Asteroid City (movie review)

 :: automat ::

I saw this movie a few nights ago.  

Some things were special:

• The guy I went with hadn't slept much and was drifting in and out, which turned out to coincide with a theme of the movie (or "play");   
• Oppenheimer was previewed, thematically connected; 
• the slide deck of ads at The Laurelhurst, pre movie, featured a chocolate lab much like Sydney, my dog.  

What I'm trying to say is: the atmosphere was one of fourth wall breakers.  Very meta.

The movie's colorful kernel has a playhouse, movie set, sound studio look to it, with the movie trick of feeling infinite and outdoors, as the police chase flies by (more than once), diminishing to a speck.  Very Bagdad Cafe in flavor, a favorite already.

A mushroom cloud in the distance. Strangers thrown together by the exigency of having brainiac kids.  A military. A meteor crater. Soda fountain. A UFO with ET.... Very 1950s. So many of the stereotypes so well rendered. We've all been there in our dreams.  Some of us never left.  This place is perfect, like an animated Norman Rockwell painting.

We have the stoic National Geographic type mostly combat photographer.  The school teacher.  The handsome cowboy Montana man.  Another principal is the tough but heart-of-gold 2nd tier actress, played by superstar Scarlett Johansson.  She and the photographer each have offspring.  

The photographer has four kids:  three little girls and a brainiac son.  The actress has her 15 year old daughter in tow.

A next layer out, the way I think of it, between the colorful kernel and we the audience, is a black and white apparatus having to do with the making of the play we're currently enjoying.  There we have the writer, the director, the actors auditioning for a part.  Some go on to become well known!  

This is where the sleep scene comes in.  The cast of auditioners sits in the bleachers facing the writer, who is explaining he wishes to insert a sleep scene wherein everyone in the play falls to sleep simultaneously, without exception.  Then he's like "OK do it!" and everyone pretends to pass out, except for the one sleep walker guy (there's one in every crowd).

We're the outermost layer, the audience, made self-aware by the play-within-a-play aspect, also favored by Shakespeare.

This is a film I'd like to own or at least have easy access to, as I'm already looking forward to a next viewing, while still munching on all it gave me the first time.  I got the above picture off Facebook, not from the movie.  It helps suggest the atmosphere, which includes the diner, gas station, automats, motor court village...

Pre Primary Politics

I think Marianne is on track with her rhetoric, in terms of preserving a sense of continuity, to the extent that's possible in the United States of Amnesia (Gore Vidal's phrase).  

She's like most DCers (although not a DCer herself) in wanting to start the NATO war narrative on February 24th, 2022, when the lid got taken off a situation that was already quite kinetic.  The shelling of the Donbass had to be admitted as world historic.  

Not everyone agreed on the tale to tell, leading to some serious bifurcations in the storyteller tree.

The hype around presidents has become farcical, with the candidates expected to promise way more than that office might constitutionally deliver.  Citizens with no imagination for democracy fall back on monarchical tendencies mighty quick.  That's the reflex base humanity has the most experience with.  

Democracy is science fiction, or might as well be, from the standpoint of how we're accustomed to behaving.

In that sense, I think Marianne is playing her cards correctly, in wanting to dial back expectations.  Americans should not assume such an entitled position, as one time victors in wars long ago.  

In these new chapters, history gets hammered into shape from a wider (more spherical) set of angles.  We get a more unshielded view of the inner workings.  It's more like having X-ray vision, and seeing more clearly where the bodies are buried (so many!).  We see a lot more of those skeletons, lurking in their respective closets, hoping to stay secret.

Thanks to a juvenile fascination with an imperial presidency on the part of the populace (neo-Romans in large degree), those posing to become president have to genuflect to this President on a Pedestal so many Americans carry around as egoic-iconic, closet monarchists that many of them be.  

Marianne is no exception.  She doesn't have permission to just be herself, while running for the right to staff the White House with a lot more of her people.  That means she too has to pretend she has a magic wand.  "Look, I can make all your debts go away and make your rent or mortgage affordable again."

What democracy requires is a great deal more time spent on study, which is where a UBI might come in handy.  However giving them time to appreciate their real situation, with its quasi creaky UBI, is what the pandemic did already, thereby sowing discord around whether working from home might be OK.  

That wasn't supposed to become such a hot topic, messing up the real estate market big time.  Before the middle class goes down with all hands, it's making a stand in the suburbs, defending what was sold, not that long ago, as the American Dream.

The good news is many more democratically minded than ever are doing their homework more assiduously.  

The Pizzagaters have entered adulthood by now, and realize it's not enough to just give lip service to "doing your own research".  Its time to wise up.

The Flash (movie review)

I'll say up front I was charmed by this film in many ways, once I remembered it was a comic book, its own genre, and if you haven't submerged yourself in that literature, you're right away out of your depth. In my case, I'm not an avid comic or graphic novel reader these days, but I'm a veteran scuba diver into comics to many depths.

I think what we have to remark on is that Parallel (actually, intersecting) Universes are the talk of the town this scifi season.  We had the Academy award winning Everything Everywhere All at Once to kick it off, then Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and now The Flash.  All are about a spaghetti monster meta-verse (SMM) wherein many permutations of the current reality get tried  -- perhaps some or all are dead ends.

The Flash is true to the comic genre in being geared for teens thinking seriously yet fantastically about their next self, the adult they're "leveraging into" (if that's a way).  

I always think of the comic-borne generational teachings (mimetic DNA) as feeling "home grown" but also coming from an adult, a peer human, in touch with her or his inner teen and also a master in some mode of expressiveness (a comic book author, which might be a team).  

The opportunity, as always, is to teach some important life lessons, or at least echo the inter-generational thoughts about such philosophical topics as: "what if it were otherwise?".  More concretely:  "what if I could fix the past?".

The way these movies flicker between realities, and get you thinking in terms of swapping in different actors ... 

[ a way Flash knows he's in a different future, is different actors star in the same movies;  Michael J. Fox is not Back to the Future guy in this future.  Oh no!  That's a motif.  A kind of Mandela Effect as in this world you're the only guy who remembers "the way it was" unless maybe you came with companions (Dorothy had her Toto at least) ]

... develops a more easy come easy go relationship with reverie literature.  

The big budget versions do not necessarily seek to monopolize, only guide and suggest, and no convergence on a single telling is required.  Batman is like this in this movie, like that in this other.  Indiana Jones keeps shape shifting.  Astrologers sometimes have a better grip on this kinds of slidings.  Words like "woke" don't begin to capture all the turning wheels.  Culture is at least complex, if not complicated.

This film has to shine as a star in the universe in which film explores the same self in the form of two arguing brothers, one the older and more mature, the other the messed up kid, going nowhere.  Yet the superpowers must be passed on.  "The adult I hope to become versus the train wreck I am now" -- picture the thought balloon, above a teen reading some comic.  The recursion motif.  Pray to your future self for rescue, might be one version of bootstrapping.

I'm going to admit enjoying some of the action, the high kinetic first person physics type stuff, heavy game engine.  Like batman on that motorbike, chasing bad guys in a dense city.  Then there's the signature scene of the whole movie, alluded to in the credits, where Flash faces low nutrition limits, one of his vulnerabilities, thinks fast, solves the puzzle.  No babies die.  A universe we don't have.

Flash's mother was archetypal, and the family matrix well rendered, offsetting the rest of the movie: obvious super-real level fantasy, the stuff of Greek legends.  Flash is the comic book Mercury, back to Hermes with winged shoes.  We all know that, right?

The movie flirts with gender and ethnicity bias (is one or more of those bad?), all the morphic qualities teens wrestle with and of course not only teens.  As a perennial aspect of life, we're confronted with all these pivot points (Dawn liked coming of age stories), it's just that comics have been traditionally pitched to a specific (one could say stereotyped) target demographic.  

I'm saying the best way to enjoy The Flash -- and why not if you paid your money -- is to be a teen. Perhaps be yourself specifically, if you're able to connect, or be a generic teen, for at least a couple of hours.

Debunking Conspiracy Theories

I am aware of the theory that the Biden administration is in cahoots with the Russians in seeking the demilitarization of Ukraine.  

Dangling the mirage of a military victory against Russia, by feeding Ukrainian fantasies of military superiority, is what it took to inspire an all out assault with lots of junk weapons and no air support.  

Ukraine, left to its own devices, would not have undertaken its own self destruction without being egged on by the White House and its cabal of irresponsible so-called pro-Ukrainians.

I understand why many Ukrainians have doubted the proxy war was ever architected with their best interests in mind.  These qualms were present from the beginning.  Nobody thinks a tank war in Europe is appropriate in the 21st Century. 

The sense that the bottom of the bell curve, intelligence-wise, has way too much decision-making authority, runs strong.  If we have any smart folks in the room, why don't they end this madness?  Because they're so vastly outnumbered?  Isn't the Bell Curve semi-symmetrical?  Why does the Planet of the Apes contingent seem to have the upper hand?

I think many in The District are sincere in thinking they're in some kind of historic showdown, and they are. I empathize with diplomatic types who sense a lot of the investment banking discussions are no longer accessible to them.  When it comes to planning future infrastructure, you don't want juvenile bomb-happy types in the room.  They're too anti-social.

DC has opted out of the civilian control structure, having militarized its foreign policy to the point of having no friends in high places anymore.  This probably accounts for the specter of Papa Biden being cheered on by a tiny cabal of unilateralist ideologues with a track record of being wrong about everything. The dummies have been isolated to a set of swank addresses.

Multi-polarity was an inevitable result, with business relationships forming around the ongoing task of subverting and circumventing all the dark ages sanctions being imposed by the lower half (the anti-intelligentsia).  Europe has been buying gas from Russia, piped through Ukraine, throughout the entire misguided campaign.

Claiming it's a terrible thing for Americans, that China and Russia are sorting out their differences, is highly short-sighted, and is mostly a mantra among the low-brows on cable.  Americans have a role to play as well, when it comes to cracking down on unbridled, uncontrolled militarism.

Regarding UAPs, we all know the adage that strong claims require exceptionally strong evidence, and what does not count as "strong evidence" is first person testimony from the security clearance crowd.  We already have mountains of that fluff.

Having a top secret clearance is a bureaucratic rank, and does not automatically confer evidentiary weight.  In practice, having clearances relates to sharing database logins, rumors, gossip.  Claiming the super-secret nature of UAPs is what adds to their believability seems a kind of circular logical fallacy, an appeal to an evanescent type of authority.

The higher the security clearance, the more far-fetched the narrative, and the blurrier and less satisfying the actual evidence.  That seems to be the pattern anyway.  Stay tuned.

Speaking of the lower half of the Bell Curve (a snobbish tendency of Ivy Leaguers), I disagree that we’re not having a pre primaries debating round. True, there’s no League of Woman Voters staging an event on cable, and the corporate media aren’t interested in democracy, but we have our new internet-based news services and the debates are happening daily, albeit asynchronously, with interviewers we already know.

I've been tuning in RFK, Dr. Cornel West, and Marianne Williamson.  Only Biden seems uninterested in the political process, suggesting he's not a serious candidate this time around.

The older more synchronous debating format was made for cable TV viewers, a demographic that no longer subscribes to real news.  The corporate TV folks have opted out of democracy and want spoon-fed pabulum and rubber stamp candidates.  Politics is a spectator sport for them.  A debate would be somewhat pointless in that medium.

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