“Mayan Calendar Girls” is a surreal collection of unconnected chapters that are supposed to make up a story, if you read enough of them. Each chapter is interesting and the characters are fun, but the point of view jumps between chapters and there are few linear links between them. If you don’t mind reading a story in bits and fitting the bits together in your head, you might find the story a lot of fun.
The story seems to be about the Mayan calendar, the end of time, a crystal skull, several groups of people who are after the skull, drugs, dolphins, and people trying to hook up. There is a large cast of characters, including a Chinese expert in Mayan culture, a Mayan businessman trying to make money from his heritage, a stoned hippie living in the bush, and a woman who likes to swim naked with dolphins. There seem to be several plot lines running simultaneously. Some of the sequences read like a James Bond novel with bad guys tying the hero and heroine up, jet ski races, and gun fights. Others have a New Age feel such as the scenes with the dolphins or the chapter told from the point of view of a Mayan goddess watching a family over the generations. There is lots of bantering dialog, swearing, sexual fantasizing, and suggestive imagery. For example, a southern senator compares a woman’s breasts to Hershey’s kisses.
When you get to the main page of the site there is no link to the first chapter. There is a link to the last 5 episodes, a list of chapter names (no numbers), indices, scenarios (the names of places), tags (names of characters and things), and a keyword cloud. Clicking on any of these will get a chapter or two on screen but most of them aren’t linked. Reading the chapters as listed from top to bottom or vice versa doesn’t seem to work either. Clicking on a character’s name usually results in a few chapters in the character’s story line. Then you have to start again. It’s an interesting way to read a story but if you’re a linear thinker you may find it frustrating not to know where to find the next part of a particular plot line, or even if there is one.
If you’re interested in reading a non-linear story, there’s lots of fun and interesting plots and characters in “Mayan Calendar Girls”. The writing is a bit rough and a bit crude in places but it’s a good for a laugh.
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I suppose I should be ranting about how sexist this whole thing is. I mean, the video alone . . . Reducing the End Of The World to cheesecake and frat snickers? Awful.
Trouble is, I find myself getting a big kick out of this. It helps they led off with Aphra, the industrial spy described as "Indiana Jones meets Cleopatra Jones" at one point. She goes beyond sassy and it’s a scream that she’s working for a redneck Republican while her competition in dirty tricks is like "superWhiteBoy" working for the Committee to ReElect. "Do they still call it "CREEP"?" Aphra asks. "I can see why." Later, when her predatory sexuality comes out to get frisky, she’s even more of a scream. I could really see her as the young Ertha Kitt.
Then you’ve got Curtsy, blonde all over, you might say, and a dolphin groupie. Horrifying and sick, of course. But I gotta say, I could kind of go with her. She’s hot for dolphins (like so many girls out there taking marine science) but actually does something about it. And I wonder if she’ll get past that and hook up with the nice Mayan boy. Apparently the disembodied Goddess or whatever is overlooking all this agrees.
I like the spunk of Charity, the redhead fire dancer, but who really grabbed me after a slow start is Xchab. We’re so used to Indians being such noble redpersons in fiction, it’s a little odd to see the petulant, teenaged Xchab yearning to break out of the "Mayan village people" life and become a little punker with money and cool cell phones like she dreams of. And watching her head get twisted when she runs into the crystal skull who seems to be orchestraing this thing, Charity tarting her up and taking her to a strip club to learn a trade, and seeing a briefcase of dollars change hands. Her approach/avoidance of modern culture is touching and funny.
The men are all pigs, of course. But they’ll do.
This is pretty wild, and as good a way to take off on the whole 2012 thing as any other I’ve seen.
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Man, it is SO great to run into something like this after wading through all the vampires and zombies and wizards and gay zombie vampire wizards!
This is just amazing, actually. Not just the integration of art and videos into it: that’s been done for sure. Or even the offhanded way of dealing with the whole 2012 deal. We might expect treatises on calendar mechanics and pyramids and cosmology, but no: we get girlies. And shrooms. And . . . are you ready for this . . . we get the President of the US hosting a government talk show and doing comic monologues.
Not to mention black lesbian spies working to defeat Obama in 2012 and super-white government agents working to re-elect him, Islamic plots against the Large Hadon Collider (which some think has already caused the end of the world but we just don’t know it yet), and coral forming words on the sea bootom and raiding a millionaire’s yacht to get a jade plaque that might be a manual for what to do after the end of time, and a genuine crystal skull kidnapped to direct a major motion picture, and . . . what else was it? Oh yeah, girls.
This isn’t chick lit, but a lot of chicks would like it, I think. Curtsy and Aphra and MeiMei aren’t you parents’ Charlies Angels and Xchab the little Mayan waif getting turned into a stripper and mystical magnet is endearing as well.
This is one wild and crazy serial and has a whole bunch of artwork and links to explore. Check it out. It’ll probably get published and filmed five miinutes before the world ends.
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