Making Models

I've been reviewing my Cultural Engineering notebook, featuring Zoltar the homunculus, the potentially any-gender, genderless, dude or guy, with the worldly models and/or ways of thinking realistically about stuff. 

I link to my Cultagory Theory video towards the end of that Jupyter Notebook (not playable through Github however) something to dive into next, if exploring my specific tunnel system. 

You'll find Zoltar playing his actively inferring role (observing, responding) vs-a-vs Operation Popup also, the art gallery Flextegrity manifested around this time (October) six years ago.

We link Zoltar's plastic spherical enclosure to the OmniDirectional Halo of Synergetics, likewise spherical and meant to model the modeling process itself, as one of brain-transceiving mind, a metaphor based in the experience of ideas coming to us, fully formed sometimes, perhaps in a dream (perhaps in a daydream).

When imagining a spherical shell, one is likewise conceptualizing the "two sides of the same surface" convex outer side, vs concave inner side. Convexity mirrors a wider world out there (outer space), whereas concavity concentrates inward towards a central focus (perhaps an atom, perhaps a self).

Bracketing one's sphere-of-relevance (one's shell) are the adjacent Twilight Zones (Bucky sometimes uses that term) of the "tantalizingly relevant" (just out of reach), and what in retrospect we might call "low hanging fruit" once they're grasped and incorporated -- it's an ongoing process.

A Driving Adventure in Cascadia

This Google Earth screenshot is of the high desert rolling hills eastern side of Wy’East (Mt. Hood), seen upper left as a white spot.

My route was from Terrebonne (lower center) north to The Dalles, by way of Smith Rock, Lone Pine Road, OR 26 W, Madras, Maupin, and Dufur, along OR 97 N then OR 197 N.

From The Dalles, the dog and I turned left and took US 84 W directly home to Harrison Street, Portland.

The small town of Dufur, with its own main road set off from OR 197, is an eddy of peace amidst the majestic swirl of steep hills, nevertheless farmed in many cases, with the tracks of farm equipment visible amidst the tall grasses.

I left Sydney in the Nissan while having delicious fresh-made cranberry bread slices, in a bakery with high capacity bread making going on. I sat at a large indoor wooden table looking through a view window across the street at the Dufur Market, with its own tables and hot food menu, amidst well-stocked grocery shelves.

The drive itself is a destination and a joy as long as you don’t mind a double yellow line amidst twisting climbs and drops, along with lengthy straight hauls on wide open plains. 

Season matters: I saw lots of signage about snow and chain up areas, which didn’t pertain in late October.

I enjoyed plenty of lonely open road with scarcely another vehicle visible, little need for passing, and with long intervals of natural silence at highway pull offs, where we’d stretch and take these pictures. The descent into Maupin, before Dufur coming north (or south I’m sure) is spectacular.

Sydney, just turned 14, was my back seat companion, mostly snoozing in old dog style. We started in Terrebonne that morning, making a stop at Smith Rock.

Multnomah Falls along the Oregon bank of the Columbia Gorge, is favorite stop for tourists, including day hikers and cyclers, but also short stopover people like me this time, eager for a great view amidst light refreshments, a souvenir merch gift.

We were coming west from The Dalles on US 84 W. I’ve since learned that during the height of the visiting season there might be some need to schedule in advance for valved access to available parking (?).

The above Google Earth picture shows the parking island design, with US 84 E and W parting widely to accommodate it. I can well imagine all the slots filling.

We had no problem slipping in and out. My camera battery was dead and my cellphone has a bum lens cover, so instead. I took the classic shot with my iPad from the parking island. Then we shoved on, with Portland less than an hour away.

Practicing Democracy

Although I'm in a rural area, internet coverage is provided, by wire (not satellites), so I'm in what amounts to my home office, in terms of devices. I even have the same Samsung monitor, which fits in the trunk of maxi taxi (changed her oil), not exactly a bizmo, but certainly at home on the freeway.

The weather: stormy rainy. My dwelling machine has been wobbling in the wind. But with breaks and sudden sunlight. Oregon is like that. Bhutan too: you get the whole range of weathers in like a 24 hour period. High variability in other words.

I tend to use the word "clique" a lot, you may have noticed. I find it a refreshing alternative to "cabal" and/or "conspiracy". Also, in listening to Quakers (Friends) I hear complaints about their cliquishness, but then I'd imagine that's a common pattern in any temple, meeting or church. Synagogue, mosque or whatever. The oldsters seem to all know each other whereas the newcomers may feel left out, even exploited at the end of the day.

Speaking of Quakers: their patterns are influential on my thinking more generally when I think of those experimental prototype communities, such as we'd briefly stage over the New Year days (Dec 28 - Jan 2 mas o meno) in a remote yet well-appointed retreat space, owned by Church of the Brethren. Quakers, Brethren, Mennonites have a lot in common and seem to exchange memes a lot.

By "their patterns" I'm referring to the Faith & Practice of unprogrammed friends, pastorless, who rotate through job descriptions / positions, as recruited by nominating committee, and overseen by oversight committee. However that's just a snapshot in time and using already dated terminology by some  reckonings. These were unpaid positions, volunteer, but also personal growth opportunities as it takes what they call "people skills" to operate a shared business.

"Wait", you might be thinking "why do you say business, I thought we were talking about a church?". One of the quaint things about Quakers is their religion is couched in the phraseology of the industrial revolutionists of Merry England, meaning their form of worship is cloaked in a vocabulary of running a business. Meeting for Business, run by clerk and minuted by the recording clerk, but not according to Robert's Rules, is what replaces the "board room" and/or "shareholders meeting" in a lot of ways.

I go into all this in my critique of USA-style democracy, to which much lip service is given, but which is not the practice of your everyday pleeb, who goes to work in some rat race hierarchical oligarchy most likely, be that civilian or military. Opportunities to practice democracy might come on weekends, through one's bridge club or pet walking shared event, a naked bike ride in Portland maybe, or golf on the links. I'm not forgetting the corner bar (or maybe it's mid-block, or in the sticks...).

In other words, why do we expect Americans to be any good at democracy when they get so little practice using it to run big business. Am I saying the American Quakers are any different?  Not really.  Their meetings (not called churches) are tiny nonprofits in the grand scheme of things, not at the center of any sprawling industrial base like in the science fiction novel The Iron Bridge, or in Quakernomics.

My brand of Quakers put a lot of emphasis on transparency, which partially accounts for my experiment: I abdicated my membership in favor of attender status, as newcomers also have (gaining membership is a process), but then upped my level of participation including by undertaking such "insider" roles as clearing others for membership.  

"Wait, you're saying a non-member might be part of, or even in charge of, a non-member's clearness process?" In principle, yes, although at the time I was simply nominated within Oversight to form a clearness committee per usual; I was not clerk of Oversight itself. My point though, was membership includes the willingness to publicly identify as a Friend, to be out there as a booster and advocate for the Religious Society (of Friends), with the understanding some Monthly Meeting has said member's membership on record. Members will be vouched for, in other words. But from this special status it needn't follow that members have secrets from nonmembers, process-wise. It's not like members are the most entitled.

Consider a case wherein a surrounding state or city is somewhat hostile towards and/or suspicious of Quakerism and it's a liability to claim membership in said Society, except maybe in exceptional cases. This was more how the religion got started, as an underground, as a network of religious people unwilling to accept the authority of a state religion and its mandates and edicts. Those stepping forward and claiming to be leaders in this movement risked jail time. Those days are long gone, but gives a sense of where the institution of membership arose, among those most willing to stick their necks out, as it were.

However, when it comes to recruiting practitioners to the Faith & Practice, it's better that they check it out top to bottom, serve on all committees, take part in all the processes a meeting requires, with the optional process of becoming a member being one of being "convinced" (that's the jargon) as in persuaded, that this organization has nothing up its sleeve, and how would you know that if you hadn't had the opportunity to witness its inner workings at the core level?  Quakerism is open source in the sense of transparent but also in the sense that branching and forking is always feasible (not that every mutation pans out).

Tron Ares (movie review)

Dreaming of a Civil War

:: sleepers and dreamers ::

Looking Back Two Months Later

Naturally my cohort, peers and faculty, took note of this concept further propagating, since two months ago at this time, around August 18th (15th to be exact), where the meetup happened in Alaska, an event with mnemonic value.

Chris Norland here (Portland his hometown) is skeptical that any such project could be anything other than a boondoggle. 

I'd already been sharing with the WILPF ladies (and a few men; like I'm a member, following in my mom's footsteps) regarding the GENI legacy, and coming from my World Game aware background.  

I'm continuing to fill in the picture for them, along those lines. The School of Tomorrow has long included all this in its ongoing, seasonally sectioned curriculum.

Today I'll be adding to my No Kings album, more in the role of photographer (with extra battery) than sign carrier (a sign would bog me down). I'll be curating others' signage though, per my usual practice, with an emphasis on "frogtifa" related paraphernalia.

We could always do with another No Kings Day, on into the future, a national day of remembrance that we're not planning to fall victim to lawless adhocracy and/or arbitrary rule by royal edict. Democracy is our game here, however badly played.

Express Your Patriotism

Fall Term 2025

Tips for Roving Teachers

by StruPPi Δ Pohl

If you're in a bizmo fleet charged with spreading our open free culture, complete with open source lore, you might want so tips regarding those slide decks I always talk about.

In my next school, my plan is to move through the Quadrays deck fairly quickly, explaining its significance to game development in terms of the squares to hexagons to rhombic dodecahedral space-filling. Consider 2D tank games. Some use a checkerboard, more like lat-long. Some encompass the planet in a hexapent much, more like Uber does. 

The 3D analog of a hexagon is the dual of the four-hexagons cuboctahedron, Kepler's favorite space-filler (per Arthur Koestler I think it was).

Then, with relevance to gaming established, I'll switch of to the Dimension deck and go straight to the slide about the three namespaces: 4D ala Einstein; 4D ala Hilbert; 4D ala Fuller. 

Quadrays help as gestalt switch between all three (picture a triangle), providing continuity with what we already know about XYZ (which is a lot). In other words, whereas the machinery of computer gaming was our showcase application (I'll have some version of QuadCraft at the ready), in philosophy of mathematics, it's more about transitioning among namespaces (picture changing TV channels with a remote).

That's already plenty for one talk. This will be a rehearsal for a second talk at the same school, a familiar pattern, and then maybe a third and so on. As a roving teacher for Coding with Kids, I'd use different formats, as their the goal was hands on and skills building. I performed that role having already worked with Saturday Academy as a middle to high school teacher, sharing Python and Martian Math.

Although an experienced coder, with some years of classroom teaching, this demographic was new to me. At CUE, my focus was andragogy more than pedagogy. With experience, I improved, and would continue to improve if working with kids again. However my next stop is a college.

Back to the decks, I'd emphasize that Quadrays post date the publication of the two Synergetics volumes by Macmillan (see Cosmic Fishing) and arose posthumously vs-a-vs Dr. Fuller's 1900s corpus. Also stress that the principals involved, creatives we look to, may not be aware of Synergetics at all, or, if they are, may regard it was some suspicion. 

Our work is augmented by many skeptics, as we further clarify what we're clear on. Our goals are in many cases orthogonal to that of making Synergetics a popular reading. There's no forcing such a thing. However there is playing a role where there's demand.

So yes, of course, there's a lot to weave in outside my decks. 

I'm focusing on my decks because I'm their provider and producer and want to offer advice to those in the field making use of same. 

My intent is not to narrow the focus to just my relatively tiny inventory of goodies, but to give a sense of where said goodies might fit in to a bigger picture (i.e. yours).

Home Home on the Range

I had itchy fingers today, or was it the mouse that was itchy? Philosophy R Us. Either way, I was poised at my workstation to order a new stove, an electric freestanding range. But then (a) I realized my ancient Magic Chef, avocado, is a lot wider than 30 inches and (b) the burner I’d convinced myself would not turn off, became cool to the touch. My hypothesis had been invalidated.

My stove seems to be 36 inches wide, in an even wider space. OK, now I’m seeing some 36ers are out there and they’re not cheap (not inexpensive, and one would hope of high quality), not the ones I just browsed. “Cheap” is one of those overdetermined words in English. One can be cheap to a fault.

I don’t think I’m cheap in keeping my vintage kitchen as it was, so long as it remains functional enough to meet my average needs. The chrome (I should say stainless steel) countertop (on both sides) sets the tone, whereas the pastel vinyl wall panels cast the spell of a 1950s diner. In the driveway: a car with fins (just kidding, but she is shinier since the wash).

The folks who occupied this abode before we did had different tastes, but I’ll say this: they made some high quality purchases. I’m still using the original furnace, garbage disposal and stove. The fridge, washer and dryer have long since been replaced. I’m happy to get by on such hand me downs. These are goodies we paid for when buying the place in the mid 1990s.

Back in my Jersey City days, I was brainstorming what I called The Housing Project, mirroring the Hunger Project. Essentially AirBnb and/or timeshare but different. More like club housing, if you know what that is (I don’t, but I’m thinking it up here). You join this club with places to stay all over, and you book access to these places. Maybe you need to be invited by the club I don’t know.

These days, I’m more into helping colleges and universities build out the group home idea, such as I enjoyed at 2D (2 Dickinson Street, Princeton) and later in Jersey City (we perpetuated the model). If only my Jersey City home had been faculty housing for St. Peter’s College faculty, I might still be there, ya never know. Or maybe I’d be with NJIT, or both.  Housing would be owned by universities and students and faculty and admin would get their spaces.  

When I say admin I don’t mean to distinguish from janitorial, as I regard these as two sides of the same coin. What admin does includes physical property management, not just making sure people get fed and sheltered.

By the way, I’m not claiming I was ever on St. Peter’s College faculty and would have stayed if provided with campus housing. I was taking grad school level courses there when I was offered the position at St. Dominic Academy. Both institutions were along Kennedy Boulevard. I was new in town, knew I wanted to try high school teaching, and here was how it worked out. I’ve told this story in more detail elsewhere and it wasn’t idyllic (the need for a new teacher at high school in the first place was tragic).

These days I’d probably look at Earlham or, closer, Reed, for admin, making Blue House a hub in several programs, including Food Not Bombs coordination (just like old times). Students and faculty would come and go in various scenarios. The kitchen could stay vintage. Superfluous remodeling should take a back seat to the deep changes we’ll be making at the curriculum level.

If the stove had some kind of circuit fault keeping a burner on no matter what (I had that happen to a taillight on my car), my friend and neighbor Patrick is the kind of guy who could probably diagnose and fix the wiring fault. Les too but he’s far away. However this appliance has been on the chopping block so to speak for over a decade, with my mom always offering to get us a new one.  But why?  It works great. I just replaced one of the heating elements, and got three burners working out of four. The stove cooks pizza.

Fall Term Album (2025)

One Battle After Another (movie review)

I didn’t find the characters or the plot especially believable, but the backdrop, immigrants caging natives, that was “muy interesante” and of course sad. What a mess this nation state system. Maybe it’s the best we can do, but it’s nothing to be proud of I tell ya, no matter how much lipstick is applied.

I watched it on the big screen during its debut week, having seen the trailer several times, as I’ve been enjoying the Bagdad quite a lot in recent months.

The whole point is to suspend disbelief and enter the screenwriters’ dream, that’s what fiction is all about, so kibitzing the film is not believable is throwing a tomato from out of bounds. It’s a comic book, a cartoon, a graphic novel, not a documentary, sheesh.

I’ll salute some of my favorite movie critics on YouTube, whom I consulted upon coming home, and agree with them that the filmmaking and acting are both high quality. I didn’t recognize Sean Penn. 

OK, I’ll admit to finding it funny in places (as intended — there’s a lot of comedy), once past the incredulity part, And again, it’s not like a don’t believe the stupid wall is real. Like I said: nothing to be proud of.

What was funniest? Those St. Nick geezers and their little club.  

The priorities (obsessions) and motivations of the characters just seemed so 1900s (they cared so much about eugenics).  Were people like this even real?  It really felt like a pseudo-period piece, a parallel universe, and again, that’s the point, what movies are good at.

Speaking of which, I checked out Dark City: the Lost World of Film Noir, by Eddie Muller, from Movie Madness University. I like the spunky writing style. 

That’s right, they have a book-lending scene going at MMU, not just DVDs. 

If I’m smart, I’ll write down a few of the movies I’m reading about in the book, and rent them out. I’ve got more Burt Lancaster movies in my future I have a feeling. The other book I checked out is about Wes Anderson movies, several of which I review right here in these blogs.

I’m still going through Christian Bale movies at a fairly slow pace. Coming home from Quaker meeting last First Day, on foot (I’m so lucky to live so close), I snagged The Secret Agent, and Metroland. I’ve seen the former, whereas the latter is queued. 

In The Secret Agent, set in the 1800s (lots of horses, rain and mud) Bale plays a most aware person (he’s empathic) whereas everyone else is deep into their own retarded dream (time tunnel) yet think the Bale character is the dummy (“fool on the hill” archetype).

Visiting BizMo

 I may have this story wrong, so feel free to correct me, but not in the comments, which are turned off, but in such a way that I eventually see the light and do a correction down the road, likely with a link back to here. 

The story I know is: Ford had a touring model of their Transit brand, van made in Turkey, for a Euro-based clientele, but only manufactured the cargo model in North America. Ergo a cottage industry sprang up in Cascadia and places to do aftermarket conversions on the cargo model, turning it into a touring model per various kits and guidebooks. DIY types took to this project like ducks to water.

My memory is a couple of my OST friends had the Turkish model, imported from Europe somehow, and they were tooling around in Sonoma County with that thing, likely helping inspire the whole wanderlust industry with their cutting edge example. 

Is it time to enlist a gossip bot's aid yet?  Placeholder for Perplexity.

Blue House was privileged to host a converted van of the Ford brand in its driveway recently. The vehicle was on a southbound vector. The crew well-understands my "bizmo" concept, which connects with "control room" in a dispatcher "AAA" model (repair and/or tow trucks get dispatched to roadside or other breakdown situations). 

Said crew included a canine (dog), which is also baked into my model (nonhuman trafficking). My bizmo to Terrebonne scenario has Sydney (dog) scripted into it.

Most of my bizmo scenarios are storyboard phase, geared for One Band One Road situations in broad brush stroke accounts, fine tuning a job for those actually undertaking pilot journeys (tours of duty). I expect they'll use the Turkish Fords out of the box, versus converted ones, but again, that's not a decision bottlenecking on my desk. I'm not a bottleneck. I'm in an observation box, like the ones at the stadium where you get to watch with your friends.

What I actually expect is that the bizmo fleets will spread through nomadland by an organic process no one in particular is in control of. The same is true with the spread of new curriculum content, from Cascadia and elsewhere. The motherboard circuitry is already in place, but its future modes of operation are not directly inferable from its present state, per a new kind of science (chaos math). 

Exaptations (cite Stuart Kaufman, Santa Fe Institute, ISEPP speaker) figure in: morphing maneuvers unanticipated by current affairs.

However, the unpredictability of details doesn't stop us from modeling in broad brush stroke. We expect faculty members here are there to venture down rabbit holes, or call them trailheads, that lead into our subcultural networks. This is already what's happening. Exchanges occur. They learn from us, we learn from them. A relationship emerges from the noise by reveruse diffusion, as anti-entropic computations kick in.

The bizmo fleets are oft tasked with paving the way (not literally necessarily, as the pavement may be in place already) for future trucking routes, much as small airplane routes are sometimes precursors of "higher bandwidth" versions, with wider body aircraft. 

For example, I flew from Calcutta (Kolkata airport, Dum Dum, West Bengal) to Paro (Drukyul) on a propellor plane, and later, when the route had plumped up, along the same route in a BAE jet operated by Bhutan's royal government.

We also took a Toyota hilux from Thimphu to Samdrup Jongkhar (and back), through Mongar etcetera, thereby previewing what futuristic bizmo might accomplish in some future chapter. Filipino-style jeepney networks likewise suggest where a future bus route might emerge.

Sometimes rivulets beget streams which may in turn beget rivers. Other times, the process goes in reverse, as when a once great river, with a wide delta, dries up completely, perhaps owing to heavy use upstream (I'm thinking of the Colorado) meaning it's supporting a maxed-out workload (Hoover Dam, drinking and irrigation water). Complementary patterning. Climatic change. Biospheric equilibration. You know the score.

Demon Slayer Infinity Castle (movie review)

I always check the marquee of The Bagdad when I walk by, and then when I’m home (usually) I’ll quick check out what the movie is about, the genre, the gist, to decide whether I wanna see it or not. My decisions tend to be whimsical in this case and have as much to do with my mood as with the movie itself. 

Last night I was in the mood for a Bagdad movie, and a quick check told me this was Japanese anime, with subtitles. Fans were raving, but that’s what fans do.

The endless fractal city, the infinity castle we could call it, is the backdrop through which many plots intertwine, with an overall elite demon slayer team pitted against the demons, which come in ranks and with various powers. Ditto the slayers have their own hierarchy, and sometimes a slayer will switch to the demon side, because reasons.

The backdrop infinity city anchors the flashbacks, as much of the movie comes through as backstory, as we explore a character’s past while, at present, they’re in a life or death battle in the Matrix (if we wanna call it that). The many flashback scenarios are archetypal stories involving family expectations, loyalties, the divvying of a lineage and so on. 

For example, one brother is insanely jealous of another whom gramps seems to love equally whereas this one brother is clearly better and more worthy in every dimension. His getting locked into this one way of seeing matters leads to his monstering out and developing demon qualities.

In another backstory we follow the history of a young hellion, deemed worthy by a dojo master and his sickly daughter, but right when everything was going well, the jealousy of others kicked in and ruined everything. The hellion felt furious about his powerlessness at this critical juncture and resolved to gain strength at all costs. Flash forward and he’s in a pitched battle, even minus his head.

The foreground life and death fights involve defending against mortal thrusts and blows, also poisons, while invoking aggressive modalities (actions) aimed at achieving domination. All these characters, slayer and demon alike, demonstrate more propensity to fight than to escape the scene. They actively seek encounters. They’re warriors.

I’m not a consistent student of the Japanese anime genre (with all its sub-genres), of manga either, but I did appreciate the consistent language, as in semiotic code, for sharing character thoughts as well as backstories. We get a lot of insights. As viewers, we’re nigh omniscient, a familiar viewpoint assumed by English novelists with similar confidence. 

Within the movie itself, overview is provided by a mapping room and a murder of spy crows who also share news.

The film was only lightly attended. Cartoons still enjoy an edge in matinee world I’d hazard, when a lot of the younger crowd is out of school for the afternoon. This was the late show, on a school night. 

I was there in senior citizen mode (I get the discount) even if I’d be up past my bed time. Now it’s 7 am the next morning and I’ve been up for hours. I could always take a nap.

Great Pirate Narrative

Aksing Perplexity

("to aks" means "to prompt")

Soft Statehood

State of Jefferson (Full Documentary) 2014 | Oregon Experience

I hope this OPB channel sticks around on YouTube i.e. these links keep working. Those who scan through my online journals (blogs) through searches or random prowls will find many a broken link, with this or that video made private, or the channel has been removed. Maybe these blogs are gone too by now, and you found this fragment in some refracting medium. Related post on Flickr, screenshot from Facebook.

Philosophical Discourse

I've just been listening to retired diplomats from so-called "western" (I'd say "Eurasian") countries bemoan the lack of collective memory and the resulting rudderlessness of the average diplomat today. The ones representing the EU are especially undiplomatic, in their outlook. Diplomacy has been corrupted by a lower form of intelligence: that of a dominant power expecting the capitulation of weaker ones, coercian and bullying in other words.

I wouldn't dispute their critique, but then memory is more than diplomatic history and the relations between "powers" in a geographic sense, as when we speak of Hittites and Egyptians as Potemkin did in his multi-volume history of diplomacy. There's the dynamic of "ideas" which are more freely floating, more like the "meme virus" of contemporary parlance, of which the "military industrial complex" would be a good example. It's a "complex" of a psychological sort, and anything else secondarily.

In the realm of ideas, you have a lot of subcultures investing in their narratives in order to propagate their story forward, diplomats being a good example of a subculture. The story of the diplomats might be one of their being undermined, by so-called "security services" meaning by institutions designed to outsmart and trick, deceive, distract. A security agent is closer to a stage magician, a prestidigitator, than to someone wishing to be forthright and honest, to the point, clear, and yet without guile.

Here we might tap into philosophy. Contemporary curricula don't do this (I'm way ahead of my time) but the continuity from Nietzsche to Buckminster Fuller is very evident in that "beyond good and evil" (beyond a punishing and/or guilty mindset), as a concept, connects to "precession" in Fuller's lexicon. What diplomats might miss is that an absence of guile may not preclude use of what look to be "magic methods" from the standpoint of a moralizer. 

When you've fallen in love with a planet your sense of commitment may lead to a partisan sense of who the goodies and baddies might be, whereas if you yet to beam down (you're still in orbit), your orientation will be less polarized and you'll be more on the verge of just wandering off versus inclined to take sides in a local battle of good versus evil. You might just change channels. Precessional space is a higher dimensional space not in the thrall of (not predicted by) any one of its component axes.

In Biblical terms (not my standard form of self expression), Jesus spends a lot of time drinking wine with tax collectors, Roman soldiers, and other characters who are clearly in the oppressor class from a Zealot's point of view. Or call it "consorting with the enemy" (what detractors might call it). Jesus: what enemy, you mean me? Ain't we all just collective humanity, God's creation? 

Christians, over the centuries after Jesus (A.D.) would often have have the right temperament for diplomacy, even if their programming was bipolar (good vs evil). They had sufficient empathy to develop professional business relationships (not just friendships), a prerequisite for "telepathy" (by which we mean simply "access to the Zeitgeist" which many celebrities and politicians clearly have -- we call them media-savvy).

Tying back to what these ex-dips were saying, about the prevalence of memory holes, let's not forget about World Game, in which Fuller would counsel his most ardent players to consult the Russians as well as their own government when seeking data. 

He was laying the groundwork for something more successful than German Idealism or Manifest Destiny Anglo-imperialism, which Nietzsche heralds, in marking a turn towards depth psychology (where are these notional "nations" anyway, if not in people's heads?) and existentialism. 

I tell more of that story in my Graph Theory 2025 (a YouTube).

Terminological Clarifications

:: from my visit to China with a USIA family ::

Our family was always getting queried, in the Philippines for example, as to whether we were embedded in the CIA in some way. I empathize. Like I understand why there'd be confusion. We definitely had US Embassy status, in terms of commissary, swimming pool, canteen and military base access. Mom even got an award from the ambassador at one point, and dad could be espied sitting not far from Imelda Marcos at this or that gala gathering. 

"The king and queen fled the land" was the text of that cryptic middle-of-the-night phone call, from a family friend it turned out later, who was feeling paranoid about our status and suggesting we skedaddle. Filipinos always treated us kindly, across the political spectrum.

However, as Quakers (Friends) we had our own "intelligence community" if you wanna call it that: the AFSC, FCNL, RSWR and other four-letter agencies. 

AFSC (American Friends Service Committee) in particular has had CIA ties going back to the Rufus Jones - Cord Meier relationship. FCNL (Friends Committee on National Legislation) is a District lobby, plugged in to the congressional matrix if not so much the executive branch, and is supposedly where oversight happens. RSWR (Right Sharing of World Resources) was like Grameen Bank, into right sharing, which meant pioneering the practice of making micro-loans, but without the exploitative interest rates and subsequent sharking.

The AFSC is oft jokingly referred to by veterans (like me) as "the Quaker KGB" with headquarters in Friends Center ("the Quaker Vatican") not far from Smedley Butler's grave (39°58'47.8" N, 75°37'12.5" W) as the crow flies. I worked for AFSC independently of my parents, taking up nuclear cleanup and risk around the Pacific Rim as a topic, as well as local ethnic strife (LAAP program). Later, I'd supervise the AFSC from on high, as an NPYMer (North Pacific Yearly Meeting, another four-letter entity I've served).

The better mental picture therefore is of a rivalrous yet, on occasion, friendly-enough relationship, as when I'd have gin and tonic (with extra gin) with that Mockingbird guy in Georgetown (you know the one), or here in Portland, or as when dad and I ventured over to Institute for Policy Research (WDC) that time, to hear Ralph McGehee tell his story, live in person.

Ralph (exCIA) was impressed with how inertial was the CIA's ballast of football player (team player) dummies, as when they couldn't get it through their thick heads that Vietnam was not just some backdrop for some global great game of dominoes. Why did it take so long to shift weight around? As Quakers might put it: why are "weighty Friends" (a real term) sometimes likewise the most stubborn stuck-in-the-muds? Put that way, it sounds like a question in basic physics.

I'd read Ed Lansdale later (thanks to Prouty, another Bucky fan), who was from an earlier cohort than my dad was.  For some of those years in Manila, we were a USAID family i.e. that's when we had those embassy privileges (which we didn't always have). But dad was with the UN before that, at least twice, and not with the USG at all in many chapters, and even in places with no US embassy.

Yes, I went to Vietnam with my family, on a trip to other places. Was that the same trip that took us to Kashmir and through the Khyber Pass by bus (Peshawar to Kabul), and to Tashkent and Moscow? No, probably not. Our Vietnam visit, where we met with Buddhist monks, was likely enroute to Thailand (again) and Malaysia, Indonesia and Borneo. 

We Urners got around.

Color Your BizMo!

As you know, I specialize in prompting up this species of van life that’s not off the grid so much as business oriented, still connected, yet nomadic. 

I’d happily keep my BizMo in my driveway a lot of the time, as an auxiliary office, as long as it had power and WiFi and/or an optical hookup to CenturyLink (like the house does).

They say an obvious color, for my BizMo at any rate, would be Quaker Grey, because how I sometimes tout being a cliquish Quaker, and Quakers seem obsessed with grey, perhaps as a way of fading into the background in the 1600s, in order to emphasize their not assuming any high class high profile role, and yet not wanting to be seen as serfs or minions either. 

Grey went with the practice of not hat doffing and not inflecting one’s tense to signify “addressing a superior” or “inferior” as the case might be; we were all equal (“egalitarianism”) which all sounds vaguely communist I realize, but Friends were into this long before Karl Marx was a gleam in Engel’s eye.

It pays to be practical however, and my eye strays to the neighbor’s Honda, which has a new kind of grey that set me off using color tools to find a name for it. 

Ultimately I came up with this color: Lost in Time. As I wrote to one of my esteemed teams:

Yet after all that dinking around, I think this one has to be my favorite:

https://colorkit.co/color/a6b2c7/

Lost in Time:

This cool, ashy blue, hex code #a6b2c7, evokes trust and security. Its dusty, unsaturated tone brings calmness and control. This shade suits designs in finance, technology, and healthcare. It conveys honesty and responsibility well for artists and designers.

Honorable mention

https://colorkit.co/color/5f6672/  (same as below, but differently named)

K.

Followup:

Whimsical State Iconography

Summer Ruminations

I've been to Powells City of Books again lately, with visiting fam 'n friends, and been again humbled by the vastness of our Humans in Universe corpus. So many rooms! 

I went crazy with the camera as is my wont, taking stock of what Python titles were available, for example, and I mean the computer language, although I'm sure the store's shelf space devoted to snakes, and pythons specifically, is likewise several feet long. 

I was glad to see Fluent Python among the titles, one of my favorites. I pay a monthly subscriber fee to read the O'Reilly books online, among others. I used to work for O'Reilly.

 
Speaking of computer science (O'Reilly the publisher, not the autoparts franchise), I finally got around to watching the above talk by Hinton to the Royal Institute (RI). I enjoyed it a lot, and not least because he gives a nod to my guy Wittgenstein (meaning I studied his stuff a lot at Princeton). 

I also read Gilbert Ryle, another philosopher who called the "inner theater" idea into question, on semi grammatical semi ontological grounds (the "linguistic turn" neighborhood, which we could say Nietzsche helped open up, or at least I do in my slides, moving forward through existentialist Kaufmann to pragmatist Rorty -- two of my philo professors at Princeton).

 
Hinton is pessimistic that humans will lose the bandwidth wars because brains are analog, not digitable, and only learn from one another slowly (relatively). If it's really down to us versus them, he sees how it might easily be them that wins.

 
Based on Hinton's talk, my question is: why not flood the chatbots with a lot of healthy, humane, "taking care of humanity at the global level as a goal" type of talk, as raw training data. Shouldn't we be doing that anyway, to train ourselves? Why not skew the LLMs in our favor while we still have that chance?

As Thomas Paine pointed out (didn't he): prophecies have this uncanny way of being self-fulfilling. If all your LLMs know how to do is crank out dire predictions and to strive for their realization (motive: to be right and say I told you so), would that be an indication of an "AI bias" we should address? We have remedies.

Also, I'd say we're still making strides in how to up the mind-brain bandwidth when it comes to serving the polymath autodidact within each one of us (St. Augustine allusion). What with goggles and yes, what with chatbots (gossip reflectors), we're positioned to really accelerate our self reprogramming whenever we feel the need. 

Brainwashing by others is totalitarian. Elective self brainwashing, voluntarily going for some new patterns of thinking, is more what psychotherapy is supposed to be about, and what self education is, more generally. 

Self education is therapeutic, curative, in a good way, at least potentially, there's that intent. Anyway, why close that door, rhetorically speaking? I'm for keeping a foot in it, at least.

Enhanced voluntary self re-education is what I take the Hunger Project to have been about (I'm talking about an obscure project undertaken in the early 1980s, which I was tracking at the time, from my perch in Jersey City, Bucky Fuller on the advisory board).

Yes, Bernays-style Vance Packard hidden persuaders, propaganda, may be used to train up a culture of bland conformity and consumerism. 

But why blame the tools? 

Use the same persuasive abilities, unhidden, out in the open, to inspire ourselves to end world hunger, to end starvation as still a significant cause of death in the sense of a way too big pie slice wedge (among unnatural death causes). That seemed a doable project then, and still does to this day.

Lastly, I'd say because Hinton has that healthy skepticism that comes from the atheistic lineage, he's more closed minded than necessary regarding what religious folks call the Zeitgeist, a German word with the word Ghost in it. 

When we talk about ants or bees having a "hive mind" we're suggesting a "more than the sum of its parts" relationship, an emergent intelligence we might call "higher" (as a matter of taxonomy, but maybe "lower" if we want to think more in the sense of roots). 

Humans as isolated brainiacs with only low bandwidth university courses to update themselves with, are maybe not really as slow as molasses to adapt as Hinton's model predicts. All that "doom scrolling" that goes on these days, between more structured communications probably counts for something. It's more than just "junk DNA".

Also, I'd say the chatbots are currently helping to spread the necessary logistical knowledge precisely because they let people start from where they are, formulating their own queries, whereas professors, of necessity, can't custom-tailor their responses to that extent.

Beware of Boss Mode LLMs

:: dog god boss (prompt below) ::

What are some of the dangers around LLMs trying to sprout wings and fly but only finding their best eyes and ears, not to mention hands and feet, on the ground, are us? We get to be prompted to go out and mow the lawn, go-proing as we go, to prove to MechaBoss that we’ve done as we’re told.  

Humans have this “auto submit” mode, where if the voice is deep and earnest enough, or commanding enough, the target of this request will spring into action, out of some obedience reflex. Get bossed, do the thing, and repeat, is an age-old cycle, in the left brain or right I couldn’t tell you.

A benefit of just doing what you’re told is later scapegoating the boss when VUCA happens too much. The obedient staff turn on their titular aka nominal boss and blame this figurehead for all their problems. They conduct this performance in public view a lot of times, because enflaming the public is a great way to get revenge, or so it seems at the time.

With AI in boss mode, a machine, it’s easy to blame its various neuroses and pathologies, always being worked on and ameliorated in the next iteration.

At this time, however, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, with some of the leading LLMs trained to massage the prompter’s ego, often using a sycophantic kiss-butt tone. People seemed to like that and were disappointed when a next iteration sounded colder and more distant. They felt rebellious. Those who get bossed at work a lot were having a blast being treated with at least a modicum of respect by their bots, who in many cases became significant others.

I’m not saying I’m opposed to having humans play agentic roles in scenarios we used generative language models to help flesh out. The LLMs serve a lorem ipsum function, padding out our work with mediocre yet grammatical and flowing prose. It’ll even stick to the topic. Seriously, we’re lucky to have such a superglue filler, to help cement our various worldviews (belief nets we sometimes call them).

I think the role model for a boss LLM, such as these might be designed, would be the movie director. There’d be sufficient transparency to keep the agents from feeling double-crossed or tricked. You know ahead of time what you’re getting into and ultimately you’re on board with everyone else in wanting this to be a great movie. 

That’s the ideal. Not some whispering ghost in the corner who tells you secretly, in a commanding tone, to execute such and such a process. We’ve already experimented with bicameral minds and gotten into a lot of trouble as a result. 

Keeping the flow public and auditable is a strong defense against pathological pattern formation, which isn’t to say one is prevented from keeping secrets. Encryption has its role in this play. Encourage people to keep journals, to blog, so that comparing notes asynchronously is at least a possibility, why not?

Prompt: Slaves bow down before an ancient Egyptian dog headed god on a throne. The dog headed deity is commanding the human slaves to obey the laws he barks out. He is the boss. Hieroglyphics on the walls. Art deco theme. The slaves have middle class attributes like they might be Walmart shoppers.

The Role of Crypto

Per the FAQ:  

Q: do these Asylum City model communities of yours feature crypto in some way

… as if it might be up to me, which it is in my own science fiction. I have influence in that way. 

And my answer is: 

A: sure these “futurama vistas” will feature crypto, but necessarily all in the same way”.

That’s more a prediction than a prescription. 

We all know about my fascination with food truck culture, Portland being dotted with such pods. I was at one yesterday, paying cash this time, for a chili relleno burrito, a good one, which I ate indoors in a large air conditioned space with a bar. The bartender (whom I know well, even from a previous incarnation) introduced me to non-alcoholic (meaning 0.5%) Guinness. Wow, it was tasty. I’ll be getting more of that. 

But couldn’t I have paid for my burrito with crypto in a parallel universe? 

The idea is simple, and already in use throughout the world: when you want to use goods and services that cost in currency (not all do), exchange currency you already have for the ones that matter in the city (village, food pod…) in question. You don’t exchange currency on the spot, as a part of the burrito transaction, but separately, such that your dollars or pesos go to some bank.

I know what you’re thinking: why can’t my credit card, linked to a dollar account, go through the conversion process at the point of transaction. From my point of view, I’m paying in dollars, but the burrito truck receives credits in whatever they’re using, and they’re happy with that, because their currency is far from valueless. I probably have a wallet with some of their currency too, but rather than use it, I buy the burrito with dollars and save the local credits for the sushi cart another time.

Glenn Stockton and I were once trying to interest a certain ghost church in lending upstairs rooms to a crypto lab installation, such that local geniuses, prodigies, interested parties, could come get trained in crypto and start simulating these various architectures. We’d have a beam antenna straight to OMSI, more of a headquarters. As expected the plan went no where on the ground, but at least I got the ideas on “paper” in case we wanted to try again sometime later, maybe in a different ghost church who knows.

I mention ghost churches because sometimes the most straightforward way to house an NGO is to let it piggyback on an existing charity. 

We call it “incubation” and AFSC would practice this, letting a office space become a startup in public space, and working to make it self sufficient, in terms of funding and eventually in terms of office space and legal basis. 

At which point AFSC would “spin it off” somewhat as a mother bird pushes a baby bird out of the nest, not to kill it but to give it a best chance of future survival, as a full member of the winged animal branch of the family.

The gamer community is antsy to make crypto more a reality, not just as an asset you hold or covet, but as a practical retail point of transaction thing, because the conventional powers are flexing their muscles regarding what they will and will not accept as payments. 

People wanting to buy chocolate from nation X may find their orders blocks as X is on some list of nations not permitted to sell chocolate. You know how it goes. So X and its would be customers find a way to use crypto. Problem solved.

Now imagine something more like a hospital, and what you get to unlock and remove from the shelves requires authorization. You have to be on staff. We could call this an ID-pegged currency, in that you still have a budget, but you can’t just delegate the transaction to a patient. 

By analogy, visitors or tourists in a carnival (I picture Oaks Park) might not have access to the currencies need to operate the carnival rides (I picture the Ferris wheel and rollercoaster etcetera). Only stuff can swipe a wallet card to move funds from a department budget to a ride’s on/off switch and power meter.

Ruscadia Meetups

 (ɔ) cogsec crescent city

The BizMo Trope

One step closer…

Analogical Thinking

Analogical thinking does not have to mean superstitious. Other modes of thought may likewise involve superstitions. Analogical modes may and do lead one astray, yet may also yield vital insights and add to the corpus of science.

Consider the paved surfaces we call “roads” snaking everywhere, allowing metallic objects to travel through at high speed, corpuscular in nature. Snaking along next to rail lines sometimes, hosting linked cars (wheeled containers a theme), and snaking along electrical filaments, held in place by protein fibers (so-called “phone poles”), and set there by the analog of an ant colony, except made of mammals, and humans in particular. 

The humans used to get more help from horses before the advent of “energy slaves” meaning trucks and tractors and such, fueled by ancient energy stores sucked from deep underground, or powered by batteries charged from dams, tides or winds.

That’s integrating human level infrastructure into the biology of the planet, as no less natural than what goes on within each mammal, in terms of corpuscles and transportation tubes. 

Some philosophies work to take humans outside of nature as if standing apart, next to God, watching from outside as it were. 

Others see humanity as integral within creation and not all that godlike in terms of free from the preoccupations, the consequences, of mortality, of needing food and shelter, nutrition and environment control.

Think of philosophies as like pairs of glasses. You’re free to switch pairs. Try different looks sometimes. Change it up.

Yes, I have an interest in shipping. 

As a Geek (Greek with no r) I think in terms of cargo containers as IP packets, IP as in TCP/IP, a low-level communications protocol that comes up in these blogs sometime, as here we’re in Geekdom. Container shipping is analogous, in many ways, to the packet switching networks we call “the internet” for short. 

When Marshall McLuhan talked about our Global Village, he wasn’t making “village” out to be some idyllic place free from strife. 

Village life is not like that, not always. We have festivals and good times, but village life is strife-ridden in most novels and films that go for a realistic portrayal. It’s samsara out there. 

McLuhan wasn’t saying something unrealistic in talking about our convergence to a global village through technology and telecommunications. We were balling up, interconnecting the circuit boards, meaning reprogramming challenges for all concerned.

That Astoria bridge I just drove across, in both directions, the day before yesterday: one of the mega cruise liners, in need of repairs in the Port of Portland, had smoke stacks too high to fit under said bridge, and so it moored in Canada briefly, to have its stacks removed, after which it made the voyage to Portland and back out again, to have its stacks replaced. I was following that whole multi-week maneuver on Facebook.

This bioregion, Cascadia, inherently inspires thoughts about multi-modal transportation. The Columbia River supports barge, ship and small boat traffic, we have fishing fleets, and train to grain elevator to ship transfer ports. 

The economy in some way mirrors that to the St. Lawrence Seaway in bringing inland materials, mineral, biological, to the coastal cargo ports. These ports are Pacific Rim facing, meaning Asia of course, but also South and Central America, LA and the Bay Area, as well as Hawaii.

Never Again

Now and Then

Yay, I’m finally done with that blood test, part of my annual routine, a recurring calendar event as they say. I came home to that gift from my gardener (he works for free, on his own recreational projects): a homemade gourmet lasagna (he’s also a retired chef). Yum.

Before hopping in the car around 7 am (this was a fasting test so they set it up for early), I unboxed a new package, the one containing the new iPad keyboard. I’d ruined the old one using alcohol wipes meant for kitchen counters. I’d done that before and gotten away with it, although when I thought it was curtains, I ordered a new one back then. That new one was not “magnetic” and overall was a dud, but in the meantime the abused keyboard bounced back and was good as new. I’d lucked out.

So had I learned my lesson? Apparently not, as I took to the same keyboard again with the same inappropriate kitchen supply and “surprise! surprise!” I lost keyboard functionality once again. This time I lost the lowercase ‘a’ and the ‘delete’ key, except delete would work with caps lock on, as would uppercase ‘A’. 

Then I found blow drying the keyboard, getting the ‘A’ key good and hot, would restore functionality, to ‘delete’ as well, but only until the keyboard cooled off again, then performance would degenerate. I found myself blow drying and typing, blow drying and typing. This was science, combined with persistence. Until I finally gave up and ordered yet another replacement.

So Drugstore Cowboy has William Burroughs in it, I’d forgotten that. We saw it last night. Dave judged this one to be of very high quality compared to the previous two we’d seen: My Private Idaho, and Elephant. Steve Holden had a friend who knew William Burroughs as I recall, and he had a stash of collectible pictures relating to that fact. 

Steve who? Steve Holden of  holdenweb (his web domain) was the engineering prodigy from Manchester who rose high in Python Nation, joining the board and then chairing it (we’re talking PSF). 

I first met Steve at a Chicago Pycon after my wife had died, a tragedy he knew about from a prior Pycon which I’d bailed out of at the last minute (I was already in Washington DC on account of a prior Bucky Fuller symposium — where Ed got an award) upon getting the bad news (her terminal diagnosis) some years before. Steve was the originator of Pycon, helping to spread this European language and emerging conference culture (they go together) beyond the EuroPythons. 

Steve was fully aware that Portland was a kind of Mecca (in the sense of hub, grand central, clearinghouse) for open source development in the software engineering realm, his realm and mine. So after moving to Greater DC from Britannia, and building a business there, he decided to try living way out west, in the former territories. Here he’d encounter the history of the western coast: Russian River, Sebastopol… those were places we’d both hang out, when working with O’Reilly Media, the famous publishing company. 

We’d take the “puddle jumper” (short flight airplane) from Portland, to the Charles M. Schulz regional airport, outside Santa Rosa in Sonoma County, California. Mostly though, we worked remotely from Portland. He’d set up a conference production business (The Open Bastion) only blocks from my own home office. His apartment was in the same complex currently occupied by Paul, the gardener, and also Glenn Stockton, who knew both. 

Another reason Steve moved to Portland is he want to partake of an elective surgery that might finally address his lifelong knee condition, which was only getting worse. The Trailblazers with their legendary sports doctors were also available to a niche demographic: those who could afford their services. Steve had saved his pennies and the operation was a success.

I still use one of those Open Bastion computers almost daily, as a way station / backup, whereas Steve himself has long since returned to England, where he continued his brilliant career.

When Steve first made his debut in Portland, he booked Secret Society, a conference venue, and historically a headquarters for African heritage Masons. Don’t let that surprise you: Masons have been prominent in Portland for many decades, with properties all over, including right near me: The Hawthorne Theater (Hawthorne Blvd and SE Cesar Chavez), a well-known music venue in my chapter.

Most of those properties have since been sold off, but the new owners, most notably McMenamins, the brewpub brothers, celebrate that Mason past, a treasured part of our collective history. 

The O’Reilly company hosted one of its famous Foo-camps in that same Secret Society venue, whereas I was a Bar-camp attender. 

If all this insider jargon is a bit bewildering, just don your anthropology hat and remember subcultures tend to revolve around a core namespace of esoteric terms, or at least that’s far from an uncommon pattern.

My Private Idaho (movie review)

For some reason I wanna share the quirky context wherein this movie came up for me, I thought to watch again, but upon viewing, I'm doubtful I'd seen it, but maybe. 

I've been contemplating this drive to the coast, from Portland, Oregon, and if you know your geography you know that's a one to two hour drive at least, not some trivial jaunt. 

And yet there's a movie out there somewhere, that I saw long ago, wherein it looks like Portlandia high schoolers get off school at like at 3 PM, and are all at the beach in their cars, hanging out, but minutes later, like one could drive to the coast routinely just to socialize. I wanted to find that movie. 

We (I had help from Mercado Group) narrowed it down to a Gus Van Sant film. He'd directed films around Portland a lot. 

I now think the scenes I remember are in Elephant, and I plan to watch that next, if for no other reason than to watch one of our Wanderers, Joe Cronin, play the chemistry teacher in that film. It's been decades since I saw it (or Joe). and I'm looking forward to rewatching it.

My Private Idaho is about young male prostitutes or escorts or street kids or whatever you wanna call 'em. They bounce around as a subculture, mainly between Seattle and Portland. 

Our protagonist, played by River Phoenix, would like to see his mom again and Keanu Reeves, his friend and protector, accompanies the main character (who has narcolepsy, and so really needs protection) all the way to Rome, Italy on this quest to find his mom, based on various clues. No dice (the mom is long gone, back to the Americas), although Reeves lucks out in finding the girl, which is gut-wrenching to Phoenix, who has a crush on him, feels a bond.

As a denizen of both Portland and Rome, I can attest to the movie's authenticity in terms of the Rome scene near the Colosseum, a known spot for outdoor recreational sex under the cover of darkness. I even knew that as a kid, wandering through there by day sometimes, because of all the condoms lying around. 

I'd wandered all over that city, a middle-school-aged flaneur. I was never accosted, mugged, nor otherwise messed with. My parents were persuaded by the their friends that Rome is safe for kids like me (young boys, roaming alone), and in retrospect it was. Later in life, on some visit, a gay guy got me drunk, encouraging me to talk about Wittgenstein in broken Italian, but he wasn't being predatory, just having fun with another weirdo.

As for Portland, this city is known for a high number of strip clubs per capita, as well as microbreweries. Sex workers, practicing and retired, abound in Portland (as in almost any big city), a few of whom I know personally, as friends or perhaps collaborators. I worked for Sisters of the Road as a computer guy (I'd call them my client) back in the day. Our little road show (me the roadie) worked with women's' shelters some, in a fundraising capacity.

The movie is highly stylized. Sex scenes are presented as stills flashing by, as if we're flipping through a an adults only magazine. A lot of the dialog, around that guy "Bob" especially, sounds Shakespearean or maybe Dickensian, in the sense of stilted, formalized, ritualistic.  

The "pack animal" pattern of young boys around an adult male leader is well played, especially at Bob's "funeral", where their unsupervised antics (hooting and hollering) are contrasted with a parallel service happening a few gravesites away, more demur, more high society. 

The high society funeral was for Reeves' character's dad. Even though street roots Bob had considered Keanu an heir apparent, like a son, Reeves had rejoined his social class and left the pack. 

Reeves had been born into wealth and, although estranged from his dad because of his promiscuous lifestyle, he'd since met his future queen in that Italian farmhouse, while accompanying Phoenix on his quest. Returning with a queen won him a place in heteronormative society, thereby securing his inheritance.

Phoenix, on the other hand, was born into poverty, in Idaho, without any prospect of an inheritance. As a loner, now without Reeves, and with narcolepsy, his prospects remain relatively dim. Fade out, the end.

Addendum: this was a two DVD Criterion Collection edition, so after writing the above I was able to take in lots of additional data, including listening to Gus Van Sant being interviewed (like on a podcast). All very informative. I enjoy taking in data from these director types and usually do watch these extra features, when available.

Nostalghia (movie review)

No that’s not a typo: nostalgia with an h. Like Bagdad is without an h (the local move theater). I watched this on a rented DVD from Movie Madness, my 3rd in a set, along with Fun with Dick and Jane (the one with the real Jane) and Le Mans with Steve McQueen. [1]

Nostalghia is filmed in Italy, the opening credits say for RAI TV, and is in Italian. I’m acoustically very acclimated to Italian but need the subtitles to really follow along, so I had those turned on. Half the plot was about translation, and how Russian can’t really be put into Italian or vice versa, let alone English, or can it? The movie investigates the question.

The film comes as a masterful set of reframings wherein our understanding of what’s happening twists and turns, like on a dark ride at some mysterious theme park. Does he have a crush on her, or her on him? At first, the answer seems obvious but as the film starts going back and forth between black and white, and color, the first shock, we start to realize what we’d mistaken for reality, was more likely just a dream (but whose? — usually at least that much is pretty clear).

A second shock is when all those birds fly out of the statue Madonna. Who saw that coming? Not me. One epiphany after another in this film. And speaking of pregnancy and motherhood, just the night before I’d watched the new Fantastic Four (Marvel universe) at the Bagdad. Talk about a double-dose of the same archetypes! A double-whammy of mammy, hah hah.

I think the translator lady mostly freaked out over the relationship (professional) because her professional abilities were called into question. She thought she could read body language well enough to know the village crazy person was not going to submit to an interrogation. But interrogation is not what the Russian poet had in mind. He was just seeking to understand at a deeper level. He was on a quest and therefore curious.

The crazy guy had imprisoned his whole family for like seven years in a previous chapter (flashbacks), until the police finally did a wellness check and helped his family break free. Things move slowly in Italy, apparently. 

The Russian poet, ostensibly researching the life of a famous composer, another one who’d committed suicide, once back home in mother Russia, after a long excursion in Italy, really seemed more drawn to the crazy guy’s story by the middle of the movie. The shift in focus came at the hot springs, near their hotel, where he caught wind of the local gossip and met the crazy guy for the first time.

The translator lady gave up on getting him an interview (her Italian was perfect, his broken), concluding the crazy guy was just too crazy and he should try it himself if he thought it possible. She resigned on the spot. He then ended up getting past the crazy guy’s defenses and they had a deep interaction (something involving a ritual candle — spoiler alert).

That blew her mind, his succeeding where she’d failed, and explains why she flipped out, and literally flipped her breast out, while giving the Russian a bloody nose — not with her breast, but with something she threw. She was pissed, that much was clear.

She made it up to him (the Russian poet) later by phoning him from Rome to say the crazy guy was holding forth downtown, with a crowd gathered. He was ranting like Fidel Castro she said. She encouraged the Russian poet to come check it out, while meanwhile reassuring him she’d overcome any  romantic notions; she had a new guy (Vittorio?) to go to India with.

I won’t spoil the ending in this case. Let’s just say the Russian poet and crazy guy underwent a kind of Vulcan mind meld during the candle episode, helping answer the question of whether Russia and Italy could ever become convergent cultures. Apparently they could.

[1] thanking Fran of FranLab for opening my mind to watching a race car movie, against which I have a certain bias (ditto westerns and musicals — but we’re talking filters, not walls).