliché of pre-industrial peoples living in harmony with the natural world (though, to be fair, the Mayans only ruined one city-sized area at a time. Australia was covered in lush rainforest until the aboriginal inhabitants repeatedly burned the entire thing to the ground to smoke out game, meaning the worst ecological catastrophe of all time was caused by a people hippies are now obligated to worship).

Whoa, for real? Jamie, pull that up. You're blowing my mind right now.

NPCs deplore this kinograph for portraying the Mayan civilisation as cruel, but in truth it doesn't show nearly the worst of it (children were ritually drowned in the cenote, for starters), and it's not as though The Northman or Kurosawa's epics whitewash the history of their respective settings. Personally, I want to see more Mesoamerikino that's as uncucked about showing both the aesthetic splendour and the insanely violent practices of pre-conquest Mexico. The rise of the Aztecs from Chichimec nomads kicked out of every place they settled to vassals of the Tepanecs to a triumphant regional hegemon under the speakership of Itzcoatl would be the perfect subject matter for an epic to end all epics. For this reason alone, infantilising noble-savage cod historiography must die.

Greatest Movie of All time of the Week: After Hours!

Martin Scorsese is now mostly famous for telling zoomoids marvelshit isn't cinema, but to olds like me, he was mostly famous for making gangster flicks where people talk like people talk, you know? With the you-knows and the whatnots. And this sort of gradually overlapped with and morphed into biopics and theological navelgazing and other things of that lofty nature.

Yeah, this ain't one of those.

But, like those few strips where Garfield became an existential horror comic, in 1985 Scorsese suddenly decided, just once, to make a David Lynch film, which was an audacious move, because Blue Velvet didn't drop until the following year, and Lynch's formula (one part Hitchcock, one part Kafka, one part The Wizard of Oz) was yet to be articulated*. Nothing Scorsese did before or since was anything like After Hours, which is a shame because it's his best movie, but is also kind of great because it implies any mainstream filmmaker or entertainer in general might just take a sudden detour into bizarre territory for no reason at all.

Horrifying sculpture of Gregor Samsa-mode abjection, or YouTuber reacting to the new slop to drop on Disney Plus? As always, you decide.

Griffin Dunne plays Paul Hackett (who, we will learn, can't), a hapless everyman whose efforts to live out the plot of a romantic comedy with Rosanna Arquette (Buffalo 66) go awry due to a storm of what begins to seem like targeted bad luck. Events contrive to strand him in the Soho district of New York, unable to get home. Like Dorothy, this becomes his singular focus, but things get worse and worse for him as his neurosis leads to poor decisions and his poor decisions lead to crippling fear and guilt, none of which is warranted because he's clearly in a situation so absurd that no decision he could make could save him from it.

"Can't we just get over the rainbow?" - Dorothy Gale, Paul Hackett, and everyone living in currentyear+9.

To say much more would be to give away a lot of the twists and turns of the piece, so I'll pontificate on Kafka instead. Kafka's main theme was abjection, which he understood so well that he completely covered everything there is to say on it, at least from the inside. Despite this, every other person I pass in the street wears a Nirvana T-shirt, indicating that abjection as a topic has never been more popular. Social media is mostly people whining about (and demonstrating) their collection of mental illnesses. Characters in TV and movies are made unlikable and dysfunctional so people can "relate" to them. What none of these posers realise is that Kafka was laughing at them (and himself) because unlike Burt Cobain and his shit Pixies knock-off band that blew up over their only good song (read: riff), Kafka had a sense of humour.

The longer you look at this still, the funnier it becomes.

*Ingmar Bergman also made a Lynch film, 1968's Hour of the Wolf, long before even Eraserhead dropped, but since it's Bergman it has only the dark Kafka stuff, because Bergman is Shadow the Hedgehog.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Rumble Fish!

Do u think the fish motif or the fish-eye lens visual pun came first in the creative process?

You've been successfully bullied out of liking Donnie Darko but you still want an entry-level (not an insult) arthouse-for-teens-and-young-adults kino. Enter Rumble Fish, the most overlooked movie from Godfather and Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola, who spiraled into massive credit card debt over Apocalypse and failed to bail himself out with flop musical One From the Heart, which explains in part why his 80s tenure is obscure while other New Hollywood-era filmmakers like Scorsese continued to pump out the hits. If you're going to tank your long-term viability over a project, it might as well be Apocalypse Now, but after it, nothing in the Coppola oeuvre has made much of a splash, unless you count his nepotism baby's single worthwhile outing Lost in Translation (yeah, I like shoegaze. Blow me).

"♪Ciiiity giiiiirl/I love youooooouooo/Iii dooo..." - me in the shower

To be honest, most of that obscurity is no great loss. No one is going to his grave agonising that he never saw Peggy Sue Got Married. Rumble Fish is different. Picture Rebel Without a Cause filtered through German Expressionism with a bit of that Koyaanisqatsi time-lapse magic that was cutting-edge at the time, with the subtlest frisson of The Warriors or Streets of Fire stylization to its monochrome urban jungle setting. No adolescent will be bored by an art flick featuring setpieces like this subway beatdown:

Nor will any cinésnob fail to be moved by the film's casual diversions into dreamlike flights of fantasy:

Yes, that hack Spielb*rg ripped off this device for his rancid Oscarbait Schindler's List, but try to imagine how cool it must have looked back then.

Matt Dillon (Wild Things) plays Rusty James, a somewhat dense Brad in a teen street gang that calls street fights "rumbles". Mickey Rourke plays his older brother, The Motorcycle Kid, with a conspicuously Kurtzian burned-out poet-of-doom sort of vibe. Rusty James idolises The Motorcycle Kid as the badass anyone called The Motorcycle Kid would have to be to stay called The Motorcycle Kid for long, but TMK starts to drop hints he doesn't want Rusty James following in his footsteps. Perhaps to underscore the Apocalypse Now resonances, Dennis Hopper is cast as their alcoholic dad. Probably not to make you (me) rewatch Streets of Fire for the 14th time, Diane Lane is cast as Rusty James's gf. Because he's Coppola's nephew, Nicolas Cage is cast as some other douchebag in the gang. But besides the credited actors, the movie is populated by a cast of visual and audio characters who compel the viewer's attention: the looming clocks, the speeding clouds, the creeping shadows of the fire escape.

They speak of time passing with a low-key urgency unknown to any other film. Your life is fleeting, your youth moreso, so make it count, but set aside 90 minutes to watch Rumble Fish.