When
I contend with Brian Greene and other physicists on Twitter, effeminate mind
altering geeks as they are, I must come off as a blockhead. I cannot compete
with them in the mathematical empiricism which illustrates the laws of nature
as necessarily fixed, so why do it then? Before giving a direct answer, it may
surprise viewers to learn I once did amazingly well in algebra and Euclidian geometry,
and even got an A on my chemistry final dragging my sister bitch on a leash. My
acumen sharpened or fogged primarily due to despair. In my home districts, I
thrived. Outside of them my motivation struggled without the proper covalent
bonds, but I never quite lost interest in how Einstein and those who made
nuclear war possible revolutionized astronomy. I did not realize, or had
serious memory lapses against what I was taught, that stars start
out as frozen gas that clumps together, takes 10m to ignite or fail,
accordingly, and that our solar system won the lottery with long odds,
especially since brown dwarfs are popular failures which do not result in
fusion, in theory. Space generates its own dynamism over extraordinarily
lengthy periods through vibration, end of story. And yet, theoretical physics
borders on tacky space opera in places. Matter may ultimately be a hologram.
Time may be an illusion. Dark energy. Anti-matter. Four forces, weak and
strong, magnetism. Are we absolutely certain we aren’t attempting to decode
god? We cannot really say all that much about our self-awareness, let alone why
the particles which configure life are so different from those which configure
uranium, or why disease and age and so many other things generate agony,
against which pleasure is fleeting. We know joy when we feel it too, but most
of life processes itself irrespective of human naval gazing, which is why
androids and android sex and zombies and singularities worry our collective
social dynamics. I do not think the laws of nature recreates humanity in
alternate universes as neatly as the equations of impaction lend themselves to
in popular science. This is where my “yes but,” comes in, even if I risk being
a Neanderthal, like Ron Perlman in Hand
of God. Perlman is always reprising himself as a caveman, and his canceled
series challenges materialism in exactly the same way I feel the need to
challenge what epistemology gains through radio waves and optics. The pilot
episode reveals a conspiracy through hallucinogenic delusion which, just
possibly, might be divine revelation coming at a necessary price. Amazon
canceled it, so we’ll never know, as its second season seems to meander in
corporate evil. The actor who plays Keith (Dillahunt?) was certainly made up to
look like a warrior from Judges, conquering Canaan. Going against the grain of
established critics, there are things I’ve enjoyed viewing here, if only to observe,
in context, why the West Coast is as fucked up as upstate New York.
My
mother’s sister telephoned, since I have stopped using Facebook. We ignored my
abominable attitude, and the prospect of moving into grandmother’s nursing home
went in one ear, as the saying goes. Mary really thinks she is doing the right
thing, oblivious to the fact that my sentience is still vital. Marie, the other aunt, accused me
of whining, thus generating the enthusiasm of her former married relation, and
then hung up. I have my moments, but Marie is wearying me with this constant
punishment, as both she and my father contributed to this gradated wasting of
my strength. A generic ten year old Quantum extended my strength, and when it
blew on 10/02, I didn’t assume I’d be dead in 6 months. Unless I can move the
absolute zero of Satan’s forbidding glacial majesty, exchange power chairs,
relearn how to maneuver myself to restore some semblance of self-determination,
it is possible, without exaggeration. The disposable underwear, the loss of my
fish, coffee, toilet usage, the toll may now be too much. Trudy Richardson may
not have defeated me with her illegal tactics, but as I’ve written, the stocky
lupus African achieved quite a lot with her conniving, linear mindset. I have
no love lost over these murders. First I thought one thing, and then said it’s
a black problem, and decided not to ripple Twitter’s ions. I am not Milo,
quite, but if the handwriting is on the wall, things might get more interesting
still, in my quest, if not for grace, then?
"I take the side of the animals though," Terrence Hill, Eastwood's dialectical absudist There are reasons Natasha Richardson interests me as an industry standard-bearer, particularly when juxtaposed against Jodie Foster, the child tom boy who never played lesbian but still challenges gender in subtle fashion, even as a forceful straight heroine who will do what she has to for an imperiled daughter or son. Sequenced into this, Past Midnight is your standard plot point thriller, nothing particularly special about it or Richardson's performance, except that it has the visceral undercurrents that are pertinent to the faux feel good economy of the first Clinton presidency. As an aside, I have no reason to give a flying fuck if Hillary prevails, as the Obama administration managed to kill me; I simply didn't realize this when I supported Barack in the Pennsylvania primary in 2008. If I thought I was a gasping fish out of water in my very early forties, I was under a misapprehension, as I may be hanging on nearly a decade later, but just that, despite consumption of fish oil; Hillary, it is sort of a naturalized anathema. The husband was sexually intriguing, liked women too much, and it remains an embarrassment that his seminal fluid became an impeachment vote while Saudi Arabia's bin Laden was brewing his spectacular blow. There is enough blame to go around for 9/11, but morally Clintonian narcissism was a nearly fatal distraction, so I cannot quite forgive the 42nd president, and think the left is incredibly stupid to elevate his wife for her public injuries in relation to Bill's philandering, but that is the United States, in a nutshell: a pretty woman who wants to engage in social justice becomes a social worker, sets eyes on Rutger Hauer, who cannot possibly be guilty in his role as a slightly more attractive genotype of Anthony Hopkins-- just as Clancy Brown is a tinsel variation on Ron Perlman, who had the courage to humiliate himself as second in rank in The Quest for Fire. Natasha's Laura preens off compliments, picks up her torch, and gets drawn into a threat which would keep most women under psychiatric care for the rest of their lives. Pluralism rarely takes account of the toll in its insistence on the inherent intrinsic value. We never get to see the aftermath. Films aren't very good at evolving, or in this case, devolving characters, this is why Victor Hugo could write a tome like Les Miserables and we have flawed great classics that do embody full lives of our projected alter egos, even if they are ponderous reads, but Past Midnight strikes chords in terms of how liberalism crushes the spirit of the noble crusade, and ties in with the ambulatory carelessness of Richardson's 2009 death. Yes, on the surface, this seemingly content and happy starlet with her authentic Hollywood romance was simply the victim of a mishap. Beneath the surface, she really wasn't thinking about her age and the risks of learning to ski at 45. Foster, as a more conflicted woman, would have been more instinctually wary. The greater the talent, the better the intuition. Spastic was never held at knife point by a rural slasher with womb triggers, but the dowager has been subjected to everything else short of attempted murder, and yet, even in victimhood, remains, surviving with rage addicted tenacity, while Natasha's vivacious privilege becomes the suddenly absent, perhaps more to her fortune than the pondering with which we cling to temporal circumstance. As a figurine, a paper cut out of the Clinton era, she manages to let the pieces of her part in this film fall into place.
"We have gone from a legal system denominated by common law, divined by courts, to one in which statues, enacted by legislatures, have become the primary source of law."-- Guido Calabresi It takes hubris to play the dunce, as Ron Perlman does in Quest for Fire, a movie not necessarily conducive for outcasts in our primate social hierarchy. Its carefully staged savagery stunned, as opposed to overawed, in the early Reagan era. Watching on contemporary flat screen technology, a mature savant perceives its carefully circumscribed progressive dictum: tolerance leads to better quality of life outcomes. And this is bullshit, in a naturalistic Darwinian allegory which could not possibly have occurred in Paleolithic Europe. Certainly migrations occurred, and different humanoids may have co-existed with different levels of technical knowledge, but no band of early human hunters survived territorial ambush, attacks by sabers, mastodons, grizzlies, and sexual cross breeding with Nubians, a fight with their own kind, and lived to tell the tale, in the creation of the modern homo sapiens. McGill's Naoh may have been the heir apparent, brave but not stupid, with just the right amount of masculine empathy, but it is Perlman's buffoon Amoukar who has the wisdom to know who belongs where, in the sinews for the right sense of place. My early progressive educators were wrong; they led me to believe that my status as a token cripple who could mediate between worlds was an economic surety, and this is what angers me. Everyone saw my astute intellectual promise. The suave history teacher who had style, the angry hippie, the loutish philosopher whom ISIS might have decapitated as a subversive, perhaps rightly so. I would have never made tenure, even if I had applied myself to some minute thesis. Then we have the activists who are not activists as I define activism. Whatever their rhetoric, they fail and eject too many of the most challenged invalids they supposedly offer self-determination, and couch progress as decentralized case management. They are no better than Putin, in his attempt to resuscitate an outdated authoritarian model. In 2009, a twitter user, purported homosexual who thought I might have posed a problem to a woman who stopped following me, urged me to "get help". Cures for battle stress due to a life of attempted annihilation don't exist. Neurological science in the seventies was not as advanced as our current genomic sequencing era, but still, Dr. George Crothers espoused beating brain damage out of those handicapped by cerebral palsy. No one stood up and made any conscientious objection. The parents acquiesced. It took how many years for the state of Pennsylvania to investigate and shut him down? Did my mother have a crisis of conscience because her seven year old came home screaming?
