Gifts from Japan

Sydney and I visited with our friend newly back from Japan, accepting gifts to pass on to our circle, pictures also. 

Sydney is a chocolate English Labrador.  Her main hobbies are eating, sleeping, and grazing like a cow, smelling things. She’s so well-behaved she’s earned her right to walk around the block leash free.

In the news, the Lower48, part of the post USA diaspora, is being subjected to tyrannical rule by a Monster U (aka USSA) engaging in reckless out-of-control warring with no popular mandate. 

Post USA indeed. Pretty obvious, if there’s some awareness.

We look to the Global U to help us with teach ins, about how we got here and how we might make it to a next chapter.

Scapegoating one man is relatively easy. The people hiding behind the scapegoat enjoy having their human shield.  Wealth creation (adding life support) takes more planning.

Our syllabus uses technical shoptalk like LAWCAP and GRUNCH, a lot of which got amplified in the Occupy chapter (which we’ve been revisiting this Summer Term at School of Tomorrow).

For lunch I had Korean BBQ, from a food truck in one of the pods I frequent.

Pattern Language: the Alcove

:: annotated mother goose atop global matrix ::

Sheep Detectives (movie review)

I caught this one on Prime, my curiosity piqued by a positive review from Beth, who has years of experience raising sheep in rural Oregon, and is also a retired librarian who consumes media at an amazing rate, like Rosalie does. 

This so-called Mercado Group (where our book club got started) has been meeting for years and is a steady source of guidance when it comes to my studies, especially when it comes to fiction.

Sheep Detectives is a clever movie, weaving the whodunnit genre, the murder mystery, with more existential explorations of mortality. The sheep do not have an adult human’s view of death, except the older wise ones who remember stuff. Usually, sheep just want to forget.

However what keeps sheep wanting to remember are unsolved puzzles, such as who killed George, their good-hearted shepherd who has been hoping to reunite with his two kids, whom he had put up for adoption (I’ve forgotten why already, baa!). 

A good memory is a prerequisite for detective work. Lilly, a loyal and intelligent sheep, teams up with the elder sheep to bring the killer(s) to justice. She fights off the temptation to go unconscious, prizing self awareness which is likewise awareness of otherness (Synergetics for Sheep could be a slide deck).

The most singular trope in this move is that of the “winter sheep”, a divergent introvert that wants to belong as a youngster but over time learns to accept its loner status, with a more distant relationship to the herd.

We have both a noob (a lamb) and a senior (older sheep) of the winter type, helping us plot the trajectory, the arc, of such an archetype, portrayed unpromising at first (an ugly duckling) but as noble and helpful to the herd’s long term survival in the end (swan). 

Sheep dynamics are a kind of mind dynamics, which includes being super forgetful.

The integration of live action actors with animated talking sheep is quite impressive. These two forms of mammal intelligence, four legged and biped, seamlessly share the same sense of humanity, including a sense of loss when dear ones depart, and a wish to avenge victims of foul play by detecting the perps.

The dynamics in question map to individuals for sure, but also to more Machiavellian entities, such as states, which likewise engage in subterfuge (e.g. false flag attacks) as well as bumbling, clueless behavior. What inspires the bumbling police guy to snap out of it, finally, are the off camera (from his point of view) antics of the sheep, whom we might map to other fairy tales with invisible spirit worlds (e.g. ghosts). 

X-Day Again

I’m not gonna devote this blog post to church (of the Subgenius) arcana. Per my Fun Homework YouTube you might know that I don’t have anywhere close to the encyclopedic knowledge of church lore to the extent some do, whether ordained or not (I never had reverend status).

Instead, I’m gonna continue with my account of July 4, the day before (X-Day is celebrated on July 5, and is like a family event, never in competition with Burning Man. There’s a documentary you could view.

So I got off to an active start with the bike loop, like old times (S2P). Then what? Well, I got into Wandering mode meaning I had all kinds of fantasies about where I was going, with some pegged objectives (catch the fireworks at least), so I didn’t set out to see Minions 3 at the Fox Tower Regal. Again, I had the theater mostly to myself. I enjoyed the movie a lot and will get back to it later.

After that, I circled back to the waterfront having come downtown by FX2, and whaddya know I got a perfect direct line of sight to one of the main Blues Festival stages, just north of the bridge, on which I was standing. Great sound. Great bands. Great crowd, with many pouring across the bridge in both directions, which had to get raised soon after I arrived: two, not one, two fireworks barges were ready to take their places for the after dark show.

By the time the fireworks started, I was back on the east side (of the river) where a custom DJ booth took advantage of the echo under I-5, and they did an excellent job of it. Their music made a perfect soundtrack for the visuals, the fireworks. And yes, I did notice all those people having dinner on the bridge in that cordoned off area. Very imaginative.

I walked from my viewpoint through OMSI parking lots to Tilikum Crossing, the same stop where I often hop on the FX2 with my bicycle. This time though, given the emptying out of the downtown, the FX2s were hopelessly full, so I decided to walk to Powell and grab a 9, transferring to a 75 at Chavez, with enough layover time to shop at Safeway for all American cheese puffs and Diet Dr. P. 

There’s a corny carnivalesque aspect to July 4 ceremonies. People are serious about not being too serious. I overheard some people singing the theme song of Team America, World Police, which is satirical. 

A sense of pride emanates from a cosmopolitan city like Portland cuz, for all the negative spin doctoring, it’s that proverbial “melting pot” people keep registering their skepticism about, as too pie-in-the-sky. 

But it’s the on-the-ground reality, this wealth of diversity sharing in the festivities. We’re not talking about speculative eventualities. We’re melting in a melting pot whether we like it or not. The Portland vibe is we like it, as we already melted long ago and just wanna stay what we already are: weird. 

We wear that word “weird” as a badge of pride, all kidding aside, and with the support (not opposition) of the commercial sector. Visitors have come to expect said weirdness just like when you’re in Gotham you expect there might be a Joker lurking in there somewhere. Ditto: weirdness lurks. Think “incommensurability” maybe.

Blues Festival on KBOO