and old movies

[click image]

.

Old movies that help me contemplate the rarefied abstractions of the truthier Out There.

.

Sorry. Somehow the last four videos were sliced off the playlist. It's fixed now. Sorry.

.
love, 99
.

not to slide into nihilism

[click image]

.

I would never go there, but I recognize this as the stuff that sends the unwary down that chute, never to return to the light of day. Turn off your TV. If you are jonesing too hard for something to watch or hear, do old movies with no commercials, or listen to lectures by fascinating people, or podcasts by people into interesting things, or surf around in crafts blogs, or do your housecleaning! Just stay the hell away from marketers of propaganda and products, the pervy purveyors of brain death. I know old movies are jammed full of it, too, and how, but they're old and you don't identify with them. Nobody living will have sucked yer brain out yer eyeballs.

.

Or maybe some George Stevens if Cukor didn't do it for you... anything. Darn the holes in your socks. Take up knitting. Start lifting weights, anything. Just turn off that consarn TV.

.
love, 99
.

my first doctorate was in old movies

[click image]

.

There's the most wonderful old motel down in Crescent City. It's called The Curly Redwood Lodge and it is made completely from one ancient redwood. This would offend my sensibilities no end, except it was built before there was anything like a shortage of redwoods and I'd say these many decades of good service to travelers was far better than the idiots who cut down trees so huge they completely forgot they had NO way to get them to the mill, deciding to make use of the stumps as dance floors.... So, anyway, many was the time when I'd gone walkabout where I ended up there, and find myself not wanting to leave. Not liking Crescent City one bit, but wanting to be in the arms of that tree, with it's pristine clean tile bathrooms, and Turner Classic Movies on the tv... low key... peaceful... not a trace of this steaming dung heap we call our "culture"... just blessed rest... in the arms of an ancient... with the sounds of the sea. When I think of it, I always picture myself watching Notorious, swooning, imagining, just as I did when I was a very young girl.

.
love, 99
.

my heart is broken

[click image]

.

Just shoot me. No really.

.

I should be with these guys....

.

Aww, heck, let's have a little irony for our late night with cloud cover so thick you can't even tell where the biggest full moon is in the sky.

.
love, 99
.

a beauty

[click image]

.

American.

.
love, 99
.

you may be new to insomnia

[insomniacs click image]

.

I would have NO way of knowing.

38 mins ago

Radiation leaked from a crippled nuclear plant in tsunami-ravaged northeastern Japan after a third reactor was rocked by an explosion Tuesday and a fourth caught fire in a dramatic escalation of the 4-day-old catastrophe. The government warned anyone nearby to stay indoors to avoid exposure.

Tokyo also reported slightly elevated radiation levels but officials said the increase was too small to threaten anyone in the capital.

In a nationally televised statement, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said radiation has spread from four reactors of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in Fukushima province, one of the hardest-hit in Friday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the ensuing tsunami that has killed more than 10,000 people.

"The level seems very high, and there is still a very high risk of more radiation coming out," Kan said. "We are making utmost efforts to prevent further explosions and radiation leaks."

42 mins ago

In a sign of mounting fears about the risk of harmful radiation, Air China said it had canceled flights from Beijing and Shanghai to Tokyo, but there was no sign that people were rushing en masse to the capital's airports to leave.

"There has been a fire at the No. 4 reactor and radiation levels in the surrounding area have heightened significantly. The possibility of further radioactive leakage is heightening," a grim-faced Kan said in an address to the nation.

"We are making every effort to prevent the leak from spreading. I know that people are very worried but I would like to ask you to act calmly."

The French embassy in Tokyo warned in an 9 p.m. ET advisory that a low level of radioactive wind could reach the capital — 240 km (150 miles) south of the plant — in about 10 hours.

Winds over the facility are blowing slowly in a southwesterly direction that includes Tokyo but will shift westerly later on Tuesday, a weather official said.

But I figure now is a good time to show you the ropes.

.

UPDATE 1AM, PDT: The fire in the fourth unit has caused it to explode. The evacuation radius has been upped to 30km and there is a big danger of a meltdown. This is getting all the way out of hand.

I don't know if I can stay on this all night. Please leave links if they add anything substantive... or, OUD, please call if I have to get up and run....

.
love, 99
.

for insomniacs

[click image]

.

This, I thought, was a particularly good Michael Tsarion interview on Red Ice. So you will not go far wrong by listening to it instead of counting sheep and with steam rising off yer malfunctioning neurochemistry.

If you feel too birdbrained for that, you could watch a funny shoot-em-up or an old seriously depressing masterpiece....

.
love, 99
.

some cult sci-fi for our evening field work

[click image]

.

I know it can seem not scholarly, but this is part of my doctoral work and full of things to ponder about our cultural conditioning and our psychological landscape in general, but if you have to pick between watching last night's offering and this one, you should go with last night's. There were a ton of indian allegories in it that none of us should miss.

.
love, 99
.

oh, man

[click image]

.

I thought I was going to be in bed hours ago....

.
love, 99
.

benefactors

[click image]

.

This might even out yer chromosomes. It did mine....

.

Just for staying up late with me, a bonus feature....

.
love, 99
.

it's so very maxfield parrish out right now

[click image]

.

For all my griping and moaning, it is exceptionally beautiful here.

.

How about a dumb old Western to take yer mind off it all?

.
love, 99
.

we're easy

[click image]

.

We're damn hummin', now ain't we? Millions marching... people being ground up and used for mulch... hairdos pontificating... space lizards slithering... cyclones gathering... and we're finding space, lending our heartbeats.

.
love, 99
.

let's stick with the heavenly theme, shall we?

[click image]

.

While we are soothing our aching nerves, we can be gaping at the splendors and the horrors of the mental conditioning being pumped into us over the last century, sort of liberating ourselves as we're entertaining ourselves, taking our minds off the hamster wheel and using them to regain a sense of spaciousness....

.
love, 99
.

united states overthrows mubarak

[click image]

.

I don't have any doubts left.

From a 2008 Cairo Embassy cable:

XXXXXXXXXXXX claimed that several opposition forces — including the Wafd, Nasserite, Karama and Tagammu parties, and the Muslim Brotherhood, Kifaya, and Revolutionary Socialist movements — have agreed to support an unwritten plan for a transition to a parliamentary democracy, involving a weakened presidency and an empowered prime minister and parliament, before the scheduled 2011 presidential elections. According to XXXXXXXXXXXX, the opposition is interested in receiving support from the army and the police for a transitional government prior to the 2011 elections. XXXXXXXXXXXX asserted that this plan is so sensitive it cannot be written down.

This would have firmly implanted the idea behind the injection of news items about the suitability of ElBaradei to replace Mubarak, and is bolstered by his having made a much-published "return to Egypt", when it was so short-lived before he retired to Vienna. I don't think he'd been back until the call to prayer last Friday, and this might account for his glum physiognomy and uninspired speechifying these past few days.

He'd rather be in Vienna, but he's been slotted for this ruse and now must show up for it.

It's going to shake out that not only am I positive there are no ACTUAL terrorists anywhere within the global citizenry, but also no ACTUAL revolutionaries, save those who fervently follow those "shining" few who mysteriously take the lead.

Little wonder the meme we-don't-want-to-be-seen-as-picking-the-Egyptian-president is in such heavy rotation. Strictly speaking, it's the gospel truth, but practically-speaking, yes, that would be a bummer, but we're picking him anyway.

It's a wrap.

.

I know, I know, how 'bout an old movie? What could be more relaxing than that?

.
love, 99
.

i can dream

[click images]

.



.




I had gone to a church basement to hear Auster and Arriaga talk. That was odd because to me church basements are where antiwar protests and freedom movements are born, but this time it was to listen to these great authors talk about novels and screenplays and liking directing because you can look at the beautiful women. It's a very, very engaging discussion and I'm having a fine time.

When they are done and the lights come up in the audience, Robin is sitting about two seats from me, and even though he is smiling, I can't tell if he recognizes me. I get him to move to the seat next to me. Now HE seems shy. Yes, yes, he remembers. "You would write and write and write and then face-to-face... fwoosh." He made a hand motion of a young girl disappearing swiftly and smoothly into the pages of time. I said something about how crazy it was to run into him like this, clear out here in the boondocks. He cracked a half smile. He looked genuinely pleased, but also a little distracted with little winces of discomfort so I left him to himself.

Auster and Arriaga were jumping off the stage and talking happily with everyone in their path. We all went out into the parking lot to make for our various cars. I said good-bye to Robin as he hurried to his car. The other two stuck near me, and I got a chance to tell them how I enjoyed their talk so much that now I really had to read their books, telling Auster that a friend had heavily recommended at least half his books to me. He was very pleased about this. I thought this was going to be the end of it, but, no, we were going back in for another.

Inside now there were about ten of us and the church basement was now in Jenner instead of Smith River. [I so love that about dreams. Easiest trip between those two points ever not even conceivable.] Now it wasn't just authors and people coming to listen to a literary discussion. Now it wasn't set up for an audience facing the stage. It was set up like a meeting was to take place and the people doing the staff work keep flipping back and forth between church member volunteers and hotel staff and back. There was a wife there for one or the other of them, and Auster had been showing a great deal of interest in me, but suddenly it was Arriaga who was engaging me in the very friendliest exchanges, and it seemed to be his wife with him, but not taking any of our banter in any way awry... letting us start turning into close friends completely unimpeded by wife energy.

I saw a desk with a mound of cards and papers on it. Right on top was something clearly with my handwriting on it. It had been a card to Bradley Manning wherein I had enclosed some paltry sum toward his defense. I was going to become alarmed, but noticed that there was a note attached to it that they were sorry but they couldn't deliver the donation and had to return it. Things were very busy in preparation for something, and the whole energy stayed a big roiling leaving from the former situation and planning for another one and setting up to do something right now. The energy was seamlessly leaving / staying / returning / conspiring / planning and all of it in an extremely satisfyingly friendly... no... essentially loving atmosphere. Arriaga was saying very wonderful things to me. He made The Connection.

This couldn't have anything to do with my mp3 player continuing to replay until I get up and turn it off, or the fact that my crazy tiredness and need to get back in bed eighty times today was all about me needing to have one of those bouts where I do all my Phase Four and REM for the month at once. My sinuses are taking their turn being the part with the ice picks in them. It moves around my head. It sometimes is my ears, one or the other, and sometimes my EYES, and sometimes my sinuses, with varying participation in the little necklace of lymph nodes at the top of my neck. Anyway, when it is my sinuses all inflamed, I snore so loudly I keep waking myself up... which was what I kept doing every time I tried to succumb to a nap all day. It was just the gods of dreaming finally grabbing me by the throat and slamming me down on my bed that let me get the dreaming in before the snores could prevent it.

So. Now I'm going to pretend I am back at the monastery, getting my coffee and puffing my carcinogens before hitting the Zendo at five. I'm going to—in honor of this pleasant dreaming—pretend that I have finally trained my haywire circadian rhythms to go to sleep at nine and be up by five. The IDEAL schedule for anyone like me.

IS there anyone like that?

.
love, 99
.

underworld usa

[click image]

.

A Cliff Robertson flick, with commercials on DailyMotion....

.
love, 99
.

now that i'm becoming an expert

[click image]

.

I can hardly wait for this.

.
love, 99
.

things change

[click image]

.

Obviously.

.
love, 99
.

have a movie whilst i nap

[click image]

.

Albert Finney has always been one of my favorites.

.
love, 99
.

can't sleep?

[click image]

.

Go for a walk down Memory Lane.

Talk about mental conditioning... OMG.

.
love, 99
.