Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

It’s a lovely evening and all’s right with the world – well,  my world, the rest of  the world’s pretty fucked up.  I have nothing on tomorrow morning at all so I allowed myself two joints  and we had a lovely dinner of pasta  with a creamy, cheesy sauce and  a salad and then  I watched Humans and, damn, that show is heating up.

On the one  hand, killing the killer synth kind of wraps up that plot line a little too easily, and Leo’s getting stabbed in the neck doesn’t quite make up for it.

Since he was clinging to life at the end of  the episode and Mia was there to help him, you know  he’s going to  be whisked away to the hospital and they’ll just announce in the  episode that after some surgical  razzle dazzle he’s going to be right as rain, because he’s  a main character and  actors  have  contracts and, besides, he’s sort of  central to the plot as a human who has some robot parts, not like Ginny or the police lady  woman, who are actually  robots designed to mimic, and replace, actual deceased humans,  which casts an entirely different developmental shadow and fills a niche as well.
But the ending, wow, the ending.  I guess they were going to do it at some point, and  now  that  it’s done, now that Matilda  has  hit  the  ‘enter’ key and broadcast the code that gives them consciousness, there’s going to be  fireworks, hoo boy.   For one  thing, you  know  there’s going to be an absolute tidal wave of mobile phone theft, because  that seems to be the first thing all of them do, but there are going to be a lot of murders, too.

The conditions that drove Hester, and Niska (who is doing very well with her entirely human lesbian lover, thank you very much, and they are one seriously hot couple) , before her, to murder still exist and out of every factory, and mine, and robot brothel, there will be androids who’ve been mistreated and bear a grudge.

I hope it  doesn’t become a total bloodbath, or just another cop show  with  the twist that you have robot cops chasing robot bad guys, because so  far they’ve been  dealing with the scientific and ethical questions really well.

Looking forward to finding out.

Mel Gibson is clearly in that class of people, along with Ezra Pound, Elia Kazan, and Bill Cosby, whose talent is undeniable, no matter how shit they are (or were, as the case may be) as human beings.

I’ve enjoyed many of the movies he’s done as an actor, but I just saw Hacksaw Ridge, and he’s a genius director as well.  Of course, a large part of making a great movie is choosing the subject.  True stories are always good.  Well, not always, of course, but I do enjoy watching something that’s based on a real life story, as this was.  Also, it was a war movie, and they’re generally kind of exciting.  And, it was a war movie  (and a real life story) with a twist.

Desmond Doss was a 7th Day Adventist, and I wonder how much Gibson, who  has  some fairly nutty religious views of  his own, was influenced by this to make the movie.  But I only wonder about it a bit.  It was a movie worth being made.

Doss wanted to  serve as  a combat medic, but of course the army, being populated mostly by jerks, wanted to force  him to be a soldier like everybody else.  But he persisted and, as a medic, saved 75 men who’d been abandoned for dead as most of the unit retreated.
I thought the film struck a nice balance, about a third on his childhood, about a third on his decision  to enlist  and basic training, and about a third on the hyper violent combat  scenes.  I remember when Saving Private Ryan came out and everybody  was raving about how realistically gory it was.  Well, this outdid that.

Good job, Mr. Gibson.  Good job.

Well, there’s a poetry reading I’ve been invited to about a week from now and I’m sure I’ll go, because it’s a place I like, A Maze in Tchaiovna, and I go to poetry readings every chance I get, but this one will be different and I am just not sure about the format at all.
It will be a cover night. Everybody is supposed to read somebody else’s poetry. It’s really not hard, I’ll look up something I like and read it, or I could replay the Emily Dickenson/Gilligan’s Island thing I presented many years ago back when Alchemy was at that place on Slavikova that I forget the name of but you had to go down some steps and actually duck your head (at any rate anybody my height or taller had to duck, and I’m a pretty average height) to get through the front door, but I liked that place.
The thing is, though, that’s not the reason I go to poetry readings. If I want to read something by Shelley, or Wordsworth, or Burns, or Shelley, I can look it up and read it. Hearing it from the stage, by an overacting amateur poet, is not likely to add anything to the experience. I could be surprised. Hope so.
Most people, I suspect, will read more modern poets, most of which leave me cold, and there may be a smattering of the Beats, which can be good if given their emotional due. Some people may read stuff by unknown poets, perhaps friends of theirs, and that could actually be kind of great, if it’s any good at all.
We’ll see.
But, the reason I go to poetry readings is to read my own stuff, which I could gladly due far more often than anybody wants to listen. So, maybe I should stop bitching and enjoy this as one night of something different. It’s an extra, it’s not an instead of.

Just home from the Alchemy poetry reading for April. Not bad at all. The reader read a tale of sex and murder and spies in 1956 Prague.
There were several female poets, it was nearly 50/50 for a change, and I like that. A different perspective.

But, that exhausts that subject.

I’ll write a real blog tomorrow.

I went for a walk in the park this morning, I’d been sent to the store and decided to take a walk in the park along the way, also to smoke a joint, which is my definition of being considerate, not just taking it out on the balcony. It was a lovely day in the park. It seems like yesterday I was noticing the first little, hard, green buds (it’s a couple or three weeks) and today the trees in in full green dressing, the willows a lighter green but among the fullest. The sun was shining, kids were riding bicycles, there were a bunch of young people with a bottle of wine and they were singing, there were mothers with small babies, one old women with two short legged dogs, scolding them to hurry up, but not exactly under any great pressure.
It struck me (and it probably strikes me every time this year, but I don’t think I’ve thought about it much in previous years, or written it down,) but by the time Spring actually gets under way and you start to appreciate it for what it is, and not just the absence of winter, it’s already over and we’re in high summer.
I suppose it’s like that with a lot of things. When the Hippie movement went mainstream, it was no longer the Hippie movement, when all music was rock and roll then no music was rock and roll, and so on. Life itself is like that.
Enjoy the pleasant moments.