Charley Brown Unchained: New Slaves

Man Cave 1.0

When we first meet Mr. Calvin Candie he is relaxing in his man cave enjoying a beverage and some sports, a recreation enjoyed by millions of Americans on any given Sunday.  Our 72" HD TV's + Surround Sound sure bring the action close, but nothing is as close to the action as the front row seats of Mr. Candie.  

It might seem wrong to compare Mr. Candie's choice of sport with that of the average American, but Quentin Tarantino doesn't seem to think so.  In fact, in Django Unchained, Tarantino is pretty explicit about his opinion of the similarities between the two, especially the industries surrounding them, and the dollars they earn through the violent and shameful exploitation of their fellow man.

"Clues," Zina said, "I kept giving you clues.  But it was up to you to recognize me."

     Emmanuel said, "I did not know who I was for a time, and I did not know who you were.  Two mysteries confronted me, and they had a single answer."

     "Let's go look at the wolves," Zina said.  "They are such beautiful animals.  And we can ride the little train.  We can visit all the animals."

     "And let them free," Emmanuel said.

     "Yes," she said.  "And let them, all of them, free."

     "Will Egypt always exist?" he said.  "Will slavery always exist?"

     "Yes," Zina said.  "And so will we."

     

Philip K. Dick

"Are you ready for some Django?"  

"Like slavery, it's a flesh for cash business."

Dr. King Schultz

Quentin Tarantino makes it clear that the widespread brutality and exploitation in the industries of slavery and sports entertainment are one in the same.   Whether on the cotton field or on the football field, people are simply bought and sold, beaten and brutalized, and thrown away the minute they begin to lose their value.  And the few that make it up to the house….

Tarantino is suggesting that the American Dream has been replaced by America's Game, a paradigm of big-business that masquerades as entertainment.  A perfect blend of money, violence, and theater that functions as digital soma for the masses.  

"I must admit I'm at a bit of a quandary when it comes to you. On one hand I despise slavery, on the other hand I need your help. If you're not in a position to refuse, all the better. So for the time being I'm gonna make this slavery malarkey work to my benefit."

Dr. King Schultz

Be A Man

At the center of the film is Django Freeman, played by Jamie Foxx (played by Eric Marlon Bishop), who once played Willie Beamen, superstar quarterback of Any Given Sunday.  "Django" means "I awake" and seems to suggest the cognitive transformation at the center of this film.

When we first meet Freeman and Beamen, they are in the same predicament:  they work on fields (cotton / football), have owners (slave master / franchise owner), and are in chains (shackles / "move the chains!").   Beamen seemingly is in a much better situation than poor Django.  Sitting on the bench is one step away from the spotlight, but Django, despite being moved across Texas to a slave auction (football draft), is one step away from salvation.  That first step towards salvation arrives in the form of an ex-Nazi named Dr. King.

Dr. King Schulz is his full name, and he is traveling cross country in a carriage with a big floppy tooth on top.

Schultz is played by Christoph Walz, who once won an Oscar portraying a Nazi.  "Dr. King" invokes Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who helped liberate African-Americans from the inequalities of segregation, and by association, Martin Luther, the German monk, who liberated Catholics from indulgences.  Schultz may refer to Charles Schultz, creator of Charlie Brown. 

No longer asleep, Schultz has made peace with himself and his morality in this flesh for cash world.  He simply would "rather be a dick than a swallower."  This is made perfectly clear in the shot below, where Schultz' the bounty hunter explains the rules of the Game to Django from inside a glass cube, while the real Schultz sits comfortably outside of it.

Django's liberation begins with Schultz adopting the role of Director, putting Django into character, complete with costume.  In fact, Schultz will put Django into many characters along the way:  valet, Siegfried, a black slaver.

Prestige

 "I Own You Bitch"

What Schultz understands, what he will teach Django, is that real human life, what is best called reality, is closer to the mountains and dragons of myth than the streets and marketplaces of the machine.  The Dream trumps the Game any day.  Because of a life of slavery, this truth has been obscured for Django.  The unlikely relationship between Schultz and Django provides a chance for both men to return to reality.

Django:  Why you care what happens to me? Why you care if I find my wife?
Schultz:  Frankly, I've never given anybody their freedom before, and now that I have I feel vaguely responsible for you. Plus when a German meets a real-life Sigfried that's kind of a big deal. As a German I'm obliged to help you on your quest to rescue your beloved Brunhilde.

For the final act of this quest, Schultz and Django travel to the Cleopatra Club, masquerading as owner and agent, neophytes to the big business of the Mandingo fight game.  The two are welcomed in to a bizarre situation that only gets more bizarre, as Tarantino builds a complex puzzle involving football, Hollywood, and slavery.

Leonide Moguy, Candie's lawyer, shares his name with a Russian born director of French films.  "Just call me Leo" entangles them both with Leo Dicaprio, the American actor who plays our slave owner Candie.  To solidify this environment, we learn that Candie has a love of French culture. 

When Schulz, Django, and Leo make it upstairs, Candie's first question is “Why?”.  Why enter the Game?

Subtle

Tarantino completes the cube with a thinly veiled reference to Fred "The Hammer" Williamson.

Williamson played eight seasons in the NFL, and earned his nickname "The Hammer" because he used his forearm to deliver violent hits to the heads of opposing players. After finishing his NFL career, Williamson followed the lead of Jim Brown and took his talents to Hollywood.  One step forward, two steps back.

Two-Eyed Charley

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  When Charlie Brown plays football with Luci, it is an explicit portrayal of insanity.  The only way to move forward is to wake up and stop trying to kick the football.  Stop playing the Game.

Am I Awake?

The Bicameral Internet 2: Meta-Memetic Mamafesto

Yahoo For Yellowbellies

William S. Burroughs was scheduled to give a lecture at a small college in the midwest just before he died.  He was rather ill, and unfortunately had to cancel.  Thankfully some notes scribbled down for that lecture survived and have recently been floating around on the Internet in some of the more obscure corners of 4chan and other weirdo blogs.

The title of the lecture was to be The Immediacy of Writing.  Burroughs had often stated in the past that "Writing is remembering accurately," alluding to the fact that writing exists solely in the past.  To be even more explicit, he states "Writing will never catch up to the present".  Burroughs felt that this reality shouldn't keep us from trying.

"There is music in the written word, an improvisationally erect tone, but it has been choked off by an unknown, extraterrestrial viral infection."

One way to cure this "viral infection" is the use of the cut-up technique, a unique and extremely powerful method for bringing the written word as close to the present moment as possible.   Though powerful, this fragile technique quickly falls apart if abused.  Burroughs sensed that the inherent power of cyberspace provided a unique opportunity to "cut-up" the globe.  He correctly saw that a cybernetic window had opened revealing the trending present, where the dominant memetic winds of the whole globe intersected in one plane.  The applications of this window were limitless in his estimation, affording anyone the uncanny ability to forecast and re-sculpt the present moment at will.  He then suggested that no intelligent government would ever allow this "wishing machine gone wild" to fall into the hands of the populace.

Obviously this "wishing machine gone wild" now exists.  Just how powerful it can be and just how long it will remain is not yet known.

The above is a screen capture of the top ten "trending memes" on Yahoo as of 6:49 pm on October 11, 2017.  Amazingly, Burroughs lecture notes allude to this type of aggregated "top-ten" lists, and he included many techniques for using them to achieve the desired temporal transcendence. Suggested techniques include weaving together all ten memes into a short story (written within a one hour time frame suggested by Burroughs), sigilizing the totality, or assigning Tarot cards to each meme through a process that was unfortunately left out of the notes.  These are only a few of the suggested applications, and I'm sure Burroughs would invite a healthy bit of improvising in this area.

Does it work?

This is the wrong question.   

 The correct question is  

"How strong is the result?"

Again, the key is not to abuse the method.  Use sparingly and only when inspiration strikes.  Lucky for you, the materia will be ready and waiting.  Just make sure you have a strong sense of humor.

The Bicameral Internet: Kubrick is Real Only Then, When "I Am"

 

The cunning counterfeit of reality, revealed as such when authentic reality breaks through - like the “tip-tip” of the branch blowing against the window in Finnegans Wake during Earwicker’s dream.  This “tip-tip” is the clue, and the only clue.  In Ubik it is the commercials and messages intruding “from the other side”.  Do we experience that?  I did in 3-74.  So I am forced to conclude that our reality is a cunning counterfeit, mutually shared - and that the wise mind is trying to signal us - to do what?  To kick over into anamnesis, discharge of DNA long-term memories.  To remember and to wake up are absolutely interchangeable. 

Philip K. Dick

Film is normally a temporal process, but Kubrick, uniquely, uses it to enclose space, the most vast volume of space possible. Thus Kubrick literally expanded the hologram for anyone understanding his films, and he was part of a historic movement involving the abrupt evolution of the human being in terms of so-to-speak relative size vis-à-vis his reality. This is the inner firmament of Bruno (or Paracelsus—whichever). Ah! The microcosm is transformed briefly into the macrocosm; and a slight but permanent expansion of the person, the microcosm, occurs: perhaps an altered relationship to the macrocosm, in terms of identity.  Kubrick’s films as a means by which the alchemical Verklärung can take place: thus it is directly related to the Hermetics.

Expansion out of the prison: escape from the prison by extension, like an insect expanding out of his exoskeleton during/via his metamorphosis. “The body is the tomb of the soul”—half-life. The BIP as a sort of exoskeleton, hence a kind of rigid (iron) body. This is the “second birth by the spirit.”

This is a radically different way of experiencing the self (microcosm) and reality (macrocosm). Memory and inner space. There is some relationship. Memory involves vastly augmented time which is then converted into space. “A long time ago” becomes a very large spatial volume, with the result that the past still exists—e.g., my seeing the world of “Acts” in 2-74 and finding it latent in Tears. So my seeing the distant past (in 2-74 and experiencing it overtly in 3-74) was due to the conversion of time into space—which I saw as the vastly augmented spaces. But I see now that the two phenomena are actually one.

Therefore the hologram (reality) is in truth one huge volume of space with no time involved, in which all “time periods” are spatial “onion” layers as (again) in Ubik, where the past lies inside (i.e., along a spatial axis) objects and can be retrieved.

Time, then, is actually spatial expansion, layer upon layer. So the hologram is quite large—it is ubique; yes; here is the ur-significance of the word “ubique”: it occupies all space.

By using his films to enclose huge volumes of space for the viewer Kubrick committed the ultimate political act of liberating—expanding—the individual. Likewise, my space phobia is connected with my own rebelliousness! Unable to deal with external space—i.e., unable to rebel—I have turned to inner space, to exploring it, which, too, is a political act; so my writing, involving inner space, is covertly subversive: it teaches secret ways to rebel (mostly by evasion: escape). This is why the whole psychedelic movement of the 60s was a threat to the authorities; this was the area of the subversive threat I posed—my studies of inner space—in fact—my conceptions of inner space differing from person to person is very radical and politically subversive, I now see, even when it didn’t involve drugs. Viewed this way, then, 2-3-74 represents a total political victory by me, in that I broke through into absolute space such as is not even known about following the disappearance of the Hermetics.

2-3-74 can be understood politically if the significance for the nature of the individual in terms of his enclosing space is recognized as basic (e.g., Kubrick’s films). This absolute space involves absolute (i.e., a priori) knowledge and power over time in that time can no longer extinguish the person. This relates to authentic Christianity. Hence there really is something very subversive about Ubik, as well as Eye and Stigmata and Martian Time-Slip.

I personally achieved the catalytic metamorphosis that my writing promotes. And my writing may aid others in expanding their inner space—pointing toward what I did: breaking through into absolute (hermetic) space where the self is Adam Kadmon, unfallen and unoccluded!

It’s a world inside a world. This is why Kubrick’s space-enclosing films free us.  There is a direct relation between more space and the real world (also between restricted space and the irreal world).

Valis was an “uncanny one-way intrusion” perturbing the basis of the small high-speed world from outside. Valis proves there is an outside.

Valis proves there is an outside. This is the most important sentence I’ve written, since it shows our world resembles that of Ubik, Maze, et al.

Philip K. Dick

The Shining Forwards and Backwards: Enantio-Palindromia

"You can take the Black Iron Prison out of the man, 

but you can't take the man out of the Black Iron Prison"

Philip Seymour Dick

On the 37th Anniversary of the theatrical release of The Shining, John Fell Ryan's fractal-ed fairy tale

  
The Shining:  Forwards and Backwards  

will be screened at
  
The Outta Space in Berwyn, IL. 

This spectacle demands to be seen in public with all the best people that you can muster, mister.  
So come out and party like it's 1980&21. 

"To the poison!"

Guided By Torah: Bereshit and the Golden Boys

"to illsell my fourth part in her, which although allowed of in Deuterogamy as in several places of Scripture (copyright) and excluded books (they should quite rightly overmanned be, would seem eggseggs excessively haroween to my feelimbs for two punt scotch, one pollard and a crockery or three pipples on the bitch"

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Torah:  the first five books of the Tanach; derived from the root ירה, which in the hif'il conjugation means "to guide"

  

Book 1:  Genesis

Don't mistake your mistake for my mistake.

Book 2:  Exodus

I can't believe that you're still working the line
(I'm so glad that I'm not).

Book 3:  Leviticus

Please don't misuse this information now.

Book 4:  Numbers

We've lost our souls, there will be no returning.

Book 5:  Deuteronomy 

Moses On A Bench

A traveler's diagram for where I am,

for what I am.

Commentary:  Genesis: Big Daddy and the Devil; Exodus: into the desert (sandbox);  Leviticus: self imposed laws and regulations designed to return to a higher plane (aerial nostalgia);  Numbers: wander the desert for forty years and die (when the big door swings open and shuts);  Deuteronomy: King Shit gives his final sermon, somewhere outside the Promised Land, knowing he shall not enter.

Or something like that.......