Crossing Red Lines

"Do you know what swishing is?"-- Oprah Winfrey, shadow empress

The Sand Pebbles arguably belongs to Richard Crenna as an American military officer willing to sacrifice himself for the absurd might is right principle unless the State Department swallows cowardice in the face of being overrun by a half billion righteously enraged Asians; it is both an usually interesting film for its time and place, and chock full of the usual stereotypes we already know and field with familiarity. The Caucasian heat for the exotic, Caucasian guilt for denigration, which in this case is justified, because the Western powers had no business carving up imperial China in the first place, just as in contemporary terms, the Mandarin cyber dragnet has no business making Arthur O. Sulzberger an enemy of state, and yet, it is also a rare piece of entertainment that deals with real historical policy that was morally problematic.

Real time dysentery, though not really, slowing me to the silence is golden cliche, with the additional adduce of moisture saturated air, you would tend to think that a woman of 42 would not hire a girl with a newborn strangled by the umbilical cord at birth emblazoned as a decal on a T-shirt, but dealing with Ingrid Bunton was just as much, if not more, an abusive experience as the woman who threw herself at me. Ingrid turned me into a laughing stock, got sexually involved with a security guard who banged on my door after she had obviously impregnated herself again. I am a seducer. Ingrid is the type of sexually dysfunctional female who usually winds up battered if not murdered, and even the young woman I hired back after I fired Miss Bunton in the baby bump phase said, "There is something wrong with that girl."

The only apartment manager who treated me with dignity had to get involved, invoking the obvious fact that Riverside was not The Love Boat. It would be amusing and it is, in its own way, funny, the lack of control that urban loose legs exhibit, except that it isn't. Opening the door to Ingrid's psyche offers a horrible travesty of silent minorities, the discarded, who are exploited in fairly bestial fashion on a daily basis and have to live with it, and this is the vomit that federally mandated disability centers catapult on the wall like a food fight with mashed potatoes. They do not care about it either in the lowest common denominator. What's a few thousand coolies here or there, after all? As fantastic as high camp, or wearing the dead on our sleeves.

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.