The Gospel of Sri Tabbyji

There another kirtan coming up soon at the yoga shala. Shalla I go or not? Stay tuned.

Anybody wanting to understand the movie business would do well to read The Return of The Player by Michael Tolkin. It's a novel, continuing the saga begun in The Player by same author, about a heavy-duty major-league asshole of a movie industry executive. But despite the unsympathetic main character, the book is loaded with deep insight on the movie industry, and the nature of story. And Tolkin ought to know, he authored the screenplay for one of my all time favorite movies The Rapture. Talk about a nutty flick! Yet highly resonant to me.

Here's some verbiage from the Hollywood exec main character of The Return of The Player:

The planet is dying. That's why the world expressed Hollywood out of itself a hundred years ago. It needed to hypnotize itself at twenty-four frames a second. Physics cracked the atom, biology cracked the genome, and Hollywood cracked the story. It's all the same thing. The journey of the hero is about the champion, about the guy who fights his father and beats his nemesis and gets a new name and cleans the stable and brings fire to the people and gets the princess, and that's the lottery ticket fantasy, it's your personal Jesus; it's why Joseph Campbell hated the Jews because the funny thing about having so many Jews in the movie business is that their religion doesn't have the formula for the journey of the hero. Moses dies before he brings the tribe across the river; that's not a really satisfying movie ending. Moses has a sister and a brother, and he's married and has kids who don't amount to much. That's just life; that's not a movie. That's why the structure of Greek legends makes good movies and the structure of Jewish legends makes mediocre television miniseries. And all of Greek theater come from a period that lasted about as long as the time from the invention of sound to September 2001. Seventy years, eighty years. And then it ended. The movies had their run and now the movies are over. The planet is dying, what do people want?

Did you catch the meat of that? Let me repeat:

Physics cracked the atom, biology cracked the genome, and Hollywood cracked the story.

That's important. Story - beginning as craft or art, crossing over into applied science, technology. And what happens with that crossover, every single time? The reptiles of power wrap their scaly talons around the thing - atom, genome, or... story.

The planet is dying. What do people want?

We still want story. But going beyond Hollywood, we want it to be real, now. A snuff flick. And the High Command is only too eager to oblige.

So make no mistake, that's exactly what 9-11 was. Pure Hollywood. Presumably, actual movie executives and producers and screenwriters need not have been directly involved (although they may well have been, cf. Wag the Dog) but particular personnel don't matter. Once they saw what was possible, the Soviets didn't need Oppenheimer to build their own bomb.

The USA mil.gov black-ops people are crafting a storyline siphoned directly from Hollywood's (screen)playbook:

• Fires
• Explosions
• Arab villains
• American heroes

I cannot believe that people can't see this is all faked. I'm not a little conspiracy geek rubbing my hands, gloating like some goblin, that I'm so much smarter than everybody, I see the truth and you don't naah naah. An accusation like that is insulting. But worse than that, it's dangerous.

A response like that doesn't respect the gravity of this situation. This isn't about me or any other individual. I don't take any satisfaction in this horror story. And any average dumbass, just like me, would know this is all bullshit if they could turn off the soundtrack for just a minute and see it as it is.