Orthographical Scraping

Not their technology, our technology!-- Jason Cope

I freely confess that my page views from Russia perplex me. They surge in my darkest moments, engaging in confirmation bias or astonishment, even ridicule, perhaps exploitation, then recede when I have a valid critique, or perhaps to them, I am a unique specimen, the now wavering invalid who defied Google, the Philadelphia police, University of Pennsylvania’s psychiatric procedures, and my rental agent, only to fall to family and a shyster excuse for a wheelchair technician. Such largesse would not be granted to me in the post-Soviet Putin era, not being an apt love interest for the traitorous Edward Snowden, but whatever is going in the globe’s largest, but sparsely populated nation, which could be quite easily defeated by the Chinese military, something which I am sure our intelligence agencies know better than I on the sheer strength of numbers alone, I was not manipulated by Russian propaganda during the election cycle. Like many in the right wing, Trump was not my first choice during the primaries, but I was then an independent, and do not engage in backing a particular political horse, state or nation-wide, all that often. Trump prevailed, and I was actually going to throw my vote to the libertarians. Instead, I took pity on my aunt. I concede, during my unhappy engagement with Yabberz, that some of the spin on the Clinton Foundation may have been doctored, but this was not an influence on my vote. That goes to Monica Lewinsky and the Starr Report, because it is just possible that we would have been just that more vigilant about the rise of Al Qada and Osama bin Laden had we the people not been in an uproar about impeachment and sexual impropriety during President Clinton’s second term.

Now, the dowager defended Bill in her communities, as the Senate voted down the House articles, but in the aftermath of two decades of terrorism and failed neo-conservative warfare, I put the onus for this on the Clintons. Had the Clinton administration heeded the rising temperature of Islamic radicalism, GW would not have had a rationale for Iraq 2.0, in our failed game of chicken with Baathist prawns. This is how my pyramid is built, and continuously disappointed, my gravitation toward anarchy no better or worse than what has gone before. District 9 remains my favorite niche film in the science fiction genre, and I’d argue that it isn’t quite as ironclad for progressive tolerance as meets the eye, though it never references apartheid overtly, because native black South Africans inhabit an anomalous place in the energy of the documentary narrative. Regardless of Blomkamp’s intent, we come away uniquely challenged by his unique little gem: first contact might neither be as transcendent or malicious as the industry often feeds it to us. Arrival tilts its axis on the same pole, and opts for the benevolence of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Starman, never quite considering Blomkamp’s striking thought that we’d wind up with Serbian camp conditions instead. Having been around since Khrushchev and the fabled shoe tactic, I have no love lost for collective state models, nor modern leftist cult style corruption which results in the death of Putin's opposition. I have been disenfranchised by corruption on the American left, and while I may not be the enemy of Slavic mindsets, don’t presume I am your appeaser either. Implosive anger such as mine often leads to attacks on the social altruism towards which we naturally incline, such as those striking Austin. I’m quite aware of that, though in this case, if law enforcement is correct that this involves music industry figures, that adds up to quite a bit of specious hemlock. So we wait and see, wondering if Greg Abbott will have a political life after his tenure.

That Nick Gillespie liked two of my tweets since I started supporting Reason isn't a job contract, and it doen't mean Brian will green light my next pitch. The magazine is just this side of too California for my tastes, but since I desire to keep exploring libertarian themes, it is nonetheless a small hope against alarm at the occasional spastic tremor.

Sickly Hues of Milk

This TV plays games with those of us on the cheapskate, much as we play games with the frustrations of touch interface, or online paranoia. Steve Jobs has neither my gratitude nor my fetish zeal, although one can look at Tim Cook's libertarian streak in his battles with the FBI as a paradoxical quagmire. Most of what we get from This is mediocre: mediocre space opera, mediocre war movies, shoveling shit to those worried about IVC Filter implants. 

Once in awhile something you want to eat comes along: The Burrowers, District 9. Code 46 seems to have the same nutritious texture, but caught me off guard, because I was busy having an insurgency tantrum about Blogger's HTTPS update, figuring they want to muzzle stiff necked intransigents such as yours truly. (Is my rebellious despair all that important?) I will have to catch its rerun over the weekend, but what I saw of the first twenty minutes certainly had an unsettled effect, at least in terms of cinematography, which contributed as much to the dialogue as Morton's oozy Caucasian journey in an urban environment anesthetized to the residue of humanity within it. All I did was log on to research what I was looking at, wasted over 2MB getting upset about HTTPS encryption and security protocols which I certainly don't understand, missed getting grocery on time, and now have to roll to the Pakistani at the 7-11 to waste money on bad franchise food, hoping they still have wings, as that is their most tolerable selection. Obviously, we need time off now and again; let's see how I tap dance around an overage gigabyte, shall we? I'm worried about my castor tire, and if that goes, so do I. Live it lovely.  

Intrinsic Predatory Stance

I paid Google, fool that I am, for 24 months with this domain, whether or not I should tell you that, and I'll be incredibly lucky to still be posting that long, unsure if Blogger is penalizing me for my mouth with Adsense or if I just don't know how to link the damn domain back into the ad account. I have to get a customer rep on the phone, and try to promise not to get gunned down for sedition. I am simply a clever twist on the conventional quadriplegic, not the dazzling American right wing militia; symptomatic of how much I've changed, however, the FBI's justification for the kill shot to Finicum doesn't sit well with me, not that I am prepared to gnaw that bone at the moment. I feel that no matter what I do my life is finished, and Presbyterian Homes won. I lost, because my rage toward the corporation is destroying whatever cardiovascular durability I've left, and if I give my notice they've just won faster, because I do not know if I can tap dance my way into any temporary security, and my emotional pain over this is killing me. I hope most of you are better fortified.

Prison, with a shockingly young Viggo Mortensen, is actually a viscerally frightening horror film, vis-a-vis the template body snatchers formula which mushroomed into enough cheap films in order to torture the poor. It works, for me, due to the spiritual habitation of place, and its malevolent vengeance intersecting with blood guilt, just on the edge enough to remain entertaining, and utilizing African intuitive links to the totem to give the grotesque body dysmorphia a tangible quality which makes you want to keep pace. Like District 9, this late Reagan vehicle transcends its tricks. Few in its family tree do. Viggo just has that face, like a grimaced pole cat. My right leg is numb, domestic terrorist spinster extraordinaire. I did not create this account to whine, but I've taken alot out of myself this winter, and need a solution.

The Faberge Egg of Ponzi Schemes

"They defended a stubbornly held view of themselves, which was that they were ordinary and in the right of it."-- Doris Lessing, kindle loc 27

Dick Polman utilizes the rule of thumb that when mainstream media zigs, you should zag in the other direction, but Jantjie is an irresistible confirmation, a nefarious joke of first order rebellion against saturated accolades of a top heavy liberal era doddering under so many finely attenuated victories. I can only imagine the swarm of stringers and interns who have contributed to the fall out, the back story juice. One flagship outlet blames Afrikaner subjugation, and I don't doubt it. I remember the townships. I also remember Winnie's gang, politely swept under the carpet for the soaring oratory. Many analogies made between apartheid and American segregation, but the Dutch settlement of Cape Town and the European bloodbath which created the United States are not quite identical. White Americans stigmatized a diverse ethnic group, including themselves, and came out of it with an uneasy plurality and an archaic bureau which yelps in decimated cycles, reminding the citizen uneasily of nineteenth century pacification.

So I pick at scabs. To what end? We could speculate that perhaps forced co-existence of diversity, such as within the absurd theocracy of public housing, doesn't work any better than the refugee camps of my favorite Afrikaner film. What District 9 says about racial hatred is not quite easy to parse, as the native Africans are and aren't integrated, and both black and Afrikaners hate the prawns.

Toe nails on ailing left foot clipped successfully, I am absolutely ecstatic that I now understand how an aggregate works, having forgotten that I posted my Blogger address in my profile statement, my poor brain dancing with pieces in my life already over-extended, and alas, now I have to troll for subscribers, but we're all in a spam lot, just like Gorden Gekko is a parody of a pissing army ant. Why Oliver Stone had to make the 2010 sequel is a bit of a dribble, not that the drool of the story line rests entirely on Douglas's shoulders. I'm beaten people, beaten even if I get the fuck out of this building, even if I feed my former supervisor her head on platter. The aesthetic vanity of a grand dame in dignified old age is beyond and away, dead alive rolling through the motions. I will stay with Examiner.com for a time, however. Sedentary lifestyle-- with patience maybe I can join the editorial team, if I can keep my thinking cap.

Braque Boxes

James once suggested to William Dean Howells that he should consider publishing a story on incest.  --Michael C Clark, shoulder ghost

I may not have had the diction on hand then that I have available today, but even before my father smashed my stereo to avoid smashing me, and there were several of those instances, signifying the luck of the draw that my immediate family wasn't subject to annihilation, I knew in my pre-collegiate days that Pete Townshend's solo smash was too effective as a corrosive force on my naivete. Elton and Bernie may have dangled homoerotic lyrics like a choice pork medallion, but they did it with an adolescent simplex. Townshend is darker in Empty Glass, a sick perverted bastard if ever there was one, and yet, in the musical traditions that fermented British rock, the album is a work of art, much like Birth of the Nation put the movie industry on the map due to its technical accomplishments, despite the ferocity of its repressions. Blomkamp speaks to this aesthetic complicity in District 9. He was speaking my language before my blogging unwittingly gave voice to my somewhat unrealized convictions, before I butted heads with secular liberalism, whether Zionist, academic, or LBGT.

The plot does have certain inexplicable elements. Christopher seems to be a lone intelligence amid a swarm of alien idiots who cognate slightly better than great apes, and Copley's Wikus survives a paranoid military of a paranoid government and its equally brutal gangland counterpart, but that given, it is a film that has caught up with what it is possible to achieve in science fiction when authors treat the genre with respect. In watching Blomkamp's mock analysts, we see reinforced how our own analysts stand as a bulwark, giving power the benefit of the doubt. When the Petraeus scandal broke, David Brooks gaffed, sitting in his Newshour chair, "I had lunch with him [the general] last week."

This signifies that Brooks gets access in the Beltway, but little else in what the public should know, could know, about the people we pay to run our governments; District 9 signifies this -- it is a film  integral to Africaan guilt (and those Dutch polyglots should feel guilty) but applicable to the rest of us. It is honest in its view that the legal collapse of apartheid does not magically fuse Europeans and Africans like Siamese twins, although Henry Louis Gates, whose chip on the shoulder practically vibrates, says we are all biologically African! How can caste subjugation be so pervasive? Gates makes Rand's ideological lunacy seem sympathetic.

Blomkamp should have won the best foreign film Oscar, but that would have been risky, an anti-establishment gateway.

Transgressio, Urban Analogs

"... 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.