Monday, June 23, 2014

Big Brother - Summer 2014 (2)

CONTINUED FROM HERE


23.6.14
Toya scared the nation last night. A goaded zombie apocalypse where brain was replaced by fire.
But my real dislike is for four men: Steven, Winston, Ash and Marlin.
Meanwhile we can only hope that Matthew can tame the storm with which he is partnered.
Read HERE Marion's account of it. Love or hate what happened last night, this is real television. The only programme I watch. At other times, I sink back into the safe arms of 'classical' music. Still, I am sporadically reading Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann at the moment, wherein there is, inter alia, a long diary room conversation with the Devil...literally.

24.6.14
There has never been anyone like Toya on BB before --- deranged and articulate, but with flashes of wisdom, evoking soap opera type dramas with other housemates in turn, e.g. hen-spitting with Corrie-like Helen and tunnelling into the emotions of Danielle and shafting Marlin etc.
And as Hell breaks loose around her, Ashleigh quaintly paints her nails.
Well, Steve has been let off, so my vote for eviction on Friday goes to Marlin, with Winston and Ash close behind. Toya, now up for eviction herself, whatever you think of her, needs to stay!

25.6.14
Toya Story
A more conducive atmosphere last night.
Toya kept calling herself Hurricane Toya in the diary room - an attempt at self-branding. She would have been better using Tornado Toya, as she tends to zip from one housemate to another in turn and twists each one out of or into shape, depending how you look at it. She remains, whatever the case, a powerful, articulate, if sometimes deranged, feminine (potentially maternal) force, a positive step up from Pauline, but strangely similar.
Danielle, perhaps because she is up for eviction this Friday, loosens up, in more ways than one. I'm not sure which Danielle I prefer, but there is something strange about her. She emitted the 'Jesus Christ!' expletive at one point, which is something that Catholics strictly avoid, in my experience. Also her job as glamour model (wanting to do a double shoot with Kimberly when they get out) seems to sit uneasily with her explicit religion and with her (staged?) recurring shock at anything even slightly rude? And her act with the cigarette also seemed staged.

26.6.14
I think it was cheap and artificially provocative for BB to allow some of the nominations to be seen by the other housemates.This will deter future, supposedly private, nominations from being frankly expressed.
It is a nightmarish prospect for the housemates as well as the viewing public to be saddled permanently with Helen. Hell on Earth.
We can only hope she will transgress again and then be thrown out.

27.6.14
Marion wrote: Jale helped find Winston's spirit guide - she's beautiful and golden and has a bow and arrow. Jale thinks she's an angel. Winston looked quite impressed.
This deadpan description by Winston allows me to forgive him for at least some of his more usual Winstonness. At first I thought he was describing Marion's twirling avatar on THIS thread...until mention of the large breasts. Image
By the way, does Winston look a bit like the Young Churchill? I think he might:-
Image

Quote: In the DR, Matthew discussed Helen. A gem -'I lose intellect when I talk to her.'
He's in the right and on the moral high ground, but he is SO supercilious you want to shove him off.

But I love his superciliousness.
And then we have another attempt at becoming Marion's spinning avatar:
Quote: Christopher's workout, more like the dance of the sugarplum fairy, was hilarious.
And, the BB brilliant breakfast? The foulest thing ever seen on TV (beyond any Horror genre concoction) and one could actually smell it through the screen in a direct-current of empathy with those reacting and retching to it.
Marlon to go tonight.

28.6.14
Well, Young Winston survived! Ready to be our saviour regarding the World Wars of the macro future. (See photo above).
However, Tornado Toya fizzled by the wayside and this is a shame and a surprise. She had shown much, on the whole constructive, potential within the future conflicts of this micro House itself. But it wasn't to be.
She maintained her fighting spirit to the end and performed well in the post-match interview. Violent lipstick and all. (How could she be evicted ahead of such spear-carriers as Ash and Marlon?).
Still, a sign of hope. The new Power is in the lined-up distaff forces of the Warriors of Love against the grizzled males, and these include an at least temporarily immune-from-eviction Jale: with her get-out-of-jail-free card -- which is probably a thin-end-of-the-wedge precedent by Big Brother to make Hellon Earth (Pauline's legacy of a curse) immune from her own immunity next week ... and, judging by last night's chants of the masses outside - those Canetti Crowds of Power themselves - Helen will then be jettisoned within the slice of a wink! We can only hope so. Excise the blight, I say!

29.6.14
Not much to add to Marion's latest report, other than to report that I have now settled on a prediction as to this season's eventual winner.
Taking into account all factors of evidence I can muster, I sense it will be Winston.
Believing that this person will be the eventual winner fills me with dismay, and we are not quite yet a third of the way through the series.

30.6.14
Marion wrote HERE: Danielle had to run a Finishing School for Gentlemen. She was got up like a Miss Prim and proper Victorian with amazing spes. The first task for the gentleman was to write a poem dedicated to one of the girls. Winston gallantly rapped a stream of personal filth and was told he was too forwar if he wanted to be a gentleman of any calibre.
Actually, Danielle seemed rather to relish Winston's doggerel that teetered on the edge of Swift or Pope for a modern age. Not that it was to my taste. She was far harder on the other men. I fear Winston has a spell that transcends...

1.7.14
Marion wrote: Chris in the DR was fed up with conspiracy. He believes Steve, Ash, Winston and Marlon will be saved. Steve - who has no investement in other people, who is like a clock that, after you buy it, asks you the time rather than tells you it. 
An interesting observation by Chris, that Steven talks to people only in questions. Is this new business-speak for the managerial entrepreneur like Steven these days? Actually, Steven Goode has long been my least favourite housemate, for reasons I can't really pinpoint. Helen is at least straightforwardly awful.
Quote: All in all, it's a very unhappy house. Only Helen's removal will cure it.
As I said before, we now have the precedent of the Pauline-permanencies being waive-able for a week, i.e. in the case of Jale. Why not with Helen, too?
And thanks, Marion, for defending masculinity from the broadbrush of the Marlon template!

2.7.14
Marion wrote: Just when you least expect it, a near perfect show. full of the little gems we crave.
I completely agree. The best BB show ever!
Can't add anything to THIS perfect report by Marion. Escapegoat, and all.
(I've never seen 'The Game of Thrones'.)
Image
3.7.14
Yesterday, I wrote that I agreed it was a great show the night before. This time, I disagree.
Although there were some more telling insights with the masked ball as a tableau being got up well, the staged nature of the questions and answers from the archetypal zombie dead and the whole task itself, all very silly. I kept imagining the many make-up artists and other BB staff involved in tutoring the housemates in what do and how to do it (eg Mark suddenly turning up, carefully prepared, as a turbaned psychic) - why don't they film all that preparation? What behaviour is exposed during rehearsals etc. for what we eventually see? In the old days, the housemates were strictly isolated from any other people, except just the voice of BB in the diary room.

4.7.14
Marion wrote: I think everything is staged now -
...including, last night, with a budding clutch of fauxmances bedding in for the duration. I can't pretend to understand some of the machinations going on and even the TV's subtitles of what the HMs were saying didn't seem to help me. I can only hope Marion understands what's going on. All I know, is that Ashleigh is becoming a strong character and Kimberly less of a strong character, as if a form of symbiosis is draining one and feeding the other. And, despite his cerebral shortcomings, Winston remains, with some dismay on my part, the disarming jack-the-lad future winner of the series.

5.7.14
I was disappointed that Ash didn't leave last night.
As I speculated much earlier in this thread, ("...there is something strange about her. She emitted the 'Jesus Christ!' expletive at one point, which is something that Catholics strictly avoid, in my experience. Also her job as glamour model (wanting to do a double shoot with Kimberly when they get out) seems to sit uneasily with her explicit religion and with her (staged?) recurring shock at anything even slightly rude? And her act with the cigarette also seemed staged."), Danielle is not what she seems.
Meanwhile, Steven IS what he seems, and should leave, even before Marlon and Ash and Helen. A half-baked jammy dodger.

6.7.14
Marion wrote: She's an ex of dexter koh. That tells you everything. I find it fascimating the way the imp peeps out from behind the prim facade.
I'd forgotten that Danielle is an Ex of Dexter from last year's BB. She is either a complete impostor as strict creationist Catholic as well as Prude or just a bit of one?
I agree that Helen's topiary of Christopher seemed rather naughty. Meanwhile, to her credit, beneath it all, she is not as inarticulate as some of her swearing 'bitchy' forerunners in BB over the years.

7.7.14
Although the Santa scenario showed Christopher in a good light and threw Helen off-balance, the scenario itself grated on my nerves. I have nothing to add to another of Marion's hilarious and all-encompassing reports.

8.7.14
Marion wrote: At lights out in the bedroom, we saw rather more passion than is BB's wont or than we want to see.
Agreed. And the TV subtitles - used for my aging ears - seemed to indicate something shocking that Ash and Helen were doing. I shall be having a rest from watching BB for a while.

9.7.14
Marion wrote: So where are we? Contact from the outside world affecting the action in the house. The DR no longer a safe place to express one's feelings so BB mght as well close it for good.
Where are we? We are nowhere, with nowhere to go. Can't even have a private conversation without BB showing the others.

10.7.14
As Jale said meaningfully: "There are no innocent parties here."
Meanwhile, Marlon has never been one of my favourites but there was something strangely endearing about his reflex innocence amid devious guilt.

11.7.14
Yes, Danielle was hilarious last night. And Chris's appraisal of Marlon is spot on. I suspect that all private conversations and DR discussions are now much more guarded than they would have otherwise been without BB compromising them so radically in the last week or so. Hence, the 'Yawn'.

12.7.14
The question arises - as well the rhythmic see-saw of his duvetted rear - whether Steven was miming, possibly in cahoots with Kimberly... My bet he was. For something other than sexual satisfaction. Every thing was so dry and clinical.
I can't believe I am talking about this. Time for another rest.
And the other pantomimer, one of religious and prudish catchphrasing, Danielle, appeared in a Channel 5 programme trailer about girl webcammers, within BB's adverts! Presumably this was a programme that was filmed before she went into the BB house?
I think Cassandra should win BB. Know who she is?
(later)
Marion says here: I found an article this morning saying that Kim's ex is to enfer the house, along with an enemy of Helen and one of Ash's. It's going to be explosive. Cafefully staged with Steven and Kim in on it?
Look at. Ashleigh - everyone sure she was going and surpris surprise she didn't. BB injecting a little drama?
Has a subterranean script being written? The Kim/Steven scenario has been leading up to the explosion.
Tomorrow a HM will be evicted with no public vote - all we can be sure of is that it won't be Ash, Helen, Steven or Kim.
BB began as a social experiment. It still is, but of a different kind: how much drivel can the public swallow?

Thanks for that Marion.
I'm definitely off for a summer break now!
Thanks for all your finely witty and truthful reports.

13.7.14
Thanks, Marion. I did gird my loins again last night and I was satisfied that the person that I disliked most from the start of the series is more and more showing me why I thought that.  But even so one can't judge character through a screen of any sort, especially when they could be role playing and especially when we only see edited bits of their behaviour. It's like reading about a villain in a novel who turns out to be a hero.
It's not the real or enacted sex that worries me either; it's the way it's being used by the people involved and by those editing their performance.

14.7.14
Did I hear right? Did Helen tonight describe the blue barrel raft that she helped build in the task as 'Avant Garde'?

Image
Another fine examination of the whorls and spirals of the thumbprint of the House. Thanks, Marion.
For thumbprint, read: the changing gestalt of the real and mock treaties between some and others and then others and some - the google-seeking and manoeuvring by the modern webcame boys and girls who have upped or downed their game under the gaze of National TV.

15.7.14

Marion says: I do long for the old days when they nominated and we decided.
I go along with that!
Anyway, a BB reshuffle running parallel with David Cameron's Cabinet reshuffle happening at this very moment! Armageddon indeed!

16.7.14
"Powerful, Babe, powerful!" says Bianca. I think BB has sunk to new lows with this character, and that's saying something! BB no longer deploys human behaviour; it now negatively manipulates it toward a lowest denominator.

17.7.14
I think Super Cassandra should replace the whole show with her snap intros.
I knew there was something fishy about Danielle when she once used the 'Jesus Christ!' expletive. No Catholic would have done that.
This programme has now gone ultra vires if not ultramontane. I am speechless. Biannca Lake - note the double n.

CONTINUED HERE

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

The Duke's Revenge (rewritten)

The Duke was inadvertently buried alive. It was at the height of moonshine - so there was no real excuse. The shadows represented men leaning on their shovels; a job worth doing was worth doing well, but they needed to do it quickly before the moonshine faded from the night sky, and thus not even one of them noticed the barely perceptible breathing of the corpse as they dropped it into the bespoke trench.
One would have thought that a Duke worth his salt ought to have warranted a costly coffin with all the requisite knobs and knockers. But this Duke was perhaps 'persona non grata', an ingredient of a conspiracy that few of the land's commoners could forgive - and these few loyal men, silhouetted by the moon, were the only ones willing to put themselves out in order to give him an honest burial, if not a rich one. Or such was the speculation abroad at the time.
A pity none of them bothered to check the pulse.
Or were they communally wise in their shortcomings? A death by mass misunderstanding is not a death by mass murder, after all. And should the revolution fail, there would be no connection of evidence to incriminate them. It is said that every group of loyalists has at least one of them marginally disloyal enough to betray the others. Light from the moon often casts queer shadows.

The Duke eventually stirred beneath the newly undug ground. He had been poisoned temporarily, he realised. This event had been writ in the stars, even if this was seen from the hindsight of the darkest grave. Everything fitted the predicted pattern, but there was nobody who could actually have predicted it. Someone must have predicted it by planning it - and that would have been the one who was at the centre of this whole conspiracy.
The Duke had been brought up in a privileged nursery, within a palace that, in more socialist times, had been made ugly outside to conceal the riches within. Spoon-fed by calf-gloves, then tutored by voices as silky as their throat-ruffs, the Duke was at first shocked to leave such a palace to see exactly how ugly it looked from the outside, with its grey and chipped buttresses, its bedraggled flags failing to fly from leaning turrets, the drawbridge that creaked and groaned every time it was lifted or lowered, and that only happened once according to the undependable official records. But no doubt the drawbridge had worked a second time, to reverse whatever the first had been.
Now close on suffocating, the Duke woke with his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. In a flash, like someone drowning, he remembered the conspiracies that had surrounded his life, and the odd occasion he had left the palace, disguised as a commoner, turning a blind eye to the state of the palace's ugly exterior, hoping that any illuminating moonlight would be dowsed by clouds, to avoid locking eyes with any passing strangers.
He recalled one particular night when, leaving the palace, the moonshine was so utterly strong, he mistook it for sunshine. He was not accustomed to leaving the palace during daylight and the building's viewpoints were permanently curtained under with thick drab curtains so as not to conflict, when viewed outside, with the image of the rest of the building's uncared-for look ... or these viewpoints were completely defenestrated with new but deliberately-worn brickwork. He had rarely ventured out during daylight hours and, in this way, he had very little experience of sunshine as opposed to moonshine. Tonight, the full moon was so bright with reflected sunlight, it was as if it had become a circular mirror rather than a huge rock careering through space above the earth. Something with a new-found ambition to wield an astrological power.
For the first time, the Duke could clearly see the grains of the earth that loosely formed the ground upon which he walked and these were incredibly as separate as Patna rice grains.
But was this caused by a previous dream of waking up in a grave as a premature burial - with his face covered in earth, the individual components of its dirt crowding into his eyes like coarse grains themselves?

He suddenly remembered his childhood. The many different nursery toys, some hard and clockwork, others soft and malleable, together with the rich comestibles, sweet or spiced, the valuable books, some with pop-up pictures, some with just dreary text, and the people who looked after him. He averted his face so that he could not look directly into their eyes, these people who looked after him. He didn't know how spoilt he was. He just took it all for granted. But if he had known he was a mere Duke rather than a King or even a Prince, he may have wondered how a King or Prince could possibly have been treated better than him.
One of the activities - taught to him by the figure of a man in a hood, or the voice indicated that it was a man - involved the planting of seeds in indoor beds of earth. The Duke could remember relishing the growth of those seeds - with their often flourishing into orchids ... sometimes, though, with their otiosely unfurling into weeds instead. Part of the game was to guess what organism each seed would produce, following months of daily watering which somehow, as a child, he found exciting, too.
Little things please little minds, he was once told by an officious piping-voiced retainer without a face, so such an individual had no need of a hood at all. Or was this figure just a figment of the young Duke's nightmares?
These growing seedbeds were in one vast chamber in the palace, double-ranked along each long wall of blind windows - making it seem like a hostel dormitory of filthy futons. His favourite plant - the one with the biggest surprise for him when it suddenly grew with a spurt - was a variety of sunflower that had a moonface as its bloom instead of a sun. It glowed in the dark, like real moonshine, an effulgence unhindered by the blindcast windows. Meanwhile the indoor lighting was kept dim on purpose, so dim, the Duke could hardly see a hand in front of his face. In fact the only illumination was often the plant's fragile moonlight itself.
As he dreamed like someone suddenly drowning in the pit of earth with which he himself had been smothered like some huge seed, the Duke hatched his own revenge upon the whole world for not planting him dead, but alive. However, revenge would have been harder for him to wreak if he was, like the drawbridge, only either lowered or lifted, rather than both lowered and lifted.
During the later unpredictable phases of the moon's dark side, some grains of the grave often shifted and separated. This creating of gaps would reveal -- to those idly passing by, not realising this was a burial plot -- a dim yellow glow seeping from lower in the ground. But hardly anyone passed that way again to see it shining.
Meanwhile, the Duke's palace became a backstreet hostel, one with a dormitory, ranked darkly along each inner wall with mounds of over-used mattresses, these sleeping berths for a new breed of downandouts, ex-civil servants, B-list Royals and other hanger-ons. A sort of revenge. Whether it was the Duke's revenge or the Moon's, the results were the same. A creak and a groan, each time someone came or someone left.

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Genes With Their Gloves Off

My expression: Genes with their Gloves off - to describe the incredibly powerful American Pastoral by Philip Roth

pastoral

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Eventernal Slumber

Eventernal Slumber

I thought of this phrase this morning in an eschatological context.
Yet I have not yet fully defined it. I need the synergy of input by several diverse minds, of various philosophical and religious dispositions...
From the evidence of watching TLO since 2005, I thought the ideal place to help find a meaning for 'eventernal slumber' would be here.

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Re: Eventernal Slumber

Well, if you want a troglodyte's point of view, I'm thinking 'death'.

Now I will try to keep awake. The fog.
~ Eric Basso, “The Beak Doctor”
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Re: Eventernal Slumber

Seeing eventernal as a portmanteau of "event" and "eternal", I'm thinking a not-too drastic form of mass extinction. Only instead of dying, the entire race falls into a state of sleep from which it can't wake up. Nobody is left out, nor is there some kind of hivemind process at work. Every sleep is individual, as are the dreams and nightmares that may appear in this condition. So we're left with a planet full of dreamers in a most literal sense.

And I was thinking this would end with everybody dying as a sequel to dehydration and what not, but that would kind of spoil the "eternal" part
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Re: Eventernal Slumber

Immune to external influence, hopeless
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Re: Eventernal Slumber

Eve In Her Eternal Slumber.
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Re: Eventernal Slumber

"Thinking death" - when your thoughts are all about death or Death thinking about you? Yet, Wafflesnaq is followed by Ramonoski and I sense that as we all grow older, we have more and more event-driven broken sleep or slumber, i.e. dozing between dreams ... as a dress rehearsal for Death that may be like that? - which then reminds me of my own story 'Candle Dreaming' where if you finally dream about a single candle burning in your dream and nothing else then that is your last dream, a dream that will last forever, without any dozing between, powerless to wake. This then relates to Stratovarius' 'immunity'.

And Druidic's Eve sleeping incredibly reminds me of all these many paintings HERE that I posted a week or so ago - drowsy with divinity.

I feel this is early days in nailing 'eventernal slumber'. We have hardly scratched the surface. Or maybe we have already nailed it. 'Drowsy with Divinity'. Our backs turned on life but still conscious of the flame within.

Thanks, all and others yet to come.

PS: my broken sleep last night was interspersed with thoughts of this thread.

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