"losers" according to uncle ruslan
uncle ruslan tsarni
My head is swimming today from the week's news drama of the search for the Boston bombers, the shootout, one dead, the other escapes, they find him in a backyard boat with a tarp over it. The guy that reported finding him in the boat said he was covered with blood. I saw a pic of him lying on the ground with cops all around him and handling him. He looked to me like he was out. The only blood I saw was on his head. They say he's not communicating. I take it to mean he'd been hit in the head and it will take some brain surgery to bring him around. They will bring him around. We won't be told much from here on; we'll hear what we are told. Coming from FBI it will be reserved. A book will be published within a year. I'm sure it is already being written. It will make a good true-crime story. It will be on paperback shelves in the grocery stores and drug stores soon, the "unauthorized" true story. As it happened, I suppose the entire Boston Police resources were out and in place with the marathon, redirecting traffic, crowd control, just a little bit of what the police had to contend with. Without knowing it, they were ready. It was an interesting story in intelligent police work, respectfully invasive. FBI showed their stuff. At the beginning when it was said the FBI was involved, I knew whoever did it would be found shortly.
tiger from the life of pi
Today I saw THE LIFE OF PI, a story that got me like no other film ever has. It had me wringing and twisting in my chair, identifying like it was my own story. By the end, I came to see it as a vision one might have in the vision pit American Indians went into 4 days and nights for the vision to get their name. It pulled in for me my cat friend Tar Baby who left the body 3 years ago. The story was torn between living by the spirit and living in the body. The hopelessness I've known a few times in the spirit, and the whole story I felt on the inside. I was twisted up so much it became a concern I might be stressing my heart unnecessarily. At those moments I reminded myself that this is a made up story performed in a studio with blue or green background filled in by computerized ocean. It is all controlled circumstances with a tame tiger, I'd tell myself over and over, attempting detachment from it, but it never worked very long. I will watch this film again tomorrow. It has too much in it not to see twice. I tend not to like computerized ocean movies, but this one worked. It worked because the story itself was a fantasy, making the ocean a fantasy, the moon a fantasy, the tiger a fantasy. I wanted to tell the kid in the story to stop fighting the tiger, but I also don't know what would run through a kid's mind. Already by that time in the story I saw he could handle the situation a whole lot better than I could.
this image is a free wallpaper
I don't recall any movie ever getting to me so deeply and so emotionally, so mentally, so spiritually. It is a spiritual story without a religion. All the religions come from one core: God. At the end, the story teller asks the guy he told the story to if it made him believe in God, and he answered yes. I was a little uneasy with that, but it was not me speaking, but someone else for his own reasons. My thought at the time was emphatic yes, but I don't know why. Where did all the wood come from to build a raft with umbrellas, books and so on. Every time I'd think Ho-Hum from a stretch of the imagination, I had to remind myself this is a fable, not a documentary. It is a subjective interpretation of 3D reality that opens to other dimensions we're not yet comfortable with, or don't recognize when we see or experience them. Ang Lee, the director, impresses me more every time I see one of his films, like Lust~Caution, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Ice Storm. I haven't seen Brokeback Mountain yet, but will after this Life of Pi experience. Ang Lee makes a beautiful film. I'll add some of his films I have not yet seen to my netflix Q.
waco texas in the foreground
A town called West, in Texas, blew up a few days ago. Fertilizer plant that hadn't been inspected since 1986. Governor Rick Perry and new teabag senator Ted Cruz, the Joe McCarthy look-alike and think-alike, who both denied aid to New Jersey and New York after the hurricane, are now asking for government aid. You'd think a war was happening in the USA. I saw at a big pot rally in Denver somebody shot somebody. One of the many odd aspects of these daily random killings, in addition to the personal killings, is a question of why so many of the "young" are ready to throw their own lives away either by suicide after killing several people, or arrest and life in prison or the chair. It strikes me as a lot of hopeless young white people. The black people living in hopelessness have been killing each other for decades. That's ok: they keep the prison system going. Job security for prison guards and staff. Now, it is young white men doing public random killings. Throwing their own lives away is what they're doing, taking others with them. In the black world prison is credibility, like the Marines is credibility among white men. In media world, it's a way to be famous for fifteen minutes. I hear Beck singing that hit he had some years ago, "I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me." It came up when the uncle of the two Chickens with the bombs in Boston said they were losers. I think of losers as people who lose things. These two guys both lost their entire lives and their names, dropped them in the toilet and flushed.
making of the life of pi
I'm asking myself all day why it is I watch a two hour fantasy movie and twist and squirm reminding myself to breathe so caught up in the story, very much like never before, and see news of two explosions that killed several people, wounded well over a hundred apiece, many deafened, and I hear them like it's everyday news. But I burrow in my chair over a fable-like (fabulous) story in a movie. Sure, I'm sorry for the people getting their legs blown off in Boston and the people hurt in Texas. It's news. It's objective. It's not subjective. Most movies don't get to me any more than a pressure-cooker bomb on the news and a fertilizer explosion. This story, The Life of Pi is subjective. It is a first person story, told in first person by the narrator who experienced it. It's like Ishmael telling the story of the Pequod and Moby Dick. It is the story of our individual interior journey to God. The Life of Pi is a beautifully told story. The news stories are ugly stories. They are about destruction, pain and death. The Life of Pi is the story of life, of awakening to life itself. It was an emotional rollercoaster of the heart and of the mind. It was hopelessness and helplessness taken to the edge where our boy hung by his metaphorical fingernails throughout the tale. The end was so right.
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