Wed 11 Jun 2008

Haunted house party, part three

Posted by laup under Meditations, Outbreak, Random Encounters, Weirdie
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As you may have read, my mission to UFO girl was a big fat failure, and I have to go back to my mirage with bad news. I go on vacation with K and we hike out in the wilderness, only to return to a house with a serious problem.

While we were doing our thing, a huge storm front moved through the area and our circuit breaker box became flooded with water. The electrical hookups to our residence are near ground level, which makes them eye level when you stand inside in the basement. The water runoff of our back yard is poor, so in a sustained, multi-day storm the water backs up under the porch. The seal on the power line had failed, and so water was dripping into the box and out onto the counter in front.

K notices the growing pool of water, so we go out back and try to re-route the water flow away from the wall. This seems to help, but we’re not happy, as water and electricity do not mix well. Now that I think about it, we were crazy to be sloshing around in a pool of muddy water with a circuit breaker box taking on water. Life is full of close calls, fun for the entire family.

We keep our senses alert for funny smells and sounds, and stay at the ready for an evacuation with the cats if need be. I had recently donated some clothes to a co-worker’s friend who lost everything in a house fire (where the teenagers, who were being bad by staying up past curfew noticed the fire and warned everyone in time to escape). So, of course, my nerves are extra jittery.

Our sleep is jumbled, and the day we are supposed to have to recover from our vacation is blown in stressville. We contact our landlord to get an electrician in, but I have to take some extra days off to make sure the seal and box are replaced. The whole thing is basically a panic attack that turns into a big hassle.

I get to thinking that a certain mirage must be responsible for the scare and beat down poltergeist combination. Well, time to pay the piper.

In the basement, the spooky doll has been moved to the top shelf. I get a quick scare before I rationalize K must have moved the thing to readjust the planter pots around. No need to turn out the lights, I’m guessing my mirage is happy to communicate from the shadows of that extra room.

I tell him I blew it, and that there will be no UFO girl date. He just laughs at me. My mirage explains that he expected me to fail, so he isn’t surprised. He asks me how I felt, and I tell him I felt embarrassed and dejected. With a sullen chuckle, he explains to me that how I felt is how he feels all the time, and he wanted me to know what it’s like to be a wretched person overshadowed by a high-minded idiot like me.

I’m dumbfounded, and my mirage leaves me alone to consider the joke he’s played on me, and the lesson behind it.

I hate this place.

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Tue 10 Jun 2008

How to deconstruct a great rock and roll band, part three

Posted by laup under Meditations, Music Quest, Outbreak, Random Encounters
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I was in the supermarket the other day, and the music system played a U2 song I’d never heard before. That’s always a surprise, as there are only a handful I haven’t listened to, and tried to acquire. Unfortunately, I couldn’t catch any of the lyrics, just Bono’s voice and the Edge’s guitar. Sounded a lot like something they’d done during their days in between Zooropa and Pop. Couldn’t find it on the internets, but the way I see it, I’ll find it if I’m meant to.

It brought me back to those days when I felt identified with U2. There I was, in a dark place, but sustained by the music of a close and reliable friend. Oh, but the changes there are always a coming down the line! Along comes Passengers, an experimental album with a guest appearance by Pavarotti. The album didn’t exactly do it for me. It broke the mold of what I expected from U2, and not in a good way. There was a lot of experimental music that indicated a searching in the band they had never done before. I figured they must really be busting their butts to come up with a new sound.

So, in the interim, I finally got a hold of October to tide me over. I found the majesty and personal exuberance of the album uplifting. This was the period in which I finally abandoned tapes for CDs and began to acquire a collection for play on my handy-dandy new remote control system. I focused on U2 singles and connected with sounds I’d only heard a few times on the radio, or on friend’s tape mixes. Plenty of material to keep me going for the next, most awesome of all albums.

Pop comes out, and visions of sugarplums dance in my head. The rumors say its “U2 does techno”, which to me meant they would take electronic music to the next level with their own brand of rock and roll talent. I dive into my copy and listen, waiting for the awesomeness to kick in.

Wah-wah-wahhh.

There are a handful of good songs on the album. In particular, “Mofo” I think is the best effort in that it shows what the rest of the album might have pushed forward artistically if U2 hadn’t backed off. That’s the problem. The song selection comes off as an initial attempt to push the boundaries, and ends in a lack of confidence. The bad songs come off as attempts to fill the album after having pulled back from what might have been beyond the band’s abilities.

The Pop Mart tour repeats this motif, with the band trying to hide behind the veneer of self-depreciation. Guys, if you weren’t serious, why did you even bother? I can get a comedy album anytime around the block.

Interestingly enough, this is the first tour where I manage to get tickets. The price was steep as I recall, and they’ve only gone up since then. The spectacle of the lemon and the outfits was wasted, I think. There’s no way to top the Zoo TV tour. I think that was one of those once in a band’s lifetime things. But just the same, the concert was nothing short of a religious experience. A lot of the songs from Pop played much better in concert, and I kept thinking, “Why didn’t they record this version on the album?”

My girlfriend of the time dumped me right as I bought two seats. As a result, I had plenty of room to dance. The seats were nosebleed, so I couldn’t really see the band. I rocked out to every song drunk out of my gourd while standing on the fold out chairs. I think my neighbors must have thought I was nuts and were afraid I would fall. Who cares what they thought! Finally, after long last, I could experience my heroes. It was a night I can never forget.

However, the album hardly had enough momentum to sustain me, and the words of my ex-girlfriend from that time made an impression on me. She said they had sold out like REM and were going downhill. Much as I didn’t want that to be true, I had a sinking feeling she was right.

The next album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, certainly provided evidence for that. There wasn’t a single song on that album I could stomach, which was extremely unusual for me. I tried. I listened as much as I could stand, but no magic happened. I went with a friend to see them in Baltimore during the Elevation tour, and they were good in concert. The new songs didn’t do much for me, but all their old material was excellent. While I didn’t have a religious experience, I did have a good time.

I’m sure there were other albums in between this one and the next. But now that I look at it, I think I stopped being interested in the in-between stuff. I detected a lack of energy in their music I’d never experienced before. Was it me? Had I changed? What had happened?

The next album came, How to Deconstruct an Atomic Bomb, and I bought it with a certain amount of reservation. Unlike the previous disappointment, I was actually able to listen to this album at first.  Maybe I was hoping they’d turn things around and didn’t want to face facts, so I tried even harder to like it.  But I soon grew tired of this album and tossed it to the bottom of my heap, along with other albums that I never listen to anymore.

It’s as if I’d outgrown them. Everything before the moment of disappointment still sounds good to me, but everything after that sounds like junk. I’m separated from a feeling of myself that I can no longer access. They have ceased to carry that projection for me.

I think, now, as I consider it and look back, that it must be a mix of things. The band members were never the heroes I thought they were, and they’ve simply run out of good music with which to hide their flaws behind. I’m no longer the same person, in that my projections don’t catch very often on others anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever have a favorite, personal band or musician like U2 was to me again in this lifetime. Too much history that can’t be repeated. I’ve left the garden and can’t go back. Even if I could, I don’t think I would.  It wouldn’t be the same.

At first I blamed U2, and I hated what they’d become in my eyes. Being my personal band, I took their transformation personally, even though it had nothing to do with me. Then, after the anger and disappointment of loss, I started drifting and walking in the desert.

Freed from my false idol, my music quest could finally begin.

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Mon 9 Jun 2008

Nobody liked the Holy Grail

Posted by laup under Meditations, Movie Madness, Outbreak
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I always get a kick out of how popular Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail (Holy Grail for short) is today.  It’s become an enshrined icon of popular culture (and rightly so, I believe).  Geeks everywhere can spout off lines from a half dozen scenes on command, and many can do much more than that when it comes to reciting the litany.

But it wasn’t always so.  My folks used to take me to all sorts of movies when I was a little one.  The kinds that could only be seen at student cinemas in universities.  This was before the era of video cassette, DVD or online distribution.  Sometimes you’d see a movie and not see it again until twenty or thirty years later.  That’s how crazy it was back then.

I went with my folks and their best friend BK to see a new movie called Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail.  I was little, but I recall quite vividly taking in the various scenes from the movie and finding it all ridiculous and true.  I also remember students all around us looking disgusted or confused.  Some were getting up and leaving, dismissing the film with a gesture of their hand just like in those movies where the heroes’ film is trashed by the audience because they don’t understand the genius.

My folks thought it was brilliant, so I saw the movie again in a different university cinema.  I liked it (even though I was hardly old enough to have a deep understanding of what I was watching).  The reaction was the same.  Hippie students dissing the film and making fun of the scenes (“is this supposed to be funny, man?”)

When I was in college, I got a chance to see the movie once more in a university theater with fellow “hip” students.  The reaction couldn’t have been more different.  Genuine enjoyment, reenactment of key lines, copious laughter.

I think about all the icons of culture generated during that time period and how they’ve become assimilated into the mainstream or acquired devoted followings.  The individualized aspects, I think, get lost as people take up the compensatory message of the artistry and celebrate what the icon means in a participatory way.  But the conscious understanding of what the icon is telling us is seldom understood.  You can’t take Holy Grail seriously; it’s just a comedy, right?

Wrong.  It’s truth.  The movie’s a statement of where we are right now, on this planet.  That’s why it’s so “funny”.  You laugh, because otherwise you’d cry.  Or you’d scoff and say, “I don’t get this man.  Pass me that doobie.”

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Thu 5 Jun 2008

Devil’s daughter in a flying saucer

Posted by laup under Meditations, Outbreak, Random Encounters, Weirdie
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There’s this elevated hillside surrounded by a semi-wooded area sixty feet from where I live. It’s where all the dog-walkers poop their canines and look the other way as they return home before anyone says, “I saw that!” At the top, there’s this old, flattop pavement, which looks like it was once from a primitive tennis court. Unless hardcore volleyball players, who love diving on hard surfaces, once played here. It’s a relic of a time when the place where I live was less developed by the pollution-people than it was.

I get the feeling that this is the ideal place to meet the UFO girl. Heck, she can’t have failed to locate my sorry brain pattern by now. I resolve to wait until I receive a message of some kind saying “tonight’s the night”. I suppose I could just stand on the hill and shout like a stupid fool, “Hey, UFO girl! What up?” I don’t have it in me. To tell the truth, this whole business is starting to be a little tiring on my brain stem. Even though I’m over the flu and my domestic chores patrol is back on track, I’m still not feeling the mo.

That’s too bad, because UFO girl materializes her spaceship into my immediate reality and proceeds to drive me crazy. All that junk I packed? Useless, because UFO girl is absolutely crazy. As in treacherous, randomly determined, force of nature nuts. As in, “Let’s drink hydrochloric mezcal plastazoids and drive the ultimate turbo bean on the wrong side of the galaxy until dimensional entities inject us with projectile mucus that shoots out our eye sockets with neutronic, magnetizing feedback.”

It takes every nerve of steel I can borrow from the hero bank just to avoid being dashed to pieces on the radioactive asteroids hurtling towards us at negative light speed. You want to name an edge-of-your seat panic sensation, I’m there. From “omigod we almost got crushed” to “if things don’t improve now, I’m dead/crazy/maimed”. I know I’m supposed to pass along some kind of message, but I’m too busy bouncing around the hold with the fossilized remains of previous victims’ clothing and decayed bits of half eaten frozen chicken nugget packages to remember anything.

There’s no talking to UFO girl about anything. My attempts at communication just inspire a fresh round of randomly determined activities. Invite some death robots aboard for some slam dance mind mashing by way of neutron wave bombardment. Carbon based units get to play target until relieved of their pants and their self respect. Then it’s hijack some space boulders and drive them through a crab nebula shouting atomic obscenities and human beings pay the embarrassment tab. It could be never-ending terror in a nightmare-inspired maul-maze butt smashing geode of psychic maggot eggs eating your soul kitchen’s best of millenium collection. UFO girl keeps me guessing what the next random natural interstellar disaster is going to be.

Without any warning, UFO girl puts her spaceship in neutral and coasts for a while. Her eyes glaze over and she regurgitates the astral remains of a stale Martian biscuit from next week’s episode. All over her command module, which she assures me is rented and of no concern. I manage to blurt out that I’m here on behalf of my mirage, who wants a date. UFO girl tells me in a voice that sounds like bad diarrhea that she doesn’t go out with miserable skulking horror worms, only unstoppable cybernetic nerd-creatures with microfilm sized hardware and/or software. She presses the ignition diode and revs the spaceship treadmill for another high speed chase of interstellar wombats and a stopover at the geargrinding refuel zone with bonus gut prize.

UFO girl says, “You ready to party?” I say, “I didn’t come here to party.” Abruptly, she lock-kicks me out of her spaceship reality and says, “If you didn’t come here to party, then get lost!” And just like that, I’m back home. I’m glad to be back, but I’m in desperate need of a drink to calm my nerves and/or a tasty meal to fill the gaping void in my stomach. I ache all over, but I’m wired like nobody’s business and a little shell-shocked. I imagine tumbling out of an accelerating psychic spaceship will do that to you.

Crud, what am I going to tell the scary guy in my basement?

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Wed 4 Jun 2008

Now Comes The Lightning Age

Posted by laup under Backwater, Meditations, Outbreak
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I was musing over the decline of fossil fuels the other day, and what it might mean for the future. Demand for oil is out pacing the available supply. China and India are reaching for the same mobility and prosperity enjoyed by the United States, and they are growing by a fantastic amount in both population and industry.

Meanwhile, the oil infrastructure is rusting away because of insufficient investment in the next generation of rigs and technicians. To top it off, the oil companies have picked all the low hanging fruit off the tree, so to speak. All the easy-to-find oil has been located, and all the light, sweet crude (the easiest to refine) is disappearing fast.

What we have left are declining field discoveries, aging wells going into production collapse, and a steadily shrinking supply of heavy, sour crude oil that is increasingly hard to extract and refine.

In layman’s terms, this means that the era of cheap, abundant energy, which fueled an unprecedented industrial age of manufacturing and transportation, is over. From here on out, cheap oil is replaced by expensive oil, and the price of everything this industrial age of cards was built on collapses.

This does not mean the end of oil. We will never run out of oil. It means energy prices go through the roof to reflect the increase in scarcity. A price of 100 dollars a barrel of oil is about eighteen cents a cup. Think about how far a cup of gasoline will get your automobile. Now, imagine paying a group of people in today’s market eighteen cents to push your vehicle the same distance. The commodity is cheap compared to how much it can accomplish.

Nothing can replace oil. Oil is used to make fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics. It can be turned into fuels that power farm machinery, aircraft, ships, factories, power plants, and most of all, trucks. Transportation is 75% of the use of modern energy. Food production and modern manufacturing as we know it couldn’t exist without oil. Cheap energy created the modern world.

The alternative energy sources we have now won’t keep things going the same way. Solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels, coal, tar sands, and so on all have problems that oil doesn’t have. None of them are as versatile as oil. You can’t turn sunlight or wind into plastics. Biofuels don’t scale to industrial levels and take over food producing land. Tar sands are too energy intensive and waste too much water. Nuclear takes too long to build to stave off the energy crunch. Coal won’t power airplanes. Technology isn’t going to save us in time because we’ve run out the clock.

Is this doomsday? No one can predict the future, though it seems like I am by reciting the litany of doom above. It’s a comforting illusion to hope for the end of days and a release from this crummy world we call Planet Earth. I don’t buy it. The decline of oil is real, and changes are coming to the industrialized world that technology won’t be able to save. But what comes after is anyone’s guess.

I speculate that we will continue to have electricity. That’s what I keep thinking about. I’m skeptical of batteries on any scale, since I’m not sure the resources exist to replace the fleet of vehicles we have now, with the kinds we have now. But I see a renaissance in rail and canal travel. Food, power, and components will have to be generated locally because the energy to transport them great distances will be too expensive.

I wonder about the resurgence of the laboring class, and of animal transport. The transition would have to include that in some great numbers because as fuel prices go up, it might become too costly to build a road with machinery, and cheaper to use laborers. The social implications of this blow me away, because it won’t be like the “good old days”. It’ll be a different context with different attitudes.

Corporations will have to change the way they do business. They won’t be able to easily relocate to a country where they can pay cheaper wages anymore, because the cost of shipping the parts is no longer cheap. If they decide to go with cheaper steamers or sailboats, the travel time increases.

There will be conflicts as the various owners of the countries fight for the remaining, poor quality oil fields. As food production plummets, there will be starvation. There will be less travel for the average person, and less goods. I shudder to think what people in the “prosperous” countries might do, with their sense of entitlement and shock at the end of the party.

Yet electricity will still be there. The focus will be the grid, the power lines, the telephone wires, the “line” itself. The level of energy will be smaller, and less instantaneous. We’ll all have to withdraw, pull back and reexamine the old ways of crafting, building and farming on smaller scales. Communities will be interconnected by the line, but physically constrained by lack of cheap energy. This is the age of lightning, of individual development through the development of ideas and an acknowledgement that you, the person reading this, are your own means of production.

The stroke of lightning illuminates, and sets you free. In the tarot card of The Tower, lightning (from the heavens) strikes the tower of Babel and throws the king and pope into the swirling waters and thorns below, along with the top of the tower. The current order of hierarchy and power has been struck down for its hubris. Yet the figures, robbed of their hats of authority, are human again. They seem to flail, yet if you turn the card upside down, they are dancing!

We will be humbled, and brought down to earth from our lofty heights. Our lives will come under scrutiny and require contemplation. The chances are good that humanity will come out of the fall with a new sense of purpose and a greater sense of community than before. Problems will emerge, of course, as the quest continues. Conflicts will be more personal than before, and of a more immediate kind. The danger is that individuals can emerge to infect the group with psychic contagions more easily. We might find new advances in individualized repression more terrifying than anything we’ve seen yet. And countering that, cooperative groups of democratic nodes more stable and humanizing than what we could possibly imagine.

No doubt, things are going to tilt on their axis in unpredictable ways.

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Tue 3 Jun 2008

In search of UFO Girl, part five

Posted by laup under Outbreak, Weirdie
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Now that I understand I’m not the host of this show, I’m confident that the search will come to its conclusion. I’ve said my one line, in a manner of speaking, and done whatever it was my mirage couldn’t or wouldn’t do. About all I have to do is be prepared for the inevitable meeting with UFO girl.

I think about what might be useful for an encounter with an ultra-terrestrial being about a contact encounter with a mirage. Being a real world guy, I need to accommodate a non-real world request for a hookup with two imaginary beings that I consider no less true just because they don’t occupy space and time as any physicist would describe it.

I’ve been trained in the old school of fifties science fiction films as to what to expect as far as outcomes. The last thing I want to do is end up a helpless victim of an ultra-terrestrial being. At least, if I have a say in things. Somebody has to be the victim or there’s no pathos, and one never knows one’s role in any new encounter until the whip comes down.

So, against death rays, I’m packing a sign that says “Don’t Shoot I Am A Human”, which identifies me as a person not to be atomized. In case of abduction, I carry a Black Sabbath tape. No UFO can take off for butt probe land when you are equipped with sounds so heavy they’re iron, dude.

I read rumors that UFO girl has interchangeable heads. She’s been known to lose her rational head and have it replaced with a monstrous maw of titanium teeth and high fructose acid spittle. For that, I’m taking a plastic bag with some poppers in sawdust. Nothing confuses alien monsters with force fields more than random noises or clouds of thrown crud. Hey, all I need is a diversion so I can book.

Finally, in case of alien possession and injection of nasty DNA, I gots me a used handkerchief of my recent flu virus days. Just hold that puppy up and it’s like a crucifix to vampires. As we all well know, alien beings with advanced technology are helpless against the common earthling diseases.

I gather my goods, not knowing if they will be of help. Hey, maybe I’ll get lucky. I need to stay alive long enough to pass along my mirage’s offer and escape to safety so I can make a report. My pass’s life clock is blinking, yo.

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Mon 2 Jun 2008

Along Comes A Menagerie

Posted by laup under Bath Lore, Cat Lore, Comic Books, Gardening, Meditations, Outbreak, Outdoors
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In garden news, the potatoes are coming up nicely. The tomatoes need a lot of care, so it’s touch and go with them. Onions and chives are on target. The lettuce, contrary to last year, is being really difficult. It looks like it might surge forward soon. I hope so, it’s been a long spring.

The basil croaked, which really surprised me. The other herbs are doing well and spreading rapidly. I’m psyched because our cooking gets so much mileage now out of them, and we now know the power of saving herbs for later in the winter. The garden is teeming with earthworms, which it wasn’t last year. I guess word has gotten around that this plot is active.

K and I have a huge amount of plants in moss packets ready to plant, hopefully this will start the serious attack of garden goodness. Oh yes, and we have a new blue hose with a purple multi spray attachment that rocks the mike. Our major challenge this year is keeping the weeds, which have mounted a massive attack on all fronts. My back is killing me, and the thistles ruined my gloves, requiring me to get a fresh pair. Sheesh!

Frankie has taken to bullying Blink, the older and weaker female cat. It’s gotten to the point where Blink is always hiding and skulking about, and it’s driving K and myself up the wall. In all other ways Frankie is a honeybear, but when she doesn’t get her way (such as wanting to get a walkies outside and we say no because the landscapers sprayed the grass with pesticide today), she acts out on Blink.

We’re really not happy with our vets. We took Frankie in for a respiratory infection, and they decided to give her the latest round of shots because we hadn’t been in to update them. This was in addition to the antibiotics they prescribed. Now, we hate giving Frankie her shots because she becomes weak and sad for three days, and it’s heartbreaking to watch. So for them to give her the shots before we could protest, when she was already feeling crummy because of an infection. Well, the vets are on my poop list. I’m going to go empty my wallet somewhere else. Frankie hid under the bed and sulked for days, and it made me mad.

On the bath front, my aunt gave me an awesome array of bath salts from Pretty Baby, and some cool dude bath bombs from Lush. Alas, I’ve used up the gift boxes and I emptied out my main store of goods the other day. Not having the requisite ability to meditate my cares into valuable cash and prizes at a certain level is of course, intolerable. But understandable, since my stress levels have been off the wall the last month and a half.

Actually, I have a whole stash of bath bombs I’ve been holding onto for karmic reasons, which I’ve been unable to touch. The victims I’ve planned these for will no doubt benefit, but for me it means lean times. So K and I made a brief run and I picked up some more of my faves. There’s this pine-volcanic gravel bomb that does the trick nicely, and I’ve been jonesin’ to make use of that kind again. Stimulates my brainstem nicely, and I’m glad to have it back.

Picked up the third Age of Bronze, titled “Betrayal Part One”. It’s as good as always, and I read through it so quickly it’s sad. The Trojan War is finally starting to heat up, as both sides start to maneuver their pieces into position, while the personal stories of the characters continue to develop in interesting ways.

Of particular interest to me is the diplomatic mission to Troy to regain Helen and avert the war, where several people reveal their character in really cool ways. I never get tired of Odysseus’s trickery, and I have to say Palamede’s honesty is starting to win me over. Paris’s cowardice, arrogance and treachery are really going too far. Troy is doomed.

K has been getting the hiking bug, and after a long search she finally found a pair of boots she could deal with. REI had nothing but high priced, weird and poorly manufactured junk. That surprised me. LL Bean just didn’t pass the muster. So we hit the local Ranger Surplus, because I needed a new pair of jungle boots and a new pair of fatigues. K was skeptical, but she found exactly what she was looking for there. Durable, support, reasonably priced, and not made cheaply.

I swear by my army boots and fatigues. My old desert storm boots and fatigues have been slowly falling apart this last year, despite my best efforts to milk them further. I’ve worn the fatigues for twenty-one years, and the boots for eleven. The service, when it comes to the basics, knows how to make long-lasting, hardy equipment and that’s no joke.

The boots breathe and stand up to anything while giving you support and protection. The fatigues cover your legs with cool/warm air as necessary, and they protect you from terrain, foliage and insects like nobody’s business. Plus the pockets are awesome. I’ve carried empty beer bottles in all four at the 9:30 Club, saving my friends and me the hassle of throwing them out while the music is raging. It’s good to have a new set. I feel it’s appropriate, in a way, with the way my life is going.

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Fri 30 May 2008

In search of UFO Girl, part four

Posted by laup under Meditations, Outbreak, Playtime, Weirdie
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I’ve got a dream for a clue, a hall pass that’s feeling close to the due date, and a whole lot of personal drama driving me crazy. Ordinary life and its chores are hard enough without battle cruisers patrolling the streets for human heads.

Spontaneously, I get out some of my illustration materials and tools. I continue work on one of my personal enrichment projects. I have four blank certificates of accomplishment on ditto paper from the fourth grade that I’ve been copying and adapting onto poster board. So far I’ve only done the first one.

I like giving artistic creations to people, where time and energy allow. These modified certificates are something different and neat I can give people to pump them up. It’s nice to get a bonus round every now and then.

In no time at all, I’ve got my second certificate done, and I’m satisfied to have a new goodie at my disposal. I wonder where the motivation to do this came from, since I haven’t been at full power for a few months now. I imagine it must have come as a token of kindness, as after all that’s what it’s supposed to be used for. What might I have done that was noteworthy, I wonder?

I recall my dream, and how I saved Important Woman from the snipers. Maybe the motivation comes from her as a form of recognition. Perhaps that’s where a lot of artistic inspiration comes from. It’s granted us through our dreams, and the figures of our dreams are the messengers. Sometimes we remember the dream where that inspiration springs, and sometimes we don’t. I think this sort of thing must be going on all the time, asleep or not.

K makes me a nice, delicious, hot cup of tea from her special recipe. She can tell I need a boost. A rooibus peach/blueberry bliss combo with fresh crushed blackberries and a big spoonful of honey in the raw (that unprocessed stuff with the pollen on top). It must work, because not only do I recover health points, but I have a Mr. Spock moment.

If I assume this inner dialogue is always going on, then I have to admit I’m not always participating overtly and that it’s not always about me. Things could be going on that are moving this search forward that I’m not aware of, and perhaps all I need to do is wait for my turn to do something. That, to me, seems to be the crux of the matter – the need for patience and for the various other storylines to catch up – whatever they may be. My brain is a secondary organ after all!

Nobody wants to discover they are a supporting character. Such an admission wounds one’s pride. I’ve put out the message, and I’m just being egotistic in thinking there’s more to it than that.

Suddenly, a light bulb in the chandelier above burns out with a flash and a snap. I take that as an agreement.

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Tue 27 May 2008

In search of UFO Girl, part three

Posted by laup under Meditations, Outbreak, Random Encounters, Weirdie
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My big hope to meet the UFO girl rests on a crummy sound file attached to the Internet probability antenna. All I get in the way of clues is a dream.

In the dream I’m in a museum/international center. There’s this important woman moving from one location to another. She’s got about a dozen bodyguards about her for protection, plus a personal assistant and two administrative assistants. There’s a small amount of pedestrians milling about. Nobody recognizes the woman and her entourage. They just give her searching glances as they go about their business. I’m there too, part of the crowd and probably there for the art, but for some reason I get the feeling everyone knows who I am.

A bunch of snipers appear on the second floor balconies and aim for the woman. I jump to her side and somehow by waving my arms and moving in front of her at strategically important moments the snipers are only able to hit the bodyguards, and a few of the passers-by. I pull out this weird plastic submachine gun and blow away a few of the snipers. The rest take cover and I try to get the woman and her shrinking entourage to a waiting car.

The woman takes a grazing shot to the head, and I have to stop shooting so I can carry her the rest of the way to the car. The bodyguards are totally useless, and I know somehow that I’m the only one who can do the job and keep her alive. I have to put her down, shoot at the snipers some more to make them dive for cover, and open the car door. The driver, the personal assistant, and the two administrative assistants just stand there gawking at me, ducking bullets and doing nothing helpful.

I get the woman into the car and we all leave the scene of carnage behind. I perform emergency first aid, and for a moment it’s close, but I stabilize the woman. I notice the driver making the telltale suspicious glance at us. I pick up on something fishy about the personal assistant’s behavior, and the way the two administrative assistants look guilty. I realize they’re all working for the snipers and the woman’s been totally betrayed.

The driver gets wise to my suspicions. He locks the doors and puts up the privacy window. I know he’s driving us into a trap, so I start smashing the privacy window between us with a battering ram glass breaker I happen to be carrying around. Before I can shoot the driver he books and leaves us behind. I take over the car and drive away, just in time to dodge a rocket attack lock-on.

Keeping an eye on the remaining traitors, who do nothing because anyone with a battering ram in their pocket is clearly out of their mind, I drive to an underground parking lot. Waiting for me is a limousine being driven by Lurch from the Addams Family. In the back seat is a sexy nurse with mad doctor skills. I park the car and make the three assistants back off and turn around. I warn them that if they try to see where we go, or look at our license plate, I’ll blow them away.

I carry the woman to the back seat and the nurse takes over. I know she’ll be okay now. I cover the three traitors from the window of the limo with my plastic gun. Lurch shakes his head and makes his distinctive “I don’t believe this” groan before he gets in the car and drives us away. We drive off through downtown to a secret hideaway.

The cats wake me up with demands for food, and I return to the real world with a clue that makes no sense to me. I don’t know how much time I’ve got left on my haunted house pass, but I’m getting the growing feeling that my library books are coming due soon, and the ghosts there collect late fees in something other than cash, check or charge.

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Fri 23 May 2008

Three hundred losers

Posted by laup under Meditations, Movie Madness, Outbreak
Comments Off on Three hundred losers

As I’ve mentioned before here, I don’t much care for the movies that are released in theaters. I believe the entertainment industry is incapable of making good movies except by accident. It’s the medieval printing press formula of spitballing. That is, mass production of a large number of products in the hope that something will stick and make enough money to make up for the tremendous losses of everything else that bombed.

You see it books, television shows, video games, and popular music. A whole lot of garbage, and a few lucky shots. Yet the industry, with its medieval guild system of cutting off free markets via the control of distribution, refuses to diversify for its own financial survival. All I see is consolidation into large, inefficient corporations that struggle to make the margins. It seems like in the news the only game to play is buyouts.

Without the propaganda machine known as the entertainment public relations industry whipping up public interest, the struggling entertainment industry (again, that term, which suggests craft, but conjures up images of sweatshop smokestacks) might be in worse shape. The mantra is always that it takes “the big boys” to make quality, and since they take all the risks, they deserve all the profits.

Well, hey, if that’s true, how come I’m not entertained? Where’s the “quality” I keep hearing about? All one has to do is read the first sentence of The Da Vinci Code, listen to ten seconds of Britney Spears’ “Gimmie More”, or watch a minute of any show on the SciFi Channel to know this doesn’t pass the laugh test.

The decline comes not just from a longstanding contempt for the public and what it wants, or the exploitation of artists and craftsmen desperate to make a buck, but also from an emerging sense by a new generation of people trained in the computer. These young people are growing up with tools not available even ten years ago that are cooperative, creatively open, and allow you to do work that used to take entire studios of people to produce.

It’s entirely possible now, for example, for a group of people to put together an original, entertaining show, if not better than a mainstream one, using a computer. Sound, video, special effects, and the portability, along with a massive distributor called the Internet, you can do it. You can even set up a website and charge for it if you want, or just post it on YouTube for people to enjoy simply for the love of sharing. It’s all about creating, passing it along, and getting involved.

The iron hand of oligarchy may yet crush this sentiment of the unwashed masses as they evolve towards freedom from coercion. It wouldn’t be the first time. If you look back through the centuries at the history of newspapers, pamphlets, and hootenannies, you’ll see how the owners seized control of popular culture. But as always, one can never tell how things will turn out, it’s anyone’s guess.

But I digress.

I saw a movie called “300”, which is a story about a battle between a small group of Spartans (the good guys) and a gargantuan army of Persians (the bad guys). The battle decides whether the last stand of the good guys inspires their allies to band together and have a chance at remaining free, or they fail and the leader of the Persian army conquers everyone (this is bad). That’s the movie in a nutshell, and it’s been lauded as a macho man story of serious butt kicking and decried as a historically inaccurate appeal to patriotism.

I think both sides are completely wrong. It’s just a really, really bad movie that people are throwing their own projections upon, either because they feel powerless and want to watch some pump up, or they expect disappointment in today’s movies and this one grants them the opportunity to complain.

To the people expecting “quality”, “historical accuracy”, or even things like “realism” or “authenticity”, you are deluding yourselves. This is a fantasy, adapted from a trade paperback taking liberties with history to start with. All you have to do is look at the cinematography, with it’s green-screen generated landscapes and phony-baloney colors stolen from every music video filter of the nineties, to know this is an internal story, not an external one.

The characters move and speak like figures from a daydream or an idle fancy. The outrageous wolves with glowing eyes or rhinos decked out in battle armor are exaggerated monsters of the unconscious with no relation to real world animals. The crazy maneuvers during the fight scenes have nothing to do with physics and everything to do with how adolescents play with action figures.

I’m not knocking this approach. I’m just saying you can’t expect such an overt disregard for reality to hold up under anything more than a loose, subjective viewing. You can say such a shallow presentation neither nourishes the soul hungry for art nor makes for fascinating intellectual analysis, and I’d agree. See that industry treadmill spewing out offal? Yes, it’s gross, and it’s useful to consider the ways in which it falls short (ahh, that sulphurous, rotten egg smell of a group of men pushing an armored elephant right off a cliff). After all that, it’s time to start talking about alternatives.

To the people who think there’s a lot of kicking of butts, I think you need a reality check from Patton: “Now I want you to remember that no *#&!#%$ ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb *#&!#%$ die for his country.”

Sure, there’s a lot of awesome battle moves going on, the Spartans inflict huge losses against an outlandish array of revved up opponents, and they all die fighting. That’s not kicking butt, that’s losing with a flourish.

Yes, their heroic sacrifice inspires the wimp allies to stand up to the invaders, but we never see if that final battle leads to victory. Without final victory, you lose. Yes, you can say we know what happened in history, but remember this is a fantasy. If it isn’t on screen, we can’t imply anything. It’s a complete let down.

You want butt kicking? After a long movie of fighting down to the bitter end, the superhero leader of the good guys gets a chance to spear the bad guy leader — and clips the bad guys ear. He missed (if the guy’s not dead, you failed). Since the movie is a shallow fantasy, the symbolic effect of such an act in real history means nothing (but having a Man Who Would Be King scene would negate the movie’s premise and ending).

This pathetic miss occurs in an interesting context. There’s an earlier scene in which a lesser character performs an amazing feat of throwing ability.  His spear lands dead on against a huge, armored rhino at least a hundred feet away, exactly enough to kill the creature so that it slides to a stop inches from the guy.

And it’s strongly implied that this lesser character’s weakness of “needing his father’s approval” is what leads to his horrible death. The movie’s implied moral statement is “anything that makes you weak makes you worthless”. Things like feelings other than murderous rage, not being a Spartan, and having a disability.

The leader of the Spartans, who embodies the butt kicking principle to the utmost, should at least be able to duplicate the dead loser’s killing shot from what, twenty feet? Right? This is for the win, leader dies, army falls apart.

Failure = 100%

I don’t watch “butt kicking” movies to watch the heroes lose. I watch to see the good guys inflict major hate and discontent. That’s what my subconscious primitive is paying to see.

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