I’m looking into building some real Egyptian-style arithmetic into our School of Tomorrow curriculum, perhaps transliterated into Python. I explain more of my rationale on Synergeo and places.
From my outbox (fixed a typo):
Remember, we often study Midhat Gazale’s Number and Gnomon.
In the meantime, the technical literature feels pretty opaque to me so far.
Here’s a sample from this morning’s inbox:
Longer rconstructions are suggested to reconnect aspects of Egyptian fraction division from 1202 CE to 1925 BCE as inverted to proposed 3,100-year older multiplication origins. Intermediate 300 BCE Greek (Archimedes) quotient and remainder square root approximations of the upper and lower limits of pi, decoded from a Byzantine text, were exposed by a three step inverse proportion method in 2012. The method was adopted by Arabs, Fibonacci and Galileo. The older second step apparently was used by Babylonians and/or Egyptians inverted division to multiplication. An implied third step, accuracy level, may have been trivial, and therefore was not required by Greeks, Arabs, Fibonacci and Galileo in scribal shorthand data.
A false impression that might develop when reading my “movie reviews” (more like recalls, mixed with reverie) is that once I’ve posted a synopsis, I never look back. Another movie in the bag, no longer worth thinking about. That’d be wrong of course. I continue to data mine for treasures, and keep finding them, as I retrospectively rearrange the facts of my experience.
Like take the Bee TV movie, which I’ve only recently seen: what is it about bees the gets our attention, beyond simply being stung? I’d say it’s that they dance to show the way.
What if humans are like that too; in many wisdom traditions that’s how they’re portrayed. Where did we ever get the idea that “truth” is something one scribes on parchment, articulates in print? Why not learn a lesson from the bees and talk about communicating truth through dance, through performance?
Timing matters in that case.
In terms of parchment though, I use it a lot, meaning I’ll keyboard these blog posts (electronic parchment) and doodle with sharpies in my bus binders. When I ride public transit, I’ll sometimes take a binder along in my briefcase. I might read while we’re lurching along, and then stop at a coffee shop to do a recall and add my two cents. That’s my model of the PWS in GST really: input (reading), value added (edit/recombine), output (posts and doodles… performance art).
I might be pondering performance art and dancing bees for another reason: the surrealist cabaret I took in last night at Clinton Street Theater.
Was I the oldest one present? No matter, at least I was in costume, and could hob knob in line (a couple blocks) with another geek, who once worked in the Silicon Hills, a lesser used moniker for a sister city in some dimensions (talking demographics): Austin, TX.
He / him is a long time friend of visiting faculty (they / she). He talked NSA, FBI, Carnivore… a well-known shoptalk in geek circles. I talked nonprofits (NGOs).
I learned more about how this cabaret was likely organized: a call goes out, acts get submitted, and the selected eight acts get sequenced with an intermission.
The clowns with their collection boxes, wandering the aisles during showtime, reminded me of the clowns in Bhutan, who performed the same function, especially focusing on us tourists, there for the experience.
I’m thinking of a car trip we took to a famous festival, I wonder if I’ll recognize the name of the town from Google Earth… Wangdue Phodrang. I remember it pretty well.
I have events queued, and then there’s my scheduler. It’d be fun to write science fiction where the so-called mental faculties were invented after computer science. We might say that’s how it was: the abacus came first. Somewhere anyway.
What comes first in locale A is sometimes very late to show up in B’s storyline. And that’s not saying B is deficient in some way. The existence of spatiotemporal permutations need not imply some moral gradient. Some ethnicities worry way too much about goodies vs baddies, when we’re just doing the math.
One of those as yet unscheduled events is my birthday (May 17), the celebratory lunch, which could be within a wide range of dates. Another event involves an art show opening, not my first rodeo on that score, and related to Wanderers.
I still hang out with various Wanderers and Thirsters, although not always during official meetups. Portland is still a “small town” in some respects, meaning our many networks are somewhat aware of one another, because they overlap. Somewhat. Small but not that small.
My film studies kick took me back into English lit for a spell, into William Blake in particular. Those studies have taken me to various YouTube channels, such as Esoterica by Dr. Justin Sledge.
No one calls Blake’s Albion saga a work of science fiction, but they could. He’s using myth, like we do in Martian Math, and psychology. Urizenites might complain it “lacks rigor” (don’t they always?).
I’m seeing Blake somewhat in the Romantic lineage, the conventional wisdom, but yes, he’s something of a singularity, more like a Tolkien or C.S. Lewis in how he engages in world creation, populating his vista with allegorical archetypes, or Egregores, the four Zoas, and their fallen forms and emanations. Definitely a namespace.
Not only does he write about these agentic players, he engraves them for our viewing pleasure. The guy was a multi-media genius, foreshadowing Tomorrowland’s animations.
Perplexity wasn’t that impressed when I tried to prompt up some ties twixt Blake and Bayes, as in Bayes’ Theorem.
In data science lore, we talk about the pushback the Bayesians got from the Frequentists. The latter complained of “subjectivism” which got me thinking about what I’d learned from Rorty, and from Kierkegaard himself, about Kierkegaard.
Another queued event: taking in a movie about discovering bees watching television (another allegory by the sound of it). I’ve been reading some of the buzz (it’s not new). After that, I’ve queued posting a review.
Yay to Quadray Coordinates taking off. We’ve come a long way from Wikipedia’s special badge, affixed to the article, saying this stuff might be right, but it’s not important to know. Something to that effect. Weird editorializing — what people get away with around the Bucky stuff all the time, right?
Now we’ve entered an era when LLMs have incorporated “the small but growing body of research” into Hilbert Space, at the same time the new quadray implementations work to embed them in Hilbert Space as indigenous, as isn’t that where any coordinate system belongs? It’ll need an inner product to play well with the others therefore.
On my end, I’m happy to feed the LLMs but don’t feel any inclination to make my implementation of “simplicial coordinates” (as some call them) a creature within Hilbert Space. I’m curious how the OED will define them. Will the Wikipedia article get flooded with slop as the XYZers mount a hostile takeover (it wouldn’t be the first time).
We’re doing fine without an inner product, even as we define a distance formula.
We enjoy life outside of Linear Algebra. There’s enough “family resemblance” (Wittgenstein) with Linear Algebra to get by.
My intent, all along, has been the exposition of Synergetics the namespace, so it’s important that any IVM-to-XYZ conversion give primacy to a unit edged tetrahedron, and that this be the diagonal of our volume 3 cube, relative to which the XYZ unit cube will have an irrational volume of 1.06066…, i.e. the Synergetics Constant (S3) will jump into the foreground.
A lot of developers in the quadrays space betray no awareness of S3.
Here I’m journaling some misconceptions of mine that I may continue to indulge even if they’re “my babies” i.e. I made them up. Actually, in both cases, I think I’m not alone in holding them.
Firstly: somewhere I picked up the notion that the Oval Office in the White House was shaped that way because that’s the cross-section of the human skull: an oval. The office of the chief executive is figuratively the brains of the USG, or is at least the seat of an important gland.
“Not so” says Gemini:
George Washington had other memes in mind when he elected to go for that oval shape. Though the "brains of the operation" idea is an interesting metaphor, the architectural intent was focused on the democratization of social space rather than biological resemblance.
Secondly: the dome at Auroville, called the Matrimandi, is reminiscent of a geodesic sphere, like Spaceship Earth at EPCOT,
But on closer inspection I think we need to put the Matrimandi outside the category of “geodesic sphere” to keep our concepts more precise. EPCOT’s is one, Auroville’s isn’t. No big deal. They’re both meant to inspire a global sense of kinship.
I might confess to being a tad self-indulgent in getting the tiramisu French toast, more of a desert, but then breakfast-desert is a thing, per any Waffle House. Petite Patissierie is a tad more upscale.
We had planned to rendezvous at Landmark across the street, but as the new owner informed Dave, who go there first, it’d be a couple more weeks at least before it opened.
The new owner is a former owner of Float On, the floatation tank boutique at one time managed from the top floor of the Pauling House, the website talking about John C. Lilly, a floatation tank pioneer.
Dr. Lilly used his flotation tank time attempting telepathy with the dolphin species. The tanks themselves were further east on Hawthorne Boulevard, at street level, and remain in use to this day, the business having reconfigured.
Don Wardwell brought along a book by Stephen Hawking he was borrowing, for us to skim while we awaiting our orders. We boasted to the wait staff how Don had been in tight orbit around Stephen at times when Dr. Hawking was working with ISEPP, Terry’s NGO. Stephen came to Cascadia a few times.
That’s how Wanderers arose, in conjunction with the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series that ISEPP organized.
The Linus Pauling House itself was not a main venue for these lectures, although occasionally we’d get lucky, and a visiting MVP would join our group for a more intimate talk. Dr, Susan Haak for example, talked to us about Pragmatism.
These around-the-table discussions were in contrast to the large public lectures they’d be giving to ticket holders in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall (“The Schnitz”) and in the nearby stone church, likewise on the South Park Blocks (shared with PSU and Portland Art Museum).
Sometimes we would take our guest to lunch at Than Thao, a few doors down. Mario Livio comes to mind.
Terry, ISEPP president, would also drive his guests around Oregon to visit schools, such as high schools, community colleges and universities. Some of these schools were also donors to the lecture program. We also had corporate donors, such as Mentor Graphics.
Special ticket holders for the lectures, many of which are written up in these journals (Sir Roger Penrose, Jane Goodall…), got another perk: a catered dinner at the Heathman, after the lecture, during which the invited guest could be plied with more questions, over wine, coffee and dessert.
My wife Dawn Wicca was the bookkeeper for this operation (I’d help out with the mailing database), getting us on the list for this special Heathman dinner privilege. The Pauling House itself is only a few blocks away from my domicile.
These days, with the lecture series in the rear view mirror, Wanderers still find ways to meet, and of course to wander solo, perhaps as hikers. Or to wander in packs, like Brenda the biker (although she drove her car into town this time).
Speaking of Brenda, see ordered a fancy beet juice drink, which she let us sip, which got use talking about Jitterbug Perfume, the book by Tom Robbins. She was able to find the forward online, and read it allowed to our party.
The backstory here (hey, it’s my journal) is I’d hoped to return the five DVD set of Orson Welles content to MMU on SE Belmont, and maybe score something else (F for Fake maybe? They didn’t have that — or maybe I searched wrong? I’ll double-check later).
However, after I’d plunked the vids case through the return slot, a sharp clerk fished them up and cued me to the fact that I’d only returned four of the five disc (despite the printed reminder message on the case, and despite my having glanced at the multi-DVD container before heading out and persuading myself I had all five).
Nope. Number five was still at home in the player, I realized at that point. My bad. So I’d need to come back later on a second try.
But in the meantime, on the way home (I was walking), why not see this 3:45 matinee, a cartoon (animation), at The Bagdad? End of backstory.
OK, now let’s cut to a central scene in the movie, one I considered most relevant to a subject I study, namely Synergetic Geometry as pioneered by the late, great, one-and-only, R. Buckminster Fuller (RBF).
I’m talking about the geodesic sphere we found ourselves within as a point of view, the concave inner surface omni-triangulated (I was looking for pentagon patterns)). At the center of this sphere is like a Marvin the Martian and/or Darth Vader gun, set to destroy a whole civilization or planet — the backdrop for this story is the whole galaxy of many planets, reminiscent Little Prince.
Surrounding the giant gun, which is drawing power from the imprisoned princess (a mommy to minions), are concentric gyroscopic wheels (not unlike in Lawnmower Man, the B-movie).
I could see why the baddies felt powerful in controlling such a precessional gizmo. All they needed was some girl-boss-turned-slave energy to make their evil and destructive dreams come true.
But then the other girl boss, the older sister, appeared with the Mario Brothers and a friend, and, deus ex machina, convexity met concavity (their two hands) through the glass, eliciting an even more primal energy, and the evil design was exploded.
Precession favors the regenerative. I could see kids might be getting the message.
The domineering male archetype (symbolized a father-son pair of death cult dinosaurs) takes a back seat to a more nurturing civilization-building female energy.
By the time I got home and had all five DVDs ready, it had started raining, so I accomplished the return (successful this time (I cued the guy: “all there this time”) by car, while steaming an artichoke in the Instant Pot pressure cooker.
Per these recent movie reviews, I’ve been continuing my Film Studies with MMU, thinking ahead to where “a production” produces more lasting results than mere movie lot props, as our props will be made for the real world.
Tough Guys links me to trains and thereby to steel (I think of that Amtrak on the Steel bridge — a digital picture I took during No Kings 3.0) whereas the five disc set on Orson Welles takes me back into Martian Math, as well as the noir genre.
Picture one of those yurt-n-dome-based windmill-powered communities I’ve been positing for Mongolia or Siberia, with Alaska-Cascadia-based campground prototypes. Such installations would naturally attract documentary makers, as well as inspire science fiction (such as about a train tunnel under the Bering Strait perhaps).
On the Wanderers front, Terry passed me his latest thinking at the Spring Equinox, which I triple-hole punched and added to my “bus reading” binder, to which same binder I today added a hardcopy of Daniel’s paper on Blake vs Newton and Bimetallism i.e. Gold vs Silver (so also Economics in flavor).
We had a follow-up breakfast at Bread and Ink, as Tom’s (our customary venue) was still closed owing to that kitchen fire.
Speaking of Tom’s, the new food pod is almost complete: the food carts are open and operating, it’s just the indoor commons that’s still under construction.
Terry’s paper traces what he considers to be two flavors of thermodynamics, one tracing through the Carnots and the other through Boltzmann and others. Did Newton really recant infinitesimals? Lots to track down. Terry’s thinking inspires me to see in terms grand polarities, with equatorial geodesics tracing a tightrope walk between the two, a dialectic hybrid or unity-of-opposites.
As usual, I left the meeting with a lot to think about, and while my queries were fresh in my mind, I ran a Deep Research prompt through Perplexity and got back what I consider to be worthy Philosophy of Engineering, which I file under Cascadian Pragmatism (a useful categorization more than some textbook definition).
That’s the second time in about a week that the LLM’s (“gossip-bot’s”) output as come across as worthy of memorializing on GitHub, directly pasting the Markdown copy into Markdown cells in a Jupyter Notebook. The earlier prompt, regarding namespaces using the 4D meme, was likewise “perfecto” (picture an Italian chef, making that perfecto gesture).
I didn't expect I'd be spending my morning wrestling with the Periodic Table. Talk about back to basics. The back story is I was visiting my PythonAnywhere application, a teaching stack, Flask atop Python with SQLite on the side, and noticed my half-assed demo wasn't actually bullet-proof. I'd only disable any editing later, before the hack. A couple lines in my Glossary had been defaced.
In the process of refreshing the Glossary (geek terms, wrote it myself), I noticed the Periodic Table was far from complete, with less than half the 118 elements I knew were out there. That's when I fired up a new Jupyter Notebook, to document the process, top to bottom, of taking two CSV sources, merging them, and extracting just what I needed to fit a pre-existing mold.
That's all in the foreground. In the background, an out-of-control city-state known as The District (aka City of Morons in these journals) is threatening to attack Persia and destroy it, in retaliation for its own psychotic war of aggression. If this were a farm animal, we'd put it down, quick and easy, but given we're dealing with the Pentagon (now private sector), we have to factor in the criminal element (organized crime runs that shop, we all know).
I'm far away in Portland, Oregon and don't engage in any message traffic with any official DCers, except on Facebook maybe, where I'll write comments like "too late" if it's someone posing as “from the USA" (snicker). Sorry Charlie, you're not persuading me any more with that flavor of BS; we haven't had a real USA in some decades, per our Medal of Freedom winning hero.
BTW, I recommend not contacting the defacer sticking an email address in my database. I never did. But I wanted to show what enterprising hackers might accomplish. Actually, in this case, nothing all that special had to happen as the code's weaknesses were all mine. Fortunately, it's a learning application, designed to be hacked on. I'm learning.
Also, I'm not gonna try Manus through Meta. If I try Manus, it won't be in a way Meta knows anything about.
As I do somewhat often, I deliberately avoided any opinion pieces (aka reviews) regarding this movie, but had seen the previews. However I’d stereotyped the type of film somewhat inaccurately. The film proved somewhat surprising in other words, such as by including a song number, a female vocalist (and main character) hearkening back to those noirs of the 1930s-1950s I’ve been sampling.
I’d expected more of a special effects high action movie, with a lot of kinetics, and this film had that, but its axis of emotional depth as well as intellectual depth was more than that of many comic book derivatives I associate with this genre. I haven’t read the novel behind it, which explains a lot of my cluelessness, which I was fine with (I’m clueless about a lotta stuff).
The smart part is its juxtaposition of high school biology with phenomena of an astrophysical scale, condensing solar systems to Petri dish ecosystems model-able in the lab. Suns are dying because of an infection, and antibodies must be sought. The humans push their technology, leveraging the very biohazard they’re fighting, and the one guy at the tip of the human spear encounters a counterpart with the same objective, so they form an alliance.
As we were leaving the theater I overhead one viewer saying “I didn’t expect it would be that funny” which well-encapsulates my own sense of surprise as well.
For some readers, "rendering" may have a negative connotation, perhaps associated with something a butcher might do vs-a-vs meat. In my namespace, it's a softer meaning: ray-tracings, renderings into visible vistas of mathematical objects ("making the invisible visible"), as in "render farms".
However, as an English speaker and as someone into Shakespeare, as well as Norman O. Brown, I can't claim to control all the connotations. Misreadings are ever possible, and are not even discouraged.
With that opening for context, let me say Johnny Stallings knows how to render Hamlet effectively, as a read performance, presented at a podium, but with props, a mini-play. He actually dons hand-puppets when he gets to the play-within-a-play (a big part of Hamlet is the play staged in its interior), and when we get to the Alas Poor Yorick part, he pulls out Budget Skull from its box.
The Yorick part got me off on a tangent later as I associate that scene with a performance by one Andrius Kulikauskas in my backyard, with a bubble-head named Zoltar, an homunculus. Hence the selfie (one of the embedded slides), as even though Andrius was the principal actor, we're talking about my memories.
The setting for this rendering was also a big part of the experience: a maze of rooms in a gigantic space, a Presbyterian Church that has creatively morphed into a dual-purpose community center named Taborspace (it's on the northwest slope of Mt. Tabor).
Until one of the other invitees pointed it out, I hadn't realized there was a literal labyrinth just outside our Artspace window.
Speaking of the other invitees, this was a very hip-to-Hamlet crowd. One guy immediately noticed Johnny's version omitted some famous concluding lines. However Johnny's pithy densification of a four-hour plus marathon is told from Hamlet's viewpoint, and since he's dead by this scene, it makes no sense to include it.
You'll find Johnny appearing throughout these blogs over the years, not only in association with Shakespeare, but Walt Whitman as well. I have Nick Consoletti to thank for cluing me into the Stallings namespace lo these many years ago, when I saw him do King Lear as a one man show.
Hi Jim --I hope you and/or rybo will post summaries of your findings from Lehmanville per your new geometry group. Adderley also has a group with overlapping membership; I've not heard from him lately (he's in Australia, well remembers the heyday when we started up a Synergetics subculture in Cascadia, in Seattle, distinct from the SNEC operation, with its own funding / sponsors).
This was the 1982 version; I hear there’s another one. I’d have to say it’s an early spy story, set after the American Revolution set off the one in France (per some tellings), and wherein the “Bond” character is quite effete, a dancer-prancer type, a flaneur, a fop. But it’s all an affectation (a disguise) as in reality he’s fighting bravely for the crown, against depraved terrorists.
The terrorists in this case are the scary hoi polloi, a Pol Pot style mob some might say, chopping the heads off anyone with eyeglasses or who otherwise looks like they can read or, worse (code): dance the minuet and other courtly numbers. People of culture in other words, not riffraff.
“Chop chop” goes the guillotine, and the crowd roars its approval, “Off with their heads!”.
Our movie audience (the spectators, those for whom this spectacle was made) should be feeling revulsion and disgust by now, mixed with righteous outrage. How is this “Enlightenment” in any meaningful sense? It all seems so cheap and tawdry.
Countering all this madness is the Scarlett Pimpernel, who / which understands the necessity of a strong monarchy to prevent just these kinds of mental illness from spreading virally.
The SP is somewhat a Society, a peer group (think Three Musketeers) but also is lead by our hero, the faux dandy, so “fake n gay” to sound like Candace.
It’s obviously a spy movie because it’s all about betrayal, defections, switching sides, or at least appearing to, or… unless you’re quite dedicated to puzzling it all out (cut to snoring on the couch) there’s no way to be much besides confused.
And the disguises, let’s not forget the disguises.
We’re always wondering if SP is sincere in his love for his lady love, as in the first chapter of their relationship he uses their romantic picnic together as another occasion to smuggle another aristocrat out of the looney bin (where the patients now run the show). So he’s using her as a human shield of some kind?
No, he sees her as fighting the same oppressor. At first that is. Then he has reason to doubt. Then he has reason to have faith again. See what I mean? He has his ups and downs. She, meanwhile, is trying to fathom his calculus and is likewise doubtful of his integrity.
Anyway, there’s a superhero superpower coloring to the whole thing, which is of course intentional as that’s what fiction is all about doing, usually: creating larger-than-life characters who swashbuckle their way through all kinds of obstacle courses in unlikely, sometimes oddball, ways.
We woke up to the dreaded news of Monster U outta control again.
I’m seeing Biden and Trump were human shields, too senile to really take the heat for the dummy beginner mistakes made by presidents Blinken and Rubio respectively. I’ll do more satire some other time.
Grok completely rewrote my prompt.
What Grok wrote (based on my initial input):
A cinematic movie theater screen displaying the iconic final scene from Thelma & Louise: a 1991 Ford Thunderbird convertible driven by Benjamin Netanyahu as Thelma and Marco Rubio as Louise, both in character as the heroic women, plunging off the edge of the Grand Canyon cliff into the abyss in a dramatic leap of defiance, dust and sunlight streaming dramatically, wide shot of the car mid-air against the vast canyon, the scene framed as a large movie screen in a dark theater with faint audience silhouettes, humorous and satirical political comedy style
Try it yourself? I’m outta tokens. Not everyone uses Grok, I realize, but at free tier I’ve found it generous with how many freebies it lets me choose from.
From my outbox:
From my angle both Biden and Trump were way too burned out to be key decision makers. They're just human shields, these senile presidents.What I see is Secretary Blinken, and now Secretary Rubio (doubling as NSC chief) arrogating "superpowers" (extraordinary authority, as in extra judicial) in the background, aggressing against Russia and Iran respectively, and losing big time because neither is the brainiac each supposes.
Damn, vanity sure is rampant among the so-called "leadership" (snicker).
Where it looks to me Fuller was headed was towards a “geared trig” based on what he called Scheherazade numbers. With gear teeth that fine, would we ever need something finer for physics engines (models)? Instead of trailing off indefinitely, we could stay with definite terminating numbers — as we must anyway in the real world.
When it comes to visualizations on a computer screen, the threshold is pretty low i.e. there’s no way to register a difference of higher frequency than the resolution of the monitor. Under the hood though, we can carry the overhead needed to go higher precision if we need to, which is where computer algebra systems come into play.
There’s a pall across the land, a sense of deadness, as people come to grips with (a) having no leadership and (b) the prospect of an all-out brawl in the Middle East for no coherent reason other than tempers are running high. No cold calculations suggest spazzing out would be productive, but who coldly calculates anymore?
I woke up feeling a bit on the woozy side, and I’m not blaming Duvall. Even this many hours later, I don’t think I’m at 100%. Something I ate maybe; either the oyster stew or the juicer carrots.
Is this just a boring journal, like a diary, where I write about diet and flatulence (thinking of Darwin, sorry)? I’d say it’s not just that, but I do want to keep it quirkily individual, clearly written by a human and not some bot. It’s getting hard to tell anymore.
My line on AI is that “artificial intelligence” has always been with us. You’ll get that from other thinkers besides me. Improved intelligence is a direction, and means a lot of things, where “artificial” or “phony” is the other direction, pretending we have just the two (an oversimplification in other words).
More sense vs less sense: as much as some are concentrating and curating sense, so are others maybe squandering it, and maybe that’s fine.
Housecleaning matters. Old, obsolete belief systems needn’t be kept “alive” on life support. There comes a point where suspending disbelief becomes impossible. Beliefs can’t be forced, which is why we have the words “persuaded” and “convinced”. Sure, one might feign beliefs, to get ahead in the party, but if they feel forced upon one, or from one, then they’re experienced as inauthentic, insincere, and therefore prone to crumble, dust to dust.
The veggie heads (those with no brains left, heads stuffed with straw, alas) tend to stumble towards war in hopes of that making more sense somehow. They’re drawn to the flames by their sense of what’s needed: more intel.
The zombie trope is likewise nothing new. In a way, we’re all on the same page.
You might imagine I’d seen this by now, or at least heard of it. Why? Because I extol eXistenZ, another Crononberg film that came out around the same time as The Matrix, and received less notice.
Coming from that background, of having seen eXistenZ more than once, you’ll appreciate how much I found The Videodrome (another “The” movie, like a noir) to be its precursor.
I’m sure critics have already gone to town with the observation, cashed it in so to speak, but to me, a recent initiate, it’s all new. I haven’t read what the critics say nor consulted Perplexity regarding this film. I was blindsided, as they say.
The Criterion Collection 2nd disc (this was from MMU) contains a lengthy (23 min) panel discussion in which Cronenberg and a couple other directors have a moderated panel discussion of the MAA’s movie rating system: G, PG, R, and X. Quite a bit has changed since then.
Cronenberg, from Canada, with even harsher UK-based censorship, was pushing for a rating between PG and R (right?) and since then we’ve seen TV14 appear. Also, X is now MA (Mature Audiences).
The Videodrome is talking about viewer-voyeurism, how the observer is drawn in, in this case Civic TV, a “small station” i.e. literally a “little me everyone” (meaning “Everyman” in the language of Chaucer — in the namespace of learning about Chaucer & Co. in a school setting, I shoulda said).
Everyman can’t take his eyes away from the public hanging or guillotine extravaganza or whatever it is, and this satellite TV show outta Malaysia (not slander, no worries — later Pittsburgh is revealed to be the true source (a spoiler)) is gonna be a likely hit on Civic TV, which specializes in the lurid tabloid stuff that makes money on Times Square (which has done much to clean up its image of late).
I loved the “subterranean lady” character, who still makes old-fashioned X-rated stuff, almost Victorian peep show in its naïveté. Civic TV wants more raw violence, forget the sex stuff. American Psycho might be just around the corner, stealing market share. I’d been on a Christian Bale kick earlier.
Why I liked watching this movie in the sequence I’ve been following, meaning earlier noirs (The Glass Key and The Hidden Room most recently), is partly the sense of continuity I experienced.
The viewer-voyeur (the average tax-paying voter) is being taken by the TV into the smarmy underground of hinted-at perversions and occult rituals, very Epstein. Telegenic televangelists rule somehow, in this newly emergent Donahue-Oprah world, where we get more of a look at everywoman (Everyman is all-genders, partly why he went out of style, for sounding too gender-definitive).
I can hear the lawyers now (figuratively, not “voices” no): ear piercing is the everyday business of cosmetology shops the world over, so trying to sexualize the process in erotic comedy (a serious scene judging by lighting) won’t get us an X, how could it? We’re not showing more than you’d see at an everyday tattoo parlor (sorry, body art shop).
The rules are clear (but they’re not, that’s the whole fun of it if you’re making horror films).
The lawyers are doing a lot of such thinking actually: acted-out violence for real crosses a line that grainy documentary-style violence allows, and considers important for propaganda purposes, the MAA allows it; so keep all the worst violence on television, and have viewers viewing it for context.
And when real blood and guts are involved (another line crossed?), have it all pour directly from a television, like in that Frank Zappa number. Use actual sheep guts (I thought the other guy said pig).
When we get to the ear piercing, we’re talking of-age, consenting adults, obviously, so that part is PG. Teens get their ears pierced all the time.
I’m reminded of Victorian times when, they say, curvaceous pianos needed ankle covers because Everyman was trying to stay focused and didn’t need the piano writhing like some TV console, in sexual ecstasy or whatever it was, especially during a concert with polite company present. Hallucinations might mean brain tumor, as we all know. So cover up those piano ankles already.The “eye of the beholder” is hard to capture, as it’s the one doing the beholding, but this film does a good job. It makes Mr. Civic TV be an alert, intelligent businessman, someone women find attractive. Everyman can identify. He’s like a Neo. The well-worn formulae remain intact and the movie makes money at the box office, as it’s supposed to.
Greetings from CrowTown y'all. I'm reminded this morning, as I've been sharing with friends, of Jim & Patty, valued Portland business owners who've shared many fun chapters with us, through their various enterprises. I often reminisce about All Y'All, the E Broadway smoked meats restaurant with southern cooking (ocra, catfish, stuff like that).
What might've triggered my most recent recollections, actually I'm sure of it, was having pointed out to me a property in the Pearl explicitly named Jim and Patty's by Jim and Patty. Well before that, they had shops all over town branded Coffee People, with clever marketing. Portlanders flocked to the place. We had one in our neighborhood here on Hawthorne. That property has since morphed into a series of excellent restaurants, another one on the way.
During a Wanderers meetup a long ways back, we got a report from one of those Shark Tank events wherein would be entrepreneurs would pitch their plans to would be venture capitalists (VCs), and we learned not just one of the business plans featured technology focused on seniors, improving life quality for older folks. For example: how to combat early onset senility, or any kind of senility? Proposal: pepper life with fun little puzzles, like if you wanna open this fridge, do this cryptogram in your head right now, or starve, only $10.99 a month.
So do I have onset issues at 67? It pays to remember we're all born extremely senile, although that's not the word for it. "Incompetent" would be considered mean also. So when I can't remember how a certain digit sequence maps to something so obvious as a touchtone phone keyboard, I forgive myself for being like that today, because I've always been like that. I'm no superman, let's restate the obvious for the record.
I'd say on average I've been doing pretty well for my age group, in many ways thanks to a generous donor, a good friend, who gifted me with that gym-quality elliptical, a device I've used for many hours in past chapters, as a loyal gym member who took advantage of my privileges. I'd started working out at Princeton, taking their gym class more out of curiosity than anything. I came as an alien, ready to sample what "Ivy League" was supposed to mean. Would their gym class be any different? I'd say the coaches were quite good. All I was doing was working out recreationally, no team sports, no rowing or anything like that. I had no time for such commitments.
Then I got into running, after my hallway-based guidance counselor, an older student, a university-recognized position, pointed out I was gaining weight at a somewhat alarming rate (this would be me in my early 20s, having been thin enough through high school). Thanks to Roberto, I was out the window (literally, not the door) onto the adjacent golf course, running with a pack. Princeton Inn has been drastically remodeled and renamed since then, although its overhaul is nothing, compared to what they did to the dinky station (the dinky being our affectionate name for a shuttle train out to the main Amtrak line, twixt New York and Philadelphia).
