Back In Yurp

"Back in Yurp."

Reuters reports United States President George W. Bush, crushed by humiliating defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, flying to London to return his country to Queen Elizabeth II. Following emotional late-night talks at Buckingham Palace, the British monarch is reported to have accepted the former U.S. leader's request and has asked her prime minister, Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, to negotiate joint custodianship of her former colony with French President Jacques Chirac.

A spokesperson for Her Majesty, Sir Scratcher Arse, told Reuters an interim agreement has been reached whereby the greater part of the United States will be run by Commonwealth member, Canada, which will annex Alaska. Texas will be administered by Canada's NAFTA partner, Mexico. Speaking from San Miguel de Allende, Mexican President Vicente Fox welcomed the move, ordering General Manuel Francisco's Santa Ana Brigades to enter Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston.

In a late night call to Governor Linda Lingle of Hawaii, Her Majesty indicated that the island chain is "free to go". And in other developments, California has been banned, Mississippi, Arkansas and Colorado placed under house arrest, Michigan and Louisiana liquidated, and Florida boarded up. A reward of $50 million has been offered anybody offering information leading to the apprehension of former U.S. vice-president Richard 'Dick' Cheney, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Florida governor, Jeb Bush.

"We shall shortly be despatching military personnel and teams of civil servants from Whitehall to take over the running of that country," said Sir Arse. "Until these teams are in place, Her Majesty asks that all former U.S. citizens refrain from mass murder, surrender their weapons, return home and shut the fuck up. Those in conflict zones should report to their nearest police station. For now, policing within the former United States will be carried out by a coalition force comprising Mexican law enforcement agencies assisted by members of Cuba's Revolutionary Army."

Asked to confirm rumours the heavily-sedated former U.S. president has left London for the Hague to hold high-level discussions with the International Criminal Court, Sir Arse declined to comment, referring reporters' legal questions to a smiling Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. more...

Over There

"Tal Afar is closed."

Tal Afar is an almost entirely Turkmen enclave in northwestern Iraq. I had just finished writing a book about the history of these Turkish – speaking indigenous Iraqis. As part of my research, I had visited Tal Afar in June and felt that if I could just reach my known contacts, I would be safe among friends. I knew there would be some risk involved – particularly once the Americans attacked – but I planned to observe the fighting from a safe house, well away from any actual combat.

The sight of U.S. paid Iraqi police forces monitoring traffic had seemed like a good sign that things were still under control, despite the recent fighting. As I did not have an exact address for my previous contact, I approached a police checkpoint to ask for assistance. When I asked them to be taken "to Dr. Yashar", they recognized his name as a prominent local Turkmen official and eagerly nodded in the affirmative. A senior policeman was summoned and he instructed me and Zeynep Tugrul, a Turkish journalist who was serving as my translator, and filing her own reports for Sabah, a daily national newspaper, to climb into a nearby car containing four masked gunman. As we clambered into the backseat, one of the gunmen said in excellent English, "We will take you to Doctor Yashar – please do not be afraid". more...

With so many hours to once again contemplate my own death I began to think of all the practical aspects which would be attendant upon my demise.

Scott Taylor

This took place forty years ago in Africa, and still I ponder it—the opportunity, the self-deception, the sex, the power, the fear, the confrontation, the foolishness, all the wrongness. The incident has informed one of my early novels and several short stories. It was something like First Contact, the classic encounter between the wanderer and the hidden indigenous person, the meeting of people who are such utter strangers to each other that one side sees a ghost and the other side suspects an opportunity. It won’t leave my mind.

I had gone from America to Africa and had been there for almost a year: Nyasaland. Independence came and with it a new name, Malawi. I was a teacher in a small school. I spoke the language, Chichewa. I had a house and even a cook, a Yao Muslim named Jika. My cook had a cook of his own, a young boy, Ismail. We were content in the bush, a corner of the southern highlands, red dust, bad roads, ragged people. Apart from the clammy cold season, June to August, none of this seemed strange. I had been expecting this Africa and I liked it. I used to say: I’ll get culture shock when I go back home. more...

But this was my first true experience of captivity and difference, memorable for being horribly satirical. It had shocked me and made me feel American.

Paul Theroux

Note Aw, Dude, a video of the massacre of civilians in Fallujah during July, 2004, is available at the GlobalResearch.ca forums and at thenausea.com. Watch it and feel American. Original link via David Weinberger.

Drink Socks and Die

My coffe mug. When it's empty [See below for surprise effect].

I had a dark coffee mug that changed color to reveal a message when filled. Mine showed an Intel logo. Remarkable. My wife broke it when she fell down the stairs. So I had to buy another. That's a picture of it up there.

I tried blogging today. Frank Panter posted a link to the Winona Daily News. He called it the Winona Daily Bleat or something. More, he thinks Bruce is a nice chap. I think so too.

This article in the Winona Daily News—of which Frank writes—is interesting. It's about a motorcyclist driving at 205 mph on a public road. You wouldn't catch me doing that. [Don't mention this to Frank. He believes me to be something of a daredevil.]

Anyway, an officer of the law in an airplane apprehended the motorcyclist. I'd have to read the article again to find out how he did it, but it doesn't really matter. You can read the article yourself if you want to. In fact, you can read the whole Winona Daily News. It's online, as they say.

It's a Minnesota paper. Bob Dylan's from Minnesota, so Frank thought of me, which is very nice of him. He also thought of Stu Savory. Why, I'm not quite sure, but I think it has something to do with motorcycles. Stu lives in Germany. They make BMWs there.

Where was I?

Okay... I thought I'd respond to Frank's post. The other day, I posted an entry on hyperlinks. Dave Winer and Robert Scoble, much like the guys who write books telling one how to become a millionnaire, offer advice on becoming popular. So, being over at Frank's place and not being in a mood to go elsewhere, I thought, "What the hell, let's give it a bash."

"Give what a bash?" I hear you ask.

"Commenting, Dumbo."

Scoble, who seems a nice chap—I don't know him as well as I do Bruce, but most bloggers are nice when you get to know them—says commenting will increase your popularity. This is what I wrote:

I want one...

[Editor's note: I'm referring to a fast motorcycle here. I don't want Frank to think twenty-five years and three children have slowed me. Not to mention my wife falling down the stairs and breaking my cup.]

Stu can nurse me around the old Nurburgring.

[Editor's note: Stu lives in Germany and that's where the old Nurburgring is too. But I think I told you that. Perhaps I'll leave the edits for later. Dave Winer does.]

Perhaps it was Bob; leaving town.

Five years ago, nobody read the Winona Daily News. Now you read it and I read it. Hell, we all read it. Whether that's a good or a bad thing, we'll probably only know in about five years' time. But it—connectivity—has certainly made the run in to these elections of yours some kind of fascinating.

By God, you Americans are a strange people. How else does one explain the Cat Stevens thing? That said, we still love some of you. Y'know?

Where will we be in five years' time? I guess we're like the 205 mph biker. At the rate we're going, we certainly won't be here, and 'there' is a long way off. The cop kinda reminds me of Winona's Officer Obie. Five years at 205 mph will probably see us all blogging at Alice's Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

There or at the old Nuremberg Ring. Or whatever it's called. And we'll have front-row seats in the comment boxes :).

And that's where I left it. Quite frankly, I couldn't think of anything else to say. Besides, I was tired. Blogging's quite an effort.

Note It's always polite to put a smiley at the end of a comment. It's called netiquette.

I might add that there are several literary allusions in that comment. 'Bob' is actually Bob Dylan, the singer. He was born in Hibbing, a town in Minnesota. He left in a hurry. Frank's been to Hibbing. What's it like Frank?

No answer.

Typical.

Anyway, I was tired so I began to make myself a cup of tea. I drink my tea from my coffee mug. Doing that—drinking tea from a coffee mug—is called an anachronism or something.

I thought I'd make the tea and leave the blog to percolate. That's a joke. I know it's not a very good one, but at least I'm trying. I wanted to see if Scoble's theory worked. I finished making my tea and returned to my machine to see if I was popular.

I wasn't.

So much for Scoble. He shouldn't pull hoaxes like that. I don't like it. But it doesn't matter.

I bought my coffee mug—the new one replacing that which my wife broke when she fell down the stairs—from my club. My club is, unfortunately, only for men. This may be considered sexist, but you girl bloggers should be quite used to sexism by now.

It changes color too. My new cup, that is. You can see what it says on the outside when it's full of tea. All you have to do is click on the picture I've stuck at the top. Actually, you can also click on the link I've just made. In the last sentence but one.

Clever, eh?

Blogging may be tiring, but it certainly has its rewards. Then again, I'd not have written this essay had I not been a member of the club. It has its own rewards.

You may have noticed that I've surreptitiously inserted quite a few links to my club in this weblog entry. I've done so because I don't really know anybody there. I'm also testing another of Scoble's theories. He says if you link a lot you become popular.

I hope he's not pulling the wool over my eyes again. I expect people to meet me at the door when I arrive.

Okay, that's it for now. I'm off to the club. I have to make some tea for my wife before I go. I'm not lending her my cup though. She broke the last one when she fell down the stairs.

Update Frank called. That's Frank Paynter. He said that he called the Winona Daily Bleat the Winona Daily Blat. I didn't ask him why he calls it that, but it seems Scoble's theory is starting to work. I might just try another comment before heading off to the club. My wife can make her own tea.

No Gitmo on the Hudson

RNC Pier 57 Holding Facility

I'm not one of these people who believe we live in a fascist regime. I think that's an insult to the many millions who have suffered under true oppression and horrors that we can only imagine. That said, the technology and mindset that I was witnessing being implemented all around us would be such an asset to any society where freedom was the enemy. What the Stalinists or Nazis could have done with all of those digital camcorders! Or the regimes of Pinochet and Ceausescu that were obsessed with knowing which among the populace were the "traitors." I tried to understand why such meticulous record keeping would be a boon to a society that wasn't trying to monitor its citizens for signs of dissent. more...


RNC Detention Center on the Hudson River

I can only pray that what happened on August 31 was a mistake that will never be repeated. But I can't say I'm optimistic - with the mayor saying the police did an "A plus" job and the mass media beginning to mock the experiences we went through. If this is indeed the beginning of a trend, then this episode will represent a big step in the decline of our freedom. These sweeps will become commonplace in the name of security. People will be held without charges for days. The suspension of rights now used on "enemy combatants" will begin to be applied in other areas, whenever national security can be even peripherally invoked. We could all wind up paying a very heavy price for our complacency. That's why, if there's to be any hope at all, we have to care and we have to get through to others. That's the purpose of my telling this story and I hope it manages to open some eyes. more...

Emmanuel Goldstein | Notes from the RNC - The 8/31 Experience (via Karmakat and Kathryn Cramer)

In many ways, Google better reflects the hullabaloo. It's early days yet, a common enough way for governments (especially before international sporting events) to treat their and other countries' citizens, and a far cry from "Gitmo on the Hudson". Let's just see how it goes, eh?

Note In two pithy posts, Tom Matrullo gets to the heart of the matter...

No Small Kindness

Wild World

Now I've been crying lately, thinking about the world as it is | Why must we go on hating, why can't we live in bliss | Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train | Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again

American officials diverted a transatlantic flight 600 miles in the belief that the presence of Yusuf Islam, the charity worker and pop star formerly known as Cat Stevens, posed an imminent threat to national security, it emerged yesterday.

The 56-year-old singer was escorted off the plane by FBI agents after customs officers realised that his name was on a "watchlist". He was due to be deported to the UK last night after questioning. His 21-year-old daughter was allowed into the US.

Mr Islam, who is best known for hits such as Morning Has Broken, Wild World and Peace Train, last visited the United States in May. His name was added to the list subsequently and a US government source said he was refused entry because of fears that he had financially supported Hamas.

[...]

He sold 50m albums before renouncing music for charity and educational work after converting to Islam. ... He donated profits from recent album sales to the September 11 bereaved, saying that no "right-thinking" Muslim could condone the attacks.

Source: Guardian Unlimited US jet sent 600 miles to keep Cat Stevens away

Fight terrorism. Contribute to a Small Kindness of a another sort.

Oh I've been smiling lately, dreaming about the world as one | And I believe it could be, some day it's going to come | Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train | Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again

Cat Stevens | Peace Train

Link Whores

Missing links?

Someone let in the wolves – it’s feeding time.

Shelley Powers

Dave Winer today recalls an interesting observation he made in an agenda-setting essay presented as preparation for BloggerCon I, back in September 2003. Dave says:

"One of the fundamental ideas of the Web is the link."

Oh yeah...

I've given Dave enough of a hard time over the years. Actually, no, I haven't. Such an assertion carries with it the assumption that he reads my blog. He doesn't. Be that as it may, I've ceaselessly and mercilessly beaten the poor guy with his sense of self-importance since I set out on this blogging trip.

One of the things that gets me about this particular insight of Dave's is that he mined it from the very document to which he links in his essay. The WC3 points out that the "...the link has been one of the primary forces driving the success of the Web." The second thing that irks me is that it's as much a profundity as "We breathe so that we may live."

Wow...!

Look, Dave is a thinker, a techie, a writer and much else that is complementary and complimentary. In other words, he has all the attributes one needs to be a good thought processor. Yet, somehow, and despite all the good stuff he undoubtedly has done and continues to do for the Web, I really believe he doesn't 'get it'.

Noting the importance of the hyperlink is one thing. Telling others what it is and, by doing so, stressing its importance, distinguishes the clued writer from the thought processor (and, oftentimes, regurgitator). Dave might have referred to David Weinberger's by then already discounted title, Small Pieces Loosely Joined (Perseus Books, April 2002). In Chapter 2, David tells us hyperlinks are:

"...the mechanism that enables the Web to be the Web.... Hyperlinks are the geography of the Web."

Besides Weinberger's description of the hyperlink being more accurate, descriptive, and appropriate than Winer's, the difference between the two observations is significant. Winer's statement, which defines links as 'elemental entities', earns several such entities in this blog post. In Weinberger's view, these links constitute something far greater. They go towards making the Web what it is.

They are analogous to far more. In part, I'm commenting on Dave's entry because it's online. However, I'm also commenting on it because, using a code of a different type, I remember David Weinberger's more comprehensive and eloquent definition. This 'remembering' leads us to another self-evident truth: "One of the fundamental links of the mind is the idea." In other words, hyperlinks are more than the geography of 'that which is out there', i.e. the Web. From the Web, as they morph to remembered memes or ideas (hyperlinks of another type), they begin to chart the geographies of our minds.

Weinberger's views differ from Dave's in much the same way Shelley Powers differs from a somewhat humorless Robert Scoble. Scoble's essay, How your blog will get discovered, adopts a Winer approach in that definition limits his appreciation of blogging's potential.

In her counter to Scoble's piece, This is Wrong on Oh So Many Levels, Shelley unclogs the drains by pointing out that "...the people participating are doing so based less on hits and more on interest. The interest is in the topic of the meme, not the fact that it is a meme." This confirms Weinberger's observation (in the chapter linked to above):

"On the Web, nearness is created by interest."

That nails it for me. Scoble, Shelley and Blogger's Biz Stone all wade in to the murky subject of length, but...well, go read the essays yourself. After all, one of the fundamentals of the Web is communicating ideas through links.

Dave Winer says so. I think...

I do this cause it's fun. More fun for me than almost anything else I can think of doing.

Robert Scoble

Note Like Shelley, I believe marketing one's site is something more of us should do. I have nothing against it and do not wish to see anybody hide their light under a bushel. Scoble, Stone and Dave Winer know what they're doing and employ traffic-generating tactics that work. I am not hammering them or their views.

I rail against those who, while dishing up partially pre-formatted, two-line information cascades, rush out to schmooze and press blogging flesh like politicians, arms dealers and realtors with bridges for sale. There's no originality or life in their cynical practices. They are self-serving whores who will defile the minds of our youth. [Okay, that's a bit over the top, but you know what I mean.] They promote commodified consumerism at its worst, reducing blogging to little more than 'business as usual' which, these days, resembles Haifa Street

And blogging, lying before the breaking wave of syndication and integrated content management systems, has so much more to offer than bandwidth problems.

Being There

"...draw conclusions on the wall."

I'm a child of South Africa | I'm a child of Vietnam | I'm a child of Northern Ireland | I'm a small boy with blood on his hands | Yes I'm a child of the universe | Yes I'm a child of the universe | You can see me on the TV every night | Always there to join in someone else's fight.

Yeah well, what can I say? Word gets out. Why not? Who am I to disturb the free flow of information? I'll leave that one to the professionals. They are doing a good job and, if all continues going well, should live to stifle dissent another four years.

I'm at www.www.yblogza.com. But you see me there now, don't you?

Indeed. I cannot be accused of immodesty. Others are responsible for publicizing these things. They editorialize them in the papers, sermonize them from the pulpits and publish pictures. They broadcast them at sporting events and at political rallies. They report them on the radio, read them in their fortune cookies...


"...the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

...and write them in the sand. It is not my fault. I am not to blame. Do not lay this one on me. I am a Child of the Universe. For now though, you know what to do. You do, don't you?

If you don't, speak to somebody. Otherwise you're likely to lose about five links to your site in double-quick time. If I'm to be a link whore, then this blog's a brothel, not a fucking charity. Favors cost at this establishment.

Actually, they don't. And, if you've time, download Pluck, an online RSS and site aggregator in development. Following Chris Sherman's review of it and my few days' easy access to feeds, sites and searches, I'm sticking with this one. With the likes of Findory and Blogory, it proves syndication's CMS potential. If Google were to buy it and incorporate it into Blogger.... Voila! Now, if only we could access the bloody server (bandwidth's the real problem).

Pluck. It's in demand.

I didn't ask to be born and I don't ask to die | I'm an endless dream, a gene machine | That cannot reason why | Yes I'm a child of the universe | Yes I'm a child of the universe | You can see me on the TV every day | I'm the child next door three thousand miles away.

Barclay James Harvest | Child of the Universe

Zimbabwe Ruins

"What did we have before candles?"

"What?"

"Electricity."

Apperently, it's an old Zimbabwean joke. Zimbabweans, hard hit by AIDS and anthrax, are getting forgetful. A couple of days ago, soldiers injured thirteen people during a mock battle staged at a Marondera agricultural fair, 80 kilometers outside the Zimbabwean capital, Harare. Apparently the pride of the Zimbabwean Defence Force forgot to swap live ammunition for blanks.

These things happen. Look at Iraq. I'm wondering if the incident was severe enough to call on the state-run, ox-cart ambulance service (not built in Zimbabwe, the new high-tech ambulances were donated by Unicef) to ferry the injured to hospital, there to receive their rations of Panadol. I'd like to know if, on their way to a capital in which half the citizens dine by candlelight, they passed the farmlands that have yielded only 750,000 tons of maize this year, half the amount needed to feed the people of a country even the IMF has abandoned.

Independent Online reports regular power blackouts and acute shortages of fuel, spare parts and new technology in Zimbabwe. Hand-guided cattle ploughs have replaced farm machinery and the state railroad uses gunpowder charges to warn trains of danger ahead. Robert Mugabe wants the world to give him 35,000 tractors to kickstart farming. He also wants 50 percent of the country's mines and control of the manufacturing sector.

Frankly, I think the situation's beyond a joke.

Innermost Decisions

"For the innermost decision, that we cannot but obey..."

I don’t know why I come here, | Knowing as I do, | What you really think of me, | What I really think of you.

Hmm... As Shelley and I ready this wodge of text and graphics for a move to www.yblogza.com—still on Shell’s sainted server, I'm extending my hiatus indefinitely. The past year's been a rough one, and my blog's taken a beating because of it. Reasons for my proclivity to highlight the darker side of life? I've no idea.

It could be one of several reasons, none of which I set out here.

"Why not?"

"Well yes. Why not, indeed?"

I cannot say. Perhaps my reluctance to discuss them has a specific cause. Perhaps it has several. Either way, suppressing them does not stop these perturbations disturbing the mirrored surface of my comfortable middle-class life. It does not stop them colouring my writing. Most, it seems (or I'm told), bear life's discomfiting vicissitudes with equanimity and good cheer, taking them in their easy and smiling stride. Able to deal with them in adult fashion, they share insights culled from the day-to-day minutiae of suburban mundanity.

I must say I'm not awfully good at dispensing distilled pearls of trenchant wisdom to the electronic masses; especially from the cruel frontlines of a cloistered contemplation I seldom see. To me, such things generally reflect the manufactured quietude of Homes & Gardens feature articles. But perhaps life's really like that.

I wouldn't know.

I find it difficult to suppress the stark, the grim and the ugly. Depressing, eh? It's a depression which is very real, chronic and acute, and it seeps through to the page. But I do not apologise for it. While I generally rein in impulses to write these things as they happen, I am not in the business of maintaining the gardens of others' neatly trimmed lives. I've enough on my plate. I'll mow the lawn, but the edges are up to them.

Up to my neck in fertiliser and barely breathing, I continue to speak my mind as best I can.


"For what’s left of our religion, I lift my voice and pray..."

Not that David Lynch is of much use at times like these. I watched Fire Walk With Me last night. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have watched Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway and this, the third, in reverse order. Lynch is a great film maker and, I believe, a great human being. I know Laura Palmer (and Donna, of course) all too well. I married her. Fire Walk With Me is a tragic story beautifully told. Lynch knows of whom he speaks. Using his art to achieve an extraordinary, empathic detachment, he simply, clearly and frame by frame gives substance to that which we most need today, a love of other people.

Ah well, that's for another time. Perhaps Spring will improve my curmudgeonly mood. Perhaps then I will find my voice. Being of a bright and cheery disposition, I revel in warm summer days of green shade, long-drawn afternoons and sunbeam thought.

For now though, as must most good things, they can wait.

Uh, yes, happy seventieth birthday to the prince of pessimism, grocer of despair and minor poet without compare, Leonard Cohen.

For the innermost decision, | That we cannot but obey | For what’s left of our religion, | I lift my voice and pray...

Leonard Cohen | The Land of Plenty

Ain't It Just Like the Night...

Motorpsycho Nightmare on Betty Elms Street

'The best of luck to you, Betty.' Irene

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet? | We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it | And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it...

Okay, I'm out of here... I'm leaving the movie industry. It's been good to me, but I've had it. I've made my money, said my piece and now I'm off to Florida for a well-earned rest. Call me Midnight Cowboy; I don't care. Hollywood's a tough town and we all have our breaking point. It's not that I've seen too many films; Wendy and I last went to the movies to see Withnail and I and, before that, Apocalypse Now. Actually, we saw Full Metal Jacket as well, somewhere between the two. And Heartbeat, but that was a long time ago.

I'm not selective about what I see and have no taste (yeah... I know, it shows in the company one keeps); it's just that when you have three kids it makes a lot of sense to watch them on TV (the movies that is, not the kids). Nor do I watch much TV. I'll grab the obvious, like an English movie. Otherwise... they're all pretty much the same. Christ, the shit that comes out of Hollywood blows my mind... I started watching A.I. the other day. Spielberg unseats Lucas to become the new Disney by desecrating Kubrick. Or maybe Kubrick was going gaga... I don't know. That place will do things to you. They spray evil into the air-conditioning ducts at night. Marek told me. It's their Father's Matrix.

I'll watch The Simpsons and South Park but, at the moment, Cartman, Stan and the boys are about all we have going for us here. I've been bereft of a good 'brain-wash-soak-and-rinse' series since Andre Braugher walked out of Homicide: Life on the Street. Before that...

Actually, before, during and after that which I have watched, David Lynch's Twin Peaks has served as my benchmark. Watching Twin Peaks was a ritual. I'd plant myself in front of the TV and suck it in. There was this one scene... Nah, hell; they could show the whole thing again. I mean, I've seen episodes of things like Northern Exposure and other long-term shit but really... After Twin Peaks, the TV died. Since then, it's been like sniffing ether. Not that I know what ether does to you, but I've heard its effects are similar to glue and I've done that. They say glue-sniffing kills your brain cells, but I dunno... "Exactly," the shrink exclaimed. "You don't know. But it's not that you don't know; it's that you no longer know what you used to know."

Well, sometimes I thank God for that. Besides, he sounds like Donald Rumsfeld. Which, for some strange reason, reminds me... Mel Gibson's movie made it across the Atlantic. Wood floats. After washing up on our shores, I'm afraid the beating continued. Although the Jesus Freaks battle it out to cram theatres around the country, most South Africans either don't care ("So what if the Jews did it? Someone had to.") or take perverse pleasure in knocking the shit out of it. I suspect it has something to do with Gibson being Australian. We haven't beaten the Australians at anything for decades, so I reckon Mad Mel might be what one could call a Godsend. Some people don't like it because it's a crap movie but when they point that out, there's a stunned silence. "What's that have to do with anything?" they're asked. "The Lord of the Rings comprised three crap movies and look how well that did."

Heh... After watching the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre, former Zambian president Frederick Chiluba, up on corruption charges, likened his 'suffering' to that of Christ's. "I have suffered after stepping down from the presidency but not like Jesus did. I have just suffered a quarter of that," he said. There's a market for everything these days.

So anyway, the TV died. Until last week.

Our local pay channel offered a free antidote to Gibson-induced swamp fever. I posted The Anniversary Party entry before completing it so that I could take the cure. M-Net screened Mulholland Drive and I wanted in. Yeah, so I watched it. Now I need watch no more. It scared the shit out of me. Lynch is to film what Dylan is to music. Mind you, more people probably appreciate Lynch; these days you can count the Hibbing Bandsaw Diehards on one hand. I think he cuts too close to the bone.

Alright, so A Beautiful Mind and Iris came out the same year as Mulholland Drive. I've seen both on the box and they're essentially 'mockumentaries', costume dramas for those who'd rather not read and aren't too interested in factual accuracy. Mulholland Drive, on the other hand is, like all good theatre, slightly surreal, an example of what cinema can, and to my glue-clogged brain, should be.

As far as I'm concerned, it should have swept the Oscars. But, there again, we run into the goblin trilogy. What is it these people have with goblins and Jesus? Christ, don't real people like Diane Selwyn matter any more? Show moviegoers the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre and they all know what's going on. Show them a human being lost on Mulholland Drive and they haven't a clue. I think they call that irony. Perhaps sniffing glue isn't such a bad thing after all. At least one doesn't suffer delusions of reality.

Besides making movies that mess with Jesus Freaks' and the media's heads, Lynch gets it, and then translates it to layers of sound and imagery that meld to a single statement open to myriad interpretations. He's a cinematographic (is there such a word?) blogger. Mulholland Drive is, simply, a paean to women and losers in general. Actually, I don't mean it like that, but you know what they say... "Never retract. It's bad form." As such, it's profoundly disturbing. It also, fittingly and in retrospect, recognizes one woman, former Lynch assistant and sometime actor Jennifer Symes, a 29-year old coke-head killed 2001 in early-morning LA after driving her car into several others.

I once knew a girl, but I'm still trying to write that particular story, so I won't say anything right now...

In painting this memorial to all that women have endured since the City of Angels sold its soul to the silver screen and the over-moneyed lecherous fucks financing it, Lynch finds in Naomi Watts (Betty / Diane), Laura Elena Harring (Rita / Camilla) and Ann Miller (Coco), women able to bring his vision to life... and he uses the likes of Justin Thoreaux (Adam Kesher) and Michael J. Anderson (Mr. Roque) to fill the complementary male leads and roles.

The mummified faces of Lynch's male villains track the decades to Gene Autrey, Roy Rogers (Layfeyette) and the power merchants whose evil traces now seep through the cracks of time and cloud the air with rancid dreams. Mind you, these people live in every time. They are the body, soul and psyche snatchers David "Lizards Ate My Flesh" Icke warned me about; they're aggressive mind zombies on steroids, enemies of thought, passion, and feeling. They're creative anti-matter and feed on anything spontaneous... in fact, they've become so fat and lazy living in Hollywood, they'll eat anything resembling human life. If you're half an actor and can still twitch, stay away from that place.


'It is no longer your film.' Vincenzo Castigliane

Lights flicker from the opposite loft | In this room the heat pipes just cough | The country music station plays soft | But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off | Just Louise and her lover so entwined | And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind.

Yeah, it's in this world of shifting vices and dubious virtues that women from Doris Day and Rita Hayworth to Naomi Watts and Laura Harring have had to ply their trade in ways that chew lost souls to a spiritual and mental cud. I decide to discuss Hollywood with Father Christopher.

"Fuck off. I'm working."

I give him a savage smack across the back of his head, grip his skull like a hard-boiled egg, and bounce it across his desktop.

"I need to talk."

Holding his forehead with one hand, he pulls a handkerchief from his cassock with the other and dabs at the blood.

"Why? These people are businessmen. That's all there is to it."

"Yeah, I know, but what about art?"

He looks at me, amazed. "What about it?"

"Well, shouldn't it count for something? The way Lynch writes it, most of the art's in the movie. Hollywood sucks."

"Fuck art. Decadence and depravity rule at the Hollywood Bowl."

"Eh?"

"Hollywood is hell. It's the end of the line. I should know. Ratzinger made me Archbishop of Hollywood for a time after that sorry affair at the girls' convent. Yeah, it's the boulevard of broken dreams, the days of our lives. It's the most unromantic place on Earth. Forget the glitz and glamour. Lynch does. It's demonic and these women are Hollywood bottom feeders. Worse, in this movie, the main character dies. Those that succeed in that murky shark tank do so financially. Hollywood has nothing whatsoever to do with art. Look, it's been inhabited by the scum of the earth since the Twenties and Thirties. These people have nothing going for them but money. They're sick fucks on a power trip. How'd you think they built their empires?"

"On acting ability? On sheer guts and loads of talent?"

Father Christopher's eyes flash. "Don't fuck with me, you little shit. Give me some Aspirin. You'll do double duty on the guard towers tonight. Guts and talent may draw the dumb, but acting ability doesn't count for much. D'ya think the movies foisted on us represent the best acting talent we have?"

"Heh..."

"Exactly. It's all about bucks. People like Lynch's women haven't a clue when they arrive. They're eaten alive, their kitchen-sink dreams reflected in their short-lived bath-grime lives."

"And the glamour?"

"It's as illusory as anything else. Hollywood and its surrounds are riddled with lowlifes; no talent, class, style or brains, a New Age Paradise. They need nothing because they have what matters; connections. That's what these girls are sucked into; they try to play the game and set up networks. They pay the price."

"This girl musta done somebody some pretty tasteless favors to come up with that Camilla bitch."

"Right. Ya' think any of the 50s stars had taste? Why should they have any today? Look at their houses, for God's sake."

"Heh... yeah, they all look like Indian wedding cakes. If these people don't have their heads stuck up the backside of industrial-strength kitsch, they do the John Wayne thing, perpetuating the myth of the right-wing, white American cowboy. Jesus, dude ranches in L.A. And people tour these places."

"Okay, so you get the point. Hollywood is base. It has no brains. It has no life. It is death. It's not called the 'dream factory' for nothing."

"And they have no conscience."

"None. There's a whole lot of money and a whole lot more involved here. Not for nothing did the Bush team trek out here to learn spin. For every David Lynch, there are a thousand Jessica Lynches who need their stories told. They infect everything."

"Sick."

"Yeah... and I haven't started yet. To think they call it the underbelly of Hollywood... It is Hollywood. Look at the way Lynch writes the moguls. They're a bunch of murderous goombahs. But, like it or not, they control the show. They are the MC at the Silencio Club."

"And Mulholland Drive encircles them."

"A deadly snake created and traced by unused minds."

"And they never go out there."

"Unless it's to dump bodies."

"...build walls..."

"...machine-gun posts..."

"...wedding cakes..."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

We sit and glare at each other. I give him an Aspirin.


'It's more beautiful than I ever dreamed ...' Betty

Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously | He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously | And when bringing her name up | He speaks of a farewell kiss to me | He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all | Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall | How can I explain? | Oh, it's so hard to get on | And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn.

So what's the story?

Fuck the story... there is none, for Chrissakes. It's not real. Or, if it is, this is Lynch's reflection of one and all women, a personal ode... an expression of love, a lament at the death of beauty, and a trashing of Tinsel Town... it's the best (and worst) thing that's happened to Hollywood in decades. But again... there is no story, only fear, hatred, love, lust, loneliness, repression, humor, ache, pain, creativity, hurt, projection, laughter, irony, bitterness, skepticism, and all that other shit one can dig out of dictionary.com's thesaurus facility.

Watch the film for yourself. Watts and Harring traverse boundaries of personality, time, realism, and sexuality without apparent effort. Mulholland Drive is naked Kombinat! Any plotline is arbitrary... a line circumscribing a complex, condensed concatenation of experiences forming a mind-blasting emotional whole; the film is a single event, expression or experience.

Okay, enough of that. So there seems to be this need for a plot. Why is it that people always need a plot, a site map? Ack! It doesn't matter...

The short story is that Diane Selwyn (whom we meet towards the end of the movie) is every wannabe movie star who's ever gambled on Hollywood. She's also one of its desperate losers. Having fought and fucked her way into a couple of small roles and bit parts, she's losing her mind. It's not surprising; most of her acting has taken place in her head. Although she started out with a clear idea of herself, she's started to confuse light and dark, her self and her shadow (and the man in the shadows tips his cap to the guy in the white coat before garroting the director who's snoring in his chair).

To keep her dream of stardom alive while waitressing at the local Twinkies, whoring on Sunset Boulevard and living in a dark hole, she concocts a sultry persona to whom she attributes her small successes. Of course, she knows Rita's just a conniving slut, so she later reinvents her as Camilla Rhodes, a star who feeds her bit parts. Balancing Camilla, or Educating Rita if you will, she builds on the faded myth of her early dreams to recast herself as Betty, a naive, wholesome, and altogether too-sexy country girl from Canada unable to play the Hollywood game.

Sheez... that Betty.

When the addiction to that line "She's the girl" kicks in and Diane begins to do what is needed to get a role, she increasingly attributes her two-bit success to Camilla who, as she blurs with Rita, becomes ever uglier. The reliance of one over-stretched persona on another becomes too much and shreds Diane's mind. Her fatal error is in accepting herself as a multi-faceted abstraction bearing no responsibility for her choices. In the end, following a breakdown we see as a car smash on Mulholland Drive, that dark neural pathway linking fractured regions of Hollywood and our own minds, she shoots herself.

Okay, that's enough. So much for the story.


'I'm here to audition for... Mr. Brown.' Betty

Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial | Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while | But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues | You can tell by the way she smiles | See the primitive wallflower freeze | When the jelly-faced women all sneeze | Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeeze | I can't find my knees"...

Lynch's genius is that we enter Diane's world through her subconscious, her alter-egos, defense mechanisms, projections, fears and scrambled realities. We do so by riding in on Mulholland Drive, that road belonging to one and all cities, and to each of us. The roads traversing Cape Town's Table Mountain chain ring the inner city and southern suburbs. After sunset, the Signal Hill, Table Mountain, and Rhodes Memorial roads are no-go zones. In the mornings, what's left of the police force sweep them for bodies and the city's cleansing department hoses down the semen. They're night-time cesspits, dark chains binding the psyche of the city over which they ride.

We used to go up there when we were kids, taking the wine, the music, the girls, and the dope. It was grand. A night sky and the occasional buck coming down to watch Pink Floyd join the stars. Nowadays, only people like RageBoy go up there. He blogs a trip along Mulholland Drive, a straight pedal-to-the-metal hell run along Route 36. He rips an out-of-town CD store with Selina and does the downhill racer thing back to Boulder. The one-man Lynch mob of the Web hears the raven call and we get Love Minus Zero/No Limit along the psychic highway linking us to our hearts of darkness.

It's a road we need all travel; as often as possible if we're to stay in touch with ourselves. As former Hells Angels in America, Father Christopher and all Jesus Bunker Disciples and EGR Irregulars might abstain, but we've never kicked the habit. This still troubles me deeply. On Friday last week, I went to speak about the movie and Mulholland Drive with my therapist, Waking Slow, a native-American of Irish extraction.

"It's Betty that stays with me. Or rather, I wish she did. Shit, that girl... sorry."

"It's okay... what were you saying?"

"I never did like Rita. Besides her not being blonde, I mean... She's too obviously 'the shadow' and it's in our nature to dislike her. The terror comes in when we need to flip between light and dark but find ourselves forever traveling Mulholland Drive; without respite. We start forgetting or losing touch with ourselves. It's a scary feeling... complete alienation or personality fragmentation. I use those terms as a layman, eh?"

"Yeah, don't worry; I only pretend to be a professional myself."

"Oh. Okay, that's cool."

"But you were saying, 'We all travel Mulholland Drive.'?"

"Yes, but we don't all have Diane's problems. She's living in a state of celluloid psychosis and it's eaten her mind. I mean, fuck, Hollywood. To survive it, she has to turn her life into dramatic farce, which is what Lynch reflects. I mean, look at the projection."

"And the goons. Mr. Roque..."

"Yeah..."

"Sort of like living with PorridgeBoy?"

"No, far from it. PorridgeBoy set me off. He grew out of Gary Turner and I'll always be grateful to Gary for that, but PorridgeBoy was always a bit one-sided, you know?"

"Mm... not sufficiently bent?"

"No. To flesh him out and give him a truly mean and vicious streak, I needed Chris Kovacs and Frank Paynter's assistance. Ultimately, even they couldn't help me. I eventually came up against Sanders and all those warblogging freaks and I was in it alone with Shelley and Jeneane. Those girls may be twisted, but they're not bent. We needed additional firepower, but Frank had Fang to tend to and Chris doesn't write without Bearman at his shoulder so... Well, I couldn't take Gary in there. He's too nice a guy. Besides, Cameron was on the way."

"Mm..."

"We did have some amazing wars though, with PorridgeBoy. There was that flight over Cuba where PorridgeBoy started eating the CIA guy's face..."

"I remember... so what happened?"

"Well, at the time, Sanders, Denton, Reynolds, Owens and some other twisted freaks were attending side-briefings given by Big Dick at warblogging conventions held in the ante-room of the secret chamber beneath the Lincoln Memorial. They'd take the donkey, pile into the car, and head on down to these things... Horrible, but I managed to get a press pass from some right-wing neo-Nazi outfit... I forget which one... and I used to travel down to DC with them."

"But what..."

"Well, that's where synchronicity comes into it. At about that time, Father Christopher sent Locke, his apprentice and scribe, over to Europe to nick the Bayeux Tapestry. He wanted to hang it over the fireplace at the Jesus Bunker..."

"Just stick to the basics..."

"Okay, so because RageBoy's a known suicide bomber, Father Christopher (who took over as my Spiritual Guide and Mentor) had Locke meet up with PorridgeBoy."

"The Chukka Bar Incident?"

"Yeah, a horrible scene... right out of the Inferno. Apparently PorridgeBoy wanted a cut out of the Tapestry and Locke wasn't having any of it. You don't fail Father Christopher... he's a Jesuit, you know..."

"Mm... I do, so?"

"Well, that's about it. I had to help PorridgeBoy out so that he could return as Gary to Fiona and Cameron. And Locke signed me up as one of Father Christopher's Irregulars. Y'see, I knew all about RageBoy. During one of the Cheney briefings, he'd fingered RageBoy as a suicide bomber... um, he said he was one, plying his trade at New Age Expos in the Boulder area. He'd go in and waste the fuckers. No mercy whatsoever. Father Christopher was rebuilding the Jesus Bunker at the time and had a particular dislike of Oprah and Dr. Phil..."

"How's that connected?"

[Giggle] "It's not."

"Oh."

So anyway, the warbloggers knew RageBoy did the Mulholland Drive run on a regular basis... I don't know where Cheney gets his intelligence, but it's obviously not the sort of stuff that gets into the media or commissions of obfuscation. I've been investigating Eric Norlin and I'll let you know what I come up with... They're bent, those people. Bush, Bush I, Blair, Baker III... all of them... including the Queen of England, a somewhat forgetful Ronnie Reagan and the sponsors from The Carlyle Group..."

"The Carlyle Group?"

"Yeah, they bankroll these things. They always send along one of the Bin Laden family. He sits at the head table with David Icke and the Skull and Bones guys. He's tight with them, but scorns the warbloggers... Anyway, after the main banquet, there'd always be this huge orgy during which Sanders and his buddies would roger the donkey..."

"Serious."

"See-ree-us?"

"See-hee-ree-us! Yeah, really. The head honchos did disgusting things to each other as well... you should see what Dick and W. get up to with QEII... uh, well yes, and when all was said, done and wiped off, W. and those at the head table performed."

"Performed?"

"Party tricks. You know... they'd all turn into giant lizards and fly away. It's in David Icke's new book... You read it yet?"

"Uh, no, actually I haven't..."

"Never mind, it's not relevant. The thing is, I knew if I could RageBoy into one of these things with a semtex vest..."

"Mm..."

"That's why I signed up with the Irregulars and moved into the Jesus Bunker. Besides, Gretchen and Halley were there at the time."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Well, anyway, that's how I got into the Jesus Bunker... the real as opposed to the fake one..."

"Huh... sorry, you're losing me..."

"Don't worry... there's a difference... I'll explain it sometime. The bottom line is that RageBoy was the only blogger doing the Mulholland Road route on a regular basis. Gary, Chris, and Frank were, to be quite candid, nice guys. They just didn't have the necessary... evil, if you will. Not that Father Christopher or RageBoy or Locke..."

"Of course not... I didn't think..."

"Yeah. Besides, I'd proposed marriage to the other guys and was in a bit of a quandary. If any one of them had accepted..."

"Huh!"

"Yeah, but luckily they're all married and Wendy wouldn't hear of it... so that's basically why Father Christopher became my Spiritual Guide and Mentor. A good Catholic and all."

"Mm..."

"So that's it."

"Huh? But what has any of this to do with Mulholland Drive? What about Diane Selwyn?"

"What? Oh, yeah... jeez, that Betty is something, eh? Diane Selwyn doesn't exist. She's Jennifer Symes, the girl to whom Lynch dedicates the movie. It's her story. Sort of..."

"Oh, yes. The dedication at the end. You mention it above."

"Yeah, she died. A bad scene. An ugly end."

"Good grief. So do you think..."

"No. Lynch had this thing on the boil as a mini-series a long time before that. But it doesn't matter. It's all about her. And us."


'Look ... where's this going? What do you want me to do?' Adam

Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule | But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel.

Lynch, who might be taken for Justin Thoreaux's Adam Kesher, paints himself subject to the power of big money (the film's genesis attests to how the TV networks screwed him over). Nevertheless, for all the black humor, sinister undertones, and uncanny insight, he is a deft painter wielding a light brush. Take the sex scenes. Where extra-marital infidelity is portrayed, it's ho-hum farce. I mean, there are only so many things you can do to lighten the mundane. Besides, this movie is about women making it in a world of gun-dumb males who see them as good fucks and, perhaps, actors.

By giving the love scenes to two women, Lynch entrusts the universe to them rather than a bunch of lamebrain assholes constitutionally incapable of singing the body electric. In many ways, the eroticism of lesbian love is its own cinematic payback. But what of it? It enhances a message and that message is already clear. For decades, women have fought and sustained each other in a world where men treat them as less than human.

"Yeah, that masturbation scene. Brutal stuff."

"Brutal lives. Diane loses herself to her delusions."

"That's my point. People insist this is a love story and, to a degree, I agree with them. But it's not the love of two women for each other; it's Lynch's love of all the women who've ever worked that town. It's his tribute to them. Look at landlady Coco, nutter Louise, and Betty's Aunt Ruth. They're phenomenal. Steeled to take on anything Hollywood can dish out to them, they show their mettle on Mulholland Drive and call the tune. They've been where Diane's been and they've lived to fight another day. The thing that gets me is the way Lynch surrenders the movie to them. He allows them to make it theirs and he becomes a bit player in the movie of his life."

"Along a short stretch of Mulholland Drive."

"Yeah. He rides that road."

"Sort of 'RageBoy Does the Movies'"

"In a sense. I don't know what some hold against RageBoy. He balances Locke's chastity and channels Father Christopher's frustrations. It's all good stuff, really. He rubs some women up the wrong way, I know, but I've often wondered why."

"Eh?"

"Read a couple of hundred blogs written by males and see how many bring women into their writing. Naturally, as an essential part of experiencing themselves and the world. Generally, when it comes to women, men are constitutionally incapable of honesty, much less acknowledging or trying to come to terms with the roles women play in their lives. Again, repression. RageBoy represses little. Mind you, that's what led to his downfall."

"Mm... I heard about that. Has he found a job yet?"

"Yeah, but that's not what I mean. He volunteered for Father Christopher's suicide-bombing squad only after hearing of the 72 vestal virgins. But it's a minor point..."

"RageBoy's?"

"I really wouldn't know..."


'It'll be just like in the movies. We'll pretend to be someone else.' Betty

The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him | Sayin', "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him" | But like Louise always says | "Ya can't look at much, can ya man?" | As she, herself, prepares for him...

Lynch blends sound, music, time, and imagery into his well-mixed paint. His style doesn't change, but it's malleable and he lays it on thick (so thick in fact that his use of stark sets, unobtrusively weird angles and ugly people serve as anchors to whatever one may construe as real). Each scene offers new expression of his bizarre talent. How's about those clicking stiletto heels, the dumb cops faces, the clink of the keys, and that song...

Betty and Rita are down at the Silencio. Shades of Dali does Cabaret dance across the screen. Rebekah Del Rio sings Llorando (Orbison's Crying done a capella in Spanish) and you just know you've just died and landed in the middle of Betty's audition.

Betty goes to this audition... Ah, Naomi Watts is fucking great. "She's from Idaho," I tell Wendy when she first appears, in the company of an evil old couple representing every bent and twisted human instinct squeezed into frozen smiles pasted to ugly visages (mom, dad and everyone in between). I'm a sucker for girls like Betty, even though I know the perennial smile complementing her blonde-haired, blue-eyed sparkle will soon turn to a grinning death's head.

Well, her eyes aren't blue but they sure as hell could be. She's from everywhere and nowhere in particular. So... after hiding Rita (who looks like she stepped out of La Dolce Vita) in her aunt's apartment (a cinematographic museum without any overt evidence of it being so), she goes off to an audition she's rehearsed with her unlikely mirror, Rita. Performance art is one thing; acting another. Lynch gives Betty room to deliver a transcendental performance creating something new form that given her. It's a great piece of theatre and one of the most powerful scenes I've seen on film...

Sucked into it, one realizes the artist's obligation to paint truth with simple materials. Paradoxically, it is also the scene in which Diane begins to lose herself... As she slips from Betty Blue Eyes form Ontario into a sex goddess and slag, she starts blurring the distinction between herself and Rita. Her success becomes her loneliness and she finds herself starring in a movie of her own making, Nightmare on Betty Elms Street. Y'know, "They got some hungry women there | And they really make a mess outa you." Diane has too many personas, slights and hurts to repress, and she does not have Lynch's authority to control them.

"You still there?"

"Yeah, sorry. I was thinking of something Tom Matrullo said."

"What?"

"Things change, y'know, whether in Diane's head or ours. Tom was questioning blogging... as we all do... occasionally. He writes:

What beckoned once was the promise of complexity. What has arrived seems suspiciously like the fulfillment of an order of standard-issue self-celebritizing rectilinear white USian fetishes.

Who ordered that?

The hope of blogs was that it would show us how, when we address issues, we miss them, because we forever have them in our sights. Discourse is not transparent, communication occurs somewhat obliquely, if at all, sliding between the trackbars and RSS feeds. After all, if communication actually were taking place, wouldn't we have it all figured out by now?

"Mm..."

"I dunno. What's he saying? He points to an aggregator, but aggregation is always pretty sordid. From a blogging perspective, it's lowest-common denominator stuff. It aggregates the aggregators, the two-line link-farm bloggers. It doesn't preclude widespread communication though; it aids it. These sites widen the spread of a coarse base. Look at Diane as an aggregation of all we perceive Hollywood to be. She's the norm... but even then, she's not."

"How'd you figure that?"

"Well, there are thousands like her but, do to the individual what you will, you cannot touch the identity that rides Mulholland Drive. She does so figuratively, through Lynch. Her thoughts and dreams are and remain her own. Aggregated bloggers reckon they have it all figured out, but they don't. They're dumb and don't have a clue. They end up on BlogRunner, enlightening nobody; they're media whores trolling for traffic. Real bloggers ask questions, like Tom. They have to, because they don't know what the fuck is going on. They ride Mulholland Drive and find answers. It makes them interesting."

"Well, that's true but..."

"Look, we're all media whores to a degree and it's best we stay that way. We don't want all the answers. Otherwise we get stuck on Mulholland Drive. But we're safe if we communicate. Communication is all about not knowing what's going on. Tom illustrates that in his follow up post. He locates the question differently, as a signpost for journalism (casting bloggers in the role of Other as "...the nightworld, the bad dream, the chaotic seething mass") and it works."

"Umm..."

"Answers prompt questions. I mean, if I knew all the answers, I'd probably shoot myself too. Think of Kurtz. Getting trapped in the answers is death. As soon as Diane figured it all out, she committed suicide."

"You ride Mulholland Drive too often, you get to find all the answers?"

"Yeah. Everything gets blurry and ends up coming together."

"I can see why it attracts RageBoy then. But isn't he playing with fire spending so much time up there?"

"No. Not as long as he keeps asking the questions... It'll keep him off the aggregators for sure; I mean, look at traffic to his site compared to Dave Winer, Doc Searls, or the quiet, informed opinion of David Weinberger. He's nowhere. Why? He asks questions. He's honest and he's out of control. Nobody is able to rein him in. Most people don't like that. They'd rather he joined them in the cesspit city, writing letters to the editor demanding that the local authorities clean up Mulholland Drive."

"If you say so."

"I do. It's all about the questions, not the answers. Questions add complexity, complexity distinction, distinction clarity. Ironic, eh?"

"So how does that translate to the blogs?"

"Because, although 'standard-issue self-celebritizing rectilinear white USian fetishes' dominate blogging, we still find the complexities, including those Tom offers so frequently. It's a matter of discernment, of taste if you will."

"Philosophical, all of a sudden, aren't we?"

"Well, it's Matrullo, you know. You have to pick your words carefully around that guy. I once had a teacher who used to beat me with a dictionary, but that's another story... But, okay, there's another aspect of Tom's question that intrigues me. Blogs do show us how, when we address issues, we miss them. What blogs can't do, and that's where blogs will always rise to new lows, is show us how to fix that. Ultimately, it's up to us. In other words, he and RageBoy can pose the questions, but only we can try answering them. And every answer's going to be different. That's communication. It's very much an individual thing. What rubs off, rubs off."

"Mm... Want an Aspirin?"

"No... Yeah.. be more enthusiastic. Blog the dark side. Either we all start sniffing Boulder air or we're going to end up watching our brains atrophy and our roads wash away on Mulholland Drive. It's a ghastly thought... I wrote Father Christopher about it the other day. 'How does one go insane?' I asked. 'Fuck you,' he replied. I'd like to try an easier, more acceptable way. I think a truckload of acid and an all-nighter on route 36 might do the trick."

"Sounds dodgy."

"I'll let you know what happens."

One last aside on the movie. In sharing his passion for those who give their all to their profession and will do anything to live it—from the privileged to the poor, the waitresses, extras, heiresses, models, hookers, and natural-born killers to those who don't make it, despite giving it their best shot, David Lynch tells us a lot about himself and what we do. But he also raises many questions. Not all of them need answers. One thing's for sure. The sunset boulevard of the inner city bears little resemblance to the dark, twisting drive snaking its way through the hills and ravines of our psyches.

I don't know how Jennifer Symes's Jeep Cherokee came to plough into several parked cars in L.A. at 06:20 on April 2, 2001. It doesn't matter. Perhaps it did to David Lynch, but that doesn't matter either. What matters; to me, and perhaps to nobody else, is what came before and afterwards.

Yes, we each have our Mulholland Drive as much as we each have our own story and that's why I'm moving to Florida (it's better than filming in Canada). We have no need of Hollywood or those who run it. We are free to make our own movies however and whenever we choose to do so, for our own or for other reasons. We can traverse our minds at will, responding to or ignoring that which we see, as long as we're prepared to hang in there for the duration; as long as we're prepared to do the long, sometimes scary run along Mulholland Drive, and as long as we're prepared to take the consequences.

In the end, there is no turning back.

To hell with Iris and A Beautiful Mind. Mulholland Drive is a beautiful film and a simple story. Given Lynch's outside-in, direct approach to traveling the long road of our psyches (the whole wide universe blown open to the stars and the infinite possibilities and realities of ourselves and nobody; ending, unfortunately but only in this instance, with a gunshot), I have no need of any others.

And yup, it's just struck me that the graphic I've used at the head of this blog for the past couple of months is no accident. It is to Table Mountain what Mulholland Drive is to the Hollywood hills. And a couple of nights ago, our free-to-air station ran Apocalypse Now. Anybody who knows me knows how that movie and the novel on which it was based, Joe Conrad's Heart of Darkness, affected me. Strange people from my past have been phoning me out of the blue, and others have flown in from foreign lands. In the distance, I hear the Doors doing The End.

There's danger on the edge of town | Ride the King's highway, baby | Weird scenes inside the gold mine | Ride the highway west, baby | Ride the snake, ride the snake | To the lake, the ancient lake, baby | The snake is long, seven miles | Ride the snake...

Okay, I'm out of here...

And Madonna, she still has not showed | We see this empty cage now corrode | Where her cape of the stage once had flowed | The fiddler, he now steps to the road | He writes ev'rything's been returned which was owed | On the back of the fish truck that loads | While my conscience explodes | The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain | And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.

Bob Dylan | Visions of Johanna

"Ain’t that Betty something, though?"

"...

Note This is a March entry, reposted for Beat Waydown. Beat is an ardent admirer of Naomi Watts's thespian talents. I, of course, couldn't give a flying continental whether the girl is able to act or not. Because of this, but perhaps because I saw Lost Highway for the first time last week, I feel great affinity for David Lynch's work. And, yes, I hope to do a blog entry on the movie in the next week or so. I've had a chance to read reviews of it but, as far as I'm concerned, they all miss the point. I really don't blame the reviewers. It's not easy being a reputable film critic in these dark and dangerous times. I did find one good review, on Mark Woods's site, shortly after viewing the movie. It has nothing to do with Lost Highway of course, but that too (and as we shall see) is beside the point. As is Naomi Watts's failure to appear in the film. Ehem... I just thought I'd clarify that.

Acquainted With The Night

I have been one acquainted with the night. | I have walked out in rain — and back in rain. | I have outwalked the furthest city light. | I have looked down the saddest city lane. | I have passed by the watchman on his beat | And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

Everyone who was here will tell you about this monumental quiet, and the dignified calm. But what accounts for it? Are New Yorkers walking around Washington Square right now, and strolling smoky streets where only emergency vehicles go, walking slow and calm because to be fully alive to what happened is too much — and they'd be driven mad? Or are they calm precisely because they're alive to the historical magnitude of the event, know what to do despite the horror of it, and therefore can't be driven mad? Is today's calm our civic mask, or the very toughness of our civic wisdom?

Neither, I think. We can be relatively cool today because we are (relatively) all on the same page in time. This cannot be said for our attackers. We measure historical time by a more immediate metric: the human life. Your uncle's life, your friends' life, your own. This is not the only metric available to the human mind, and when people say we're in a war between rival systems or civilizations this is part of what they mean.

In some way we admit to not comprehending that the suicide bomber is saved rather than destroyed by killing himself. But can we comprehend this other way culturally? The people of this rival civilization, if it really exists, may be measuring their time in centuries. That's why you bomb New York: to regain Jerusalem for the ages. To some, the towers went down in the same narrative space as the Hebrew Temple in 70 AD. We cannot, as we say, get our minds around this.

They are on another clock entirely, which means they assign different meaning to yesterday's loss of human life. Their understanding took aim at ours, and hit the center.

But when I turn on my television set, the narrative space shown me cannot hold the possibility that the attack also occurred on a different historical clock, alien to ours. The news has room for only one clock, one grammar in time. And here we meet with the limits of America's civic wisdom. For what the news cannot "hold," the nation cannot behold. On TV, it's still one trusty frame for time. Right now on Manhattan's streets, the ruined air tells of two.

Jay Rosen: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? September 12, 2001



I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet | When far away an interrupted cry | Came over houses from another street, | But not to call me back or say good-bye;

"Collapsed" is not the right word for what happened to the twin towers; they were somehow turned to dust. Steel beams, glass window panes, cement and gypsum board made those dark surging clouds you’ve seen on television replays. Engineers are starting to explain how. But what engineer can explain dust that was steel and must now have in it human DNA? That is one thing I think about.

Last night I made a friend show me how he downloads video from the Web. I felt ready to watch the Towers go down again and again. Hannah Arendt says somewhere in her writings: "The struggle to believe the evidence of our senses is at the root of all moral life." Show me how to download video so I can begin.

I think about ecstasy. The ecstasy of that half-trained pilot as he approached the moment of impact, and his instant transport to heaven. What time means for me, time did not mean for him. This much I know: there’s a deep rupture there. We call him a suicide; they call him a martyr.

There is too much optimism in this language, which relies on our power to name things and thus define their sense. The struggle to believe the evidence of our senses is a struggle with the lie of language, which cannot hold September eleventh's evidence or make it available to the human mind. When I reflect on that I would sooner have poets bring me the news.

Think about this, because as a professor of journalism I have: There were more people killed in one hour this week than in all the news stories from all those years of trouble in Northern Ireland. The time scale of one is incommensurate with the time scale of the other, although both are held to be "news." You can have funerals with bodies in Belfast and Gaza. We will have our funerals in New York, but most of the bodies are somewhere in that surging cloud I’ll watch again and again on video.

Television reporters do what they can within the word games they have mastered, but their subject exceeds their sense. You cannot report on a rupture in time; you can only stand near the scene and report right into it. Candlelight vigils are silent for a reason. And there is a good moral sense in the three minutes of silence the people of The Netherlands observed this week. They said it all.

Soon workers will be sweeping up the dust in lower Manhattan. The traffic will return; pedestrians will walk the streets again. And the struggle to believe our senses will enter a new phase. But when tomorrow’s news from New York tells of the city getting back to normal, hold on to your doubts and imagine a poet with a microphone reporting live from a rupture.

Jay Rosen: Reporting Live From A Rupture September 16, 2001

And further still at an unearthly height, | O luminary clock against the sky | Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. | I have been one acquainted with the night.

Robert Frost | Acquainted With The Night

Note This entry relates to a two-part August post in which Jay explores "...how the American press might start its own story over after the attacks of 2001." His above work, from a rupture in time, reminds us that poets are sometimes better able to report the news.

Bush Storms to Double-digit Lead...

With apologies to the Guardian's Steve Bell

On the other hand...

For the first time since the Presidential race became a two person contest last spring, there is a clear leader, the latest TIME poll shows. If the 2004 election for President were held today, 52% of likely voters surveyed would vote for President George W. Bush, 41% would vote for Democratic nominee John Kerry, and 3% would vote for Ralph Nader, according to a new TIME poll conducted from Aug. 31 to Sept. 2. more...

High water risin', six inches 'bove my head | Coffins droppin' in the street | Like balloons made out of lead.

Bob Dylan | High Water (From Love and Theft, released September 11, 2001)

The Killing Game

Child's play for big boys...

I gave Commentary a right royal bollocksing when I came across it a few months ago. Ostensibly a site offering informed comment on South African political affairs, its anachronistic, apartheid-era outlook enraged me. I guess I should apologise for slagging it so mercilessly back then. I did so for all the wrong reasons. Today, I can tell you it was not its anachronistic, apartheid-era outlook that curdled my blood. What got me was that its authors, presumably middle-class white South Africans much like yours truly, appeared typically insensitive, ill-informed and clueless.

They still do. In the wake of Mark Thatcher's arrest for allegedly playing a role in financing the botched Equatorial Guinea coup, Laurence Caromba writes:

I will say this: the Foreign Military Assistance Act, under which Thatcher was jailed, is a dumb law. South Africa happens to have a comparative advantage in the mercenary industry, and from a purely economic viewpoint, it doesn't make sense to shut that industry down. Mercenaries, despite their bad rep, do a lot of good. They bring order, stability and security to places where there would otherwise be total anarchy.

Um, yeah. Laurence then goes on to admit his admiration for Scratcher before presuming to interpret my take on his arrest. An anonymous commenter, agreeing with the above, accuses me of misquoting the Gunboat Baroness. Laurence, riding high on the acceptance of his thesis (and not misquoting me), feels his views vindicated.

The gist of the post is that mercenaries, the main body of which comprise legacy South Africans in a hate-filled time warp, make good economic sense. Commentary is certainly not extraordinary in putting money above morality. Most of the South African Guns-and-Jesus brigade do and, believing themselves well-informed and qualified to speak for all South Africans, they take to the Web and make assholes of the rest of us. These people typify whites who believe George W. Bush to be an incarnation of Christ, a saviour and the only person capable of delivering all of us from unending suffering at the hands of a vindictive, inept, and hopelessly corrupt African government.


A bullish market...

I say fuck 'em. They certainly do not speak for me. Besides feeling compelled to clear my good name (I am, after all, a blogger most sensitive to the finer feelings of others), I thought I'd challenge Laurence's view of mercenaries as harbingers of law, order, justice and mercy for all:

Hmm... I'm perturbed by the allegation of a misquote. Particularly one delivered in a 'sneering tone'. Where is it, Anon? Show it to me and I will remove it. I believe Mumsy said as much and, like most of us, knows it to be true. She's also prepared to back her beliefs with cold, hard cash and, as we know, that's always rough on a senior citizen making ends meet on a state pension. Nor, Laurence, would I want to understate Scratcher's status among those with clout as a respectable businessman with impeccable credentials. After all, everyone deserves a second chance, particularly talentless unfortunates devoid of finer feelings and natural entrepreneurial skills.

A few small rejoinders if I may. I do not despise Maggie; I loathe her politics and her trafficking in arms. You might say I have little regard for her. Scratcher's arrest did not fill me with glee; it gave me hope justice will be administered by way of a fair and thorough trial. Guilt is for the presiding magistrate or judge to decide in terms of the law (which is quite articulate, in my view). Sadistic? Huh? I don't get it. Thatcher certainly doesn't look like a man taking a beating. I certainly didn't get a chance to... (ehem) Nor was he jailed. He was placed under house arrest. Lastly, it's Equ[a]torial Guinea and I believe we need look no further than Iraq to find mercenaries foisting on a resentful populace a government (or two) more corrupt than the previous one.

And yes, apropos your reason to back mercenaries, it's good to see the poppies flowering again in Afghanistan. We have to keep the heroin trade going. Economically sound, it'd be a crime to shut it down as the Taleban ragheads did. Laurence, mercenaries work for those paying them. I'd like to know who was paying our Vanderbijlpark bomb maker, Johan Andries Muller Meyer. IOL reports he "...was believed to be facilitating the sales of nuclear devices, apparently to Pakistan."

That certainly ups the ante a bit, eh? Then again, perhaps he's being victimised by the Directorate of Public Prosecutions. However, when push comes to shove and directors of engineering firms to Denn model RL400/2 lathes (used to make centrifuges), I wouldn't like to bet on it.

By the way, I recall you mentioning somewhere you'd be in Cape Town towards the end of the year. Is that right? I'd like to get together for a cup of tea or something if that's possible. That our views differ is perhaps all the more reason to do so.

A cup of tea always goes a long way to clearing up misunderstanding. It's long been my regret that the warbloggers and I are separated by the Atlantic Ocean, although that regret is not always motivated by a desire to drink tea with them. Anyway, my intent was to point out that mercenaries, by definition, kill people for whoever pays them to do so. And I've no gripe with Pakistan but Johan Meyer, evincing a zeal equal to that of AQ Khan for taking mass destruction to new levels, shows a great willingness to do the job wholesale. Besides, in Laurence's world, if Meyer were to be found guilty of supplying nuclear devices to Pakistan, he would be working for "the other side".

I've yet to receive a response from Laurence to my invitation to tea but I do accept that the Internet here in Africa is bound (almost obliged) to be slower than elsewhere. While waiting, it might be a good idea to clear up another misperception. As used as we are to seeing the mercenaries of Blackwater, Erinys, Titan, and their ilk as white Rambo wannabes flying black helicopters, it would be downright unfair (even racist) to continue doing so. Mercenaries, who have been around since Cain mugged Abel, are a democratic, diverse bunch.

Kathryn Cramer's posting of reports of mercenary involvement in the North Ossetia Beslan School Siege should gladden Laurence's heart. From an economic viewpoint, the mercenary industry appears to be remarkably bullish and diverse. The Sofia News Agency quotes a Federal Security Service (FSB) official confirming ten Arab mercenaries killed by Russian troops during the slaughter that ended the siege, leaving close on 400 dead.

With all sides in this so-called Global War on Terror employing mercenaries, we might not have long to wait before Laurence's mercenary "order, stability and security" become the norm. These good things might arrive even before he responds to my invitation to tea, forcing me to eat my words rather than a slice of cake as I sip my cup of Ceylon.

Update September 7, 2004 [Reuters]

South Africa Seizes Uranium Enrichment Materials

South Africa seized 11 shipping containers of uranium enrichment materials in a raid on a firm run by a man it has charged under laws forbidding nuclear proliferation, a government agency said Tuesday. The South African Council for the Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction said the containers were now stored at a safe location and had been sealed by both South African police and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the two agencies would maintain control.

"IAEA inspectors will visit South Africa on a regular basis to inspect nuclear material and related equipment," the council said in a statement. It was the first detailed description of the raid last week by police and other investigators on a small engineering firm that led to charges against 53-year-old Johan Andries Muller Meyer for manufacturing nuclear-related material and exporting goods that could be used to develop nuclear weapons. "At the premises of Tradefin Engineering, 11 shipping containers were found containing components of a centrifuge uranium enrichment plant as well as related documentation," the council said. "Investigations are still ongoing."

more...

"Mercenaries, despite their bad rep, do a lot of good. They bring order, stability and security to places where there would otherwise be total anarchy."

Ho ho ho. Nuff said. Let's leave it at that, eh?

Update September 8, 2004

Mystery WMD-case twist

Weirder and weirder...

Charges were dropped without explanation on Wednesday against a South African engineering company boss accused of trafficking in nuclear-related equipment. The national prosecuting authority announced that all charges against Johan Meyer had been dropped.

Makhosini Nkosi, a spokesman for the authority, refused to explain the decision or confirm whether Meyer had been released. He referred all questions to Abdul Minty, chairman of the South African Council for the Non-proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, who has not yet returned calls seeking comment.

[...]

Police and other investigators also seized 11 shipping containers containing components of a centrifuge uranium enrichment plant and related documentation during a raid at his company, about 90km outside Johannesburg, said the non-proliferation council in a statement on Tuesday.

Meyer's lawyer, Badenhorst, said the items seized also could have benign uses. He maintained on Wednesday there was no link between his client and the weapons network. Meyer was the third South Africa-based suspect arrested on suspicion of providing rogue states with equipment that could be used to make nuclear weapons.

more...

It looks as though this one won't be over until the proverbial fat lady sings...
Update September 9, 2004

Nuke Accused Turns State Witness

Local media said on Thursday that the engineer was exempted from prosecution because he turned state witness. Johan Meyer, the engineer, offered to provide information on the atom-bomb black market in exchange for immunity from prosecution, said a report of the ThisDay newspaper. Meyer was arrested last Thursday evening on charges of contravening the Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Act and the Nuclear Energy Act.

more...

Makes a bit more sense... but a long and much-edited post, damn it.