Credulity and Suspension

Allow me to express a momentary displeasure with serials, despite the fact that they've driven the market for narratives since the discovery of the stylus and the evolution of play acting: If you have a mature British woman engaged in bigamous relationships because the bigamy is conveniently transcontinental, why would the British authorities treat the British but illegal husband as legitimate, allowing him to arrive in Hong Kong before informing him he had been duped? I was unconvinced of Anthony Wong's repressed pain as the real Asian husband of the deceased Meg Harris in White Dragon, and can see already the "good" Britons  trying valiantly to get the enigmatic Mandarins to behave themselves without the benefit of Charles George Gordon willingness and ability to apply his better disciplined troops to the matter. Wouldn't I be better off applying myself to the implied reconciliation of  The Upside?

Prison Planet traumatized me Wednesday evening when I was looking to weasel my way into whatever support we can gauge through a thread exchange. Strangely, this always intersects, despondency pierced by triggers through which I am better off not becoming open to the ferocity of fighting back, tearing through me like a lash. There is absolutely no respect for the dignity of life in what this man did, and in the era of a just monarchy he would be put to death for offending the divine. Now try putting the agony this lion experiences in a power chair through which life has been circumscribed from birth. This is why I obscure the obvious, or seem to be posting merely what it pleases me to examine, most of the time. I've nothing left to live for, that full metal jacket burning my lung, rousing my bile and a metallic taste at the back of my throat, artery under my armpit throbbing.

And this? A metropolis with aggressive neon spectrums just a little freer than the homogeneous, and frightening temerity of Beijing.

Leslie Howard's Sacrificial Graft

once, as I went past, I drew a sign at a point in space, just so I could find it again two hundred million years later," -- Italo Calvino, A SIGN IN SPACE

49th Parallel, in a nearly exact correlation to Lars and the Real Girl, a film roughly seventy years older, more fluid, less schematic, and even a different genre, is not an intrinsically Canadian film. Canadian films for and about Canadians may exist, and Canadian literary writers love to assume, through the chic ferocity of Margaret Atwood, that a distinctive Canadian identity exists, embodied in the graphic hero of Wolverine, perhaps, but much like X-Men is an overblown extended metaphor about difference and restraint, Canada never truly evolved as a nation, and it had the luxury of not doing so thanks to the fact that Britain Germany and France hate each other. 49th Parallel is actually a dialectical argument about neo-imperialism of two types: romantic absolutism (German Nazism, which for our purposes, for the time being, shall remain disparate from Italy's half-assed delusions of grandeur) and the UK's torturous evolution of virtuous monarchy, itself a national psychosis which is in no way unique to British sensibilities, although every empire has a unique and singular application.

Britain's unique mindset falls under this rubric:We defeated Spain and at least drew a stalemate with France at the end of the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, were therefore the truest heirs of Rome, and we get to tell the rest of the world how to live, play nice, and respect each other's autonomy, according to our rules and laws, because we killed enough indigenous natives, including Frenchmen, to have earned that right.

The Germans came along a little late and said not so fast, and the frightening thing is, the Germans almost won, despite their significant disadvantages, despite Leslie Howard's moral outrage, despite Powell's and Pressburger's near religious fidelity to the justice of liberal democracy, and Olivier's canonization by Pope Pius in the opening scene after the crash. How was the German vision different, setting aside their mechanized methods of sanitizing human civilization? The difficulty lies in the fact that Hitler as Fuhrer obscures why the German establishment rallied to eugenics, and that one ethnicity which had set itself apart for millennia became the handmaiden of the mother of all genocides -- one from which the disabled were not excluded-- but even Nazi's knew when to back off, and in the early days of Hitler's consolidation of power, German families rose up to protect their disabled loved ones, and officers stopped rounding up disabled German citizens to inter them-- setting these issues apart, what did the National Socialists want, or desire to achieve, and was it even possible to alter evolutionary science in such a radical fashion? It isn't an easy question to pose, but in essence, the Fascists, too, had such a radical notion of egalitarian purity that it might have wiped itself out in a mono-biological disaster of a human efficiency model, one which threatens to return with the merger, at least, between human and machine, perhaps in a few hundred years. Life is messy. Hitler's Fascists, unlike Britons, were invested in superior efficiency models as a notion of great civilization.

It was humanity's greatest quarrel to date. The United Kingdom won at such a great price that the lines of the equally messy Islamic insurgency can be traced through it, though this seems to have hit its watermark, whatever else these soldiers for Allah have up their sleeve.

In the same vein, Lars isn't a Canadian film either, but a North Hollywood softball a nod to US selfish shallowness about what community adaptation actually means, with Patricia Clarkson as the lynchpin for accommodating a necessary delusional mechanism, with a conclusion that sails in like a beatitude on a featherbed, but that's a luxury which North Hollywood can concoct only because the British bayonet and Yankee military success at consolidating territory created it.

In these troubled times, the sense of jeremiad in the US is overblown, even if Trump pulls an upset and has a bad term in office, but it is also true that US hegemony will never again quite be what it was, and without it, the Canadian comfort zone, and its presumed benevolence, will cease to exist. Man eating lions are a succinct minority doomed to extinction, but even the dowager has her pet causes.

TNR, First Peel

"Although I did not share my father's aversion to ugliness--which often led us to associate with stupid people--I did feel vaguely uncomfortable in the presence of anyone completely devoid of physical charm. Their resignation to the fact that they were unattractive seemed to me somehow indecent." --Francoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse, p.8

Scorpion King 3, for a schlock multicultural saga, one which minimizes Eurocentricism to brute force which plods its way though Eastern mysticism, isn't bad for light-hearted distraction, though spastic lost track of the climatic battle with Talus (damn it to hell) because she was busy pruning twitter accounts-- something we'll return to momentarily-- and I wanted to raise an incident from the opening, when Ramusan utilizes elephants to defend his city.

Spastic has mixed feelings about elephants. Padre once rode one at the zoo with Nicky or Stephanie with his legs splayed across the beast, and my mother and I had a pissable laugh moment, even remembering it brings an immediate chuckle-- but when I say mixed feelings, I mean I mourn an ancient, highly intelligent, if inconvenient, herd animal which is apparently doomed, but also, rather powerful, threatening, and a target to be killed and handled with respect, simultaneously. The army of Talus, having breached the wall, spears one of Ramusan's beasts, with an implication of mortal wound, and it upset me, in a militant PETA guerrilla type of provocation, even though I knew it was a movie, and the elephants probably understood they were playing a game at the behest of the huge monkeys who took care of them.

I was trained to study this in film, our sentimentality at our own destructive capacity with other species. There is no hard and fast either or here. Apex predators evolved for a reason, but human conscience and bio-empathy, to use an E.O. Wilson phrase, is one of inherent contradiction between our need to prove time and again our mastery over environment, and our desire to see the majority of mammals as our children, despite consuming them to our taste or eradicating habitat. Environmentalists will invariably lose this battle, and I do not write it lightly. Were it up to me I'd be a male lion breaking the backs of hyenas for sport, in an unadulterated display of power, but since humans are paramount, I'd imagine within a hundred years of my death Africa will have lost its magnificent big game, unless we brutally curtail our own population. That is an exceedingly difficult task, even if we grant our own psychopaths unfettered license.

As to social media, I do not mean to be deliberately hurtful here, but I am increasingly paranoid about mothers with children, and blocked one of my long-standing followers accordingly due to it. I beat my own path, and while mothers are ferocious forces in their own right, I am writing for mature, hopefully literate audiences. High schoolers read at their own risk, and I write this with full realization that I'm rarely "hard core," but I do, euphemistically, tap the brass ring now and then. If I cave in and give myself an FB account, then I may indeed go haywire managing it all, being detritus needs clearing now and again. Mathayus could give Goodell a few pointers about putting two teams in contest that are equally matched in battle. The third and fourth quarters were deplorable. What else is new?

Cecil, Walter Palmer, and outrage

Liberals may think that a good deal of my anger comes from disillusionment more than the erosion of progressive sentiment, and on the apex predatory scale, that may not be entirely relevant. The private racism I've been privy to in my family used to trouble me, and no, I will not embarrass them, said relatives, with a who's who said what.

I'll vilify myself instead: My father wasn't a monster when his adolescent daughter had the black boyfriend temptation going. I now see African American soft socialism the way my Catholic family does, and bitterly regret what they were trying to tell me when I had leftist religion, because I see what being broken on the progressive spikes jutting out of Philadelphia like Nazi defenses on the beaches of Normandy does to the disadvantaged.

There. You're smart fanatic is condemned-- however, Walter Palmer will face criminal persecution if I have anything to say about it, and with crowd funding sources, I should not marginalize this power. I've conveyed there will be no more killing of apex felines. I meant it, and on this issue I side with the protesters. It is true Cecil was 13 and had to die sometime, but we are now responsible for these pet children. And I will not have it. I will not.

This man will surrender his hunting license and make restitution to the citizens of Zimbabwe. I'm going to see to that. Cecil was our child, and this shall not happen again on my watch. Dr. Palmer tortured an alpha male in a dirty and underhanded way, and I'm not letting this go. This man's recreational hunts are finished. Period. End of story.

On an editorial note, Google has been moving my twitter email in spam. Didn't realize it. I now comprehend loglines! Some of you are thus forgiven. Ominous smile.

la vendetta del vecchio temporizzatore!

Finally! Network comes up with a dramatic series I desire to follow, crock of malarkey back draft echo of Day of the Animals it may be! I have no chastisement to offer Bryan Fuller about the subversive artistry of his Hannibal. I enjoyed it, and the show's contractual problems are unfortunate, but armchair anarchists do not need to view, on a daily basis, the tightly controlled frissons out of the multi-millions bankrolled on the notorious anti-hero of Thomas Harris. Hannibal's mindset is analogous to Google's efficiency model: the surgeon psychiatrist kills for the ephemeral pleasures of culinary aesthetics, and the murderers whose language Lecter understands, these kill for quests on the dark side of Slade's challenge to us that violence has its own beauty in the hands of the artist. Real urban crime simply ripples into a diffusion of responsibility, and I would have attempted to save Sutherland's life. I did act, in North Philadelphia, despite the constant violence which created my controversial posts-- not that I haven't been paralyzed by fear-- but I would have forced the commuters on that car to jump the suspect.

Whoever is writing The Zoo scripts, I have a season cliff hanger to suggest: have two, three pods of orca wipe out California. Give Jerry Brown a cameo and let him stick his head in the jaws of a Seaworld whale we wonderful humans hold captive for our entertainment, and on a mild note to CBS: if your line producers hurt one kitty, then I'm coming to New York and I'll kick your damn asses, kabeesh?