holding a cell cam

Abstract trip

Real Time with Bill Maher: Kim Davis Controversy – Sept. 11, 2015 (HBO)

Cosby Lawyer: I'm Not Victim Blaming, But 'Women Have Responsibility'

Reservoir Dogs Soundtrack FULL ALBUM

Jesse Ventura reveals who shot Kennedy...

William Harvey, head of CIA assassination unit, assassinated JFK.

David Morales was directly involved in it.

E. Howard Hunt gave a deathbed confession to his son and named names, proud of his own involvement in the killing.

Inventory

"For all her careful inventory of wires, cables and connections, there is a screw loose that is not accounted for." -- official psychological assessment of _________________ See my blog on trolls and the definition - official versus crazy definition - to get an idea of the person of which I speak here. I left out one of the things this person said in her last missive. She said that I was "addicted to negative excitement." I would say - were we talking - physician heal thyself. /////////////////////////^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^#################### I'm not sure how graceful it would be to lay out all of my medical history to demonstrate how unappealing "negative excitement" is to me, and it seems like something you hear 12 step program people talk about. I have however already blogged or posted in the past about an aneurysm I survived around the end of 2011 with a coil procedure at St. Michael's in Toronto. My scans show that there is one branch filled with coil to block it and another branch with just one thread of coil as a lead which they have to monitor now just once a year and I am encouraged to watch blood pressure is the most likely issue that can cause it to leak. Even when I prepare a film project or something else that involves a certain measure of stress, I want to be as organized as possible to avoid a disaster or misunderstanding 100% of the time. The square peg is my storyboarded movie and the round hole it goes into is the nearly zero amount of money in the budget. Meanwhile, I pay the rent with the same basic security job I've had for 14 years which from time to time involves a knack for keeping calm and managing stress and de-escalating a situation that might be brewing. So, no. I don't seek negative excitement. If I take the time to read something in my news feed and something strikes me as left out or not being said, that's when I'll fill out the space for comment beside my face that appears under the link or post. /////////////////////////^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^#################### Some people have a shockingly childish response to having anything questioned, and instead of engaging in a sane and constructive manner they might choose to view any question or fact-check as popping their balloon. If someone posts an article singing the praises of Caitlin Gender... I mean Jenner... I can leave that sort of thing be. I would know to not even bother clicking on the article to read it, so I will not have invested any time and won't have anything to say about it, having never watched a Kardashian reality show or any spin-off. I recall maybe one article about Sense8 the new Wackowski series. Another guy in the thread said he thought it was beating people over the head with its politics and agenda, and I commented that his remark is the only thing that might give me pause but that Lana and her brother Andy can direct and their skills are the reason I will watch. This one simple remark may be considered by the person praising the show to be an example of "troll" post by her poor definition of it. If a show is preaching to the converted at best and bashing people over the head with an over-ripe subtext or surface-text, that can indeed count against it. I'm a bit worried that there might be a pocket of people who are very vocal who are political first and willing to throw craft and art under the bus for the sake of pushing a social trend. Arthur C. Clarke's book Childhood's End has a section called The Golden Age in which society has gotten rid of its ills and concerns and conflicts but art is bland if not non-existent. We do live in a world where inequality is a fact of life and there are bullies. The difference is who is jockeying for those dominant positions. /////////////////////////^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^#################### I find even when I have been in the middle of a fight as the third person, in the cross-fire, my nature is to be the luke warm water that attempts to not be touched by the nervous energy or agitation of the others. I think even if there is "chemistry" with a woman on a date, my nature to diffuse tension is still there and it has caused the false read that I am not excited. It's a difficult thing to work around. I strive to remain in the centre of the wheel of life where there is less violent movement. Some people - especially performers or those truly addicted to excitement - are willing to stay on the outer rim of the wheel where the ups and downs are extreme. Any risk I take has to be fairly well calculated, and after some naive risks in the past I am even more likely to get things in writing and make sure nobody has unspoken expectations about a project or what might happen. I am likely to publish some of my journals and recollections of things going wrong in filmmaking, and maybe something separate about what goes wrong in security, although the latter might just be my movie about security guard work. I agree with the idea that what you are most afraid will happen already has, and so there is no point in fearing it. Most stress can be unexpectedly caused by people reading you as too calm (because you are managing stress) and taking it upon themselves to try to shake you up. Sometimes this can be anticipated and a preemptive conversation might avert an escalation. In any case, if you have no legal recourse when the smoke has cleared it might be best to calmly seek extra-legal recourse. If you can. Some of us don't have the compartmentalization to be as cold blooded as necessary. But I still try to keep my cool.

What is a "Troll" ?

A central principal or conceit of mine is that intelligent, worthwhile people get the idea of parallel ideas and parallel arguments. If one person presents a post or a link or a set of arguments and another person comes along to examine and refute part of it, we understand that the two arguments co-exist and that the intention is not necessarily to erase the other. Even if a movie is remade, the second statement of the premise is likely to be viewed as an also-ran and a knock-off coasting on a brand, with the original benefitting from a new marketing push in association with the next version. If we are talking about Ghostbusters - as will be mentioned later in this blog - people searching the internet or chancing upon a discussion might like to gauge what kind of support an upcoming reboot will get. My position on most issues is left of the middle. If someone is a zealot at either extreme, that person might find me too aloof on matters that they hold with disproportionate importance. A worthwhile and constructive dialogue must be open to the idea that some people in your community don't believe in cheating their way to a win by lying about the state of the zeitgeist on one issue or another. It may come to a point where on the surface nothing can be said that is tested and true, only what is popular and painless to those on the margins. It is expected that a victim of a crime or abuse might be in such a state of trauma - repressed or actively remembered - that their own behaviour is impacted and they are in danger of becoming offenders in their own life. Being is only intelligible in terms of becoming. And yet, the posture of the victim is growing as if it is a badge of honour and there is now a blind spot where it is verboten to even consider implying that the said victim or champion of the victim could possibly develop the traits of the offender by abusing others. We know someone by how that person treats those he or she does not HAVE TO be nice to. If someone tests or challenges your preferred premise, that person must not be dismissed as a troll or perhaps even cyber-swarmed. That person should be engaged with the expectation that he or she has only the best intentions and wishes the issues to be complete and to fairly represent each voice and angle. Here is the definition found on Wikipedia for "Internet Troll." This is as I understand it and have all along. ************* In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory,[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[2] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.[3] This sense of the word troll and its associated verb trolling are associated with Internet discourse, but have been used more widely. Media attention in recent years has equated trolling with online harassment. For example, mass media has used troll to describe "a person who defaces Internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families."[4][5] In addition, depictions of trolling have been included in popular fictional works such as the HBO television program The Newsroom, in which a main character encounters harassing individuals online and tries to infiltrate their circles by posting negative sexual comments himself.[6][7] **************** Seems logical. Recently, I found myself being told by someone on my Facebook that a comment was "trollish." I argued that it was not. The standard she wanted to go by was that any dissenting view or fact-check under a posted or linked article was a troll. I prefer to treat people as I want to be treated. Ads and random posts appear in my "News" Feed, and randomly if I invest a few moments checking out an article that is posted, I think it is reasonable and welcome to ask a question or point out an error or oversight. My former "friend" or frienemy as it turns out apparently wants a standard where whatever propaganda is being presented must be received in a vacuum of agreement, and any representation of the dissenting voice must be pathologized by a slap-down term like "troll" or "truther" in the case of conspiracies. In this case, it was something rather basic. ---------------------------------------------------------- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ An article link was posted by this person on the topic of "The Male Gaze." Apparently the topic was introduced in the 1960's. I do not recall the blog name or the website, not that I would want to promote it with my vast influence. I first asked a simple question, "Isn't there a "Female Gaze?" The blog or article kicked off by railing against the movie adaptation of "Fifty Shades of Grey." It argued that there was too much erotic view of the female form, as if to appeal to men, despite having a target audience of women. I pointed out that the director of that movie was a woman. The response I got, along with the accusation that my post was "trollish," was that the director may have been influenced by others to put that stuff in. So the woman who is directing doesn't count as contributing to the "Gaze" of the movie, and this person discounts the idea that she might even recognize the beauty of the female form despite being married and ostensibly straight. A lot of women on this person's FB posts will add comments about binary sexuality and fluid this or that, yet not entertain the idea that these factors might be part of the director. If said director is not responsible for what is on screen, then why the fuss about more female directors? (This last part is my own aside now, and was not part of my posts.) The article chose as its second example of the offensive "male Gaze" the unlikely target of Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron, in which it argued that females "aren't shot the same way as men. I pointed out there that the director was Joss Whedon who is a known feminist and a old sort, not to mention the fact that nothing unflattering or leering struck me in the movie. Finally, the blogger/columnist gave qualified praise to Mad Max: Fury Road but stated that the camera strategy forced everything to be in the centre frame so that women could not be pushed off to the side. There is some invocation of the "rule of thirds" in framing invoked, which seems to diminish the fact that the STORY and deliberate DIRECTING of GEORGE MILLER is what actually guided that movie to have strong female characters we care about. It was not "forced" by some sort of centre-framing policy. The research of the person seems to have come from straight out of the rectum. Yet - and I have heard this from a third party who followed the discussion - my posts remained restrained and clearly well-intentioned. The woman who had posted the link and was playing what she called "moderator" by seemed poised for attack from word one. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ -------------------------------------------------------------- Here I am calmly and idly going back on my smart phone as alerts come up, answering whatever post on a Sunday evening, matter-of-fact, and I'm getting kind of a shrill vibe from even the most trivial and innocuous remark. When we got into the trend of women leading films and changes and so on, I remarked that the new reboot of women as Ghostbusters casting Chris (Thor) Hemsworth as their secretary or receptionist is not really a parallel or inversion of the original film, because Annie Potts as Janine was not portrayed as a sex object. The response I got was an affronted spiel along the lines of, "Annie Potts in that movie is super sexy!" Now at that point what am I to say other than reiterate what I have already said, not that I have said anything against Potts. She is funny and an effective character. Sexy isn't a descriptive that I expect she was going for. Any more than Rick Moranis' character would expect to be called sexy. The conversation is like stepping in shit and not being able to scrape it off. And the core of it must be that this person had some sort of spite against me personally from the beginning, despite adding me on Facebook and voicing no objection to past posts over the years. ------------------------------------------------------------ ########################################################################### Then a shark swam into the cove. I would not have noticed if I had not procrastinated about disabling Facebook alerts on my smart phone. It had been giving redundant messages whenever someone replied to whatever. For those alerts, I could wait until when I choose to hit the site myself. But this particular Sunday night I hadn't figured out what to delete or uninstall. So I looked over and saw my old antagonist's name and thought FRIG ! Sure enough, he had put up oner of his boiler-plate bait posts to pathologies me and make an unflattering estimate of my intelligence because I am not reading the script of the party line and not "all in" with whatever zealot intransigence he represents. This post meets the above criteria for a definition of a troll. In fact, I'd say Troll is a weak word for what this guy does. It is harassment, certainly couched in some sort of smug sheep's clothing of ostensibly liberal platitudes and standing up for women which he appears to regard as so fragile that they must be handled with kit gloves and those of us who are not part of a minority (outside of the discussion) are somehow twisted and defending the "status quo." A "like" appeared on his missive around this time. The next day, I was on my laptop and noticed that the like came from the individual who started the thread, and who started a new post to say that she was not moderating or following the thread after a while. . . not mentioning that she had followed it enough to support the most offensive and truly trollish or trollesque post! My antagonist had deleted a couple of his posts over night, leaving my own posts hanging with less context. Knowing that his own had been valued and mine had not, I decided to delete my posts from the thread. I only found out half an hour later that she - the poster of the flawed article link - was upset that I had removed my posts. She said, "Why did you do that. They were important." She then bent over backwards to try to re-tell the story to "followers" of the thread, as if there are pages missing from a Gnostic Gospel. She entreated me to return to the thread, hot-linking my name over and over, only to answer me with what can only politely he called guano. It was all circular. Accusation, my defence, followed by the accusation of being "defensive." Total mind f**kery. It was a merry-go-round that was now eating up a Monday that I had off and which was supposed to be spent on writing and editing. I bowed out, asked her to stop hot-linking my name, and in tern advised that I would stop following the thread. I also ended up clicking "unfollow" of her, since it was clear that any comment on any post could have an unpredictable and soul-sickening result. She responded by de-friending me. I sent one more PM to say something like, "At least that's an answer." &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& ///////////////////// Somewhere in the middle of that, before I had gone to sleep Sunday, I'd sent her a first private message asking if there is anything wrong that I should know about, given the tone of some of her Sunday night replies and the "trollish" accusation. I reminded her that since helping out the previous summer documenting a project of hers I had not heard any reply - timely or otherwise - about what was to be done with footage I had captured and so on. The questions had been time sensitive. I got the feeling she cancelled her project or something, but never got the full scoop. I mentioned the shark/troll that had chimed in on the thread to really mess with me, and apologized for drawing that fly. But I did not hear back until some time after I had asked about her unfriending me. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ She did reply to that. I'll paraphrase rather than paste someone's actual words. She mentioned knowing me for 15 years and liking me in person and having fond memories of the play reading group (she performed a reading of a one-act I wrote in 2001, and did a good job) but then went on to characterize the way I am on Facebook. She also mentioned that the had taken the council of my adversary - the one guy I considered to be a TROLL - whom I had to delete the year before, and who I had failed to block. (I have blocked him since this blow-up, but would have rather not have him seeing and commenting on any of my posts this past year, and have no idea why I have neglected to block him and have somehow allowed him to harass me. It must be discomfort with the settings of the site, which I am a little more familiar with now.) Anyway, it was not encouraging. I can dislike someone and still feel sick if I am rejected. She mentioned a short I made back in 2000, which I would not have thrown in her face and never have. As she describes it, what she signed on for was a western stand-off where two girls fight over an abandoned cigarette in the street. She claimed that she walked off the set because I "added a girl-fight." I mentioned that I don't recall how others characterized the fight, which was part of the script she read and part of the storyboards. If my camera operator whose camera we were using mentioned Russ Meyer, it is beside the point. She had stated that she worried I would "edit in" shots of "nudity or sex" later, which offended me as someone who is only interested in making a straightforward film with no artsy flashes. I reminded her that I did remember her also complaining that there was no craft services table with flies buzzing around and that we did get someone to buy her a bottle of water when she asked for it. She came back with a totally wigged-out lecture about what a hot day it was (not very hot and I hate hot days) and how she wasn't being paid (which she knew going in. She accused me of not even taking "responsibility" for what she complained about and said "there is no apology here" as if I should apologize for questioning or fact-checking a blog she had linked in the news feed. She ended on a note like "please don't contact me again." ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ That's the way to end a conversation that might actually answer questions intended to be rhetorical by someone who can't handle reality. Someone on her page left a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson to the effect of "Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted when I am contradicted." Her friend meant for this to be something to answer the likes of me, but it would have been more appropriate applied to her. I ended up blocking her as well as my main annoyance. But the infuriating thing is this ploy of throwing down an accusation and demanding that it not be answered. On the movie she mentioned, the only reason I have not nursed any animosity over it is that I had another actress who stepped in and saved my ass and did a great job. I got to make the movie people were there to make. I didn't have time to worry about a snack table, but I did ask the remaining people if they needed anything and volunteered to get it. They said they did not and appreciated that time was of the essence. This was a guerrilla-style shoot, less than an hour. I asked how they felt about what was said by the departing actress, and nobody felt the same despite both remaining actresses being principled people themselves. Luckily for me, their principles also included staying with a project they have agreed to shoot instead of abandoning the director and wasting everyone's time. The departing girl had - ironically - flashed her chest in a movie the year before. I won't name the film, but I taped it from City TV and have not het gotten around to trashing the VHS. Just seems hypocritical to me. @@@@@@@ As I reflected on this I recall better times but I also recall an odd moment at the home of the person in question while I was documenting her project on video and having a break with her other guests in her kitchen. The subject of comedy came up and what this or that person likes. I mentioned liking Sarah Silverman. One guy said, with a hint of mustard, "I hear she has a great rape joke." I honestly forget what I said back, but it created no fuss. I could have gone for a quip like, "Your momma is a rape joke." But I likely would not, unless that person were a heckler and I was on stage. I might have ignored his sarcastic intent and the idea that he "hears" and obviously has not heard for himself what Silverman's joke actually was and its context or delivery. I might have said, "Yes, in fact she has a few good rape jokes." I think I mentioned that she also has a great Holocaust bit. I'm a firm believer that comedy can and must include gallows humour and explore the most painful and difficult to process traumas of life. Smokey and the Bandit or Blues Brothers wacky car accidents will not play as amusing to someone who just survived a real car accident or lost someone in one, or killed someone with a car. But that can't be the standard for what is talked about or joked about. Even Blazing Saddles has a couple of "good" rape jokes, as well as frequent use of the notorious n-word. There is definitely a culture or subculture of net nannys playing word police and over-inflating reactions to behaviours and habits and old ideas and slow adaptations to the culture of sales and affirmations and propaganda wrapped up in the fear of a lost audience or a lost market. Sometimes it is fair. It is better to know if Cosby is known by many people as a creep or worse. It is better to know that Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird had more to say in his late seventies and that Scout had to actually get to know him as a human being and get over her disappointment that her dad was not an icon in her head 100% uncomplicated and on-side with all of her own political package deals. I had recently listened to Reese Witherspoon's unabridged audio book of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, and it was very appropriate timing. People will project. There is little to be done about that. People wrap themselves in a rainbow flag or turn their home country flag upside down when the wrong candidate for them gets into office. But what can be a problem is discarding the heart of politics - that your adversary or opponent on one issue or sub-issue may be an ally on many others. I know a few more intransigent jerks than I thought I knew. I'm better off knowing. I've done my own fearless moral inventory and flipped the finger at one imposed on me by a presumptuous and inexplicably pompous pair of piranha. I don't have to boost myself as any kind of moral example to feel wronged and irritated. But perhaps I have bigger fish to fry.

hype

Klepto the Clown (2015) one-minute cut

many varied entries on CineCoup

Checking out various other prospective movies on the CineCoup.com site. This one below, The Last Canadian, seems interesting. Maybe it will be a Canadian Leon. I still hope Porno the Clown gets more attention than it has, but occasionally I'll share a link.

Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy

Robin Williams - In Motion

The Silence of the Lambs - Who Wins the Scene?

Drive (2011) - The Quadrant System

The Bad Sleep Well (1960) - The Geometry of a Scene

Star Wars "Insider" Unwrapped