On A Public Execution

While the proposal did get officially shot down, I wrote this piece on the matter on October 13 while on the bus and what would be little more than mere moral aestheticism being defended in the denunciation towards the idea. Case in point being I would rather it be available to see, rather than an open secret of an autocratic decree.  

I'm listening to the audio put on Spotify as a podcast of Real Time With Bill Maher. The topic of discussion on this recent episode is that of the announced possibility of a publicly viewable livestreamed execution by firing squad this coming December 3rd. To die is Nidal Malik Hasan, a former psychiatrist for the Army Medical Corps now death row inmate; incarcerated for perpetrating the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, killing 13 people and leaving 32 others with injuries; committed in opposition to deployment. It's an idea which has stirred up quite a ruckus. Much of what is being said to the matter is vocal distaste, and with what seems a notably bipartisan denunciation.

Public execution is a tradition which is quite rich in history, its vacancy in the Western Hemisphere coming about only in the last century of cultural development. Abroad, this culminated in France with the beheading of the criminal Hamida Djandoubi via the guillotine before an audience in September of 1977. The final sanctioned public spectacle of death in the United States occurred in 1934 with the hanging of convicted rapist Rainey Bethea. Nevertheless while the event ceased happening in public ceremony, there has been executions done, mainly with the method of lethal injection; itself with its own brewing controversy currently due to a death botched not once but an unheard of two times. Beyond that, depending on ones perspective the occasions of public execution only ceased in a way gilded by state-approval, and that the act persisted and perpetuates in ways even to this day; with such murderous intent before, or with, a mob like lynchings or, more recently, the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Appearing as guests on Real Time in opposition to the announced death webcam event the soon to be retired US Senator Thom Tillis and Sara Eisen, in conversation with host Bill Maher, expressed their disapproval in convergence on the optics of it. Tillis not being against the whole of the idea, but finding it ill-conceived to be livestreamed for all to see; to which Eisen agrees, likening the possible broadcast to an ISIS beheading video. The essence of the discussion is that of presented moral aesthetics; a mirroring power move and little else.

Undeniably, the act would be an intentional display of power enacted in a way that imitated the public executions more common in the Islamic sphere of the world, given the current war between the US and Iran, as well as he who is to be killed having exclaimed, "Allahu Ackbar!" when he enacted his defiant massacre. That said, and with a diverging similarity to the opinion given by Senator Tillis: if the death sentence is going to be carried out anyway, why not let it be on optionally viewed display? Doing so would be a clear documentation stained into the mind of the broader society. Of course on another hand it does open to the possible creation of martyrs; or campaigns of fear enacted onto the populus; or stirring the masses up into bloodthirsty Hate-Week-style frenzies. Much to do with the last one seems a projected fear of personally longed for proclivities.

AM:FM Review

GHOSTEMANE released the long-awaited AM:FM this past Friday, October 23, his first full-feature album since the climactic ANTI-ICON in 2020; with a few collaboratory singles and EP's scarcely scattered in between. It is undeniably dark in its atmosphere, but in that not so innately brutal with reflective lyricism on the dopamine-deprived-sludge state of sobriety and responsibilities decreed with the experience of having children. The genre-fluid artist does what he does best on this album with its unique delivery of blended sonic blasts new and innovative as well as reminiscent and calling back to past mixes. 

Opening with a heavy and hard hitting trio, Alive!, Deus Ex Machina, and Miazma belt out their fusion of distorted guitars and rhyming declarations. Into then, the singles released in anticipation of the rest of the album: Zero Day, a song getting its namesake and lyrical motif's from a 2002 film that depicts two high school seniors as they plot and eventually enact a school shooting, being heavily influenced by the 1999 Columbine High School Massacre; melding into the fugue of BucketList, a stoner's litany evocative of GHOSTEMANE's 2015 tape Astral Kreepin. Jupiter begins a descent into a more industrial edge, though this will peak in a further song on the track list. Slowing down quite a bit to a more passive number in the midst of the outlet aggression with Hyperdrive, its synths like a Swearr song and pattering drum loop. Retaining the slower pace with Mean Girls, but nevertheless as forthright as ever. Cyberia, the most explicitly industrial song, bringing to mind Skinny Puppy or Nine Inch Nails. Getting to Get Gone with a bombastic rap on dealing with that of a parasitic nature. NSFW enters in then with similarity to FLESH and bleeds out all the fucks it can. Close now to tying it off with Noose Knot, but cutting it at a close moment. Melodically tapering off with a somber note. A Fire In The Sky ends the album with a sound that is reminding of Iridescent by Linkin Park.

Altogether AM:FM presents a solid piece of artistic output and capability, as if it wasn't evident enough already. 

The Truth About Big Pillow Industry

Ever start eating the grass growing in the courtyard because you paralyzed the air and can’t breathe after you ate too many ants at the Walmart... It’s a regular occurrence for the people in Wales who came from Mississippi after the Galactic Empire took over Kashyyk and enslaved all the Wookies when the sun set at the dawn of Groundhog Day. Really though all of it can be blamed on Bill Maher when he shot a crossbow at Saul Goodman over a parking spot in the outer area of Narnia, in the middle of a territorial dispute with the French. This being the result in of itself of remaining Separatist factions still loyal to Count Dooku’s cause, the war on drugs that he waged in collaboration with Jeffrey Dahmer. This relationship began over breakfast on Saturn, prepared for the two by Aleister Crowley. However, all was deception for Sauron had returned to Albuquerque. Technically this happened in 1946 after he was resurrected in a ritual performed by Oppenheimer that resulted in the atom bomb, but this was as well a fiasco designed to funnel money into the tampon industry.

7.

Envious of an illusion
Deprived from dissolution

Misshapen, graven instinctual reconfiguration—

Necessary seclusion,

                                 redirected retribution;
Sublimated and innate sin:

Always lost to win back again,
Gradual and perpetual privilege reconsidered;
Placated in pornographic—

Flash-fracture of menial remembrance,
Localized anaesthetic,

                                   aesthetic constitution,

Retrofitted inculcation, ceremonial emotion

6.

Cyber-sexual, private in upper-sector stature,

Loneliness riding in passenger;

Presented with perfect pleasure,

Death-set on the off-grid overture—

overturned bricks and nail polish in the sand,

Black bloodbath at the beach

Painted over by oceanic bleach

5.

Birthdays and funerals, opening scene prelude:
preview for post-mortem rigor mortis caked up death dance;

Bereavement in birth,

Psychotic red-alert—

Uncontested cardiac arrest;
Late-stage, early developed habitation,

Bequeathed asinine agency—
Cauterised chemically insurgent lamentation:
Timely eternal tomorrow full of today's hesitation

Comprehension of Coherence (2013)

A group of friends gathers for a dinner party one night while a comet passes overhead and reality around them muddles. Outside a nexus point between innumerable variations of the occasion opens up, all in various stages of the evening events, situations in life, and wondering if it's all just a ketamine induced trip. It's Schrödinger's cat on a cosmic scale beyond space-time, an exploration of how while the animal that is human kind can coerce much control over nature, even breaking out of the atmosphere into the vast void; acting, in a way, as the universe looking back on itself, but ultimately still subject to celestial forces beyond its dictation. One of the characters does best it, in the form of finding a reality similar enough to her original, killing herself in order to attain it. 

Cloistered: Come Play (2020)

Come Play is a horror movie released in 2020 about an inter-dimensional entity named Larry, who can only be seen through a screen, and looks to take a friend in the form of a nonverbal autistic boy named Oliver. As means of communication, Oliver uses apps that produce speech with a phone or tablet device, and which serve as a window and door for entry for Larry to visibly come into the outside world; with this it encourages Oliver to take its hand and go with it, so as to alleviate its desolate existence. 

Larry is essentially loneliness embodied in a hiding, decrepit, pale, clawing monster feeding on energy. This depiction is reminiscent of that in Ovid's Metamorphoses of Envy personified, an accumulated manifestation of isolation in this instance. A child broadly cut off from fully communicating, isolated by outer influence; a mother trying to do her best, jealous of the father's ability to enthral their son, while also feeling under-appreciated and that he doesn't want to be there for the child; and a father in the process of separating with his wife, while working night shifts in a vacant parking lot to support everything. It manifests by appearing as a story on a device, a short explanatory lamentation which when read aloud acts as a rite for summoning the entity into the home.

Both of Oliver's parents, who are in a somewhat volatile point in their relationship and in the process of splitting up, do try to keep it lite and going for the kid; and each have their own experiences meeting Larry and becoming privy to the existence of the lonesome creature. Sarah, his mother, learns of it while changing out the burst lightbulbs in their living room after a failed (on the behalf of Larry) sleepover with kids Oliver knew from school when she comes upon Oliver's tablet, a replacement for the phone lost in a field after a more negative interaction with the other kids, and reads the illustrated digital incantation; his father discovers the reality shortly after in an altercation at his job, where Oliver is staying there for some time so his mother can sort things out on her end with knowledge of the apparition and its mission, and Larry comes to try taking him. His father has a second encounter soon thereafter where he gets into a subsequent car accident, Larry riding passenger.

Essentially, Larry can interact with the visible world, but is within his own realm that he can only permanently exit with the screen door, and requires a degree of electricity present to continue manifesting there. This happens in the climax of the movie as Sarah frantically throws out all the screen technology from the house, and amidst all the commotion Oliver screams in overstimulation and adds to her distress to the point she sharply pleads, "Why can't you be normal?" to her autistic child. Then, the power completely cuts out across the entire neighbourhood block, lighting up as Larry audibly and invisibly approaches, and through the cast out devices on the lawn climb through the door between realms of reality. All offence taken by his mother's outburst forgotten as they quickly go to hide from the thing searching for him, winding up under a bed. As they lay in silence while pasty white and haggard feet scoured the room around them, when, Oliver exclaims, "Fear!" and begins repeating it, alerting Larry to their location where they make another quick escape, knocking out the nearby lights as they go and causing Larry to dematerialise; though still in pursuit. 

From there they wind up in a field, with no electrical device in their immediate vicinity that would allow Larry to appear on any wavelength, or so they thought. This field turning out to be the same field that Oliver lost his original phone in during a rough encounter with some kids from his class, though as time in the movie moves they all reconcile differences, making a pact against loneliness. With that device then Larry bursts back and after a final chase, Oliver in the motion to take the things hand, his mother quickly steps in and grabs it instead. She disappears as it runs back to the phone; agreeing on not being alone while watching over her son.  The movie then ends after Oliver's father picks him up from speech therapy, waking up later that night to see (through a phone camera-screen) his son playing with his now so close and simultaneously distant mother. 

Indifference to Obsession

Obsession, the movie which seemed to grab attention over this past summer. I didn't watch it at first, it seemed like a less interesting version of Supernatural season four episode eight. That said however, I couldn't truly knock it without giving it a watch; I gave it a spin, so now I can knock it. It's not this grand deep narrative about consent or anything beyond a longwinded gorefest— where visually, it's well done but in terms of plot only surface level. In a way, it reminded me of the X trilogy movies with how those pull on the pathos and make you both love and hate the main characters, drawing you in and longing for more; except with Obsession, the character(s) by and large are not so easily liked and the most 'uncomfortable' part about the movie is sitting through it in one go without being bored. 

Okay, that does seem a bit unbalanced, I will admit.

What the movie does mixes The Monkey's Paw with the tale of Jesse and Jane from Breaking Bad, that has many viewers who can't see beyond surface level assumption think it's a black and white narrative with Bear being this conniving rapist. Such is a wrong assertion based on actually watching the movie. Even before the wish for Nikki to fall in love with him is made, she already displayed a pattern of behavior that centered all of Bear's attention on her in a way that seemingly knew on some vague level but also oblivious to the whole of it. Like Jesse Pinkman bringing substance back into Jane's life then, Bear's wish acts akin to the MDMA which it's noted that Nikki struggles with using; the heroin for her serving as an extenuating factor as well as Bear's wish on what was an assumed gag gift. It is here where the online political commentator and content creator President Sunday makes the succinct point that Bear is as much a victim of the wish made with what was by anyone's mind at first nothing more than a gag gift, but like heroin they all fall under its spell by proxy. Similar to the Monkey's Paw, they fulfil the wish, and not to ruin the story, but it doesn't turn out well.

Both heroin and the wish exacerbate the tendencies of Jane and Nikki, who escalate the circumstances; while Jesse and Bear try to make sense of, as well as mediate the circumstances. The issue is its own escape. None of those involved in the story wanted any of the results to happen, though arguably with Jesse and Jane the overdose was logically conclusive.

Ultimately, Supernatural did it better and in only a bit over 40 minutes. Obsession builds suspense to fill time.

Viewing Through The Looking-Glass (2016)

1. The Movie

Alice Through The Looking-Glass is the 2016 Tim Burton sequel to his 2010 adaptation of Alice In Wonderland. Aside from namesake, this film creates an entirely different and new story— a literal reimagining of the Lewis Carroll book that as well continues the story of the young girl; and such would make sense as most of the two books had been combined in the first movie in the duology. This however, is not a dissection of that departure, more rather a retrospective of the artistic liberty venerated in the creation.

Taking place three years after the events of the first film shows Alice arriving back to London after sailing to China and back, having followed in her late father's footseps. Upon this return she comes to learn Hamish— the man whom she had rejected the quite public marriage proposal of in the prior movie— has taken over the company which her father had been apart of, as well as being the owner of what had been 10% of the company given to Alice's mother by Hamish's father, as well as their house. He uses this as a form of leverage in bitterness over the rejection, to try taking Alice's vessel and forcing her into a compensatory position on land, but only in the stripes of typical womanly work in 1875; and even tries to have her institutionalised with a case of 'female hysteria', to which she escapes from and goes back into Wonderland via a(nother) mirror.  

From the onset the line between reality and fantastical dreams are blurred; as Absolem the blue hookah smoking caterpillar turned butterfly is seen fluttering in close proximity to Alice and then making himself known to her when she left the room after learning how Hamish had deviously concocted the current situation of an uncertain future based on a seeming loss of the past. With that she re-enters the magical world of Wonderland (or, Underland) through a mirror (or looking-glass) to find her friends there in a panic as the Mad Hatter has fallen into a depressive state; which she comes to find out is due to his finding of the first hat he had crafted, and through that reminded of the family who (were believed to have) died when the Jabberwocky attacked on behalf of the Red Queen; and due to this state the Hatter has fallen into, he is on the verge of his own death. Alice at firsts tries to reason with Hatter that dead is dead, and having lost her own father she would seemingly know that it is impossible to bring people back just like that; however, part of her touted line and intrinsic to Wonderland itself is the impossible being possible, in some unconventional form. To that point the White Queen makes known that there is in fact a way for this reunion to happen, by having Alice go meet with Time himself from whom she learns that travelling through time to the past is indeed possible with the aid of a powerful device called the Chronosphere; that also serves as a sort of binding source which the reality for all of Underland past and present hinges on.

The meeting with Time is rather brief, and turned into chase with the Red Queen reappearing searching fot the device herself in order to go back in time so as to change it so that she would, as the eldest, remain the heir to Wonderland's throne instead of her younger sister the White Queen. This being born from a childhood incident coinciding with the Hatters, where the younger White Queen stole a tart from the kitchen and ate it near the young Red Queen's bed and so the latter got the blame; then leading to a scene where the Red Queen hit her head, causing it to swell to large proportion; and later at a coronation-style ceremony where she is being given a crown, the headpiece breaks on her head resulting in the Mad Hatter bursting with laughter and followed by the whole audience present, to which she then threatens all them and rages while being sent away by their monarch parents and her younger sister being chosen as next in line instead.

Alice travels through time with the Chronosphere, bearing witness to much of these past happenings. In doing so, she learns that the Hatter's family is in fact still alive and held hostage by the Red Queen. Launching a rescue mission, they do find them shrunken down and captive in an ant habitat, but in the event the Red Queen takes hold of the Chronosphere and with her sister grabbed goes back to prove the younger White Queen as the thief of the tart; however in doing so the older Red Queen and her child self see themself which creates a time paradox that quickly begins engulfing the entire world of Underland, past and present in a freezing rust. Alice however manages to get the Chronosphere back to its holding spot and all is restored.

With all settled between the once rival sisters in hindsight, and the Hatter family reunited Alice returns to the real world in just the nick of Time to prevent her mother from signing over the family vessel, allowing Hamish to keep the 10% stake and house. With that Alice and her mother sail off on the ship to future adventures.

2. Analysis

While the movie obviously and as aforementioned goes into an entirely separate story than the source book, it does not terribly disparage that core motif from Carroll at all. Alice is consistently shown as a defiantly curious force in facing and enacting impossibilities, arguing with the fantastical elements of the dreamworld while simultaneously utilizing them in an unconscious within the unconscious way to come to the end product of the sublimating experience. She doesn't take a simple answer as fulfilling. With that and the recurring symbolism of entering into the dreamscape via a mirror and concocted story: it is one of a fight against the future while trying to hold onto the past in the present, going against Time himself in defiance against the inevitability of loss and potential death of the dream. "Everyone parts with everything eventually, my dear," Time tells Alice early on.

Having the theme of the death of a dream and the cutting of a tether to old memories, this movie can then be compared to another with the same concept mirrored in its own way: the 1980s dark fantasy film The NeverEnding Story, wherein it is depicted that the death of this childlike imagination and belief, or suspension of disbelief, in the impossible results in the crumbling of ones entire world into nothing. Memory, a glorified and polished image is rusted over into a frozen stagnant void, empty of life. Holding on when there's no longer a tether connecting the boat to the ship prevents one from rowing onward into continued living.