OBLIVION (HOW LONG?)

Last summer in a cinema, and since then on DVD, our family has enjoyed watching the movie “Oblivion.”

The film is based on an unpublished graphic novel of the same name written by Joseph Kosinski, the picture’s director, and tells the story of Earth following a catastrophic event.  

Without wishing to disclose too much because the film surprises as it unspools, its protagonist, played by Tom Cruise, is a paramilitary technician-cum- repairman stationed aloft among gorgeous clouds, who is responsible for maintaining drone weapons that protect and defend oceanic power stations utilizing sea water to generate fusion energy.  

Like the “dystopic” RoboCop before it, “Oblivion” affectingly, and on a fundamental level, examines what it means to be human and definitively affirms human dignity in the face of exploitative, immoral fascistic forces.  

The acting performances by Cruise, Olga Kurylenko (pictured above), Morgan Freeman (who, thank heaven, goes beyond his usual “phoning it in” posture), Melissa Leo, and particularly Andrea Riseborough as Cruise’s work partner Vika, are all outstanding.

My daughter Jane, who is going to be an engineer (the Gulf Spill oil collector in last position HERE is an example of her previous inventing and design work), set her mind to determining exactly how long it would take for the rapacious dynamo machines in "Oblivion" actually to complete draining all of the waters from Earth’s oceans.   

Her calculations are presented herewith for your perusal.  You are kindly invited to check her work.

Pretty Things: Judgement Day (Link)

FINAL THOUGHTS CONCERNING TOM CRUISE

  The right of individuals to forge their own destiny will yet again be restricted and challenged.  Public peril will be invoked, or the general interest, or even the preservation of humanity itself.  Upright citizens will launch indignant protests against this indefensible activity, this epidemic anarchy with its aim of rescuing each person from mankind’s common lot and creating for him an individual paradise, this deflection of thought processes which will doubtless be labeled intellectual Malthusianism in the near future.   

  

  

 

  What splendid ravages: the principle of usefulness will become foreign to all those who practice this superior vice.  For them, it will at last no longer be a question of applying the mind:  seeing its boundaries dissolve into the distance they will share their ecstasy with all that is ardent and unsatisfied on this earth.  Young people will plunge passionately into this serious, unprofitable game.  It will pervert the course of their lives. 

  The Faculties will be deserted, the laboratories closed down.  The very idea of armies, families, professors, will become inconceivable.  Then, in the face of this ever-increasing disaffection of social life, a great conspiracy of all the dogmatic and realist forces of the world will be organized against the phantom of illusions.  It will win, this coalition of powers dedicated to the principles of why-not and making-the-best-of-it.  But it will be the last crusade of the mind.  And for this battle that is lost in advance, I recruit you today, adventurous, grave hearts, contemptuous of victory, who search the night for an abyss into which to hurl yourselves.  Come, the roster is open.  Queue up at this window, please.

Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (Le Paysan de Paris), translated by Simon Watson-Taylor, London, Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1971.

Sermon: Comparisons Are Invidious

     Before I break down, lose all my cool, and prepare a blog based around The Kinks song “Where Have All The Good Times Gone,” I thought it would be preferable and possibly therapeutic to examine why "comparisons are invidious."  

      I use that expression (become sort of a cliché) often because it seems frequently to apply these contentious days where the worst are definitely filled with passionate intensity and popular humor has devolved into endless repeated expressions of dark-hearted sarcasm and assertions of personal and "affinity group" superiority. 

      It’s difficult to imagine how cerebral, sometimes surreal, comedians like George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny and even Jackie Gleason (who combined delicately robust physicality with humane, socially conscious, character humor) would be able to find audiences in this ur-ugly time. 

      When I say a comparison is invidious, it's usually triggered by someone's apples/oranges analogy mistakes, but I am also sometimes telling my daughter, who is at the stage where kids compare their lot in life to everyone else’s and find fault at home, that it is generally better to shelve those thoughts because they’re unreliable and impractical.


      That being said, “physician, heal thyself,” applies to me as much as to anyone else and during this straitened, enervating period I am hardly illusion or envy-free.

  Therefore, when I discovered the other day that a local person I have known for years, someone who on paper might arouse all sorts of personal and professional jealousy, is in a hideous amount of personal and professional trouble, his name daily typeset  large all over the agora, trouble that is likely to ruin him, I was nonplussed.  

      As always is the case, the signs (which in retrospect appear as large as roadside billboards) were there all along that trouble was waiting for him.  Now that it has arrived in a first-class carriage and exploded, I wonder how we’ll all feel once the big bang shock has worn off?


  Personally, I already feel a little wiser and more secure about myself and my own instincts, ethics, and capacity to self-generate  appropriate apprehensions of fear and a sense of consequences. 

 

       As for the small but significant horde who formerly danced attendance on this man, some are already probably looking for new sources of gossip and backs to stab and bite; others will simply deny the significance of their prior relationship or claim they were never ever deceived.


  Say your prayers.   Amen.