tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37484930091637306812024-03-28T07:42:24.396-04:00Futnuckery. A Helluva Vision. The Film-Flam Man. Conjugates of the Infinite.Conjugates of the Infinite. The Film Flam Man. behold we now through a "Mirror Glass Darkly"(formerly of the "the Abyss Gazes Also", nee Futnuckery with Abaddon1215). Student of life, liberty, literature, theology, data prep, productivity and philosophy.Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.comBlogger811125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-40611883233775635922024-03-28T07:41:00.002-04:002024-03-28T07:41:36.395-04:00Rolling on with Women's Month movie-watchin'.<p><b>Virginia Woolf:</b> She spoke of striving to find a new narrative method. </p><p>Mrs Dolloway? Orlando? To The Lighthouse? <br /></p><p>"You don't like me?" Of course. Your family hates you, and you know it. Such is always the case, that if there is no anger, and only aversion, do you expect the impetus to say such things out loud? A suitable kind of reason d'etre? </p><p>She come up with the notion to find a new narrative method, and the little idea excited her; in my own world, I came up with a similar notion, and it was called publicly "Promised Bland". But to a bored woman without the imagination to amuse herself, I suppose everything around and about her is well.... bland.</p><p>And eventually, as the very reek of destination begins to weigh her, she put stones in her pocket and deposited those feelings "Into the Chattapequa", the dark waters of the Chattepequa, reflecting back only what they see...... </p><p>Herself... a gleating of shame and misunderstood intentions, eighty thousand words, and her new narrative method, but did she still feel, incessantly, that she had not come across with her reasons? (I remember yelling out the Blake line a few times, myself: "who made thee?!".)<br /></p><p>To herself, and only herself, that minds eye: that black mirror that looks almost like reality but upon examination.... those triumphal works were but a stain, I wot, in her perview, and she had no recourse but to feel all "alternative" or something, segmented off on her own little island, screaming toward that other shore, again incessantly, but always that perception in her mind, that sort of doubt, that she had ever, at all, been heard.<br /></p><p>The staid waters of the Chattepequa.... </p><p>It reminds me of the novel-within-a-novel thing, a novel written by a character in a story, "The Gothic Sea". James Purefoy writes about his protagonist walking into the ocean, to intention, reason de'tre, to snuff himself. The character's name was Jordan, or Pidgeonhole, Reese or something. Murder-cult maven, that nome-de-something. The canonical league of those fictional novels include, "The Collected Works of Kilgore Trout: An Anthology of the Everyman's Library", "Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House", "White Enamel", "The Philosophy of Time Travel", "Time Against Time"(I wrote that one: that was I; that was me), and some other.<br /></p><p><b>The Fuller Brush Girl:</b></p><p><b></b>Lucy, in the "few-cha", Modern Times, as it were, taking up life(and as we say, "life and life more abundantly"). The film, silly beyond words, and that respect, maybe in its lack of logic, reflective of something more real than the average film of happy coincidences. Why, we have "the impossible job", and its improbable but strange-enough-for-reality failures and its own non-propitious coincidences. Played for laughs, maybe, but the late 70's saw such "everyday worries" as a true and relevant reason d'etre, and spoke it to the world in such common course, such vain incantations as "mortgage" and "dental work for the kids"--and the audience sat, and almost sh*t their pants in their nervous perturbations.<br /><br />Lucy pinballs into building her life. <br /><br />Real-world Lucy was so much the obverse side of that coin, and she "churned her cream into butter" as it were, of the mouse of proverb, helping to produce, via Desilu Productions, the original Star Trek and so forth, doing so much in the real world while being, herself, pidgeon-holed by things like "The Fuller Brush Girl" and "I Love Lucy".<br /><b><br />Rio Bravo: </b> </p><p>One woman in that one, so not much for the "Women's Month", but at least she is one of those that strides the dividing line between classical womenhood and bold modernity, a saloon girl but oh with a mind of her own.<br /><br />But you remember this one, of course, Ward Bond--my Wagon Train dude--and some others, Ricky Nelson and Dean Martin.<br /><br />It was a film so good that John Ford made it twice, in fact. The team of Stumpy, Colt, Dean and the Missouri Kid. Such a good oater but proto-action film, buddy-comedy that he had to revisit the formula later. Such a formula in a western figures more a lot of people pointing shotguns at one another.</p><p>And there was livestock.</p><p> </p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-41789553217136719252024-03-25T09:06:00.002-04:002024-03-25T09:06:11.008-04:00Springtime 2024: all of nature says hello.<p><i>"They say that springs of sweet fresh water well up amid the brine of salt seas; that the fairest Alpine flowers bloom in the wildest and most rugged mountain passes; that the noblest psalms were the outcome of the profoundest agony of soul.<br />Be it so. And thus amid manifold trials, souls which love God will find reasons for bounding, leaping joy. Though deep call to deep, yet the Lord's song will be heard in silver cadence through the night."<br /> </i></p><p><i>-LB Cowman</i><br /> </p><p>The sylvan hue of melting ice--this, as the dogwoods slowly open sleep-crusted eyes, and all of nature begins to pick up its instruments, carry the rhythm, and each in earnest portray its own element in the over-arching melody of what we have termed to be a "season". This, the Vernal Equinox and the Mongoose Full Moon, the Penumbral Eclipse--a convergence, and in the world of commerce and amalgamation, a divergence, mayhap--nature reminding, tapping us on the shoulder with spring showers, pulling our attentions and shaping further our intentions to remind us that, yes, Cheever, we are very much alive.<br /><br />The cycle of life continues.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKnl3eZyROzFz_PNTpSrUUWs4vAbeAxL2NknKLY1JsmURj1DwAuGdTWw0ReaCOM3bu5T_zE91G5lXnsDzO5wlLnALY-AYJDJeiEuDzR5DTQiT1F8NAM3-3lSb3Zlj8NnSCLZFws0wBesw3N3JvDp6PCsk_lhg6ex8JsT7nSPsMO1asYpESld-SoOTi-i4/s800/dogwoods_001.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="606" data-original-width="800" height="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKnl3eZyROzFz_PNTpSrUUWs4vAbeAxL2NknKLY1JsmURj1DwAuGdTWw0ReaCOM3bu5T_zE91G5lXnsDzO5wlLnALY-AYJDJeiEuDzR5DTQiT1F8NAM3-3lSb3Zlj8NnSCLZFws0wBesw3N3JvDp6PCsk_lhg6ex8JsT7nSPsMO1asYpESld-SoOTi-i4/s320/dogwoods_001.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><b>"Seasonal Descriptive Disorder"</b>, in a sort of manic daydream, a Tchaikovsky pulsebeat and all--eyes to nature--regeneration, "regenerate", instead of past tense "regenerated", as in the ongoing, the infinitive, discarding the past tense for all its weight and lack of worth like so many pounds of waste matter produced in alchemic experiments--why I scream life begets life--and water, such a crucial part of life--80% of my own gelatin, in as much as so much of the ejaculate is mere urine. Was it "affective" or "effective"? As in suffering versus efficacy, I wot, that the point is somewhat more of something that flaps the mongoose on the hind-end, urging to response, rather than something passive like a mere feeling.<p></p>Why, the mental energy of our various transient feelings--and all of nature a peculiar so misunderstood battery--the little spit of yellow curry dust and all, the pollen is like our own residue, nature shaking off the dust from the corners of its autumn lover's bedroom.<p>Not a eulogy at all, with nothing dead but all rushing to life and then life-more-abundantly, the awkwardness-es and so forth that require clarification to most--not that, but instead a narration of something yet alive and vibrant, just like a puncture wound or something that one hastens to ignore, yet cannot--the very temper meter of all existence, kind of an axial swingpoint on which so much variously relies--like the proverbial red wheelbarrow--or the discount superstore bicycle.<br /></p><p><br /><br /><br /> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0tE1vtej_YWJkFYVNOU7aqy_myuKydQMCDwQCkDJJQ23pRVdEoJmaqbAqqZRipmo_2M8N317nRh-CGRfAf4hJXINuFsO_hvL4ccvcIOifzFztEwSnJokSG3iWZZ5RrcrMP-9vd2GS0pjxmeqG3RTmQDXhYPrYsuEJe2mQ29zQH-VldrMw6DWZJtGYfqM/s800/wiseria_002.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="628" data-original-width="800" height="251" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0tE1vtej_YWJkFYVNOU7aqy_myuKydQMCDwQCkDJJQ23pRVdEoJmaqbAqqZRipmo_2M8N317nRh-CGRfAf4hJXINuFsO_hvL4ccvcIOifzFztEwSnJokSG3iWZZ5RrcrMP-9vd2GS0pjxmeqG3RTmQDXhYPrYsuEJe2mQ29zQH-VldrMw6DWZJtGYfqM/s320/wiseria_002.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br />Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-17078014737672584282024-03-23T11:44:00.001-04:002024-03-23T11:44:29.385-04:00Aquinas, Plato, Paul and spring is officially sprung on the SEC.<p>"...in as much as it is good..." does existence fulfill, or does one fulfill his own existence. A thought from Aquinas, and the weeks readings. Life, or existence, and goodness, in the formal sense, nee Plato, a concept or idea. The province of God is goodness in the Christian ethical realm, and we approach God as the pollen begins to shower about the SEC conference, in this: the spring of 2024.<br /></p><p><i>Give a reason for your hope</i>, as Paul says. <i>But do so with gentleness and respect...</i><br /></p><p>And of all this, I can say: it has been a week.</p><p>Normality performed a kind of shift, in a kind of incremental kind of way, and as if to say, what is normative has been, in some fundamental way, altered.</p><p>"....all of my portion, and my cup..."</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7PcSB7bYN1jYLhjOuoxKHXe-MuDXd31vVdloQ4gvKq_0-Tj6evxiLJHR2vRFDkKkBjqhdCMYRuIDW2vVaAoEqb3QypTDtJ5yjv88iPGSIW-FKuaG2XwvFQwrcH_7U-OttJReRnZcng6hps572o9o0Z8y0obnHS4qP2XzaCtjeNuAnnNBN2V79567ff_k/s1200/flowers_001.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="896" data-original-width="1200" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7PcSB7bYN1jYLhjOuoxKHXe-MuDXd31vVdloQ4gvKq_0-Tj6evxiLJHR2vRFDkKkBjqhdCMYRuIDW2vVaAoEqb3QypTDtJ5yjv88iPGSIW-FKuaG2XwvFQwrcH_7U-OttJReRnZcng6hps572o9o0Z8y0obnHS4qP2XzaCtjeNuAnnNBN2V79567ff_k/s320/flowers_001.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <br /><p></p><p><br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-71228560298785761802024-03-18T16:17:00.003-04:002024-03-18T16:17:53.945-04:00The thin line between the frying pan and hookbait: moderation over abundance.<p><i>Why dost thou shew me iniquity, and cause me to behold grievance? for spoiling and violence are before me: and there are that raise up strife and contention.<br /><br />Behold ye among the heathen, and regard, and wonder marvelously: for I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told you.</i><br /><br /><b>-Habakkuk 1</b><br /><br /><i>But I determined this with myself, that I would not come again to you in heaviness.<br /><br />And I wrote this same unto you, lest, when I came, I should have sorrow from them of whom I ought to rejoice; having confidence in you all, that my joy is the joy of you all.</i><br /><br /><b>2 Corinthians 2</b></p><p>Here we are: preached to of abundance, though Lao Tse reminds that the full bucket is more difficult to carry than one containing a lesser amount. This abundance is like weights on a diver, who can only resurface if he releases his burden.<br /></p><p><i>The preparation of the heart in man, and the answer of the tongue, is from the Lord. All the way a man are clean in his own eyes....</i></p><p><i>A man's heart devises his way; but the Lord directs his steps.....</i></p><p><b>-Proverbs 16</b><br /></p><p><i>Did he smile his work to see?</i></p><p><i>Did he who made the lamb make thee? </i></p><p><b>-William Blake</b></p><p><i>What's that you say--that I'm bound for the graveyard?</i></p><p><i>Oooh, I wish you well.</i></p><p><b>-John Fogerty</b><br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-23830275893917406092024-03-16T07:43:00.002-04:002024-03-16T07:44:49.780-04:00We Rise Together. On virtue, goals and other such static concepts.<p><b>We rise together.</b></p><p>And what are we? Me, standing here as insistent as a toothache, your brother, the other shoe in the trashcan. Brought together by court ordered visitation, we are two legs pumping, achieving tandem through some candid form of natural Fibonacci sequence. But where are we going?<b><br /></b></p><p><i>"I want everybody to succeed."</i> <b>-Deon Sanders</b></p><i>"Lord-willing, and if the creeks don't rise."</i> -<b>Milton Bradshaw</b><p>Consider it. What if I reached the magical land of success and fulfillment and you weren't there? Well, maybe it'd give me time to pour some wine and fluff a pillow. What if I were looking up from the bottom of my well, watching you across the interminable?</p><p>We could spend an untold wealth of time and processing power in the pursuit of a definition of success. People have different goals, and if that infinity wasn't large enough a grouping of ideas, then we have the means and methods of attainment, which is an even larger infinity.<br /></p><p>Virtue is a noun, and the previously Puritanical moralist America would define virtue as either end-point righteousness, the goal, or perhaps the mean, such little temperances and self-denials that we think make us closer to the deity.</p><p>Ancient philosophy defines virtue as the means and dictums that achieve the goal. <br /></p><p>The goal is the Chief Good, and that in itself can mean so many things to so many people, where Puritancal America gave it to a "cabin in glory land", the achievement of a place in heaven in the afterlife. I do note that some petition for a dream home in this life, but it was said the savior had went forward to glory to prepare a place.<br /></p><p>I heard that<i> the victory of virtue is joy.</i></p><p>I heard that <i>exercising creative impulses is joy.</i></p><p>I heard that<i> joy is the pursuit, and not the destination. <br /></i></p><p>Is joy an end? Or is it just an emotion, a perception, internally of the end-point? The "point b" on the ray of the life, that ever-elusive destination somewhere between all the government forests, that Xanadu or Silverado, in the acid western that is Chesterfield County.<br /></p><p>The chief good-the entire point of the thing-is said to be "self-evident", like in the Preamble("we hold these truths to be self-evident"), instantly recognizable, something very human, very common to all in the thoroughfare.<br /></p><p>For the Apostle Paul, sin is the opposite of virtue and one of his practical arguments for the avoidance of sin, is that sin is "inconvenient".</p><p>At King Biscuit Flour, there is that old diesel THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-ing, the blooming and blossoming, of the corn blossoms, et al, the apparatus churning that corn into the precious stuff: grits. The pine trees assaulting with something like cumin or curry; the fish opening their gaping mouths for worms from heaven to all in to them, propitiously, and virtue, the common signal horn peppering us in the stately halls of purpose, intent: our families, our homes, our legacies, as we discontinue various grievances and indulgences and strive, reach for the more ecumenical, evangelical, and the more conducive of joy, hope, and peace.<br /></p><p><br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-23155802513754441372024-03-15T08:08:00.001-04:002024-03-15T08:08:19.243-04:00Film Festival Update: Vienna and the Dancing Kid, Plus Ayn Rand.<p><b>Ernest Borgnine</b>(Marty the Butcher) as Yeet, going at Johnny Guitar like a whittlin' piece to be demoralized.</p><p>The thing about this one--<b>Joan Crawford</b>, Sterling Hayden, et al--a pissing contest in the opening scene, a big old bar room that transitions into a cave wall, personalities jostling and tumbling and generally roiling around, almost like watching a derby of personalities, each speaking up and trying to lay claim on the spot of the Prime Mover.</p><p><b>Dancing Kid </b>shoots, and does not dance. To be specific, he has a silver claim, but the townsfolk think he robs and robs and gallivants and all.<br /></p><p><b>Sterling Hayden</b> plays guitar.</p><p><b>Ward Bond </b>as the cattleman pushes the sheriff around.</p><p>The puritan woman with the gritted teeth: a vague resemblance to Judy Garland, but that ain't who that is, and well, not seen before, and not seen after, soon to be forgotten like a bad dream. Her little snarl, and the thing that she had a heart-hold on Dancing Kid, a dead brother, and a hatred for Joan Crawford's Vienna.<br /></p><p>It was such that they took their guns off, did Sterling and Ernest, to go outside and fist fight. That's not <b>House Husbands of McBee</b> type of pissing in the wind, not at all, Cheevers, it got physical, like Olivia Newton John.</p><p>Physical, physical, on your face.</p><p>In the television presentation, the personality jumble took some 45 minutes, a vast opening scene in big the bar room--each character demanding the center of attention.</p><p>As the film ran on, it began to seem like a snuff film, running some two hours, thirty minutes in the television presentation on <b>INSP.</b></p><p><b>Ayn Rand, and the Virtue of Selfishness and Capital.</b> A biopic that tells of the biography of her, and the philosophy that she extolled. A second film chosen to begin the week of the 11th, looking like a woman that went against the grain in her homeland, and came to make money, extolling career as the top priority, even as she made 30 cents a day, but she rose like the cream in the churn generally does--Horatio Alger and all--and she lived her philosophy.</p><p><b>Selfishness: A Virtue</b>, and all, At Last Snugged, We The Eleven, The Spigot, in the dull tongue of the innerweb. <b>The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged</b>, and all, writing in fictions, going in circles and all, and what had really grabbed me about Atlas Shrugged, was counting how many men Dagny Taggart slept with, she like a Kimberly Guilfoyle blueprint, and not a Paul Ryan role model, a kind of pookah of the 90th percentile and all.</p><p>I felt that, that 30-cents-a-day and putting career above all--Objectivism, and all, AAA batteries here, and the jump start box and all; in fact, I saw it in lesser writings, "--to rise above it all--", bootstraps and all, that, that they say.</p><p>I lived some of that bullsh*t some early day, some 1995, 1996, talking about the ideal of various things, holding that up like a banner, a totem, a rasion d'etre, and all, and doing that, while subjecting, submitting to the everyday, of which the two rarely fed into one another. The purest Romanticism, merely concepts and all.</p><p>And later in the Polksa Cowboy Operas, The French Palace, the hero, head-shot, bleeding, in a cheer, and the defaced saloon girl love interest, and the hero died quietly, off-screen, away from the focus, head fall back, looking through a hole in the roof at the signage higher above--</p><p><b>French Palace.</b></p><p>Not "Vienna's" like in <b>Johnny Guitar,</b> but the fricking French Palace.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-21697026439890795812024-03-14T15:07:00.001-04:002024-03-14T15:07:26.355-04:00Cactus Root and the Man of Bitter Fruit.<p>Ya'at'eeh. <br /></p><p>Man from Big Water? </p><p>Him scooch from beyond Big Water, then make hot foot from the gray shores of what the "white ass person" call the water the Atlantic.<br /></p><p>Some call this legendary frontiersman Cactus Root.</p><p>Him heap full of unsound word. Word of nothing much in particular, and then we also begrudge him to take part when the drum start, hold knives to his throat so he no culturally appropriate our tribal dances.<br /></p><p>We laugh, and him see our teeth when we laugh, and him think we think he dentist, and he look into our maws. Guffaw, guffaw, our breath-wind soundless laughing exhalations, our teeth, our plainsman toothsome laughing.</p><p>He hand us good medical IOU from business office, 12/hr staffer using stick in sand to scribe an invoice: financial burden for medicine that heap bad; him fee to recoup losses in receivable monies from simply staring aristocratically at our mouths. Like the 400 dollar per hour IBM pony in Frankfurt--Floating Cloud and others put that one at standstill, tossing snowballs into its open, sucking mouth.<br /></p><p>Him trade blankets and fire water for our maple syrup; and mind this blanket and firewater, strangely familiar--like when squaw pass toolbox to elder, and elder distribute to other braves, then other brave, to the chief here, and this, a gift.</p><p>Recycled? Repurposed? Alchemy? Trash?</p><p>Other Man from Big Water put his scrotems in the gopher's mouth. From the money bag he hide in pants. He sweat on short grass--he sweat, turn pink then red--red like chief--in mid-afternoon sun, when his secretary catch him off, him make deposit, making stupid game with prairie dogs and gophers.</p><p>Other Man, we call him Man of Bitter Fruit. Him and him valet, Humpty-Bumpty-Stumpty and the Singing Woman--big noise, all of them, no sand in their words. Singing Woman on a mission, a spirit-quest, to cycle through every man in her nation, and she, like St Paul or John Calvin say that each, after she has sampled their produce, she claim each one is unworthy, and bad.<br /></p><p><br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-43285073489862342832024-03-10T18:26:00.003-04:002024-03-10T18:26:40.634-04:00Intl. Women's Day, and some "film festival", sponsored by Uncle Bingo's Bald Cream and Knob Butter.<p> <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU6JJUVy1YFmTuSktSPm526mP5PC-9VDYhFi2deCxuQH8AB062RKRdxJbM9lEHBzmHrIXpi8-l37XDAiuvB7JUgb7KzjUnZ5LFmx2Bph57t-lVqEkYjxLz1i2vsZ56LP6E8YJLDyHQkp6KA8r6R2UnBsRep-I0bHRgMW0ddL2a5MKCGYLgKvNleUlIjg0/s900/3_10_24_a.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="900" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU6JJUVy1YFmTuSktSPm526mP5PC-9VDYhFi2deCxuQH8AB062RKRdxJbM9lEHBzmHrIXpi8-l37XDAiuvB7JUgb7KzjUnZ5LFmx2Bph57t-lVqEkYjxLz1i2vsZ56LP6E8YJLDyHQkp6KA8r6R2UnBsRep-I0bHRgMW0ddL2a5MKCGYLgKvNleUlIjg0/s320/3_10_24_a.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p></p><p> </p><p>March 8 was International Women's Day. <br /></p><p>As per the good book, "be prepared to give a reason for your hope". And that, indulging hope and so forth, as the Ides of March approach, good old Bette and Cassiopeia. "Methinks yon Cassie has a lean and hungry look."</p><p>Turner Classic Movies is doing a dual focus with women's month and the Oscars, putting mostly the Oscar films in prime time, and squeezing Bette Davis and other classic actresses into the obscure hours. To some observers, such a relegation would seem a kind of minimizing effort, but wait, the obscure hours are the haunts of some of TCM's most ardent supporters.... some 9 am in the morning or something.<br /></p><p>To get the blood flowing on my own little itinerary, a documentary about Barbara Stanwyck.</p><p>Weekend of Friday 8 March: <b>Barbara Stanwyck.</b></p><p>Weekend of Friday 15 March: <b>Maureen Ohara</b></p><p>Weekend of Friday 22 March: <b>Katherine Hepburn</b><br /></p><p><b>Friday, March 8 2024: Crime of Passion.</b><br /></p><p>Previously I had seen some of Barbara Stanwyck's early efforts in film, as a "babyface": a fresh young beautiful face on the silver screen, and even a movie called <i>Babyface</i>, but here she's somewhere in transition in terms of screen persona, in <i><b>Crime of Passion</b></i>, opposite Sterling Hayden(more on him later). Its that profound thing of life experience, a kind of mental tarnish that takes the innocence and beauty and turns it into a bronze luster and duller still daydreams of simply holding on to those regular moments: maturation.</p><p>Sterling Hayden in the mix, that cave man glare, the simplistic boom of voice. A basic kind of hard stone of a man, like when Sterling Hayden brick-walled Peter Sellers's RAF officer....</p><p>I called Crime of Passion the "price of cabbage" in my notes on this one. Its a variation of the yellow wallpaper, I suppose, that a woman's vibrant and active mind is turned asunder by marital concerns. She's not co-opted or taken charge of, specifically, as in the Yellow Wallpaper; she willfully gives up a brilliant career as an up and coming journalist for the sake of her husband. He becomes her focus, and with all that time and talent of her left idle, she begins to invent some unique, but morally bankrupt, ways to advance the career of her beloved.</p><p>Caveman Sterling Hayden is perfect as the good-guy working-stiff detective. He's a less caffeine-fueled version of Donnie Wahlberg's detective character on CBS's Blue Bloods, but nevertheless, smart or dumb, he's honest.</p><p>However. <br /></p><p>His wife envisions him growing in his job, not only becoming better at the work, but advancing higher into the chain of command. She attaches that, staples it to his mental chicken, and stakes her hopes that the man's value is in his work status, and not in other things.</p><p>Mind that his character explains that the police job is just a means to make a wage, and that it doesn't define him. Consider, if he feels that way, then maybe he hasn't giving his best to the job, if it doesn't own some of his pride, some of his identity.</p><p>The film asks the question that a lot of us have wondered about from time to time, "who ordered this Lox and cream cheese on a bagel"? <br /></p><p><b>Saturday March 9: The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers.</b></p><p>Martha Strangelove(Martha Smith/Ivers) in Barbara Stanwyck, and a young Kirk Douglas as "supporting cast". <br /></p><p><b>Sunday March 10, 2024. </b><br /></p><p>Perhaps one of the best of the cable television experiences, is numerical channel surfing, just like we did for decades before streaming and the absences of numbers of the television remote controls.</p><p>So there I was, full of unction...</p><p>"flipping" from <b>The Redhead From Wyoming </b>on INSP, and <b>Cat on a Hot Tin Roof</b> on Turner Classic Movies. Redhead, was a new one to me, while Cat was beloved and familiar. Mere appetizers and afterthoughts during my little Gal's Month revue.<br /></p><p>...she just brushes through--does the redhead in the low-cut saloon girl
dress, turned horse meat monger, cattle baroness- lightly scraping
against the felicities of some cowpokes, and that with its jealousies and
infatuations alternating in such a way as to produce dull violence
amongst several big ranches, the local police, the state courts, and a candidate for governor.<br /></p><p>She's Cattle Kate, is Maureen Ohara. And she has to struggle some to get, not exactly far ahead, but to just to keep her place with the ranch. And the struggle, Cheevers, we relate to that. <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMoIAcxVVqEJDURJL0cl1pkKe9HkoIAF7vDAR9z3XkXyxQ858ui-xRErXlFHEqBD0rbY7ZDI1JzASy_3p18dO40S-JuKhtjso5RafmWeeOwhs5paE9K8tVczbFWNE33cOBxrAA87PjYFUGQ1D_TzuF6RYbDNfvxt94SUBXqesNnvsaCrb9vYB6uiuU6PQ/s792/3_10_24_b.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="639" data-original-width="792" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMoIAcxVVqEJDURJL0cl1pkKe9HkoIAF7vDAR9z3XkXyxQ858ui-xRErXlFHEqBD0rbY7ZDI1JzASy_3p18dO40S-JuKhtjso5RafmWeeOwhs5paE9K8tVczbFWNE33cOBxrAA87PjYFUGQ1D_TzuF6RYbDNfvxt94SUBXqesNnvsaCrb9vYB6uiuU6PQ/s320/3_10_24_b.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-72925034751451587352024-03-08T09:14:00.001-05:002024-03-08T09:14:47.216-05:00On Productivity(The Productivy Corridor): Disparities Between Brent and Vincent.<p>On the local level, there is a certain mindset. Brent is our case study for sake of making a point.</p><p>Brent works part-time. And having that part-time job is worth a kind of social credit, despite the lack of funds in the bank account. The little job earns Brent a kind of respect among the mainstream of the locals. Social cache. <br /></p><p>Yet Brent is below the poverty line. Nevermind the term "time millionaire", Brent living his best life engaging in various cultural activities and socializing with friends at his leisure.<br /></p><p>Vincent is basically the polar opposite of Brent.</p><p>Good old Vincent, a Yank, born into a family that owned a convenience store, Vincent began to work for his father during his teenage years. Imagine that Vincent learned to manage his time during that period, as he made room for work, schooling and all the other. </p><p>But there was a niggle that began to grow, a sort of obsession with getting on the clock, working when he could, so that he might earn. He might forsake some of that regular teen stuff in order to make some money.</p><p>Vincent learned small business during that time, and he fed that obsession with being productive, with earning.</p><p>I personally came up with a sort of scattershot approach, putting my eggs in several baskets. Despite that the totals of each basket grow slowly, they do grow, and in the end, where one person, like Brent, will have a half-full basket, and yet others might eventually have one full bucket, I would find that I had slowly filled not one bucket, but several.</p><p>So I organize an hour with the pomodoro, and do time-blocking for the daily, which is segmenting various subjects into various blocks of time, usually each block an hour or two, important meetings with Chris Hale and Seth Adams, and so forth.</p><p>But the week? The scale of so many days?</p><p>It gets a variation of the Eisenhower Matrix, a four part grouping of squares of varying distinction, does the week. I take artistic license here like so many productivity pundits who each claim to have invented the Eisenhower Matrix.</p><p>What I've done is segmented the week into large pieces of time that I divide into pieces in an Eisenhower Matrix, four parts, of varying importance, just the way Ike would.</p><p>Those pieces might be 400 dollars a day for some weird analytics, or 2 dollars an hour in the spare time, stuffing envelopes at half-attention while on Zoom with Chris Hale.</p><p>You could call it quick hands, or perhaps busy hands, just the way Vincent would, but with the pomodoro's enforced leisure periods mixed in. That even making a grocery list for Seth Adams demands its own leisure time added into the substance of the time, like Bentonville's "2 hours on" earning "15 minutes downtime".</p><p>We're talking seat-time and the economy variously of attention and other demands, such as mental energy.</p><p>Imagine a neat little row of bean sprouts.</p><p>Each bean, less than cent in cost, acquired almost as worthless waste material, and then placed lovingly into cups.</p><p>What did we do? Did we get a business loan? Did we buy Facebook ads? Did we design influencer content?</p><p>No.</p><p>We did the core business of putting small dashes of nourishing water into each cup.</p><p>And what happens, eventually?</p><p>A penny spent in December. A few minutes spent in care. A squirt here and there.<br /></p><p>It spawns a few meals in the later seasons of the year. <br /></p><p>Vincent the obsessed Yankee hustler takes something like this to a further extreme, saying that he doesn't spend his first million on a "f*cking Bugatti", but instead uses the money to hire a team of employees to grow his own business interest, cementing his income stream, multiplying, compounding, feeding his obsession for the concept of business.</p><p>In the same sense, that modern entrepreneur mind is pitched the 5 percent interest bearing checking account, earning some low amount, but feeding that dream of someday having the passive income, some subsistence amount earned trouble-free on all that sweat and negativity from the daily hustle.</p><p>I think the new American dream is somewhere between the Meta content planner calendar and the interest-bearing online checking account.....</p><p> <br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-42929188296189391212024-03-04T00:07:00.002-05:002024-03-04T00:07:35.876-05:00People with two lives, plus a goatmonger and one his charge; Futnuckery.<p><b>the life one has</b> v. <b>the life one wants.</b> Invariably to attend to one, does no service to the other, as of the sunflowers and the Christogenic inner sunshine--these need our mental energies, our attention, in order to thrive, but we have to choose between the two over and over again, and choose wisely, at that. </p><p>"The Life One Wants" is as much a thirsty little plant that calls us away from the ordinary, the things in front of us everyday, and it can become a demon, in its hunger, being in the balance a full, heart-felt love letter of negligence to our regular lives.</p><p>A good dream can make us vital, can push it and we can use it as a fuel, a tonic, that helps us in our real lives. A pain that verges on pleasure that keeps us awake, it could be, or something that makes us cognizant of not, The Way Things Are, but The Way Things Should Be(as of the dreams of inventors, civil rights pioneers, and hobbyist bloggers).</p><p>But. The Life One Has, is it as changeable, is it as easy to form or re-form as it is the dream? Can we just imagine something new in to that world? Dare we?</p><p>Dare we not just suffer along in the everyday world, while wasting our best spiritual energies on daydreams, idling away in impossibility, rather than churning the cream, doing our knitting work, to manifest the thing, The Way It Might Aught To Be?</p><p>One of my various personalities was that of a fledgling bluesman, <b>Fatfish</b>, picker of the acoustic blues, owing nothing in particular to any subset of the genre, and likewise finding himself unclaimed on the part of any of those others. There was a thing, an artistic expression, <i>"The Goat Farmer".</i> </p><p>Read on, if you have the sand to read on.</p><p>One of those "goats" was an alcoholic. A man of public schooling, a tradesman, skilled labor, and an alcoholic. Mind, so many would say, "oh, that's the alcoholic" as if he were a lost cause, a lost soul; and yet I knew him to be not quite dead in his own time, having spirit and vitality. What others dismiss as something to be ignored, I could find a sort of level of friendship. He could even make human-like sounds in conversation, and we would sometimes trade cigarettes, and variously give a ride to the convenience store. It might shock the Pharisee to realize he was as much as <i>almost human.</i><br /></p><p>At home, his friend was a wandering neighborhood mutt, but his pride was a bought pure-bred, some Alaskan species. Beer and Louis L'Amour novels, and on the best occasions, to pamper himself beyond servicing his alcoholism, cooking a batch of fried chicken and biscuits for himself and his purebred.</p><p>He was unmarried, actually divorced, with several children, and it was the thing of Jesus broadcasting the mustard seed transposed into the real world: that some of his seed fell on fertile ground and thrived, while yet other was carried away by predatory birds, and finally some dried upon stony soil, never becoming much of anything.</p><p>We come to the point where we realize that if we could not extract some sort of lessons from our past, then it was lost time, neutered, and useless in pushing forward. Both the Daily Life and the Daydream of old could be a sort of data that we put through the sieve of our own intellects in producing something yet more ugly than those dull hours, something of a horrid blueprint, of something wretched that we idealistically and romantically refer to as "a blueprint of the future".</p><p>That past dataset and the dubious, incredible agenda of the future, I sometimes refer to as "futnuckery". <br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-91761247086621352902024-03-01T07:45:00.078-05:002024-03-01T18:03:40.479-05:00mathematics is but a method of describing nature.....<div>Some trick, slight of hand, the pattern and number of the petals on a sunflower, and the light, that beautiful source, the arrangement something in itself, some <i>{1, 3, 7, 15.....}</i>.</div><div> </div><div>Naturally occurring like that syrup-goo slathered Celine Dion cassette in her glove box, Fibonacci sequence. <br /></div><div> </div><div>Also, as a friend reminds: <i>3, 6, 9, the goose drank wine! </i></div><div> </div><div>Not the Creeping Chaos of the odd half-addition, half-multiplication of the natural universe, but instead the opposing, not like the neural pathways growing and all that, rerouting and splicing, forking off into an almost never-ending set, a large set of numbers, infinite but for our lack of comprehending such a sum. Like the Meta dataset. The increasing tonnage of cat videos online. They say of Meta, they have more than a lifetime of metrics in their system, that no humans would have enough time and inclination to ever effectively parse that....</div><div><br /></div><div>no human.... but a cold, indelicate intelligence might....<br /></div><p>That Russian Winter of Old Age, losing the faculties of the mind, yet growing more and more in emotional maturity and common sense. Decreasing almost infinitely towards zero, even between whole number one and zero, trailing more and more fractional components, ever decreasing in numerical size, quantitatively, but increasing in complexity.</p><div>Reeks of high school, oh my brothers.</div><div><br /></div><div>The inverse of Abraham Maslow, the corrupting of the FDA food pyramid, the difference between say an orange and a tiny truffle, size inversely proportional to caloric content, the whole work reaching not to RA, per se, past the Walmart, the benches at the library, and all, the FBI training center, not that, instead but death, and the infinite open sky is but an expression of some kind of dispersion, in which we but hear something of an A.M. signal, with much noise interference, as we gaze back languidly on the wreckage of the earth.</div><div><br /></div><div>Contra-indications. </div><div> </div><div>Pro-growth capitalism, racing to keep the stock vibrant in the eyes of the trader, beating inflation by the total of some 7-10 percent... </div><div> </div><div>....and Megyn Kelly telling the story of the boy chased by the mongoose... </div><div> </div><div>I'll sue her pants off; tell her an even better story.</div><div> </div><div>Mechtilda of Magdeberg, the universe whispering that white noise, that breeze sound of indefinite existence.<br /></div>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-29349815067251378352024-02-02T17:23:00.001-05:002024-02-02T17:23:17.088-05:00180 million things I hate about you: on the American dream and the month of February.<p>Women's better health, and the continuing upward climb of the American Negro across the nation's workplaces, schools and communities, among other sundry assorted items. In the interim, does it not seem business as usual, this continual swerve, such as "#thestruggle", as we put bags of money into holes in our own walls, and the weather wearily trudges along, alternating between sweat and frost like so many hummingbird-heart schoolgirls.</p><p>Or, as it were, in the "entitlement" conversation: the better health of the American Negro and the diminuatives amongst all of us, and of them, I stand on the edge and look, inward, towards the very core of the struggle, though my eyesight fails to permeate the inner layers, and I see, perhaps, but complaints, rather than a "street-level reality". A clutch in my guts as I purse to pull and struggle at the halter, but such as it is, nothing is uncommon, I suppose, as in nothing that has not vexed anyone else.</p><p>Which is usually much more than enough to turn upward the toes of any good man.</p><p>Asking him of the plight of women, he would agree, without substance I think, being essentially a vapor among the throng that may or may not support various birthing privileges or abortion access guised under an umbrella of various other services, and the wolves they were tossed towards don't advance, but wait for the diminuatives to rush unto them. And its the same intonation as to talking of gas prices or the weather, one would think, the concerns from outside that circle, and the vessels of trade, the wares of commerce and industry, and all that.</p><p>The optimistic upward climb, that as success and status increases, beguiling Fox News, the climber's altruism responds inversely. As if to say, "I don't listen to Donald", and he had 180 million subscribers, or something thereabout, people listening to the person the outwardly claim they don't listen to, just a sort of Sissyphus orbital to pull them down into a more helpful position, I would say, just like jigsaw puzzle pieces in a little cardboard box. With ever the promise of daylight at the end of the tunnel, unless one of the select unwanted and inconvenient few, "chosen".</p><p>Sissyphus pushed, not that he was accomplishing a simple task, but think, not that the item would be uplifted, but that both would be upon the precipice ultimately, and further more, most of his existence, the item, left alone, would have crushed him to death. So he pushed, and the philosopher is distracted so by the futility of the thing, but what of the social meaning, or the utilitarian meaning, other than just spending time, pulling frozen peas and carrots from a freezer, to a chef, and then, after those are finished, to turn around again and get more.</p><p>If Sissyphus is a lost cause, then aren't we all?</p><p>I mopped the floor, and it was similar seeming futility, that some wizard or pyrotechnic would make a robot to do the job more efficiently, but it was that same compounding continuum of human use that was my boulder to struggle with, that done once was not final at all. Five days a week it would be done, over and over, a few stray footprints being as the boulder on the mountain.</p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-57494098339382414942023-12-18T16:47:00.000-05:002023-12-18T16:47:12.221-05:00Following your own heart-felt, blissful truth.<p>Of course, it was incumbent upon the New York Times to proclaim God dead, and Nietzsche taking up the slogan himself, said so ruefully, that he would be replaced with something.</p><p>"Listen to your parents" became</p><p>"Listen to your hearts", and finally, the poison drought:</p><p>"Follow your bliss".</p><p>And then, noise systematically sandwich smashed into categories and different folders, directories, buildings in the science department.</p><p>"Follow your own truth."</p><p>Until, at long last, no truth whatsoever, and no life matters particularly.</p><p>I reasoned this in part under the auspices of a tempest, with network access down, and my brain left to its own desserts, Epictetus and some other.</p><p>At long last, a two cent printed circuit dictating my existence? I relent and take to the woods, in the Unabomber Bridal Chamber, with an Oliver mechanical typewriter, and plenty of spleen: spleen and caffeine.</p><p>And in the meantime, I owe no one nothing, under the Democrats, nothing but to love them: live and let live.</p><p>Replacing the essential core of man with something cheap and undignified, perhaps the way of those in Cathay, or something, to do the chop-chop motion, that people can be stacked like cords of firewood drying in the sun, beetles and so forth crawling around on them, that superficial dampness beneath, something of the leeching of lifewater from the earth.</p><p>But God was not dead, and in the meantime, our own truths meant precious little when there was advertising time to sell. Nietzsche would have been impressed or totally galled by how they whore to the sponsors.</p><p>But even the spirit American, the romanticists, and the thinkers, dirty little toenails and potato grease on their chins, still: to thine own self....</p><p>And then something of the very awareness of the Akashic record, and disappearing peoples of old, and various technologies lost, but tantalizing us, leaving a residue beneath even the numerous sands of time.....</p><p>Trying to make a program of life, a downward push on the society, befuddling the Aristocracy and so forth, a communal unhappiness that we butter our cheapest breads with at the morning table: marxism and communism, conflict theory, class warfare, to the extent that we have raided our enemies' cupboards.</p><p>That of late, Smithfield, Chinese, celestial, old Cathay, and the eternal churn of bodies, as the world cedes every advantage to the dishonest player, in the name of his own conscience, and the girls are barred from universities, and my dance class begins to meet in secret: things banned by the politbureau, gyrations that they hate so well.</p><p>The downward pressure of one's own bliss, the communal dystopia, the grayness and indecency of total equality among the classes of people, and the assistants telling the old one what to say, the old eight-prong king, and the presses running night and day with narrative, and the endless bending to advertisers and the corporate masters, some 20 million thrown at the top, the board, the chowder society, the ballet set.......</p><p><i>Ne hou ching me ming zi...</i></p><p>They were saying just yesterday, if the younger black adults were to support a given party, that given party would have to come across with things that mattered to that particular set of voters. And the eternal struggle: the engineered balancing of racism versus wide-open borders, the greatest city in the world nearing a fall in the face of indigent migrants....</p><p>They balanced this such that no platform is particularly palatable, and is just a line of talk for various outlets.</p><p> <br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-18879792696334271622023-11-30T09:19:00.003-05:002023-11-30T09:19:15.980-05:00near the end of autumn in the southeast.<p>This time of year in the southeastern United States has these mid-morning thaws, in which a thin veneer of overnight or early morning frost beings to melt in the brilliant near-winter sunlight.</p><p>This thaw is like the renewing of the mind, the growing midday temperature being a kind of growing hope, a kind of destiny enlarging and increasing with the advance of the clock.</p><p>And overnight? Like the caterpillar entering his little cocoon for later, a kind of "gone to earth" type of wish for rejuvenation, and during the day, the romance is to come as the thaw comes, the ice "effervescing", turning from white to clear, a thin skin of frost becoming water, and the clear water then evaporating in the later midday.</p><p>We're in a kind of bated breath that happens between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the advertisers are wanting our money, and the loved ones are beginning to impinge upon our time: baking, shopping, the red velour ribbons, green wreaths of cedar or pine, and the white oak leaves are our version of snow across the SEC.<br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-49138914275243269162023-11-29T17:57:00.002-05:002023-11-29T17:57:36.618-05:00Review: The Merry Wives of Windsor.<p> </p>
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104778.The_Merry_Wives_of_Windsor" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="The Merry Wives of Windsor" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347766098l/104778._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104778.The_Merry_Wives_of_Windsor">The Merry Wives of Windsor</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/947.William_Shakespeare">William Shakespeare</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6011023393">4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
A comedy without a lot of Shakespeare's usual verbal flourish, which should be far from off-putting for the modern reader, because it means this one is more accessible than some of his other plays. <br /><br />History says that the English queen suggested that she wanted to see a comedy featuring John Falstaff, and here Shakespeare complies in what could be called "John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor". <br /><br />Accessible, somewhat physical, and somewhat also "adult" featuring humor regarding infidelity and jealousies, with of course, a stock wedding featuring a daughter torn between her parents' choices in suitors for her: but that's really just a subplot, in the long run.
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/48765712-mike-morris">View all my reviews</a>
Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-88548422622489303302023-11-08T10:02:00.002-05:002023-11-08T10:02:31.908-05:00The God of Hope providing Peace and Joy to the believer.<p>If only it were worded this way. But here are three King James Version verses stringed together from different books.</p><p><i>"Now the God hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.</i></p><p><i>Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us.</i></p><p><i>And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may bound to every good work."</i></p><p>This was:</p><p><b>Romans 15:13</b></p><p><b>Ephesians 3:20</b></p><p><b>2 Corinthians 9:8 </b></p><p>Shuffling the verses often makes a great message, but may or may not damage the context of the passage.<br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-61575060456593325892023-11-07T09:59:00.001-05:002023-11-07T14:46:34.273-05:00Productivity: DRICE method for productivity and Google Workspace Calender with Metrics("Time Analysis")<p>lenny@substack.com has a piece from Darius Contractor on the "detailed RICE framework", which can be applied to pretty much any question-decision-action cycle, not just in business.</p><p>Also, Google Workspace has added schedule metrics("Time Analysis") to Google Calendar in Workspace. It looks good, and without the paid account or pro account, one has to use add-ins for such info.</p><p>One can look back and get tabulations and even graphs of time spent and comparisons of time spent at various things, even color coded.</p><p> <br /></p>
<p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_jSm4__r-l4?si=0iCgtKANBdWFdqC6" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>as always</p><p>site email: abaddon1215@gmail.com</p><p>paypal: @origen84 or paypal.me/origen84</p><p>cashapp: $origen1979<br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-47588064914627924642023-11-07T08:04:00.006-05:002023-11-07T14:46:08.928-05:00Henry David Thoreau and Walden<p>"Screw you all. I'm going to live in the woods for a while."</p><p>He took him to the woods, for lack of much else of substance to do. He was classically educated, Ivy League, studying Greek, reading Homer in the Greek, as was the fashion of the day, that so much of the curricula bedrock of the day dovetailed with the Ancient Greek language.</p><p>He started a school that failed, and for a time, he was even Ralph Waldo Emerson's housekeeper, just earning a wage and on occasion writing a book.</p><p>A unique man, educated, but in plain language, he could justify at length so much of his own existence.</p><p>Consider it: a person without a proper career. In today's age of goals and devices, one works a career towards a dream home, and then, Dr Martin Seligman and others have studies that indicate that the peak of happiness in this modern existence is a vacation of at least one week. So the dream is to take a break from the dream, maybe.<br /></p><p>Thoreau took most of a year, near Concord Massachusetts, camped-out in a self-built cabin on the edge of Walden Pond. He had some 30 dollars in groceries, mostly staples, as he seemed to live on a kind of hard-tack or "hoe-cake" or something, a simple fritter of sorts of simply flour and water.</p><p>His approach seems to be an outsider's look, as in an earlier writing, the "Two Weeks...", in a chapter on "Sundays", he looked at religion from what seemed to be an outsider's perspective, uniquely original, taking on eyes of someone seeing for the first time, and explaining as if speaking to someone with no knowledge of the thing. Clinical, like, and a nice little time capsule for the modern era.</p><p>There was, of course, the "Two Weeks On The Potomac and Merrimack Rivers" and his "Cape Cod", in which he gave a nice naturalist view of the flora and fauna of the countryside, though he dips less into that literary vein in Walden.</p><p>The ultimate bit of minimalist philosophy, perhaps, in a man, not of property or stature, with perhaps a bit of an odd reputation. And of the modern era, we note that his work survives so-called "counter culture" because he was an abolitionist, in the present lensing of history: one of the "good guys". A day laborer quite often, working a harvest, helping raise a barn, for his income, then finding fame in posterity later as an author, eclipsing to an extent the Transcendentalist Emerson in his lasting influence.</p><p>Indeed, a first edition of such a book as Walden would be a great prize for my own person if I were not such a downcast poor day laborer myself, but I have annotated copies in plain print, and a digital Thoreau, "Complete Works", with of course, access to Thoreau with Gutenberg holdings and the Walden Pond Society.</p><p>In reading Walden, we have kind of an intoxication of neuroplasticity, pathways in the brain being routed, something in the unique quality of the writing, the originalist kind of perspective, the renaissance man of the youngling America, and we find that thinking can be intoxicating, and thinking about thinking is an even higher intoxication, as Thoreau talks about laying in the mid-morning sun on the bank of the lake, and so forth, having his idle time outside of tending his garden, reading Homer. </p><p>Consider this somewhat "contemplative", a time of being lost in one's thoughts. As is said in the King James, "God man made upright, but man has sought many devices". I note the overbearing presence of the cell phone in modernity. Android now gives the casual user a usage report weekly, tallying total hours of usage, and even presenting in terms of metrics, a comparison of week-to-week numbers.<br /></p><p>Thoreau was minimalist, before minimalist was cool, and a "contemplative" but not in the religious sense.</p><p>Note that Civil Disobedience is not mentioned here. It's a work for its own page, I think, worthy of so much mention for not only its substance, but its influence in the history of American Civil Rights.<br /></p><p>The email contact for the page is abaddon1215@gmail.com<br /></p><p>Cashapp Cashtag is $origen1979</p><p>Paypal: @origen84 or paypal.me/origen84</p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-53827239557765799552023-11-05T09:35:00.003-05:002023-11-05T09:35:52.711-05:00Instruistoj Hat: Hawthorne and Young Goodman Brown<p>It seems of no consequence: what "they" thought was evil, and the modern dissipation in contrast, what would bugger church-focused youngling America, and the very complex, vague evils of today.</p><p>But the point is universal, across cultures, that the young husband wanted to find out the secret of the young wife, and he took to finding out, seeing what Maury would chime, "the lie detector has determined..."</p><p>Across a bridge of interpretation, following his bride, unknowing, into the night-time woods, is the same as catching her asleep during Captain America, and going through her phone.</p><p>Not unlike me catching my 9 year old Caitlyn with a stash of Cuban cigars. "You should take a belt to that little ass." Of course, thank you, but I don't really want to be a DSS casefile.</p><p>Me, telling her we don't support communism, and she telling me that she doesn't, that she's just a flaming nihilist, instead. <br /></p><p>Not that we're at all, any of us, above that sort of thing.</p><p>And "goodman". Como se dice? Just a dude, a young man, young but grown, a man making his life, and titled in no other way, such that in the largely Puritan influenced church-focused America, a Mister is as such, with no encumbrances or liens upon his heritage, is known as a "goodman", and women?</p><p>Goodwomen.</p><p>Hawthorne, called a great American writer, and his horrific tales put in textbooks, is rarely yet spoken of as a good horror writer. And he also dabbled a bit in science-fiction, but the labels of those elude his work, thanks to the lensing of early America and all that in his work.</p><p>Why, his very epoch of history has cemented him into the textbooks, that we have insight into what was horrific or heart-wrenching for that era of America.</p><p>For a young couple, a young husband, what's the bad thing that could happen? Superlatively bad, when infidelity in early America was somewhat out of the scope of imagination, what would that point to as being a real evil for a young couple?</p><p>Answer next time.</p><p>As young Brown discovers something about his miss that he did not know.</p><p><i>"The lie detector has determined...."</i><br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-83094380200887792182023-11-03T06:45:00.005-04:002023-11-03T06:45:59.402-04:00Truth with Emily Dickinson and Anna Barbauld, approaching wisdom and reason and Thomas Payne as a capstone.<p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Tell all the truth but tell it slant--<br />Success in Circuit lies<br />Too bright for our infirm Delight<br />The Truth's superb surprise<br /><br />As Lightning to the Children eased<br />With explanation kind<br />The Truth must dazzle gradually<br />Or every man be blind.</span></p><p><b>-Emily Dickinson</b></p><p>Indeed, ease into it, or come at it from a state of ease, in a state of ease.</p><p>This truth thing that buggers us so much, in the svelte era of the interplay of ease and rationalism, heightened senses to be calipered and so forth, as France fumbles over it itself again and again, from overthrowing fat self-interested monarchs, to the killing of political enemies, to the empire and all.</p><p><i>Too bright...</i></p><p>Here now, the days become shorter, here, November 3 in the Southeast USA. We will not have such a glut of sunlight with which to contend, but more and more darkness, and then the bugaboo of Daylight Savings Time, we shall, turn over the truth thoughtfully again and again in the gloom before we scream it to the world--plenty of time!</p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">There is an eye that never sleepeth; there is an eye that seeth in dark night, as well as in the bright sunshine.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">When there is no light of the sun, nor of the moon: when there is no lamp in the house, nor any little star twinkling through the dark clouds; that eye seeth everywhere, in all places, and watcheth continually over all the families of the earth.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">The eye sleepeth not, is God's; his hand is always stretched out over us.</span></p><p><b>-Anna Laetitia Barbauld</b></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Mr. Burke has two or three times in his parliamentary speeches, and in his publications, made use of a jingle of words that conveyed no ideas. Speaking of a government, he says, "It is better to have monarchy for its basis, and republicanism for its corrective, than republicanism for its basis, and monarchy for its corrective." If that means that it is better to correct folly with wisdom, than wisdom with folly, I will no otherwise contend with him, than to say it would be much better to reject folly altogether.</span></p><p><b>-Thomas Paine </b><br /></p><p> <br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-41472576342658959182023-11-01T14:39:00.003-04:002023-11-01T14:39:51.327-04:00Eternity, the void of our own reflections, a bruise on space time, and the obsolescence of the spirit in autumn/fall scenery.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj38HILDt3CdQqPOdtGwnfHRyZGwx3EvYCVJTNmTq-oaWhBSLFjU-CjIIe5qRUwlc5M-42xFa7lirjADxFPm2L6aecX0F0xn00JSsJNxLUT0204Ut1Di8HlrMiJpJqGJxMT1VB_sZbfHczipBvlb0Qjh3JiPZXiNRfl-E-Ohxr-qqt8bltHLxWxL-kNQnA/s1600/triangle_001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="1600" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj38HILDt3CdQqPOdtGwnfHRyZGwx3EvYCVJTNmTq-oaWhBSLFjU-CjIIe5qRUwlc5M-42xFa7lirjADxFPm2L6aecX0F0xn00JSsJNxLUT0204Ut1Di8HlrMiJpJqGJxMT1VB_sZbfHczipBvlb0Qjh3JiPZXiNRfl-E-Ohxr-qqt8bltHLxWxL-kNQnA/s320/triangle_001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>To test many things, some watch youtube videos or <i>tik yok</i>, while others measure and form hypothesis; yet to test eternity we have but to ignorantly leap into it with an unguarded heart.<br /><br />The void we leap into is actually our lives. The hopes and anxieties and so forth are generated within each of us and dictate our perspective so often without reflecting the reality of any given situation.<br /><br /><i>"We could live like other people."<br /><br />"We're not other people...."</i><br /><br />We are perhaps, a bruise upon the space time continuum, on a hard little rock of iron careening around and around a giant bonfire of radiation and magnetic particles.<br /><br /><i>Me or thee?</i><br /><br />To the learning of, and the testing of, many things, and the awareness, Socratic, of things of which we are not aware, the sensation of a larger universe, and no end to learning and eternal trek of <i>neuroplasticity</i> in which we form new pathways in the brain, that feeling, as good as drugs or sex or other <i>dissipations</i>; while the western world watches Disney movies, we careen onward into, over, under and through old books(no Youtube video Cliff-Notes versions),<br /><br />and we hasten, but also idle, too, to experience the world in it's original Shakespeare.<br /><br />A lusterous, somber, sleepy change of seasons which brings beautiful reading weather, and beautiful weather for mid-afternoon walks; indeed, in the Western world, such is in part owned by Robert Frost, speaking a double-talk of his classroom charges and family, afternoon loafing, ambling, excursions into something nearly mystical--the Ruysbroeck of New England, Maugham's poet rusting away in happiness. At once Poet Laureate of the entire United States during the era of the Kennedy dynasty.<br /><br />Why, other than the leaves falling, under an overcast day, it's silent as a tomb, a silence otherwise spared for the hours before hurricanes in the Southeast, that quietness, and the birds gone away.<br /><br /><br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqcbollKpDZccxr_c9c4EtXMji3nG5s_jU8szBQ2bPHReSiMHv0P3AweLS6y4cPp1SdCPGsu8mh3UZcPZCzRmcmycSqV5PpQvwo0owJhsEmJFWAPNY7FNH-dhygjh0YeQLxszr37VQWFdiQPY9NsZ0g-0nRyeHPiWpN-X7AV4vOfJKemPFxNCbtL11IXw/s1024/triangle_002.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="892" data-original-width="1024" height="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqcbollKpDZccxr_c9c4EtXMji3nG5s_jU8szBQ2bPHReSiMHv0P3AweLS6y4cPp1SdCPGsu8mh3UZcPZCzRmcmycSqV5PpQvwo0owJhsEmJFWAPNY7FNH-dhygjh0YeQLxszr37VQWFdiQPY9NsZ0g-0nRyeHPiWpN-X7AV4vOfJKemPFxNCbtL11IXw/s320/triangle_002.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-47129828322765733002023-10-31T09:56:00.003-04:002023-10-31T09:56:26.203-04:00On Halloween 2023, taking it to harvest time, Autumn, and the churn of seasons.<p><b>Anna Laetitia Barbauld</b> (d 1825) <br /></p><p>On Autumn, Barbauld being the female equivalent of a polymath of sorts, has a few words: <br /></p><p><i><span style="font-family: verdana;">"Farewell the softer hours, Spring's opening blush<br />And Summer's deeper glow, the shepherd's pipe<br />Tuned to the murmurs of a weeping spring,<br />And song of birds, and gay enameled fields--<br />Farewll! 'Tis now the sickness of the year,<br />Not to be medicined by the skillful hand."</span></i><br /></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The impetus towards a change of temperature, or even a warm temperature as a "blush" brings us into a outward appearance context, and yet we can feel too the blood in our faces, making an inward context in terms of our internal feelings.</p><p></p><p>Indeed, in her time agriculture and commerce: things to be done by the people that made the world pump along. A lot of manual labor.</p><p>Barbauld's own imput was along the lines of her role as a teacher and her side function as an activist, speaking and doing on things that niggled at her in the real world. If only so many of us were demarcated so in our time, to recognize productive things, day-to-day things, the "core business" and then to give the extra time to the far future, as Bob Dylan says, "testing eternity", and how this feels like salvation he says--</p><p>--something of the long game and an inner peace with one's own precepts and doings, like the providential nod from the Lord from On High, but something too of inner peace.</p><p>Of "summer's deeper glow", we have not too much of that here in the Southeastern USA, to see the weather turn for two months TOO HOT and make everything wither and sag before the weather turns and the leaves re-color in a welcome respite. Indeed, we become accustomed to sleeping with our socks off for so many weeks, and then the real world ticks us on the shoulder and reminds us that the state of nature, as Marcus Aurelius and the old philosopher's say, is constant states of change in matter.</p><p>And as Barbauld notes below, this endless churn of nature between states of change is a "tempest".<br /></p><p><i><br /><span style="font-family: trebuchet;">"...The naked trees<br />Admit the tempest; rent is Nature's robe;<br />Fast, fast, the blush of Summer fades away<br />From her wan cheek, and scarce a flower remains<br />To deck her bosom; Winter follows close,<br />pressing impatient on, and with rude breath<br />Fans her discolored tresses. Yet not all<br />Of grace and beauty from the falling year<br />Is torn ungenial....." </span></i><br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-86561934182616266362023-10-14T09:21:00.002-04:002023-10-14T09:21:31.671-04:00The Imago Dei.<p>Ah, for a human being to "exceed the limitations of his prior programming..."</p><p>Such as "revenge is a dish best not served" or "not to render evil for evil", things that sound roundly far beyond our chief instincts, as it were.</p><p>The morning rainfall, whispering, and my unction, making plans if not outright in action, like a shark, when not pumping forward, then carving my future path with my mind.</p><p>God whispers to me, as I plan....</p><p>I am but a type and shadow of the great one, and not great myself; in Protestant theology, this makes our mistakes more obvious, the glaring difference between ourselves and the Perfect Deity. We succeed only because we are granted grace and mercy by Him.</p><p>In His image, such as it is.</p><p>A flawed facsimile of perfection.</p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-77727656327684126112023-10-13T14:41:00.003-04:002023-10-13T14:41:53.898-04:00legs pumping away on a bicycle named Revenge.<p>It's like riding a bicycle, men with machine guns who lived always in the shadow of an age-old conflict, their entire lives, a swirly-gig cyclical of various revenges, such that "you made me", "no, it was you that did it first".</p><p>I saw Erin, and I know, some are pure perfectionists, while others only casual viewers, and the producers are roaming around, hoping to capture the narrative, and it's sauce for the goose, as it were, to the casual viewer, who might imagine an awful collision of important things, but she's there, and we're sitting like baby birds, "peep, peep", hoping to catch what goose drippings aren't absorbed by her socks.</p><p>A cyclical deserves an encyclical, I say, and the week, caffeine-addicted and deprived a while, water and fruit juice, mostly coming in. I found an Italian coffee in a small metal tin and it sufficed great guns for the better part of an afternoon: staving-off headache and lethargy, and I could muster my unction then.</p><p>"Mis padres compran...."</p><p>In a dull haze mentally, I talked of virtue, ethics, and had a small audience for that publicly, however weird it may seem, the very novelty of the thing. Then I talked Buddhism to strangers, as a philosophy, mind you, and not a religion, meanwhile in my Bible pretty well through the older and newer parts of the book: mixed-readings, and even into a so called "modern translation" of the Quran, stopped dead in my tracks by back-handed, disguised threats.</p><p>Then there was some Tao.</p><p>Near the coastline, there was a health thing, which to date has plumped right back, like the proverbial fork testing the roasted wiener, in which the flesh comes back to form, like even the dog returns to his vomit, and the natural abhorration of a vacuum, and various people, Lawrence, even, coming to the fore and doing this thing, participating in the peculiar merciless striving that we call "life".</p><p>I was looking at some advertised features for Google Workplace, and thinking they were trying to compete with some other software packages, and doing well, if only they advertised wider.</p><p>And I took in sunshine before the clouds came, lizards and kittens my company, and I counted the tines on an old yard-rake, confirming the advertised total, and subtracting the one missing one, the same way I counted the keys on my music keyboard, like a partial OCD, an eclipse of some modern tendency to apathy, in which we are bid to pick apart our own place on the cycle.</p><p>By the same notion, it was a rebuke and warning in the scriptures, that people who devour one another, eventually find it becomes their own turn, as such the great wheel comes right on around.</p><p>And why, this new thinking, that if we just stopped the killing: well, it wouldn't prevent death, but it would surely curtail murder, and religious killings and territorial disputes. Those people have come of age in the shadow of great contention, and they had thus along the way prepared themselves to take part. <br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3748493009163730681.post-88266125724559265142023-10-06T12:47:00.003-04:002023-10-06T12:47:23.177-04:00Productivity: Morning productivity supercharge and Block Scheduling.<p>I followed some advice from several sources, regarding taking up study in the morning time.</p><p>One person recommended getting up early and reading, which was a bridge too far for me, and early in the morning. I tend my readings after mid-day.</p><p>Another person suggested audiobooks, which sounds easy enough, but expensive.</p><p>I modified the advice to include podcasts, and I have my devotionals and so forth among the audio tracks, and some other: productivity, side hustles, small business, finance, philosophy.</p><p>Its made quite a difference so far in my work stack, leading me to more clarity throughout the day.</p><p>Also: <b>Google Podcasts is going kaput early 2024.</b> They promise a migration tool for users, however.</p><p>Another technique I've taken up is block scheduling.</p><p>Say a two hour block devoted to one subject.</p><p>Or a three hour block devoted to one subject, and not just steady work, but also brainstorming and so forth: whatever is needed.<br /></p>Michael Morris of The Magic Mountainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03562980152098814256noreply@blogger.com0