Sister Trolling

Medium keeps its contributors informed about page views, and I suppose, because I was posting off the cuff, my comment on the Ask Ethan post about black hole theory correction picked up over a hundred views. I took some physics at Temple University and nearly flunked out, but this doesn't mean I despise the study of space. Most of it is counter intuitive even for the mathematical minds which grasp it, but what I meant, without entirely understanding extraordinary mass condensation, is: If we presuppose universes repeat themselves due to impaction, consciousness doesn't seem to repeat with it. I do not feel loss of identity when my cellular waste builds in my colon and discharges. We do not remember the squeal of pigs being electrocuted for their succulent flesh once we ingest pork, so information is in fact lost on a biological level. Information is lost on a cultural level as well, and we'll never learn as much as we need to to defeat destructive capacities of entropy. We're apes. Smart apes, the most dangerous species yet encountered, but apes, slightly better engineered, and while the equations may have been proven through induction, language itself imposes its own limitations.

Whatever the viability of theories on black holes and strings, motion and matter does not think about itself in those terms. Holes, strings. Simple implements of mammal amusements. Are physicists going to argue that energy is a living element? Stars are a chemical process, partial oxidation, partial hydrogen bomb. They aren't conscious, they aren't minds with directional intent. We'll never comprehend why particles and waves exist, why they create chemicals, nor why chemicals under the right conditions ingest themselves and reproduce, nor even define thinking. Thoughts have no mass. They evolved with the basic plankton brain, but do not exist. The only evidence we have for thought are the images of brain activity, but brain activity is not itself evidence of directional imperative. For that we have DVD teleplays.

Beneath opens with an interesting premise, seems to have a touch of after.life to it, which I admire intellectually, and then decelerates into a creature elimination film whose denouement shrivels on the vine. What is mildly intriguing about the script is survival guilt conjoined to the moral lesson of medical model brutality, not something burn victims with chronic irritation need to view when they feel their life slipping away, toying with the fact that familial bonds are the best humans can do, but with denial being necessary. Beneath the surface, sisters hate each other, whatever tender moments between them. My sister and I have a multitude of stakes within our defense mechanisms: shared abuse, a sister who should never have lived.

The disabled community makes excuses for those with minimal awareness, but I am going to be cruel. People like my sister Michelle should be put down. She lived 22 years in hell, even if she did not know it. Toward the end she struggled with constant lung fluid, and my parents did the right thing, but were wrong to let her live at all, and I'm making this assertion with my mother's sister free to read my link. I love my aunt, mind, but Disability In Arts is in part a last will and testament by a woman in a precarious position who allowed her life to be destroyed by intensely disappointed emotional investments in people and indoctrinations, a woman more than likely to be defeated by the metastasis of dubious African American competency, which has infested Western standards beyond repair, although it is true the citizens of Rome waited Hannibal out, and whatever the tactics of the general on his elephant, went on to rule the world. The European Union should fly the Syrian refugees to Russia.

If Putin is supporting Alawite ruthlessness with material, then let the leader of the Russian Federation handle the consequences.

Neeson in Dublin

It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan's annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia's choir, any of Kate's pupils that were grown up enough and even some of Mary Jane's pupils too. Never had it fallen flat.  --James Joyce, The Dead

Perhaps Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo was attempting to do something more ambitious with After.Life than what she could deliver, but it is to her credit that I see things in her feature film that echo my undergraduate studies of the early Modernists, things that recall Eliot's grasp for an existence made inert through anesthesia, or Joyce's ability to show a mode of living entirely paralyzed. We have seen such things before. Virtually everyone with the ability to operate a video camera uses a nose bleed to suggest something sinister is afoot in the transient netherworld. We are not told why Ricci's middle school teacher has a bleed, uses meds, or why the mother behaves like a shellfish with a claw attached to your finger. We do not see Liam's Deacon at the initial crash site, and don't know how he gets his victims out of the ER, or why he can fool the doctors so readily with a muscle paralytic. We do not quite need to know these things for the narrative to work better than it does, but Justin Long, scion of Jeepers Creepers the first, is not up to pitting himself against Neeson's absolute and short tempered faith. Long's on and off panic switch is as much static as Ricci's desperate phone call. I am still waiting for little Ricci to inhabit a role I can believe in, her complicity in Monster aside, and I am not entirely clear on Canterbury's Jack. An apprentice, yes, but Wojtowicz seems to want him to stand as an ambiguous observer whose conscience is finally swayed.

More than suspense, Agnieszka seemed to be aiming for suspension, asking us how we live inside the routine entrapments we fear changing: There is the promise of more potential within the failure.