Another overrated Catholic film is The Passion of the Christ.

Remember back in 2003/2004 how much The Return of the King and The Passion were pumped up? I'm honestly not making it up after the fact, but when I first saw The Passion of the Christ in the theater, I forced myself to think it was a great film that I liked. I also pretended to like The Return of the King.

Truth be told, in the very opening scene of The Passion, I was totally thrown out of the film by the speed up, slow down, speed up motion device. I was like, "Seriously, you're doing this? This was already dated the first time it was done in the French horror film Brotherhood of the Wolf in 2001." I was deflated.

And like I said, I was thrown out of the film, and wasn't able to really get into it, and the film just kept sort of bullying me out of it. Gibson is for sure a strong filmmaker, but he's all strength, and lacks what I call the film equivalent of the suspended chord in music. Everything with him has to be emboldened, and it gets tiring, like when you're reading the poetry of Roy Campbell, you get a good wash of his richness, and then the next instant you're like, "These hammer and tong lines are getting tiresome."

Like the scene where Jesus writes in the dirt: the exploding, coruscating effect of the dirt flying up like there were crackle bombs under it is, really, quite ridiculous. Why not just totally silent dirt-writing with an overhead shot? But even Gibson's quiet scenes are in their way too emphasized.

Apocalypto is a better film, but the ending never satisfied me. For me, Gibson bungled the ending, the way he filmed it with the wrap around camera and drumbeats to reveal the ships coming in. It's almost nauseatingly commandeering. It should have been a smooth flowing forward dolly following the back of Rudy Youngblood without attempting any reveal, but the ships just gradually coming into the frame as he's running and slowing down to a stop.

That being said, Gibson is capable of the "suspended chord". A perfect example in Apocalypto is when the bad guys show up. There's that still, silent shot in the forest and a thick arm comes into the frame adorned with skulls. All the dread and horror is communicated perfectly in that one moment, and the moment also serves as "flow"; a film needs good "time stream", like water.

Anyways, The Passion of the Christ wasn't a meditative/immersive experience for me, nor did it rattle or shock me in any spiritual way. I remember walking back to the car afterwards and just feeling sort of schizoid.

Then again, I'm not a fan at all of The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of its aesthetic inspirations. The repetitive dolly shots and whatnot...I don't think I've seen a film that I forgot about so quickly after watching it as that film by Dreyer.

I've always preferred The Day of the Jackal to A Man For All Seasons. The latter got fair play at home when growing up, as it does in a lot of Catholic households, and watching it the first time I was like, "Man, this guy is impeccable, unimpeachable! He's a tight, tight, well-oiled morality-in-action machine! He's fantastic! Super, super spotless!" while the dim shadow running alongside was like, "Huh, imagine that."

Every once in a while the scene comes to mind - from the atheist playwright's own words the film was based upon - you know the one with the "hard-hitting" super-truth monologue from Thomas to his Neo-Marxist future son-in-law - and it's like "Something, something something, and where would you stand then in the winds that would blow!!!" and I'm all like "Yeah, Yeah! That's it! You tell it to Meathead, Archie!"

But the Day of the Jackal is just more of a film. Not a morality play managing the medium of film using a historic figure canonized by the Catholic Church as a puppet for rather cut-and-dry depictions of conscience. That's the way plays work, or mediocre plays I suppose. I'm only going by the film, since I haven't watched the play; but it's kind of like, well, it's not much interesting to watch a diamond being formed under pressure, when it's already a diamond to begin with. Yawn. I'm pretty sure the film adaptation of A Man For All Seasons - the attempt to copy that play's impeccable fictional representation - is responsible for a good deal of the self-absorbed promethean neo-pelagianism one encounters today in rigorist Catholics.

When a husband commits adultery and abandons his wife and their children, there are no effects or repercussions in the lives of the children and the wife, and thus there are no effects or repercussions in society.

The belief that effects reverberate in society as a result of the sins of a personal agent, determining society's course and collation, in turn creating structures in which that sin is systematized, is Marxism.

The Airline Virus

I have idea.

What?

Let's have virus labs. People pay to sit in labs.

Because?

Because labs are too big to fail.

Okay.

They infect each other in the labs. Like big viral load.

And?

The labs will have wings. We propagate virus in the sky.

Then?

We'll land the labs down in various countries. Open them up.

This is fine.

Oh for the golden halcyon days of the collapsing cathedrals!

My yearning for those days is immense!

A good number of the Gothic cathedrals were functional failures and only stand today because of modern day technological engineering/problem solving.

A good number of Gothic cathedrals are an inheritance of experimental structural precariousness, of which the entirety of their completion was never achieved due to structural collapse, and today what remains of the whole is preserved through high-tech modern advances.

Living and learning as they went, a good number of high cathedrals collapsed - maybe more collapsed than stand today, I'm not sure - as they possessed no secret sauce medieval code back in the days of the collapsing cathedrals, which was the age of - checks notes - the age of the medieval age.

It can be argued that were it not for modern science/engineering/technology, many of those cathedrals would not be standing today, which falling would be par for the course for the Medievals. They were used to that, and they would just start building more. You live and learn.

I remember being up in the rafters of Holy Rosary Cathedral when I was helping to hang the new crucifix, and I was like, "This is it? Man, this is bare bones! Just one step too heavy to the side off this main beam and I'll go straight through the plaster and break my neck on one of the pews down below!"

That would make a great story in the spirit of Flannery O'Connor. And Pigeon Man peered down through the hole in the plaster and saw Paul sprawled with broken neck in the pews, and he said, "Coo, coo, he would've been a good man it was a church pew to break his neck every minute of his life."

Ha ha!

What a disturbing story!

Had a run in with a stranger the other day - or rather, he imposed himself and interrupted my work in order to expound at great length on every one of his conspiracy theories and how much he knows about what is going on.

I'm standing there in my usual too-kind endurance with my arms full of branches I had pruned, and this guy is just rattling on and on, and then hijacking every one of my words to prolong his interruption, completely oblivious to the rudeness of his holding me up. You know how you begin saying something to wind down the (very one-sided) conversation, leading to a courteous close, and the person just keeps freakishly honing in on your words to tie back into a means to continue his monologues? It's practically a form of abuse.

So here's one more to add to the roster: isolation measures at the beginning of the pandemic were the Big Mistake. The isolation measures are what got us into the present mess of so many infections and deaths. The isolation/lock-down is what actually led to an increase of the virus, because all the less-at-risk non-old people who could have been developing Herd ImmunityTM spent that time away from each other.

We put ourselves in the position of the weak immunity of the indigenous people who were devastated by the colonial pox (to which, it is implied, the white man had herd immunity).

Prior to this, he was saying how the virus was a media ploy to herd us sheep (he used the term 'sheep', and I was like, funny how all you enlightened individualists uniformly use the word 'sheep'), after all - as he proceeded to tell me in the highly original individualist's awakened thoughts, like I don't know this thing called the internet and read all the same crap he's repeating to me on it - how many people do you know who have the virus? Ask anyone, who do you know who contracted the virus?

So you start to realize why such people need to cast themselves as prophets. Because normal people see what they say - how simultaneously the virus is an overblown media deception in order to herd us sheep and a super-spreading virus due to the isolation/lock-down measures - and know that in order to proceed further down that line of contradictory thinking requires more and more red pills glasses of arsenic kool-aid, and so people laugh off or punch down with scorn (whichever according to various personalities) such blatantly insane garbage. These conspiricists isolate themselves through their cerebral and spiritual abuse/manipulation of others and dress it up as 'I'm a prophet of the wilderness!'

The fact that recognizing the plain reality that the isolation measures - late and bungled as they were - went effectively towards flattening the curve (leading to 'this is all an overreaction!' as the experts warned would happen) and the premature 're-opening' of the economy in certain places is causing the numbers to spike back - that simply this is too much for these people to process, is weird. It's almost as if - oh, I don't know, like they were desperately frightened sheep.

Anyways, beside that, he had a complete inability to hear what I actually said (none of which was argumentative), listening only for what he could work into his cerebral bubble world.

For instance, he began talking about work, and asked me about my work, and so on, and I say to him that I've been lucky with regards to work because I don't work around anyone, and that I work alone. He immediately says,  'Oh you reveal how much the media is controlling your thoughts when you say that', and I'm like WTF you stupid dick, I was simply saying that I'm lucky my work situation hasn't changed (i.e. unemployment) due to the fact that I don't work in an office/work-community/customer contact type environment.

Nor was his 'mishearing' an innocent mistake. We were talking about unemployment. This guy was completely listening only for certain things, and then imposing those things on my speech: he was conditioned to think - because he is controlled by the media that he reads and listens to - that I was saying I was lucky, due to working alone, that I'm at low to no risk of contracting the virus. In other words, the first thing that must be on my mind is 'fear of the virus'.

So what do you call someone who is conditioned to hear what other people say as only the bleating of conditioned sheep? That person is a sheep when it comes to their own intellectual/perceptual comfort, and a narcissistic wolf towards others.

Huh, imagine that.

When I was working at the grocery store all those years ago, whenever this song came on the sound system, I would stop what I was doing and sort of go into a trance. It was actually this song that got me into Dire Straits.

Without getting into personal journey stories (I'm incapable of memoir), the lyrics substituted in a rough sort of way as a yearning for God - even as the seed of faith was saying, He's right here, closer than you know, identifying himself with your most vulnerable self.

Still, there is room - God permits it - for his creature, to express his longing. It's everywhere in the Old Testament, in the psalms.

This song is definitely my favourite from the True Colours album. Neil Finn's vocals sound like Geddy Lee.

But that's not the reason it's my fave.

Those persistent, chiming, sinuous guitar chords. They're always lagging behind, and they're always moving things forward.

When the oppressed tin foil conspiracists succeed in ridding from the market the billion gazillion dog-whistle Masonic symbols everywhere imbedded in advertising (which we would not know about were it not for their prophetic decoding vigilance), by the result of an awakening in mass protests (since there's so many of them and they are so ready to act for justice) - a purge that is so necessary because such symbology has a nefarious unconscious influence regardless of how aware people are of it - then I will adopt an ironically detached air about the whole thing, since I'm not a Freemason nor am tainted by Freemasonry (whenever I saw a Dodge Ram truck, I never thought, "Ah, good, the Masons!"), and I'll say what a bunch of virtue-signallers, and what's going to be next - the obelisk in St. Peter's Square?

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Huh, look at that. Football fans in New Zealand putting social distancing behind them - the sheeple.

Now, one has reservations about being optimistic about such situations. Still, they were declared virus free, and here's the point: what happened then? Well, they proceeded to enjoy social life.

But I thought all these safety measures were a highly coordinated globalist takeover, to be put in place indefinitely as we sheepishly and stupidly accepted it and surrendered our freedoms because we are sheeple?

Maybe New Zealand is just a false flag? an insidious coordinated plan to get all countries onto the woke agenda?

Huh, imagine that.

Breaking the Waves

Safety measures break the wave, so you can prepare and coordinate, and deal with the next smaller one, until you have it down to traceable pockets, or to status of entirely virus free. Because it's a natural virus with a lifespan (not the half-life of nuclear radiation) requiring your respiratory system to propagate itself while being unable to live on any given surface past 72 hours.

Otherwise what you have is not diminishing waves, but one single super-tsunami that "just washes over the country" with no end in sight.

The interesting thing about everything the medical experts have been telling us with regards to safety measures, is that what to some ears sounds "draconian" is in fact quite optimistic - in the best sense of the word. That is, the safety measures actually have an effective end that is totally within the realm of possibility. After which, the measures are no longer necessary. But the fundamentalist who absolutizes everything in a bid to fight what he perceives as draconian, is actually helping to perpetuate a super-draconian virus and a truly dreadful scenario.

Extremists like their extremes, and they'll bend every particular of concrete reality to fit their extremes (because of which they are also the biggest ambiguous fence-sitters who are forever vamping off of every situation according as it pleases them).

It's a hoax goes merrily skipping hand in hand with let's welcome this pandemic as a super-tsunami pandemic, and in no other form, because absolutes!

Super-tsunami pandemic is in fact the direct offspring of "It's a hoax!"

Super-tsunami pandemic is also the offspring of "This is all an overreaction!"

Super-tsunami pandemic is also the offspring of "You're all just the sheeple lapdogs of modernist science!"

Super-tsunami pandemic is also the offspring of "The cure is worse than the disease!"

Super-tsunami pandemic is also the offspring of "God will protect us if we are just presumptuous enough yelling freedom!"

Super-tsunami pandemic is also the offspring of "These safety measures are the equivalence of the Jews being packed into train cars and taken to the gas chambers! Oh I walked into the store and there was plexiglass - oh the persecution!"

Super-tsunami pandemic is also the offspring of "The stock market is the best it has ever been!"

When you're too cool for the enduring chill

I wonder if many Catholic intellectuals have a crystalline "respect" for historic systemic racism, in much the same way they respect the "objective" historical split between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic church. It's a convenient avenue to maintain your status as spectator, and to treat your silent complicity like it holds the Great Pending Answer we're all supposed to be hanging on.

In other words, in the same way they regard as nominalism any act or gesture that would move towards union between east and west, because "objective history" which needs to be "respected", so they regard as a form of nominalism any acts to make change in society, to seek to be anti-racist, to take down Confederate statues, etc.

It would certainly be consistent with their nominalistic impulse to over-crystallize their ideology to the point that they feel any approach of reality as a chaotic vertigo of confusion and disaster, or alternatively to feel it as an embarrassing downgrading of their superclear intellect to the messy hordes of lost sheeple.

Do your part for the earth

Build a bat box.

Help the bats! They'll help us!

They release swarms of ducks on the locusts.

Let's get the bats on them mosquitoes (and other pests!)

"Bats are amazing animals that are vital to the health of our environment and economy. Although we may not always see them, bats are hard at work all around the world each night – eating thousands of insects, pollinating flowers, and spreading seeds that grow new plants and trees. Step outside around dusk and take a few moments to look for bats in your neighbourhood!"

"...bats save the agricultural industry in North America $3.7 billion every year."

The painter is the first viewer

The more that an artist develops an image, the more risks are created of the image being deficient/insufficient.

That is not an argument against development.

It is an argument for it.

One is seeking to open as many doors and windows as possible on one's conception across the surface of the painting. Those doors and those windows ultimately exist in the viewer, and the painter is the first viewer.

The more deeply an artist draws upon the original conception, the more that each successive layer ignores what is already on the canvas.

Ha ha ha!

All Statues Matter

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