Siegfried comes to save Los Angeles

Good evening ladies and gentlemen,

It's been a long time. Hello world. 

I've been okay. C'est la vie, as the French say. There's a lot going on in today's rapidly changing world. A lot of it is terrifying, especially for a 33 year old American male, but really, for anybody, the times they are a-change-in. 

We just came out of a terrible presidency by one of the worst people on the planet and Americans are still supporting him even to this day like he's God's gift to woman. America is becoming more and more totalitarian in every way, shape, and form, and believe me folks, its not just republicans who are Attila the Hun fans, it's democrats too. My work has cameras locked onto every cashier and in every aisle to make sure nobody steals anything. Sound familiar? 

On top of that there's record inflation, soaring gas prices, we can't afford rent, we can't afford groceries, our kids are continuously getting gunned down by madmen in schools, we can't afford children we already have, the climate has gone to the dogs, and the white people have decided to ban abortions but secretly allow their women to get abortion pills and stuff like that. Don't forget climate change. 

Covid isn't going away, and rather, is evolving faster than we can create vaccines for. The workforce doesn't quite know it yet, but they've been decimated by long covid and we don't know the full extent of the long term symptoms but one of them is being tired all the time and continuous brain fog. These victims can't even read a book, I'm afraid, they wouldn't have the attention span. On top of that, other countries are taking more control over the world and America has become a lesser. Trump made our country weak and Biden couldn't fix it. And now we're stuck. Interesting times. 

Companies are becoming less and less employee focused, even Union shops, and rather, instead, they've become more like sweat shops. Ironically, more like China. This has been happening since the American early days of the robber barons. 

Welcome to America, we're the gestapo now, and we support Atilla the Hun, and my name is Siegfried, I have blonde hair and blue eyes.

But seriously, what can one do with a mess like this one? 

There's nothing you really can do except vote Democrat for the Mid Terms. They're the lesser of the two evils, they at least attempt to do the right thing, although they're no angels either.

Part of the problem is that everybody is living in a separate world in this moment of time. Nobody reads the same news, nobody watches the same tv shows, nobody plays the same video games, nobody reads the same books, nobody can agree on anything, and most people aren't smart enough to take news, facts, and information and think for themselves, rather they believe what they hear and just naturally assume that's the way it is, that it is truth, that everything they see and hear is a fact. What happened to thinking for yourselves? 

I told my friends I take the bus in LA. They said, "Be careful! There's criminals on the bus who will rob you."

I said, "What criminals? Where? Did somebody rob you on the bus?"

They said, "No, but I just heard about it on the news."

Are they all really that scared? 

That's beside the point.

What we really need is a remote coalition government that isn't controlled by government, republicans, democrats, libertarians, socialists, communists, or our parents. We all need to come together to vote Democrat, a New Great Society, but only the true believers in the good are allowed in. Are you one of us? 

The end of the beginning. More work to be done tomorrow! 

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

Spirit is Artist. Hegel describes daesein and spirit. Difficult but not if you've already read Kant, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. The world is what it is, this being the case, Hegel is a true philosopher of dialectic. This is one of the most interesting philosophical works.

Gestalt

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about art, music, history, ideas, philosophy, zen, and the like. Almost a year ago I came upon the sudden realization that my focus was attenuated by my own distractions, resulting in poor work service and social skills among my friends and peers. Thankfully, I've been working on all that and things have been going swimmingly. You could even say people love me, even people who aren't my family or apart of my immediate friendship circle. I'm ready for the Orlando Fanclub LOL. 

In all seriousness, what I am truly talking about here is thinking processes on a metaphysical level. Gestalt actually. This is a German word for shape or form, and its the idea that systems and their properties should be viewed as a whole, not as loose collections of parts.

What really got me going with this was reading Heidegger's Being and Time, a book so immensely prolix that I'm not quite sure anybody who's read it quite understands it, or definitely doesn't understand all of it, but perhaps portions, or segments of it. Being and Time got me thinking about life metaphysically. What is life, what is being, what is time, what does it mean to be apart of the worldhood of the world? Etc. 

I've thought about these things as part of Heidegger's thought processes but that is too complicated to go into here [blog in the future incoming on that book], so rather I'll focus on what I think about these ideas. 

Life is the optimal persona [don't ask, its a California thing] of the soul, of a person, place, or thing. Being is the consciousness, so to speak, the thing that makes it a life plus everything else. This includes personality, physical, and mental traits of the person, and the way they make their thoughts process. Time is the standard measurement of life. To be apart of the worldhood of the world means to be a willing participant in the game of life, to want to be apart of social conventions. This includes work, friendship, family obligations, girlfriend, wife, kids, etc. Plato has different variations on these ideas, as does Heidegger.

My own thoughts on these ideas are simple, they're still valid still fair game. My thoughts on Being, or as Heidegger calls it, Dasein, has brought me to a new idea, a new way of thinking, thought processes. Basically, you don't have to think about your thoughts as being apart from each other. Rather, you can look at it as one entity. All your ideas could be thought of as one spontaneous act. Cycles of reality if you will. Your whole entire day could be thought of as one smooth motion rather than many different acts within 24 hours. That sort of thing. Frank Zappa had a word for this that I've since forgotten. But basically, he thought of all his recorded body of work, music, as one entity, rather than as individual albums or single inspirational moments. I'm thinking about daily ideas, activity, and thought processes in a similar way. 

This could also correlate to activities. You could do many things throughout the day with many different people, see a lot of places, do many things, and at the end of the day, you can look at it all as one activity, one single act of motion. 

I think about all this as cycles of reality, an idea I got ironically from a jazz song, from a modern jazz muso from New York, a drummer whose name I've forgotten. For me its a way of thinking in a more meta way, thoughts are more cohesive rather than random and disorganized. This isn't to say that all your ideas are related, rather when you think in this vast linear fashion, the worldhood of the world changes a bit, not it in itself, but rather the way you fit inside of it. It can come in handy sometimes when boredom is so ready at hand in the humdrum of everyday life. It connects everything together, you're more alert, so you don't look up and go, either in your mind or speaking to another person, "what?" 

What can I say? These Germans have me thinking metaphysically. 

Liliom

Liliom is an expressionist fantasy French film directed by Fritz Lang in 1934. Its based off a Hungarian play by Ferenc Molnár, which is where the movie's name comes from. The film stars Charles Boyer as Liliom, a carousal worker who gets fired from his job after defending a woman named Julie (Madeleine Ozeray), all because his boss was jealous of her and the attention he was giving her.

Julies becomes smitten with Liliom and they begin living together. The problem is that Julie works and takes care of Liliom but he doesn't work, he just takes and is a lazy bastard. Eventually Liliom learns he's about to become a father. So he takes part in a robbery, but it turns out the rich man they tried to rob had a gun! Rather than let himself be arrested he ends up stabbing himself, and his soul is transported to heaven. He sees all these babies with angel wings, and angels playing harps and stuff, space itself (fantasy elements). A heavenly commissioner tells him he's stuck in purgatory unless he goes back to Earth to do one good deed. That's the basic synopsis for the film.

"Liliom was one of the two first French productions by producer Erich Pommer for Fox-Europa and director Fritz Lang's only French film. On the film's release it was protested by the French Catholic clergy and was generally not well received by French film critics or playwright Ferenc Molnár. Despite the reception, the 1934 Liliom was one of Lang's favorites out of all his films." (wiki) 

I can see why the film was berated by French Catholic clergy for sure. The depiction of heaven is quite silly and laughable, however it is a product of its time and quite expressionistic, thus a bit unrealistic. More on the plot.

Once Liliom is in purgatory the commissioner asks him why he beat Julie (he was a woman beater folks), Liliom says he doesn't know. Then the commissioner plays a video of him talking to and then slapping Julie. Then he plays the same video, this time showcasing Liliom's thoughts out loud. He realizes he hit Julie a lot because he hated himself for his cruelty and selfishness (he finished the coffee in that video and didn't offer any to Julie until it was all gone, then proceeded to yell at her).

Sixteen years pass in purgatory and Liliom goes down to Earth to meet his daughter. He catches up with her and tells her that he knew her father, and that he was a violent brute. He had a gift for her too, a star that he stole on the way down to Earth from the heavens. His daughter Louise gets upset and throws the star in the gutter. The scale of good and evil gets tipped more towards the evil. This scale has the pyramid and all-seeing eye at the top of it, and the devil begins to inscribe Liliom's name on his tablet. Liliom slaps his daughter's hand out of frustration before he gets lifted back to the heavens.

Lousie goes to her mother and tells her Liliom's slap felt like a kiss. She then asks her if its possible to be beaten but for it not to hurt at all. Her mother says yes and and the two of them embrace with tears in their eyes. The scales of justice then tips towards the heavenly side and Liliom's name is slowly removed from the devil's tablet. Ending screen, FIN.

The film mostly got negative reception. But that didn't stop Fritz Lang from loving the movie. "Despite the film's reception, Liliom was one of Lang's favourite directorial efforts. In 1974, Lang stated that "Liliom, I always liked very much... Today, I almost like Liliom best of all". 

I actually liked the movie. It's the second Fritz Lang movie I've seen and I think he did a job directing it. I would say most of all I like the acting style in the movie the most. It had a sincere quality, the qualities of the characters seemed so believable and realistic, these characters could be people in real life with real life problems and lack of solutions.

The fantasy element of it was fun. In this film we find that for people who don't necessarily belong in heaven, there's justice waiting for them, and that's what we find in this film. I liked the special effect of the star that he tried to give to his daughter. And then there was the entire heavenly images and the scale with the devil, which was his friend that wanted to rob this rich man, except that he was in black face, or just covered in black paint wearing no shirt and shrubbery as his pantaloons. Kind of makes you wonder if they were trying to portray the evil side as African, which may or may not be the case.

All that being said, I don't think this is a necessary film to watch or know about, after all, its quite esoteric and expressionistic with its ideas. But I do think that its a good movie and quite an entertaining two hours of cinema. I would recommend this film to film students, directors, and film connoisseurs who haven't seen much of Fritz Lang's work. I highly recommend you see Metropolis from 1924 if you haven't seen it.

Liliom Zadowski: Even in Heaven, there's only justice - nothing but justice!