The Diamond Island

Xtine, you’ve been showing us that you know who the great actresses are.  You’ve gone up and down the line, and truthfully, I didn’t realize how wise and talented some of these women were.  How much they have earned our respect for the choices they have made.

Reminds me of a film I haven’t seen in a while.  The great and noble feminine soul swallowing up the harsh light of raging societal oppression.

But I think there’s something you aren’t owning up to.  Or maybe it just seems like that because your mantra-like meditation IS the owning up to it.  This becoming, a recitation of the mighty to lend you strength as you work it out.

What I mean is, realize it:  You are right with those women this very moment, in the cantina, talking about the DEAL.  Yeah, some of them are digging up some pretty amazing psychic roots or growing amazing spiritual tomatoes.  That stuff feeds us, it gets into the psychological food chain of the people.

I’m talking about the richness that comes from a mutual, shared creative space where different skill levels can discourse about what is going on.  There isn’t a hierarchy here, but a circular field where everybody’s tending their own plot.  You have every right to speak with them about what it is you are doing.

Heroines are there to show us yes, you can do it too.  The source of genius is in all of us.  We are all called and all are chosen, those who answer that call.  You are not alone Hek-sistah.  You walk the same halls and accessways as these magnificent women, one with all of them.  As you speak with your true voice they are spoken of with respect.

Never underestimate pink.

(I sure would like to be a fly on the wall during those ding dang darn conversations.  Because in that bytch-power cantina, the bar is always open and flowing with great cocktails and delicious snacks.  That’s the battleship bandwidth they’re packing that Xtine mentions, Saturnalia afternoon style.  These women are in the howse, goin’ for what’s theirs, yo.)

Managed to see Star Trek 11 this weekend.  Cost for two online generated tickets, a large bag of popcorn, a large drink and some Swedish fish came to about 35 bucks.  K and I arrived half an hour early.  Got the two seats in the back next to the handicapped zone, so we avoided any droids behind us or to the side.  Luckily, the people in front didn’t jerk their seats or block our view.  For a roll of the dice fleecing, not bad.  So far, so good.

Hate for the commericals.  They have a “movie channel” they play on the screen which is just irrelevant advertisements for stuff I’ll never buy and music videos for vapid product I’ll never put on my iPod.  Just a lot of noise and distraction, to keep you sedated until the film starts.  Honestly, could theaters make going out to the movies any less a fun experience?

The previews of Transformers, Terminator: Salvation and GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra all looked the same to me:  Explosions, Guns and Infantile Action Heroes screaming at the camera for you to care about the same old “us versus them” plots that have pretty much taken over Hollywood, the forbidden palace capital of the country.  It’s all about the hidden enemy, the ‘they’re robots so they don’t feel” enemy, and the unlimited toys for evil enemy.  But it’s all about the ENEMY.

That’s what this movie is about too.  The big enemy that is so much bigger than us that only good old American Earth know-how can defeat it.  Visions of the future?  Explorations of consciousness?  What are you, some kind of hippie?  This is gunboat diplomacy and the Monroe Doctrine for the 21st century.  Starfleet is made up of cannon fodder and incompetents who couldn’t run today’s society, let alone whatever advanced civilization might exist several hundred years from now.

Most importantly, there’s nothing fresh or “rebooted” about this movie.  The only thing that’s new are the actors.  The movie recycles every cliche from every other Star Trek movie ever made.  This is now the fourth movie where the crew save the earth (1, 4, 8 before it), and the fourth one involving time travel (4, 7 and 8).  There’s a reason why Galaxyquest’s mock of the franchise rings true:  We’ve seen it all before, many many times.

The story barely makes sense even as a mindless action flick.  The technobabble and pseudo-science gloves are way off.  God help you if you actually reflect on the dysfunctional elements.  Seriously, this story could have been any number of throw-away episodes from Star Trek: Voyager, it’s so nonsensical.  Didn’t anybody read this script?  Wasn’t this movie supposed to be more accessible to non-Trekkies?

The action and special effects are average.  As a chaser, I watched Galaxyquest and marveled at how much better it was—and it’s mocking Star Trek!  The screen isn’t cluttered with noise, it’s clear to see who is firing at whom and what the results are.  There’s closure in each scene.  Even something as ridiculous as Captain Jason Nesmith being chased by a living boulder has more fun in it than Captain Kirk being chased by a big red gooey alien.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more Star Trek 11 is the parody of itself that Galaxyquest suggests Star Trek has become.  You have the science officer hating the captain until they learn to work together.  There’s the wacky high-jinks of Scotty in the pipes just as there is the obstacle of the chompers in Galaxyquest.  The Romulon bad guy’s ship basically just fires lots of missiles like the bad guy Sarris in Galaxyquest.  The transporter has to be touch-screened like a video game to lock-on to moving targets, just like the joystick-operated digitizer in Galaxyquest.

It’s derivative of every other Star Trek movie or show ever made.  There are no new ideas at all.  Star Trek is dead, Jim.

Oh boy, Star Drek 11 is almost at the local rip-off theater!  I wasn’t going to see it or make any comments, as my original statement kind of says it all.  But now K wants to see it, so I’m going to have to take sensor readings and generate a readout.

Watching the trailers, I can feel the noisome clutch of propaganda.  Are you a troubled punk (like Kirk)?  A confused young man (like Spock)?  Don’t worry, just join the United Empire Federation of Homo Sapiens Planets, strap on a uniform, and blast all weapons at those funny looking aliens who hate our freedums.  The Empire Federation will give you purpose and hook you up with a bunch of other young volunteers all looking for extreme sports in exotic locales.  Who doesn’t want to fly around the colonies galaxy stopping the evuhl terrorist alien WMD plot of the week?

It’s the dodge and distraction of action to elicit desire.  “See how cool this is?  Don’t cha want it?”

To think that I’ve lived long enough to see Star Trek reduced to a “wider audience” (what a lewd term that is!), least common denominator space battle action story.  And to think that I will be watching it in the modern theater of high-priced no-fun.  What springs to mind is that I am required to undergo a communal ritual of some sort over a cult object whose original significance has been largely forgotten.

Well, hey I got news for those “of the body”.  I already lived it man.  I saw the last voyage of the Starship Enterprise back when it first aired in 1976.  Years later, I copied the script from Starlog and performed the play in front of my 7th and 8th grade peers.  I got to play Spock and have my ears pulled off by the prop crew.  I lived this man!  Started it up, directed it, cast it, ran it at twelve years old.  Been there, done that.

That Star Trek is dead doesn’t bother me now.  As long as I live and have the use of my mind I can always travel back in time and embrace the joy in days of future past.  That the idea has been taken over and made into something to appeal to a younger audience that supposedly doesn’t demand much from its entertainment is okay with me.  The youngins need to be exposed to garbage so they’ll have healthy immune systems.

How would I do better?  I’d start by asking, Dr. Ian Malcolm style, “assuming I could do better, should I?”  No.  I’d never make another Star Trek movie or episode ever again.

Seriously, if all the wonderful hours spent watching and learning about the Star Trek universe hasn’t got you out there living as a better lifeform, then you have not gotten the message.  If the Church of Star Trek just keeps taking your donations you are not going to be saved.  Go out there and make the “better world” of Star Trek now.  Start imagining how we overcome our problems and become worthy of discovery among the stars.

Or sit next to me in a high-priced, sweat-stained theater with the collective.  We can watch the explosions and imagine the future as excitement for the privileged few.

For a long while, I stare at the gaping hole in the wall.  My Bad Ronald has always been able to use his secret doors to come and go in my brain’s main corridors.  So the irrational fear in my gut that he will escape and attack me like the evil baby in It’s Alive is the fear I feel everyday about being alive.  Will Bad Ronald pull my strings?

In a strange way, I’ve busted out of the prison my Bad Ronald found himself in for him, sparing him the tragic and sad ending at the end of the Bad Ronald movie.  But in a sense that makes me a Bad Ronald.  I’ve willingly participated in the drama of a part I normally wouldn’t want to associate myself with.

I don’t think I can expect him to show himself just yet, even though I sense him lurking just out of sight like a black shirted, human sized leprechaun in black pants I once dreamt about.

Time to let myself be drawn back in.  Candle in one hand, slapstick in the other, its time to get busy.  I don’t think this is over yet.

There are these stony stairs in the between-brain hallways that weren’t there before.  I hear a repulsive, but beautiful voice singing in echoes through a deep, watery cavern below the halls.  I swear I can smell and hear the sea.

A peculiar rage comes over me, and an unbearable hunger, as if my stomach were running on empty for hours.  My ears begin to itch furiously.  For a moment I’m too out of my mind to take in the surroundings I find myself in.

I hear a deep, resounding noise out in the faraway ocean.  I realize something out there is answering the singing in the cavern.  My Bad Ronald sings in dark caves, and ocean creatures, maybe even sea serpents, talk back to him.

I listen, and lose myself in the mysterious between-brain below-hall cavern near the sea.  My Bad Ronald ain’t so bad.

A strange sensation envelops me.  For a moment, I think I’ve been bushwhacked by the Space Chiller.  My back slides against the wall as I shine the candle about, slapstick at the ready.  All I see is an old poster for the Jaws rip-off Tentacles, which features a giant octopus.

A memory at the back of my head stirs, but I can’t quite place it.  There’s another movie, before this one, which is important somehow.  For now, I visualize the poster for Tentacles, which is an image of a woman screaming as a gigantic octopus head creeps up behind her.

It dawns on me.  This monster, this Space Chiller, is really a gigantic space octopus captured by my Bad Ronald when she was smaller, the way he captured those people in the movie Bad Ronald.  He was keeping them in the basement because he didn’t know how to integrate the real people with his own disturbed fantasy life.  That realization was probably what caused him to burst his bonds in the movie, despite the cost.

That’s why I can’t find this darn monster; she’s trapped inside the between-brain hallways.  She’s grown too large to escape the way she was brought in.  I got to pry open some floorboards and smash down the weak wallpapered drywall junk.  This giant space octopus has got to go back into the wild.

And my Bad Ronald has bitten off more than he can chew.  This Space Chiller has gotten the better of him, chasing him about.  It’s a sick, twisted arrangement that needs me to settle up accounts.

I wander into the prison-like halls and look about.  That Space Chiller is hiding in there somewhere, having broken free but still trapped.  She’s a big girl now.  I get her to chase me—what giant space octopus doesn’t like eating a human being down to the skeleton?  I keep those whirling tentacles away with the slapstick and move quickly back towards the poster.

I start kicking at the wall, which gives way rather easily.  I hate to ruin the poster, but what the heck.  I ruined many a cool movie poster my folks got me back in the day.  You have to bust lose and take the blows sometimes.

It’s a weird dance, beating back tentacles trying to drag me into the beak from hell for tasty morsel goodness, while I kick aside rotten boards and moldy wallpaper.  I push my way through and back into the lighted (if still spooky) halls of the haunted house proper.  The space octopus, being flexible, squeezes through after me, its tough hide not taking a scratch from the still jutting splinters and rusty nails.

I run to the front door and open it up.  I suppose I could look for a giant vacuum particle aquarium in here, but I’m taking the guess that this strange gal wants to take off.  Sure enough, she changes into a whirling vortex of hypnotic psychological energy and flies through the front door.

Should I have let this thing loose into the world?  I think things will work out.  I’ve also got a big hole in the wall now.  I don’t know how my Bad Ronald will react.  This is a breach in the separation between us, which I don’t think can be undone.

Scrambling about in the between-ways of my brain.  Which incidentally resemble the long underground halls of school buildings built in the fifties, with fallout shelters and hidden caches of supplies.  Mostly way-past-their-date cans of beans and crackers.

In the flickering candlelight I see two themes.  The rusting and crumbling structures of a prison-like architecture, or the dark and echoing tiled halls of an underground hideout structure that while faded and dirty, still seems habitable.

That little demon child is still out there. Small, but fast and vicious.  Just being here scares the stuffing out of me.  My instincts are humming at me to get away, get out.  Panic and fear!

Then I come across a piece of paper with a drawing on it of a long, cylindrical spaceship.  On the back, written in magic marker is the phrase “into infinity”.

Whoa, flashback time.  I remember this spaceship from a TV show way back.  But I can’t remember anything about the show itself except a few brief images, and the crew of the ship being drawn into a black hole at the end or something.

So my science officer does the old internets search-a-roo and I find out the full title of the TV movie is The Day After Tomorrow—Into Infinity.  I find out lots after that.  That the captain of the vessel is played by the same actor who played Alan from Space 1999, one of my favorite shows as a kid!  The DVD of the movie is only available to people who join the Gerry Anderson fan club.

Gerry Anderson did a lot of science fiction shows, some of which I watched with the folks when I was a kid.  Shows like UFO and Space 1999.  I had no idea he’d made this movie that I hardly remember now, but which my Bad Ronald obviously hasn’t forgotten.

In the movie, the crew of the ship reaches their appointed destination (YouTube is our friend!) and have to make a decision.  Return to earth with all the data they’ve gathered on Alpha Centauri or continue on into the unknown and risk danger.  They decide to press on, and as a result they get into hot water, while their adventure begins.  The movie was meant to be the pilot for a new science fiction series; it just didn’t reach that goal.

I certainly don’t want to find myself on the other side of a black hole never to return to earth, but I’m thinking there’s a similar choice here.  Go back to the visible hallways of the haunted house in my brain or travel onwards.

It means a lot to me that this small piece of my past is returned to me.  And unlike the protagonists in the movie, I believe I’m equipped with the means to find out what happens afterward.  I see friends of mine making brave steps forward, reaching out into the darkness for a connection with their own lives and the lives of others.

I’m traveling onwards.

I finally watched the science fiction movie Children of Men.  The critical acclaim for the film made me suspicious.  What I heard of the plot—Cynical Man transports Divine Child to safety—didn’t sound like much.  Now that I’ve seen it, I think the movie was an overrated and over hyped, undeveloped bore.

To expand on the premise a bit, the entire world for whatever reason has stopped having babies.  The world population is growing older but no new children are being born.  This is a good foundation for a sound premise.  Unfortunately, after the movie establishes this world, there’s no further exploration of the characters that inhabit it.

The movie takes place in a future Great Britain that looks a lot like now.  There’s this dude, this generic streetwise everyman who walks in every circle (rich, poor, military, subversive, you name it he’s in touch with everybody), who finds himself the escort of a woman who is miraculously pregnant.  His job is to deliver (get it?  humor ahr ahr!) the woman to some nebulous science team on a ship somewhere off the coast, presumably so they can solve the infertility problem.  Meanwhile, a generic evuhl terrorist group is trying to get their hands on her, to use her for their own political purposes.

I admit I’m biased against the atmosphere of this movie.  Dark realism has run it’s course, and nothing new is being done to expand on the possibilities of this outlook.  I’m also inclined to thumb down at chase movies that rely on false tension to generate urgency.  The compelling idea (world dying off because the kids aren’t all right) is just a front to manipulate emotions.

Problem #1:  If Having Babies Is A Good Thing, Prove It By Addressing Premise
The movie never explores the idea behind the world it creates.  It immediately plays on the popular assumption that population decline equals social chaos, and that population growth equals progress.  A more mature and developed movie would present a representative view and let the viewer decide for themselves.

For example, the riots and hysteria in the world are one possibility.  But what about resignation and acceptance?  It doesn’t follow that if the entire world is out of kid points, everyone is going to descend into anarchy.  There’s a scene where everyone is crying over the death of the youngest person in the world (the last known person to be born), and I’m like—dude, you people have had twenty years to come to terms with reality.  Why are you even interested?  This didn’t happen overnight.

There are a lot of compelling arguments for how living standards increase as population declines.  Where are the scenes of nature reclaiming depopulated centers?  The decline in pollution?  The movie shows the world through muddy filters of heightened gloom and doom, but I don’t buy it.

And you can’t tell me there wouldn’t be a tremendous increase in naughty activity, just to plumb the depths of whether this infertility thing is real or not.  As the population of people under 30 slowly disappears, wouldn’t those who have failed to accept the situation be trying desperate measures (like mass love-ins, but no, can’t show anything that might make hippies look good)—anything to try and compensate for their psychological denial?

Nowhere in the movie was it ever mentioned that everyone’s libido had vanished, along with their fertility.  There should have been some serious signs of overcompensation here, people.

The huge amounts of soldiers fighting insurgents (what are these insurgents fighting for?) strikes me as fake.  Dude, every person you kill is NOT being replaced.  Warfare, if it can even still be waged at this point, would have had to have changed in ways we can hardly imagine.  Wars fought over access to resources and markets—dude resources are becoming LESS scarce.  Your market base is evaporating.

I could go on.  The best part of the movie is the first ten minutes where we just watch what the world is like, and the things that go on.  Once the plot gets under way, the movie is effectively over.

In other words, if the loss of fertility is a bad thing, test that premise.  Show us ways in which this miracle of life, so central to who we are, changes us when it is taken away.  This world didn’t look any different than today, so there’s no impact.  Dude, take a moral stance—”we have to deserve to survive by self-sacrifice”, “we take beautiful things for granted because of our corruption.”  Or just take a disinterested one—”life on this planet can end on a dime and just as quickly come back.”

Throw us a bone here.  Because otherwise the chase means nothing.

Problem #2:  The Chase Doesn’t Mean Anything Without Stakes
Since we have no sense of what the world is really like other than “bad news” (hey, kinda like…now!), the urgency of keeping the plot-coupon…I mean, the objectified baby carrier safe is unclear.  There’s nothing positive about the dark world of the movie.  The characters that occupy it are all cynical, desperate, jaded or disconnected.  The most upbeat character is a bitter hippy played by Michael Caine.  Yes!  Yet another failed idealist archetype to remind us, the public, that the sixties were a failure and hope is dead.  Go back to sleep.

I don’t see how the mysterious ship of scientists are anything to get excited about.  We know nothing about them other than a vague hope that they might be working on a way to return fertility to humanity.  Because you know, no matter how bleak things get, faith in technology and the scientists who create it will always pull us through.  For all I know, the mysterious scientists are the ones who created this world crisis, and the protagonist has just delivered to them the last test subject they need to make the crisis irrevocable.

Or maybe they just need to regularly get their hands on subjects who have developed immunity so they can reconfigure the cause of the infertility.  Kind of like the flu vaccine every year.  There certainly is no shortage of people who think they have to destroy the world in order to save it.  Drax from Moonraker comes immediately to mind, with his “improved upon sterility” globes.

Wouldn’t that be a great revelation at the end of the film?  “Thanks mister.  Now we can ensure that humanity is destroyed/kept under control.  Muah ha ha ha!”  But that would mean taking a stand, like “don’t trust scientists.”  Can’t do that!

The woman carrying the child doesn’t have any agency of her own.  I never get any idea of what kind of person she is.  She’s there to be moved around and act scared while the protagonist overcomes obstacles.

The protagonist doesn’t have any personality either.  Other than a noncommittal everyman with street smarts, one wonders why he is risking his life at all.  There’s no dark secret he has to overcome by accomplishing this task.  He has no character trait of fundamental decency that comes out when the chips are down.  He acts dispassionately no matter what the situation is.  When he dies at the end, after having accomplished his mission, you have no idea who he is or why he did what he did.

The evuhl terrorist group makes no sense to me.  Their plan to leverage the pregnant woman into political power strikes me as absolutely bizarre.  I’m not even sure I understand what the evuhl terrorists stand for.  What motivates them to promote their self-interest over that of the community?  They’re just super-violent and crazy.  Okay, no stereotypes there!

The government is completely a side show here, by the way.  A large, powerful organization with all kinds of reasons to want to control the situation—no they don’t have any surveillance on the evuhl terrorists even though a declining population should make the job easier.  The authorities are too busy being punked by bushwhacking or sending in the marines to blow up neighborhoods to be a participant.

What this all boils down to is nothing to base the stakes on.  Yes, if the pregnant woman is captured “bad stuff” happens.  I get that.  But what does the protagonist stand to lose or gain?  The evuhl terrorists?  How am I supposed to care what happens to this world and its characters when I don’t know who they are?

The film overcomes this through the now tried-and-true method of false urgency.  “Here come enemies!  Run!”   Must get plot coupon from point A to point B or bad stuff will happen.  Because bad stuff must not happen!  Even though bad stuff happening in world now!

Time to watch Attack of the Giant Crabs again, with it’s flimsy pseudo-science and stock victim characters.  At least I know what’s at stake.

05-07-09 ETA:  I’ve had a chance to get a sense of how the film differs from the book.  Suffice to say the book does more to explore the possibilities of the world that is presented, some of which I find compelling.  There are the Omega gangs, bands of last-generation youths burning themselves out in reckless violence.  Despotism arises as a requirement to keep the apathetic population organized enough to continue running society.  Nature is overrunning large areas of the countryside as it grows back with a vengeance.

None of these interesting ideas appear in the film at all.

I did some short-attention span searching for the director’s intent.  This interview proved very telling to me.  The infertility isn’t a premise at all—it’s a metaphor for a fading sense of hope.  The film isn’t about the future at all!  It’s a call for transformative action.  In other words, a polemic (that’s art lingo for trying to impart a message through persuasion).

My favorite quote is when the director says “Cinema is a hostage of narrative.”  I cracked up when I read that, especially since he claims to dislike exposition.  Well, what are you left with if you can neither tell (exposition) or show (narrative) a story?!

This explains why the marketing for the film was way off base.  I remember the angle that was promoted—a science fiction movie where the world has become infertile.  The infertility was sold as a “shock” (that’s science fiction lingo for the futuristic thing that makes that world what it is—for example, the shock for Blade Runner would be androids).  As if that shock were meant to be taken as a literal truth in the world of the film.

If we filter out the disappointment as a result of being falsely marketed to, I still think this movie blows.  Playing with metaphors instead of “as if” to render fun through a polemic means you are more dependent on storytelling to make your point.  And our director has already abandoned storytelling as a technique!  This really screams at me to be played off as a fictional documentary, as This Is Spinal Tap was done (which is played “as if” it’s a real documentary).  But that requires you to take the material seriously “as if”, which isn’t done.  This is a metaphor, remember?  The baby is a torch, not the baby is like a torch.

I was going to go on about how the film would have benefited by fixing the characters and the setting to equal situation, but since the director didn’t want to tell a story that’s not useful.  We are to watch this film and then take action to make this world a better place.

First of all, I really dislike the common belief that places guilt for the state of the world on the shoulders of the apathetic masses.  It’s casting blame without acknowledging one’s own responsibility.  And I mean responsibility for those things one truly is responsible for.  For example, there’s a reason why people are apathetic—huge sums of money are paid to keep people that way.  Through propaganda in the more civilized countries and at the end of a heavy club in the less civilized countries.

Another reason people are apathetic is because the world is in the grip of psychological processes that are not wholly understood and may not be controllable to any significant degree.  Attempts to direct the collective impulse against natural tendencies often turn inhuman.  History is full of examples of political vanguards who turned popular movements into destructive eruptions of madness for their own gain.  Like it or not, apathy is a part of the human condition and it pays to face that.

This is not to suggest that one is blameless.  None of us stands outside the collective shadow.  If free will exists, it must be extremely small and therefore all the more imperative that we use it where applicable.  We do share in the guilt for this mixed up chicken world.  It’s just that suggesting  we the viewers are responsible for the lack of hope in the world is a simplistic and largely unconscious view.

I mean, funk dat!  Hopelessness is a natural reaction when things are bad, and make no mistake it’s a nightmare wasteland here on planet earth.  Yeah, sacrifice of one’s life for the new life is what pays the bills at the end of the day.  But who the hell in their right mind wants to do that?  We have a world of children in the bodies of adults, how are you going to help them grow up?  Because there are a lot of bad eggs among those children.  Darth Vader is REAL.  There are real BAD GUYS out there who will jack you, and you ain’t got no extra lives or saved games to fall back on in this life.  Depression and fear are a human experience.

So, how do I make this movie better.  This director wants some metaphors, then let’s dial it up to eleven mutha-scratcher!

I think the first thing we need is what this whole planet needs a lot more of:  Compassion.  That means “to suffer with”, and it’s the lesson of the savior that we seem not to have learned even when it was the focus of the now-passed Age of Pisces.  This whole movie reeks of unsympathetic people who are unsympathetic to one another.  Yeah, it’s a mystery how hope survives and its beautiful when a person who appears out for himself suddenly shows a side of humanity.  That’s why we cheer for Han Solo when he rescues Luke in the Death Star Trench.

Make the character Theo compassionate.  Make him elicit our compassion.  When Baby Diego’s death is announced, don’t have him stoically walk out the door—have him break down in tears while the crowd look on blankly (the crowd is apathetic, see?!  But not him!).  Then, when the place he was just in blows up, have him break down and collapse on the pavement (his compassion is what saved him, get it!?).

When he bleeds out on the boat, don’t have him sit there and mumble to Kee.  Have him confess all his sins and fears to her.  “I hope I did the right thing.  Maybe these scientists are going to treat you like a lab rat.  Maybe this was all for nothing and we’ll die out anyway.  I did a lot of selfish things in my life.  But at least I know what love is now, what I’d do for other people.  I didn’t know that before.  Good luck kid, and if you make it out alive, say a prayer for me, ’cause I don’t know nothing.”  In the world of the metaphor “this is a good way for a man to die” is keeping it real, hard core.

The second thing we need is an affirmation of the human spirit.  In a world obsessed with blame and sin, we forget original innocence.  Human beings are naturally good.  It’s a fundamental hardware requirement.  Yes, in the western view we’re expelled from paradise and thus apart from nature.  This is a useful wisdom to know, but let’s not exaggerate our share of the truth.  People are good and want good things.  To truly call them apathetic and hopeless you have to also call them decent people.  That’s the pain of being alive.

So yeah, you can have bad guys doing bad doo-doo.  But have Kee change people around her just by virtue of who she is.  If she’s a metaphor then damn it Jim, treat her like one!  Xtine is right, to call her worthy, because she is!  Just by virtue of what she has become.

When the Fishes are discussing their plans to murder Kee’s midwife and her protector Theo, have at least one strong, capable Fish refuse outright.  Either by vocally opposing the plan and walking out (maybe starting a gunfight which allows Theo a more believable escape) or abandoning the Fishes without a word and joining Theo later—sacrificing their lives if need be to allow Theo to get out of a jam.

Or maybe even living (gasp!  that’s so not dark realism!).  Most everyone in the film dies a violent death.  What if the people who try to harm Kee all die violent deaths, but the people who protect her either live, or die heroically both knowing that they are serving something greater than themselves.

The fixer who tries to take the baby in the immigrant camp.  What if when he sees the mother and it becomes real to him, he instead says “No, anyone else I’d take advantage of.  Not this.  I’ll help you guys.”  Unexpected help from what look like cynical or desperate people, exploiters turning human because Kee is “the torch that will light a new world fire and bring us light and warmth.”  How awesome is that?

Then, all of a sudden, you see how people are connected and can act against the dark dreary world of the film.  Their acts stand out MORE because of the sad colors and gritty realism.  In fact if you establish all throughout the movie that Kee’s existence galvanizes people into a movement for hope, it makes the crazy scene near the end with the crying baby more believable.  This world is so messed up, that something so primal and elemental as a mother with child becomes a carrier for for all the projected hopes of the world.  That’s raw fuel for the metaphor, man!

And this I think is the director’s fatal flaw.  A lack of compassion and optimism for humanity in his own psyche.  There’s a cynic (and you can’t be a cynic without having once been a romantic) in the film crying out for someone to save him.  Sorry dude, the viewer can’t carry that cross for you.  You have to find sympathy for others and hope for the future in your own heart.  Until you find that you won’t be able to share with us how it’s done.  You do the work by going inside and taking care of your own soul first, which always, always through miracles and magic, ends up being for us all.

Well, looks like my attempts at hanging out with my own personal Bad Ronald didn’t go exactly as planned.  Judging by the spit-out bite of hot dog and the untouched milk, nitrate-based meat products in a bread sleeve with lactose liquids do not equal win.

The invitation to walk in the sunlight, breathe the wind, and look at the flowers was also a dud.  It never occured to me that this stuff is just maximum bummer for the kid.  Boy do I feel like a dummy.  Well, I gotta give the rascal points for trying.  I don’t know if I could try his brand of food or go on his kind of a walk.  Maybe I’ll have to, in order to find out what’s up.

That monster is still out there too.  I get the feeling I’m just going to have to wait until it drifts my way again.  The suspense is proving a little unnerving, brr.

Speaking of monsters, I rediscovered an old classic monster flick called Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957).  Pure hilarious goodness.  Scientists stranded on island inhabited by huge energy crabs that eat brains.  The crabs absorb the voices and memories of those they kill, so they are really good at luring victims away.  Meanwhile, the island is sinking into the ocean.  I love movies with crazy time limits before the locale is destroyed or sinks!  But the best part is the stupid crabs taunting the survivors with the voices of their dead comrades.  Pure B-movie gold.

The social media internet sinkholes have caught my interest.  So yeah, Facebook has got it’s talons into me.  For someone of my age, Facebook has been a goldmine of reconnection and personal enrichment.  It’s an event that won’t happen again, as the youngins will increasingly be unaware of life before texting each other with updates.  I wonder what my life might have been like if me and my friends in high school would have had that superpower.

And I’m on Twitter.  Looking up the few so-called celebrity type people I might be interested in has proved pretty uninteresting.  I just don’t worship my heroes enough anymore to want to follow their every effort.  Reading Bono’s tweets on twitter was an exercise in self-depression.  Looking for mundanes with something to say is just as difficult.  It’s like the Livejournal friends feed — lots of stuff that is mildly interesting, but not much I want to follow regularly.  Oh well, growing my dendrites will take time I suppose.

Meanwhile, on the book front I’m putting the finishing touches on the sixth draft.  Been taking in all the feedback I’ve gotten from folks and making decisions as to what to act upon.  Putting the last call on all that though, as I am ready to move forward.  What will probably happen is I’ll post the whole thing as a PDF here, and when I get the Lulu book all sorted out, make a link to that available for people who want a physical manifestation.  Cafe Press t-shirts and mugs are so far down the line it’s only a concept in the brainstem right now.

Back in 1974 there was this crazy movie of the week on TV called Bad Ronald.  It’s about a momma’s boy who asks the hot cheerleader out on a date.  She rejects him, and while walking home he runs into her sister.  The sister taunts him into a rage, Ronald pushes her backwards, and she fatally hits her head on a cement block.

His overprotective mother comes up with a crazy plan:  Hide her son in the spaces between the walls of her house, wait until the heat blows over, and then flee the country together.  She has plans for Ronald to become a doctor, and nothing is going to stand in the way of that!

While waiting for the heat to blow over, the mother dies during an emergency operation and the house is sold.  A new family with a very attractive daughter moves in, with Bad Ronald watching from peepholes and leaving his hiding place to grab a bite from the kitchen.  With no where to go, Bad Ronald loses his sanity and hilarious hijinks ensue in the house.  The movie culminates in a horrific ending that can only be called surreal.

I think there’s a Bad Ronald living in the crawlspaces and walled off bathroom of my brainstem.

In the movie, there’s an interval where the new family thinks the house is haunted.  Bad Ronald moves about in the walls at weird hours, bumping and scuffling.  He borrows objects, eats from their fridge, and peers in on them giving them the feeling they’re being watched.  It’s actually a nifty idea, if a little creepy.

The movie just sort of popped into my head from memory.  So of course I had to look it up and recall my feelings about it when I was five years old.  Then I was reading through my dream journal, and one entry (which I had forgotten about until now) struck me as relevant.  In the dream a voice told me that My Mirage was protecting my shadow, a scary child living underground.

I believe I’ll be leaving a hot dog and glass of milk out for my Bad Ronald.  A boy’s got to eat!  Then maybe, just maybe, we’ll go out for some exercise.  I’ll point out the birds and the flowers.  See what he thinks.

Possible spoilers for The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, so ahroo!

Standing before the doors to the haunted house, My Mirage whispers to myself.  “Before you can be granted admittance, you must uncover the identity of the wicked magician.”

I think about what kind of items I might need should I manage to get inside.  The haunted house could be hazardous!

The goddess Athena once said to me in a dream, “You must take up a sword.”  I thought that was preposterous, since I don’t do swords.  A year later, in a waking dream, the unknowable explained to me she meant a pen.  I was just too dense to understand her.

I’ve been writing and drawing all my life, but I begin to get it, faintly.  I need to take up the pen and write and draw with intent.  I must take action. It is no longer enough for me to do it unconsciously.  I have been doing it more consciously the last two years.  However, I need to know this as well as do it with intention.

I try to decipher the symbolism behind the slapstick, the torch, the wand.  I’m carrying not so much a stick as a feminine spirit lent to me by the Dark Goddess.  I’m performing not so much the part of Punch as a generic dum-dum on a ridiculous adventure.

While thinking about the past, Xtine pulls free another stone to reveal more me (without consciously realizing it).  In a way, in another time and place, I had a puffed up image of myself as the Grand Magician.  I thought I knew what I was doing.  Much as Koura the wicked magician in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Alas, as Xtine points out this guy is so way not eating with both hands.

I wonder about the man in black who follows Koura around.  We are meant to think of him as the sensible apprentice to Koura.  He certainly knows what is what.  “If you continue on this way master, you will die.”  Then I think of the oracle’s words about an evil son and wonder who the oracle is talking about – Koura or the “apprentice?”  We are supposed to think Koura, of course, but when you are on a ridiculous adventure, layered meanings can spring from anywhere.

I’m thinking about an old Batman and Robin comic, where they fight Benedict Arnold.  The old traitor comes back from the dead to break the soul of the country by defeating two of its greatest heroes.  A weird dude follows him around the whole time, granting Benedict Arnold powers.  Only at the end when the traitor is defeated does the weird dude reveal himself to be Old Scratch (the Devil).

So is that “apprentice” dude really an ordinary guy hoping to advance himself by serving the bad guy, or is he symbolic of the possession of Koura by an evil force?  Thinking about it, I decide that on a symbolic level he must represent what is left of Koura’s conscience.  He is always the “sane” bad guy, trying to get Koura to be more reasonable, more down to earth.

It is telling that the apprentice is ordered away near the end of the film – Koura has the upper hand (or so he believes) and he no longer needs his “conscience” to keep him alive – indeed, soon after he goes off on his own, Koura starts to die rapidly as the dark magics finally catch up with him!

But me?  No way, not no how.  Couldn’t happen to me!  Like Koura, I thought I was getting the forces of the world to move at my whim.  Kali gettin’ down for me?  Har!  That’s Shiva, dumb-butt, and your face is about to be used as reactor shielding.

Then I get it.  Koura was the sultan (read: king).  He “killed the sultan” (who always seems to be referred to in a present sense, as if he were still alive somehow), in the sense that he killed himself with his pursuit of dark magic.  Much as Saruman in Lord of the Rings.  The desire for knowledge can lead too far.  Always remember to practice don’t-know-mind!

SNACK!

Koura lived in the castle next to the city because he was the king who had gone bad. The fiery accident that burned the good vizier (read:  the apprentice king) happened during Koura’s fall from grace as the true king.

This is a blow to me.  I always wondered why “the demons of darkness” (read: the forces of nature) moved to Koura’s command.  That’s because he was still manifesting the king energy, even though it was for wicked purposes.

Thanks to Xtine, I realize now how little grasp Koura has on reality.  Before, I thought he was just some power monger meddling and paying the price to accomplish his evil goals.  But whoa, that’s just what he wants people to think.  Total illusion pose for the crowd.  In truth, he is out to lunch big time. All lines are busy, no groove, don’t play.  Not even on the same page.

That’s incredibly tragic.  His quest then becomes not a mad scramble for power, but a compelling desire to reach the Fountain of Destiny and recover what was lost. He “obtains”, to use his own phrase, but only two out of three – the energy of youth and a shield of darkness.  The crown of ultimate riches goes to someone else.  You can never return to what you once were.

Koura isn’t thinking of the people of his kingdom, or his poor vizier’s suffering.  He’s thinking of himself and not in a good way.  Sinbad, who represents the transcendent function (he says, “I am the most foolhardy”), comes along to restore the balance and heal the wounds of the earth.  He kills Koura in the fountain, and it is only then that the third golden tablet reveals the crown.  The king is dead, long live the king.

A phrase comes back to me.  “The hero who does not crucify himself today becomes the villain of tomorrow.”  I’ve also read that the hero is an immature energy function, that it has a purpose (to take action against the stagnation of life) and once that purpose is fulfilled, the hero must “die” and be reborn as a responsible adult.

I think that must have been what I didn’t do a long while ago.  Part of me has been skulking about like a ghost in dark moors and drinking of wretched waters.  Joseph Campbell once said, “And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves.”  The four corners fall into place.

I grow afraid.  My Mirage is waiting for me in the haunted house.  The last thing I want to do is dispatch the vampire, defeat the villain, neutralize the monster.  It’s the very worst thing in the world to slay yourself.  Psychologically or otherwise.

The doors to the house open.  I’m expected.