"... for the Baghdad I knew then seems now closer to the time of the Nights than it does to our own times." --Hussain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights, 1988 edition
Strange, the predilection for translators ventilating on their under-appreciated art, this failed child of the sixties marooned in the void between Drexel, Temple, and University of Pennsylvania campuses, respectively, the latter of which is not Ivy League, but sticks its nasal accent up your ass with well mannered decorum, though what it shares with the other two is the specter of inner city crime hanging over your shoulder. Our society both was and wasn't the film that, though now fallen victim to kitsch, is in some ways ruthlessly modern, minimalist. The female actors potted plants, aerosol air and glued eyelashes, tears and widow weeds ready. It owes a debt to Kubrick, as does Mr. Soames. District 9 pays subtle homage to analog aspirations, and Blomkamp takes his work seriously. Earned undying gratitude.
I should be going to sleep, and this post may not ply so deeply due to this salient fact, but perhaps I should refine my parameters. The hate in my marrow has more to do with the void closing in on me, like our bodies daring the overwhelming entry into space, and our sheer insignificance in it. This is not the constriction I wanted to settle for, state socialism, an exploited body everyone else earns a living on, though I too, must plead guilty of having done the same. I am imposed upon, with fewer and fewer choices not to be so, but let's get Copernican. We all know Manhattan is the center of the universe, representative of every urban environment, whether cosmopolitan or provincial slummers who never get much beyond the radius of their street block, with an encompassing loss or longing, an interior with its own macular degeneration. I lived in Manhattan, never fully absorbed it, exactly the same and not the same as Philadelphia.
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