'profane Exegesis' Excerpt

Here’s Lost In Translation (2003), with the brilliant Bill Murray as the older man Bob Harris, who meets Charlotte, the mind-wobblingly gorgeous Scarlett Johansson, who’s trapped in a loveless marriage to her young bo, the excellent Giovanni Rebisi. Let's just say he takes her for granted as he's too preoccupied to appreciate her. It's also implied he's cheating on her with some airhead. The first thing the director focuses on is her shapely behind and see-through underpants. And so it goes. I’ve seen it and loved it. Bob is of course, the model of restraint and good behaviour. A story was going around at the time of her having fucked–“her” words–a 37 year old in a lift. This turned to out to be a made-up story; a lie. But of course it was the personification of our thoughts on her. A contemporary urban myth of the “hidden” desires and secret wishes of the sexual psyche. Yours too. Following the film we have Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, with its “actual” rape scene. The above of course and other variations ad infinitum can be used as justification also, for indulging in the basest of impulses, and has been. Both become just different sides of the same coin. This is a question worth asking oneself and to do that, first you have to become aware of it, which again means not avoiding it through conveniently self-serving self-deception. Alex in the Kubrick film is listening to “Old Ludwig’s Ninth,” which conjures a series of bizarre images in his mind. He’s a one! He goes on to pick-up a couple of girls. A teenager himself, played by the older Malcolm McDowell. I had just started secondary school at the time. Billy F went to see it, natch, and gave me a very lurid account. It must have made an impression, as, skint, I nicked the soundtrack from Boots, thinking it was a contemporary one, never having seen the film, but I enjoyed the music, not least Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, the irony lost on me until now. One of the girls in the record shop mentions “the Heaven 17.” It crossed my mind earlier that The Droogs would be a good name for a band. It likely has been but they didn’t get far. I wouldn't be surprised. Sounds too much like drugs. Heaven 17 took their name after the reference in the film of course. A band that only made studio “albums,” up until their appearance on TOTP. I think, in the early 80's. And what I’ve felt could be the only working solution to my sense of artistic and “creative” frustration. Not just a thought. His probation officer wallows in the fact that Alex is now a murderer. Come to think on it, he was pretty fresh with young Alex too. If anything, all the adults are presented as corrupt and ignorant, and as violent as he is. Basically hypocrites. And it’s important to remember Kubrick is the bloke who made the transcendental A Space Odyssey with its ending which has a direct relation to the climax of Ken Carey’s Starseed Transmissions, published in 1978, along with the later Third Millennium, themselves having much in common with PKD's Valis, and the posthumously published Radio Free Albemuth (1985), but also early SF writer Olaf Stapledon's The Star Maker. And Arthur C. Clark's Childhood's End. There’s also Timothy Leary’s experience of “transmissions from Sirius,” which form a part of Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger 1. Leary wrote the introduction to a later edition of Colin Wilson's The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme (the publishers title), which was entitled The Sex Diary of A Metaphysician. Formerly The Man Without A Shadow, published originally in 1963. Alex is getting attention from “the perverts,” during the hell-fire sermon. The perverts being the prison guards and inmates alike. Doris Lessing also wrote about Sirius for her SF trilogy, Canopas In Argos and others. I'm not big on Sirius myself. I mean I don't put much stock in it. RAW discusses Leary, Dick, and Lessing in the preface to Cosmic Trigger 1, making these comparisons. The first time I came across them was back in 1991. The book was published in '77. He also discusses Terence McKenna and 2012- The Invisible Landscape. CW got around to writing about Lessing in his book The Angry Years. He wrote

about PKD in the essay Was Philip K. Dick Possessed by an Angel? He never discusses RAW–or Terence McKenna, come to that.. My view, for what it's worth, is that CW has a conservative streak. He writes about a 'far out' writer like Dick without grasping the essence of him. He simply ignores other writers like RAW who are more explicit about the direction he was going in, such as Dick's prescience about the rise of fascism, and no less specifically, his belief that we live in 'the last days,' and that the Apocalypse/Second Coming is imminent. A matter of interpretation, needless to say, or it should be. But CW does also describe some of the bizarre events over the period; of Dick's 2-3-74/VALIS experience, both he and his last wife Tessa heard a voice on the radio telling him to die, even after it was unplugged. Then there was a letter he was expecting, and already knew beforehand the message it contained... It's clear CW does take this seriously, due as much to the fact Dick wasn't alone at the time. There’s also Robert Charles Wilson’s novel The Harvest, which seems to be a metaphor for, a parable, about the Second Coming, in which a dream spreads across the world and everyone is asked if they want to live forever, or stay here. Also, The Chronoliths, about artefacts from a future war–in which the Americans lost–manifest in the present–a brilliant idea–and where he also touches on synchronicities, as well as the number 23. An earlier and shorter novel, Memory Wire was quite moving. He has a knack of writing convincingly of vulnerable female characters. The Harvest, a large novel, was as 'astonishingly compassionate' as someone said. Possibly Orson Scott Card. Alex seems to have found Jesus. I doubt it. I’ll watch the rest of this film, with its totalitarian connotations. I let my mind wander at the end, though the film was brilliant. He slips back to his original personality, and it ends with the minister of the Interior recanting on behalf of the government and telling him he deserves a good job and salary. Here’s Bowie’s Ashes To Ashes on BBC 6 Music. “Funk to funky.” “We know Major Tom’s a junkie.” No Xmas For John Keys. (The Fall). The film ends with Alex among a media crowd photographing him with a girl writhing on top of him. So what is he–a porn star? It ended on that theme–and of his “salvation” through pleasure and hedonism, put it that way. There’s the sequel of sorts: (to If…) Oh Lucky Man, also starring Malcolm McDowell. Wasn’t that made by the director Michael Lindsay Hogg? Who also made a Stones movie. Robbie Coltrane had a small cameo in it, playing a demonstrator. But I digress. Heaven 17. We Don’t Need This Fascist Groove Thang. The sequel goes into all manner of weirdness as I vaguely recall. He’s even down and out a la Orwell at one stage. I’ve been close to it myself, thought that’s not the same, but the possibility is never truly off the cards. Include me out. At one point he's in a private hospital of sorts, where they've attached a man's head to a sheep's body. Shades of The Island of Dr Moreau. I never did read that novel, of Wells. I did read a book where David Icke says this goes on for real, and people are kept in cages. 'Planet of the Killer Apes.' CW. I’d forgotten Kubrick also made Lolita, starring James Mason. I always found him intimidating when I saw him in any movies, growing up. Peter Sellars starred in Dr Strangelove, of course. (As well as the amusing and quite touching black and white comedy, The Battle of The Sexes, based in Edinburgh. There's a cameo by Donald Pleasance at the beginning as the boss of the big conglomerate.) He was also in The Mouse That Roared, indirectly referred to in the Course/ACIM, and as discussed by Ken Wapnick in his book The Journey Home. CW writes about Sellars in A Criminal History of Mankind, discussing the biog by his son Michael; P.S. I Love You. I once bought it for my dad after he’d raved about Wilson’s CH–I'd given him a copy–but I don’t think he understood the reference. (He probably never got that far. He loaned it to someone and never saw it again.) Embarrassing, but there it

is. The point was Wilson's account of Sellars' crazy, 'out of control' behaviour; the tantrums, frequent suicide threats, and threatening his housekeeper with a knife. Standard narcissistic behaviour. Sounds like half the country to me. We're just sneakier about it now. Am I digressing? Hey, who’s story is this? What is interesting is Kubrick’s breadth of vision from what could easily described as ranging from the “sacred to the profane.” Or better still, and more accurately, the reverse. From Nabokov’s Lolita to the Orwellian-like A Clockwork Orange–based on the novel by Anthony Burgess of course, (and I did try reading it in my twenties, many years ago, but gave up–I got tired of having to look up the explanation of the droogy words in the index)–to the aforementioned and profoundly futuristic and prophetic A Space Odyssey, itself based on the Arthur C Clarke story, The Sentinel, expanded into the novel title of the Movie. I read it at school.. Clarke also wrote Childhood’s End, as I mentioned, itself reminiscent of John Wyndham’s novel and the films based on them, The Children of... and Village of The Damned, which I saw in my early teens in '72 or so–though they were released in the mid '60's or earlier, and was very impressed by, especially the lethal organ scene. Telepathy and “the paranormal” presented as a wholly negative and destructive phenomenon. The scientist and physicist Russell Targ discusses it in a book he wrote many years ago, The Mind Race. Since then he's taken up studying ACIM, this after some semi-kamikazi motorbike riding. As well as writing a bunch more books. Just to add an aside on Lost In Translation, I think the ending of the film was a cop-out, if a clever one. It literally left you guessing. It reminds me of scenes in movies where the main man, generically speaking, gets off (in the sense of picking up, not boffing her, though that usually comes later, and as 'tastefully' omitted) with a girl, only the part where he actually chats her up so to say, the 'line' he gave her, is 'cut/omitted, and we usually always jump to later in the bedroom or whatever. This happens too often. When I was younger I'd have liked to have heard the lines that supposedly 'work.' There was no Internet then, where woman can let anyone who's interested know exactly what their orientation and interests are. Maybe the idea is that it's 'private.' Or would be indirectly 'disrespectful to the generic women in movieworld... Or every 'line' tends to sound corny, crude, or naff for our cool hero. Asinine. This after the camera dwelling on Scarlett Johansson's pants and butt. (Just me, then?) It's all nonsense. But I was still moved overall. I think Bill Murray, at the end of the movie- where we don't hear what he says to the very upset and sad Charlotte, says 'If you're not married within two or three years, get in touch, and my wife is history.' They didn't get on and he's a millionaire, (and she's no bimbo.) As was/is the one of the main love interest – he's 50, she's 28, (his limit as described, is 25) in the short and brilliant novel, Shopgirl, by 'wild and crazy guy', Steve Martin. That was very moving too, because it was also quite profound at times as well as cleverly amusing. A very astute and compassionate fellow. (And a shy man, like many brilliant comedians and performers.)