[Kzyxtalk] Next.

[Marco McClean]

Subject: Next

/"Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, 
fall like a thunderbolt." -Sun Tzu/

The recording of last night's Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 
KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KMEC-LP Ukiah is available by one or two clicks, 
depending on whether you want to listen to it now or download it and 
keep it for later and, speaking of which, it's right here:
https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0366

The deadline to get your writing on the show is about 6pm the night of 
the show. Whatever it is, just email it to me any time during the week 
and I'll read it on the air, and if it comes too late I'll read it on 
the air the week after that. If there are swears, that's okay, but I 
wait until after 10pm to read anything with swears in it, that's all, to 
avoid agitating the weasels.

Anyway, at http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch 
of dozens of links to not necessarily radio-useful but nonetheless 
worthwhile educational items I set aside for you while gathering last 
night's show together. Such as:

This city has the right idea about what a city should be spending all 
the money on. It's clearly working. Do you see any homeless people 
sleeping in piles of plastic bags and trash in this city? Does anyone 
look even the slightest bit ill or lonely or hungry, tired, cold, 
dispossessed, disenfranchised, melancholy, regretful, oppressed, 
addicted to opioids, buyer-remorsed, footsore, ennui'd, etc.? It's like 
heaven-- unless it's like in /The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas/. That 
would be both unacceptable and hard to spot.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2012/11/les-machines-de-l-machines-of-isle-of.html

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. I didn't watch the film yet, but from 
the trailer I get the impression that 13-year-old Valerie is like 
Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz but instead she visits a weird city of 
sexy-dancing vampires who harmlessly burn or rather toast her at the 
stake and then have sex with her, or maybe it is all a dream, or maybe 
it's like in /An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge/ and she's hallucinating 
all this as she's dying in the stake-fire. I get a kind of /The 
Fantasticks/ vibe from the trailer, or maybe Jodorowsky's /El Topo/, or 
Tarsem Singh's /The Fall/.
http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/valerie_and_her_week_of_wonders

When we first see the woman she's so happy. This is leading up to a peak 
experience, the best day of her life. Suddenly, it's the worst, the 
absolute worst, and it switched in less than a second. He's tired, 
frustrated with his job, very old, probably hungry, maybe his back hurts 
under the weight of fifty pounds of robes. She went there hoping to see 
him; she never imagined she'd actually really /be/ this close to him. 
He's moving along the line, slowly getting closer and closer. See, 
others are brushing his robe, his sleeve, even holding his hand, 
interacting with him. Oh, my God, it's going to happen! She will /speak/ 
with the Pope! He will see her, touch her! For the rest of her life she 
will have this moment! But he turns, begins to move away. She grabs his 
hand, or rather her /hand/ grabs his hand, and he lashes out, or rather 
his /hand and mouth/ lash out... And I told Juanita the story of this. 
To me, I was excited to be telling something I learned about people, 
refining and reinforcing a story I could tell others, that might make me 
a little less likely to someday be any of the players in a similar 
story, might make others imagine themselves here and be better people, 
be more understanding and less fragile, more worldly and yet still able 
to feel. Learning to be a person. It's education, rehearsal, writing. 
But to Juanita, it sounded like I was japing at a helpless person's 
destruction, a person like her --she sees herself as the woman in the 
story (of course)-- and what's the matter with me that I will never 
fucking learn to not tell her that kind of story, and her head is down 
and she's crying. And I'm like, Oh, no. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm an 
idiot. I'm just like the snippy Pope, I can't help myself. And at the 
same time, I'm like the adoring woman, too, and you try to do the right 
thing and the other person doesn't react right and it's awful... This is 
like that... But... I just looked at it again, and it's the exact same 
video but this time it's all different from what I saw before. The woman 
doesn't look happy or anticipatory at all, the whole time. And I can't 
understand her language, but she might be angry. Yeah, she's angry from 
the start. Maybe she came there to kvetch at him about a church policy 
or child molestation or an infallible executive popely action of his 
whose repercussions devastated her family in some faraway place, and 
even if he couldn't understand her he sensed her ire and criticism, he 
looked right at her; maybe that's why he turned away, flinched away from 
her intensity... It's really true that our lived lives are more about 
the stories we tell ourselves, from limited snatches of perception, than 
about what's really going on, which we only find out later if even at 
all. Or maybe it's a third thing, or a hundred things, a different thing 
for everyone in the picture. Here's where I say out loud to myself, as I 
do several times a day, "Stop thinking about that," though this time 
it's more in a /that's sorted out, next item now/ way than a mortified 
or a /bad dog!/ way.
http://www.cynical-c.com/2020/01/01/happy-2020/

-- 
Marco McClean, memo at mcn.org,
https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com