Re: B-Grade Stuff

Subject:  Re: B-Grade Stuff
Facing apparent checkmate - or worse, perhaps, stalemate - or just
dying of terminal loneliness and frustration - do you resign to get
it over with? or just go through the motions until the whole process
(which can seem to be mostly beyond your control) comes to an end of
some sort?
Sooner of later the pieces and the board will crumble to dust, and
the dust will scatter, and no one will be able to tell that a game of
chess was ever played where the board and pieces once were ... and no
one will ask who played it, or when it was played, or where it was
played, or how it was played, or why it was played ... and the small-
scale seeming events will not seem to matter then, and will not even
be known about as an event then ...
... but traces will remain ... and consequences will still be
reverberating widely ...
And when I resign and go into a torpor ... which can last months,
even years ... I do eventually wake up again ... to find that I had
not resigned after all ... and to find that, to my surprize, some
progress seems to have been made after all [of course that might be
an illusion ... or wishful-thinking] ... and I think: well maybe soon
it will reach a more satisfying resolution ...
... and then I think: that is some fucking hope ...
But when it just seems like a matter of waiting .. and enduring for
the sake of endurance .. there does not seem much point in struggling
on ... there has to be more recognitions and fellowship-sharing
feedbacks to make it seem more worth it ... otherwise it seems like a
futile exercise ...
From:  "philtal_uk" <philtal_uk@y...>
Date:  Fri Jun 28, 2002  3:13 am
Subject:  Re: B-Grade Stuff
What's up?
Wazzzaaap?!
Hey, hey, hey ... wot's ga'an on here then pets?
Perhaps something is taking its course ...
Perhaps something is working itself out ...
Perhaps some local difficulties are being sorted more
satisfactorily ...
And hey nonny nony ... it might even be better in future ...
In Blackadder, what did the foolish Northumbrian aristocrat Percy
make when he turns his clumsy hands and small brain to alchemy. The
strange substance that emerged was completely beyond description. But
like every creator, Percy had to give his creation a name: 'GRUE' is
what he comes up with, as I recall.
In Northumbrian legend, what happened to the fabled Lampton Worm when
it got hoyed down a well? It grue and it grue and it grue ... and it
got geet big googly eyes ... and then went out and about ... and ate
cows and sheep and things. Most people ran away from it because it
seemed too terrifying and dangerous. But one brave noble northern
lad managed to struggle with it and overpower it. Contrary to rumour
he did not then kill it and chop it up into bits. He took it to some
Lampton Worm good behaviour classes (there are whisperers for Lamptom
Worms as well as for dogs and horses - though their services aren't
required quite so often) and it learned better ways.
Sometimes, when we are caught up in difficult situations, and facing
unsolvable seeming problems, we can feel paralysed and unable to
decide what to do next.
When he and Baldrick were stuck in another fine mess, Blackadder
said: 'This is the stickiest situation since Sticky the stick insect
got stuck on a sticky bun.' Blackadder then got lost in his own
problems and never said if - and if so how - Sticky got out of his
messy problem. I'll now tell you what happened to Sticky next:
... Stuck on the bun, Sticky had plenty of time on his feet (he had
no hands, remember), and he had plenty of food too. So he just stuck
there, eating the odd bit of sticky bun from time to time, and
relying on the rain (which was plentiful in his part of the world)to
provide him with something to drink. (The rain, it has to be said, in
some ways also worsened his plight - because it made the bun even
more sticky.)
Years past, so many that he lost count of them - which was a good
thing for him, because, as a stick insect, he was not supposed to
live much more than one year ... so if he had known his real age, and
that his natural life-span had been long-overstretched, he might have
dropped dead in his sticky spot [Would he have died of shock at the
knowledge that he was still alive when he should have been long-dead?
Or would he have died of natural causes? How could the inquest have
made up its mind?]
Perhaps there was something to be said for the sticky bun diet,
because although it made him fatter, it made him fitter in other
ways - and above all it kept him alive, if inactive. And perhaps
there was something to be said in favour of inactivity, because stuck
as he was, Sticky had time to think and feel ... and to look around
him at the beautiful world that had been there to see and enjoy all
along but which, when he was more active, he had never seemed to have
had time to notice properly.
Eventually the bun was used up (that is the way it goes with all
resources / energy sources) - or, rather, the bun had blended with
Sticky as he ate it. He was now not really a stick insect any more.
He was a gummy kind of sticky runny funny bunny thing. When he caught
sight of himself in a raindrop that served as a mirror (it distorted
him, of course, but it gave a reasonable impression of what he might
look like)he was quite surprized. He barely recognized himself - and
spent some time grieving for his lost past self. Then he cheered
up. 'I am now what I am now,' he thought, and left it at that. Then
a further thought - it might even have been a memory - passed through
what passed for his little sticky mind. He thought of - and even
seemed to see - a yummy runny funny bummy female of his kind.
'Well,' he thought, 'I might have changed, but I've still got my six
legs, I can still walk. Perhaps it is time for me to go off and
search for that funny bummy runny thing.'
But then he paused for another moment, just as he was about to set
off, ... and had second thoughts.
'Perhaps wandering around it not the best way to find her. I've got
the natural notion that she might have the better motion. Perhaps I
should be the one who just sticks around waiting for her to come
first. Then we might be able to come together, and stick together,
for an extended period. ... So ... I'll just wait some more.'
Thus settled on a plan, he settled down to more sticking around. But
then his sticky bunny tummy felt rummy, it gave off a rumble, which
translated into the question: 'But what am I going to do for food now
that the sticky bun has run out?'
With the urgent, and, as time passed, ever-more-pressing issue of
food on his mind (and not in his body), he reconsidered his options.
And there, I believe, we still might find him: ... considering
alternative possibilities ... and waiting for something more
substantial to turn up in his actual world ...
In the Odyssey, dutiful wifie Penelope stays at home while feckless
hubby Odysseus goes off travelling for all sorts of exciting and
risky (and even risque) adventures. While he is away indulging
himself, she spends her time weaving patterns, which might be
stories, and which, strangely perhaps, seem to correspond with his
wandering courses.
In a modern rewrite, roles might be reversed, to widen perspectives,
and to improve mutual understandings.
[Though, of course, alternative storylines are always possible ...
and the one in which Penelope and Odysseus travel together might be
the most mutually satisfying and enlightening.]
From:  "philtal_uk" <philtal_uk@y...>
Date:  Fri Jun 28, 2002  3:42 am
Subject:  Re: B-Grade Stuff
'For the flowers-to-come - thankyou?!'
Yes ...
... because that is what it is all about ... trying to do something
to keep the flowers coming for future generations ... so that they
can keep on keeping on growing and blooming ... hopefully in better
ways ...
And, of course, one can never be sure of success ...
But then, strange as it may seem to some/many, there is vitality ...
and hope ... in that uncertainty ...
And when you are absolutely sure about anything ... then you are
almost certainly mistaken ...
...
...
...
The 'ongoingness' of 'it all' is a problem for some people, many
even ...
They long for a clear-cut, unambiguous conclusion [natural or
otherwise] ... a final 'sort' to things ... that 'makes complete
sense' of 'everything' ...
But such an absolute ending is probably (almost certainly - perhaps)
not coming ... soon ... or ever ...
...
...
...
And when the absolutist end-timers, with their 'concluding' visions
come out to play ... the results tend to be quite deadening ... for
themselves and for many others ...
And since the 'end-timers' conclusions are faulty and flawed [they
are mostly the products of limited human minds after all - however
much the dogmatic believers might claim divine or supernatural
inspiration] nothing much is achieved by their extravagent - and
often violent - gestures ... and there tend to be general
regressions, rather than progressions, in consequence ...
...
...
...
The 'being-and-nothingness' existentialists [of varying types] have a
lot to answer for ...
'It all' does not compress down to all-too-terribly-simple either/or,
them/us, good/bad, etc, clear-cut distinctions ...
There are always wider alternative, multiply variable, alternative
possible ways ...
...
...
...
And yes ...
... this might just be B-grade stuff ...
... but ...
... this is the story of what happens ... until the sky closes ... on
me and my special roses ... and daisies ... and other bloomers ...
... and then spreads us out again ... to open other flowers [which
might be pretty plant parts ... or which might be other that things
that flow in the scheme of things ... or which ...]
...
And when we are gone ... and spread out ... leaving only vague traces
[but probably many consequences] behind ...
... others will take up the story ...
... that is the way it comes and goes ...
... that is the way it flows ...
From:  "philtal_uk" <philtal_uk@y...>
Date:  Sun Jun 30, 2002  3:56 am
Subject:  Re: B-Grade Stuff
Visions of birds ... and other moving images ...
This looks like B-movie stuff to me ...
The Birds, in the Hitchcock version, ends with uncertainty.
The family gets into the car and drives off into and through a
landscape filled with birds.
Are they driving towards safety? or into more danger?
Apparenly Hitch originally planned to take the journey further -
perhaps to show the re-emergence of the new world after the apparent
catastrophe. But budget, or time, or perhaps just dramatic economy,
chopped off the planned extended ending.
And the ending as it stands seems hopeful enough to me - the
previously aggressive birds seem pacified (they don't do much more
than peck the humans as they make their way on foot to the car), and
perhaps by that stage the humans are learning better how to live more
mutually with the birds and other natural agents. A landscape filled
with birds is not necessarily an omen of doom - and could even be a
sign of better things to come (they are supposed to be 'our feathered
friends' after all).
What is the real human fear of / resentment against the birds? It is
not, I think, that they are much of a threat to us, or serious rivals
for the 'control' of the planet. [But the 'lords of the air' might
carry some residual resentments against us - when the world was up
for grabs after the end of the dinosaurs, it was our ancesters rather
than theirs who seized the day and grabbed much of the land power -
andnow we are depriving them of more and more nesting places, and
even wrecking their egg-filled nests from time to time.] Perhaps our
occasional ill-feeling towards the birds is just because they can fly
free whenever they chose to do it - whereas we have to wait in the
departure lounge for the planes, helicopters, etc, to arrive and
depart with us on them.
As it happens, a bird cannot actually get off the ground whenever it
wants. Conditions on the take-off site and in the air, as well as the
bird's own physical limitations, can prevent take-off. And birds have
to learn/ be taught how to fly - it soes not seem to be an
instinctive ability, as with, say, the flight of flies. Bird flight
might even be regarded as as much of a consequence of cultural
inheritance as of genetic inheritance.
If you watch herring gulls in the later summer, you see the
fledgelings learning / being taught how to fly. And the young birds
seem reluctant fliers. They spend much of their time wandering
around on the ground - the adult birds providing protective air cover
above. And the adult birds seem to have to give the young ones a
great deal of encouragement to get airbourne. The whole gull
community [of related and unrelated birds] seems to come together to
get the yound birds into the air [so much for 'selfish genes'?] And
they make a huge amount of dreadful (to human ears - though beautiful
to the gulls, perhaps) noise when they are doing this - causing mych
irritation to the local human population. It can sound like a lot of
ugly, infernal shrieking and crying (a horrible howling of the
yahoos, perhaps). But, in a strange seagull kind of way, I suspect
there is a lot of tough but tender gully kind of love in all that
herring gull howing - which helps to get the young ones upwards and
outwards.
...
...
...
And then one day I found a video of the film Players on a junk stall
in the market place that is a foraging ground for the town's gulls
(it is a kind of mutualism: we make a mess and they eat some of it -
and leave some messy droppings behind in return). And clutching this
video tape in my hand, I had the strange thought-feeling that it
might just be a sign of a widespreading future rebirth - based
perhaps on some particular and more general humbling.
I've never seen Players (I did not have enough money to buy it from
the junk stall that day - and by the following week it was gone), but
according to my video guide [Mick Martin, Marsha Porter, Derrick Bang
(1998)] it is a no-star rating turkey - a trashy tennis drama of
little artistic merit. 'Ali MacGraw is the bored mistress of
Maximilian Schell; she falls for tennis pro Dean Paul Martin. Rated
PG (parental guidance) - sexual scenes.'
And where are Ali and Max now? and who ever was Dean Paul Martin (and
was he any relation to the comic/crooner Dean Martin?)?. Time pushes
all down the cast list - the stars fade ... and all become extras in
the scheme of things eventually ... which is all they ever were
anyway, contrary to what the egotists and meglomaniacs might want to
think.
In an unlikely twist, Players features Catherine as an extra - a
barely glimpsed face in the crowd of an on-court tennis scene. I know
this because she told me (I have never seen the film) and I trusted
her word. The film was made in the late 1970s - so the Catherine
visible in that film was her as she was in her mid-teens. And it was
the vague and unlikely-seeming connection with Catherine that made me
pick up the trashy tennis drama video from the small town market
stall juk stall that day a few years ago.
Traces of her found in obscure things in obscure places - and locked
away unless you can find the right ways of seeing. You cannot see
what is stored on a video tape unless you have a video player, tv
screen, electricity supply, electricity distribution system, power
generation system ... and original energy source. And that is the way
it goes with all 'information' - it requires context, and does not
make sense in isolation, and it requires energy, inclination (and
time) to extract it.
But what you see on the screen can be deceptive or just surprizing -
and you often have to rely on the words of others to explain it to
you (and you have to trust their words).
I once sat with Catherine and her family watching their home movies.
And just who was that unrecognizable samll girl with naturally
straight hair and spectacles? They informed me that it was an earlier
version of the young woman sitting beside me, with naturally curly
hair and, at that moment, no specs.
She was long-sighted and I was short-sighted. She often took off her
specs to watch films. When I watched films I needed spectacles to see
that distant screen. When it came to reading books close up the
roles were reversed. But there are flaws in vision and there are
other human flaws - both of us were prone for reasons of vanity to
not wearing our specs when we should have been wearing them
['Boys/girls don't make passes at girls/boys who wear glasses.' ...
and all that.]
Vision is an odd thing ... and who can say whether the short-sighted
or the long-sighted have the better vision ...and of course vision
tends to change with time, like everything else.
From:  "philtal_uk" <philtal_uk@y...>
Date:  Tue Jul 2, 2002  3:30 am
Subject:  Re: B-Grade Stuff
B-movie stuff ... terse dialogue ... cheap essential scenery ...
casts of non-star players ... much left to the imagination ... modern
medieval mystery plays perhaps ...
The Full Monty ... a strip-tease tragicomedy ... dancing in the
northern dole queues ...
A group of people lacking proper paid employment take to stripping
for a living ... but parading without clothes for other people's
entertainment - and who knows what other reasons? - is not a very
dignified way for complex, educated, grace-filled people to earn a
living, is it?
A Bridge Too Far [or ... Monty's Masterplan ... or ... I was Monty's
Double ...] ...
The role-playing general was stung by the criticism that his schemes
to beat the death-worshipping nazis were too stolid and slow - and
even when they worked, the dull dog-fight caldron confrontations
disatified the romantics, who wanted something more dashing ...
So he tried for a more daring plot twist [though the name he gave it
sounded somewhat suburban: Operation Market Garden] ...
a stiletto [type of shoe? or type of knife?] into the nazi heart ...
Lightly armed paras [paratroops? or parapsychologists? or
paraphrasers?] leapt from the skies to capture bridges [let the lust
of the eye for the spectacular overcome you as you see the sky and
landscape transformed as those daring doers leap from planes] ...
Meanwhile, heavily armed tankers followed up on the roads, occupying
land, filling gaps, transforming things [see the woods change as they
blast them to pieces]...
But the result was not the hoped for miraculous clear-cut victory ...
it was 'only' a partial success / partial failure ... which seemed
unsatisfactory to many ... and the war continued ...
Who was to blame for the absence of greater success? ...
Was it the most advanced paras? ... who could not stick it out for
long enough - or, reasonably enough perhaps, were not willing to die
senselessly, badly fed and under-supported ...
Was it the apparently dawdling, well-supplied tankers [who went by
the name of 30 Corp - aka XXX CO (they might have been dawdling,
under-caring love markers)] ... who seemed to stop at way-points too
often to stuff their faces ... who seemed to like their creature
comforts too much ... who seemed unwilling to take too many risks
themselves - and left others to endure more of the suffering ...
Was it those who were supposed to be maintaining the communication
systems? [Truth be told, the tankers and the paras did not talk to
each other enough to keep each other informed of relative progress -
it was a particular instance of a general failing.]
Or was Monty to blame for all that went wrong? [After all it is
always easier to evade personal responsibilities, and scapegoat some
other individual.]
Or was the failure to achieve as much as might have been achieved no
one's fault really? - just the way it went ...
Awakenings ... a seemingly short-sighted, diffident doctor refuses to
abandon neglected people [whom 'the system' has apparently given up
on] ...
He performs careful, tentative experiments using a new drug [that
might just be a form of kindness] to rouse people suffering from
chronic sleeping sickness ...
'It's a fucking miracle!' says an earthy observant nurse as she sees
what seems to be a general awakening ...
But ... most of the sufferers fall back to sleep again eventually ...
or the use of the drug has to be modified because of some potentially
alarming side-effects ...
It was not quite 'a fucking miracle' perhaps ... but something was
achieved by giving the sleepers periods of more vitality and
liberty ...
...
...
...
'Kindness has the most favourable effect,' said Philippe Pinel, a
late-18th/early-19th century enlightened reformer of mental health
care ...
In 1793 Philippe was appointed physician at Bicetre, a hell-hole into
which Paris thrust its mental illnesses. His first act was to order
the removal of chains from the people detained there with mental
health problems. When he told the city's prison commissioner of his
plans, the arsehole jailer replied: 'Are you not yourself mad to free
these beasts?'
Philippe replied: 'I am convinced that these PEOPLE are not incurable
if they can have air and liberty.'
The people at Bicetre gained some freedom from chains and some more
fresh air. The first person to be unfettered had lived in chains and
darkness for 40 years. When he saw the sky for the first time in
decades he said: 'How beautiful.'
Finding his policies justified at Bicetre, Philippe went on to reform
Salpetriere, where women branded 'demented beyond cure' were kept in
shackles. He removed the chains, and organized exercises, concerts,
reading, visits and other liberations.
Philippe did not work in isolation ...
At much the same time, Vincenzio Chiarugi was releasing from chains
people with mental health problems in Italy ...
In England, the Quaker York Retreat 'simply' practised 'kindness'
towards mental health sufferers ...
But ... 200 years on, despite some general improvements, millions of
people (billions even) still live in chains (one way or another) and
suffer deprivations of general and particular manufacture ...
... because (perhaps) ... some greedy people want too much for
themselves ... and many mistake liberty for self-indulgence (which
always comes at a cost - to other people, and, eventually, to
self) ... and not enough is shared ... and too many people seemingly
lack the courage, or cannot be bothered (or just have no inclination)
to make even the smallest substantial sort of reach-out-to-the-other
personal gestures ...
Cryptic coda ...
'The Royston horse and the Cambridge MA will give ground to no-
one' ... there are no Royston horses or Cambridge MA's visible in my
neck of the woods ... but lots of signs of people not giving even
inches of ground ... and when you give them an inch, they take miles
from you ... and when you make concessions, the cunts just seem to
take advantage of you, or trample all over you, or take you for
granted ...

From:  "philtal_uk" <philtal_uk@y...>
Date:  Thu Jul 4, 2002  3:10 am
Subject:  Re: B-Grade Stuff
B-movies often contain sublime elements that raise them above the
main features.