I’ve been enjoying the USA Network's Colony a lot – if you don’t know the show, it’s about life and resistance in Los Angeles under the tyrannical control of mysterious space aliens (umm, maybe) who have conquered the Earth. The second season just ended on Thursday so it’s time to ramp up the theorizing.
This show is a Carlton Cuse project, so just like with Lost a few years back we are constantly being teased with backstory mysteries and it is irresistible to speculate about what the hell is really going on.
I’m especially enjoying the slow fill-in about the “Raps,” as the humans call the aliens. If they are aliens. And that is kind of the point. We haven’t met any Raps, don’t really know anything about them, and although our Resistance heroes briefly captured one they were forced to return it before they could open up its metallic armor. They’re humanoid. Ish. They have really advanced technology. They’ve got stuff going on on the moon. But we really don’t know where they came from. They work through human collaborators, though. And they seem very political, and to know human nature pretty well.
But the season’s final two episodes have included some deliberate and suggestive teases. If I'm not mistaken, we learned in the next-to-last episode that the “IGA” – not my grocery, but the global government that embodies colonial rule and reports to the Raps -- is based in Davos, Switzerland, which has to mean something fairly wicked and clever. And last night we briefly saw the "essence" of a damaged Rap, the weird glowing ball in its head, being transferred into another mechanical "host."
The two things together kind of make me think of billionaire "immortalists," who may have hooked up with some of their technology CEO friends, and decided to launch some kind of sick new galactic-civilizational project based on having lifespans and physical embodiments that let them properly venture out into space. Meanwhile, all the ordinary people, who after all are going to have to die anyway someday (because it’s way too expensive for them to get the proper cyborg treatment – see, the Republican version of health care), are just disposable resources for building this dream. So – maybe not really “aliens” at all, but yet another of the show’s provocative takes on the human survival instinct and its egoistic distortions. Totally speculative, of course, but it’s a theory that makes use of some of the hints.
I also like the way the term "host" is being clarified. When the IGA people constantly referred to the Raps as “our hosts,” it always seemed to be a strange and quietly hilarious euphemism for "conquerors." But now it seems like it’s the Raps' own term for the structures that hold their transferrable consciousness. And if the Raps use the word among themselves and their close associates, it would naturally, then, become an "ethnic" term adopted by the humans dealing with them, despite the ironies.
Favorite moment: Snyder, of course, hearing how the Raps debated destroying Los Angeles: “There are moderate aliens?”
All of it fun to wonder about during the off-season.
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Was watching the original Planet of the Apes (1968) on cable yesterday.
The older I get, the more strongly I feel that Dr. Zaius is the hero of the story.
"Don't speak to me in absolutes, the evidence IS contestable . . . !"
Discuss.
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Does anyone do post-Christmas accidia like W. H. Auden? This is from his Christmas oratorio, "For the Time Being," specifically the last poem, "Flight into Egypt." There are four sections; the third is probably the best known but the first is my own favorite, so I figured I'd pile on!
The Flight into Egypt (W.H. Auden)
I
JOSEPH
Mirror, let us through the glass
No authority can pass.
MARY
Echo, if the strong should come,
Tell a white lie or be dumb.
VOICES OF THE DESERT
It was visitors’ day at the vinegar works
In Tenderloin Town when I tore my time;
A sorrowful snapshot was my sinful wage:
Was that why you left me, elusive bones?
Come to our bracing desert
Where eternity is eventful,
For the weather-glass
Is set at Alas,
The thermometer at Resentful.
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| Date: | 2016-12-15 12:37 |
| Subject: | Agenda |
| Security: | Public |
Whatever gods there be act through man's mind and perceptions and are revealed in (1) his intelligence, (2) his ethical sense and his thirst for perfectibility, (3) his power to love (amo ergo sum), (4) his perception of beauty (to kalon), (5) his sense of mystery, (6) his power and urge to be a maker (in music, painting, sculpture, poetry, prose), and (7) his aspiration to create a paradise on earth. These are the major ways divinity is manifested in the mind, spirit, and heart of man. But there are obverse cues: (1) hatred of injustice and tyranny over people, (2) disgust with moneymongers and those who lust for possessions ("hoggers of harvest are the curse of the people"), and (3) revulsion from the ooze of the material hell many men create and happily wallow in.
-- Carroll Terrell, “A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound”
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So Reince Priebus is going to be Trump's chief of staff, which I guess is OK given the possibilities; but Breitbart-lunatic and casual racist and anti-semite Steve Bannon is going to be "chief strategist" and Senior Counsel.
Which is better than having Bannon in the top role, technically, and I have to assume Trump is a good-enough business head to know how to hand out titles to console the people he passes over. And there's always the possibility that this is a better-inside-the-tent-pissing-out sort of thing.
But I don't know, man. This is pretty creepy.
So here's my latest theory about the Trump victory:
In the laboratory, on the secret island, where they are keeping my brain in a vat, it must be end-of-semester or something. Maybe some local holiday with dances and masks and things. And the grad students are getting giddy, and drinking a lot and taking some recreational chemicals, and maybe dumping some of them into the vat fluid. And hacking the Virtual Reality generator, and daring each other to program sillier and sillier scenarios.
All in good fun, until someone gets hurt. When their Professor finds out, they're going to be in big trouble.
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| Date: | 2016-11-13 19:46 |
| Subject: | A Chill |
| Security: | Public |
And now, Orestes, it’s up to you
and your dear friend Mr. Pilades, stranger in these parts.
Get goin’ quickly.
Sun’s risin’, birds are singin’,
stars going down, darkness broken.
Get going before people start moving about
and be clear in your own minds what you’re up to.
-- Sophocles, Elektra, as translated by Ezra Pound
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In honor of today's Transition Meeting at the White House, and also in honor of my own long-past but memorably perverse experience in fandom, I wanted to offer a Barack/Donald drabble. 100 words exactly.
“Such a great honor,” Donald stammered. “I thought-–a ten minute quickie. Fifteen, tops. We went on for hours . . . I want to see you again, count on you for counsel. Help me learn!”
“It was excellent,” said Barack. “An intimate tour of the domestic front. And a deep dive into the foreign and strange.”
“Some wonderful parts,” said Donald. “Some that were . . . painful and difficult.”
“We’ll get there,” said Barack. “Together.”
He wrapped his long, brown fingers around Donald’s tiny hands. A big talker, thought Barack. But in the end, just another mouthy bottom.
For a bit more gravitas, on the issue of reconciliation of enemies, here is an Arthur Waley translation of the Japanese Noh play, Atsumori. (I've been reading too much, lately, about Ezra Pound and his influences.)
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Shit happens.
Indeed. :(
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I have been thinking this afternoon about Rabbits (hint, hint) and offer the following as comment bait:
A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts
Wallace Stevens
The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—
There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.
To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;
And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;
Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full
And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,
You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,
You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.
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Two public schools in Manhattan -- the Beekman Hill International School (PS 59) and the Landmark High School -- are located about three blocks from Trump Tower.
If he ends up a registered sex offender, do you suppose he'll have to move out?
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Not usually a big fan of conspiracy theories, but I was struck by (and recommend) Franklin Foer's recent article in Slate on Donald Trump and Russia. I did not realize, for example, that because Western banks will no longer have anything to do with Trump (due to his record of nonpayment and bankruptcy) he now gets most of his borrowed capital from Russian sources.
Masha Gessen in NYRB, on the other hand, thinks the Trump-Putin meme is a distraction, and that the Russian entanglements don't particularly stand out from Trump's other sleazy international business practices. She's not diminishing them, but feels they divert focus from concern about a more fundamental corruptness in Trump's nature that presents a more comprehensive threat to U.S. democracy and culture.
I have never been a particular fan of the Republican party, but I think I am genuinely shocked at the spinelessness, cowardice, and general historical obliviousness of their leadership -- especially the Congressional leadership -- in dealing with Trump and what he represents.
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Individualism cannot be maintained as the foundation of a society if it looks to only legalistic justice based upon contracts, property, and political equality. Such legalistic safeguards are themselves not enough. In our individualism we have long since abandoned the laissez faire of the 18th Century-the notion that it is "everyman for himself and the devil take the hindmost." We abandoned that when we adopted the ideal of equality of opportunity-the fair chance of Abraham Lincoln. We have confirmed its abandonment in terms of legislation, of social and economic justice,-in part because we have learned that it is the hindmost who throws the bricks at our social edifice, in part because we have learned that the foremost are not always the best nor the hindmost the worst-and in part because we have learned that social injustice is the destruction of justice itself. We have learned that the impulse of production can only be maintained at a high pitch if there is a fair division of the product. We have also learned that fair division can only be obtained by certain restrictions on the strong and the dominant.
-- Herbert Hoover (srsly), "American Individualism"
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1. If, as I am told some physicists suggest, things can simply pop into and out of existence at random in the vacuum of space, can this provide us with a useful model of political discourse?
2. If, as many philosophers suggest, what we perceive as real is mainly a construction of the mind, why do we bother with reality at all?
3. Can bad faith be so perfect that it rises to the level of genuine art?
These are some of the rather pretentious thoughts that crossed my mind as I was flipping channels past the first night of the Republican convention in Cleveland.
I am almost less disturbed by what I saw than by the fact that it was calculated -- by people who have some experience with this stuff -- to be effective with a significant part of the electorate. I tended to have trouble, as an undergraduate, with social science models that were based on rational actors, since I was more of a mushy history and literature type and just didn't believe people consistently behaved that way. But . . . are they really, after all, consistently like this?
Maybe I am just in an unusually pessimistic and sour mood.
</despair>
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It's June, and it's no longer Poetry Month, but the Dog doesn't care.
I was outside this morning and it's sunny and cool and it improved my mood. And I thought of this, from Wallace Stevens:
The Plot Against the Giant
First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.
Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.
Third Girl
Oh, la...le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.
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I love Bernie (not quite enough to have voted for him). But, really, this is Bernie.
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Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), from his preface to his collected novels:
. . . But the classes of tastes, feelings, and opinions, which were successively brought into play in these little tales, remain substantially the same. Perfectibilians, deteriorationists, statu-quo-ites, phrenologists, transcendentalists, political economists, theorists in all sciences, projectors in all arts, morbid visionaries, romantic enthusiasts, lovers of music, lovers of the picturesque, and lovers of good dinners, march, and will march for ever, pari passu with the march of mechanics, which some facetiously call the march of intellect. The fastidious in old wine are a race that does not decay. Literary violators of the confidences of private life still gain a disreputable livelihood and an unenviable notoriety. Match-makers from interest, and the disappointed in love and in friendship, are varieties of which specimens are extant. The great principle of the Right of Might is as flourishing now as in the days of Maid Marian: the array of false pretensions, moral, political, and literary, is as imposing as ever: the rulers of the world still feel things in their effects, and never foresee them in their causes; and political mountebanks continue, and will continue, to puff nostrums and practise legerdemain under the eyes of the multitude; following, like the " learned friend " of Crotchet Castle, a course as tortuous as that of a river, but in a reverse process; beginning by being dark and deep, and ending by being transparent.
THE AUTHOR OF "HEADLONG HALL."
March 4. I837.
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That is why we come to this place. We stand here in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell. We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see. We listen to a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war . . .
. . . That memory allows us to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change.
Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think.
-- President Obama, at Hiroshima, yesterday.
An appropriate way, maybe, to think about Memorial Day.
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I guess there is no real reason to think or post here (especially twice) about a 40-year old musical event, but I take and chew on this stuff as it crosses my path. :)
In the last post I was talking about a piece (Knee Play #1) that I liked from an opera (Einstein on the Beach) that overall left me cold. But I've been listening to the whole thing a lot more over the last few days and I'm warming up to it. It may help that I've had it on in the background while doing other things (I think Wilson and Glass would have approved.) If anyone's interested there's a decent version of the full opera up on Youtube; only the music, though, not a video of a production.
I'm not really ready to offer any thoughts, but here is Hilton Als, from "Slow Man," a profile of Robert Wilson in the New Yorker:
“Einstein on the Beach” is, ultimately, an opera about broken speech, utterances that falter. How do we talk about love? Desire? Violence? Does a word that feels this way in my mouth sound the same in your ear? And why do we have this constant yearning to speak, to listen? The poet David Shapiro, in his essay “Notes on ‘Einstein on the Beach,’ “ writes of Wilson, “His repetitions remind us that as William James said: there is no repetition, only persistence.” That questioning persistence is what defines Wilson. Another thought that was helpful to me: “It used to happen, and still happens, to me to take no pleasure in a work of art at the first sight of it, because it is too much for me; but if I suspect any merit in it, I try to get at it; and then I never fail to make the most gratifying discoveries, to find new qualities in the work itself and new faculties in myself.” -- Goethe
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Belated Poetry Month greetings to any friends still around!
I owe a couple of apologies to people who commented on my last post – I sort of disappeared due to a personal adventure and I’ve always had trouble resuming threads after a break. It was nice to hear from  pauraque and shezan. Um, last fall.
Today I am feeling a bit nihilistic but in, you know, a sociable way. Suiting that mood to the general spirit of Poetry Month, here is an excerpt from the libretto to Glass and Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, Knee Play #1.
so if you say we could get some wind for the sailboat
and it could, so it could be those ones
so if you cash the bank of the world traveler
from ten months ago
do you remember hans the bus driver?
well i put the red ball and the blue ball
and the two black and white balls
and hans pushed on his brakes
and the four balls went down to that
and hans said,
"get those four balls away from the gearshift"
well these are the days my friends
and these are the days my friends
it could get the railroad for these workers
so will it get some wind for the sailboat
and it could get for it is
will it get some wind for the sailboat
and it could get for it is
it could get the railroad for these workers
and it could be where it is
1, 2, 3, 4 (etc.)
( Some thoughts on this.Collapse )
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From today's NY times:
“I feel that ‘healthy’ infantile omnipotence is the most important asset for dealing with life’s stresses and potential trauma,” Dr. Krystal wrote in a chapter he contributed to “Living With Terror, Working With Trauma: A Clinician’s Handbook,” edited by Danielle Knafo and published in 2004. “It is the emotional mainspring of extraordinary reserves. It provides a profound, unshakable conviction of one’s invulnerability.”
Henry Krystal, Holocaust Trauma Expert, Dies at 90
This is challenging to me, since I've generally felt that overcoming an infantile sense of omnipotence was good thing, developmentally (not to mention interpersonally). But I am hardly a model of mature and successful adjustment, so perhaps as usual I have had things exactly backwards.
I'm reminded a little of the film, "My Twentieth Century," where the different fates of the two twins seem to reflect random circumstances that either preserved or crushed this visceral sense of confidence. Does anyone -- who may still be reading this from time to time :) -- remember that movie? And the escaped lab dog who faces down a freight train out of pure dumb luck?
Hello to anyone who still has my journal popping up on their flist!
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