Although the worst of that latest terrible retrograde is over now, Walhydra was relieved to discover a website for checking day by day: Is Mercury in Retrograde?
She was even more amused to check out the news for today:
NO.
There must be something else bumming you out ...
Walhydra is revisiting an old exercise about accepting what is...but, just in case, she has added a link to this little item right below the Lunar Phase widget on the sidebar.
BTW, don't forget to check out the Mercury Retrograde blog.
:-)
Note from the amanuensis: Back in October of last year, I withdrew this post from Walhydra's Back Porch. At the time I wrote,
No problem with the story itself, but right now I don't feel like pursuing it.
I had started posting Part 1 late one night —as I now realize—in order to distract myself from my rising grief over moving Mom [aka Senior Witch] from assisted living into skilled nursing care.
Now the grief has broken through...or at least another layer of it has broken through.
Well, Senior Witch is now well acclimated and comfortable in her new home, so I'm feeling more up to the task of revising and republishing this story from the 1997 Crone Thread:
Walhydra's White Slave Adventure, Part 1: In which Walhydra and Husband #3 have a narrow escape.
Blessèd Be,
Bright Crow
This...
...is what the last few days have been like.
Walhydra apologizes to the cosmos for being such a you-know-what the past few days...even if she still thinks that Massachusetts voters and Supreme Court judges are conspiring to destroy America.
*ahem*
Walhydra thinks Athena Andreadis' continued delving into the details of what's wrong with Avatar and similar films is so on target that she wants to quote Athena's new post at length.
[Note: You should read the entire post and subscribe to Athena's blog.]
The unmistakable sign of a well-wrought book or film is that it puts us in a light trance, emphasis on “light”. We suspend disbelief, immerse ourselves in the universe unfolding before us.
Yet we don’t become passive vessels. Large parts of our brain stay busy evaluating the originality and quality of the worldbuilding, the consistency of the plot, the authenticity of the dialogue and characters.
If anything jolts us out of this trance, the work immediately becomes as enticing as a flaccid balloon.
Hollywood directors have decided they don’t want to work on any of these aspects. They go through perfunctory motions, relying on lazy shorthand and recycled clichés, while they put their real effort in milking profits from the lunch boxes and video games based on their movies....
But movies still need to achieve that trance, because viewers are not so zombified as to stop thinking altogether....
So they resort to the Waterworld technique, which consists of arousing the fight-or-flight reflex by sensory overload. In short, they use assaultive special effects....
The fight-or-flight reflex is an ancient survival mechanism we share with other organisms that have a complex nervous system.....
On the behavioral side, the result is anger and fear that bypass our cortex, eluding conscious control....
Sudden loud noises, abrupt luminosity changes, rapid irregular motion and objects fast growing in your visual field are among the triggers of fight-or-flight. Sound familiar...?
When fight-or-flight is triggered while someone is in a theater seat, the resulting anger and fear are not expended because there’s no action possible beyond chewing one’s popcorn faster. The stress hormones linger, and so do the emotions they arouse – displaced, unfocused, free-floating, ready for use by demagogues and charlatans....
People who crave such entertainment turn into mobs far more readily than those who demand less crude fare and will not abandon the prerogative of critical thought.
The primitive worldview fostered by such abusive spectacle diverts people from trying to solve problems rationally, making it easier to belittle knowledge and expertise, cede rights and liberties and scapegoat marginalized groups and the unlucky – which by now include much of what was once the middle class....
The excuse that mindless entertainment relieves pressure at times of individual and collective stress is dangerous. It’s crucial to act as full humans not when times are easy, but when times are hard; when circumstances are best served by reflection, not reflex.
Walhydra is among those respondents to Athena's critique of Avatar who were "relieved to hear they were not alone in perceiving that the Emperor wore slinky glittery togs but was nevertheless drooling."
But what do we do about the fact that the vast majority of Americans don't give a sh-t?!
The gentle reader may not have noticed the free Screen Cleaner which Walhydra long ago added to her sidebar.
Try it.
When she was hunting for reviews of Avatar 3-D recently, Walhydra stumbled across Athena Andreadis' deeply thoughtful critical review, "Jar Jar Binks Meets Pocahontas," which was reprinted by the Huffington Post.
Athena originally posted the review on her Astrogator's Logs blog, which is part of a beautiful website called Starship Reckless.
Walhydra will let Athena describe it herself:
Ádh'ri Eránis, also known as the starship Reckless, is dedicated to writing and discussing science, science fiction, fantasy and the shared borders between them. Its founder is Athena Andreadis, author of The Biology of Star Trek, who also writes fiction.
Take a look.
BTW, even though she completely agrees with Athena's critique of Avatar, Walhydra and Hubby Jim loved the movie very much as fantasy.
Walhydra's favorite sequence was the trek into the Hallelujah Mountains for Jack Sully to catch and bond with his Banshee. It brought tears to her eyes.
Walhydra's disappointment with Avatar arose because all that beautiful envisioning of a new, sentient planet was backdrop to the same old testosterone-poisoned teen-boy-marketing violence.
[Here's a discussion on facebook, with very graceful rebuttals and messages of hope from Walhydra's cyberfriend Marsha.]
On Cameron's behalf, though, Walhydra also wants to point the gentle reader to this piece in The Australian.
[The film] contains heavy implicit criticism of America's conduct in the War on Terror....
Cameron said...[that] theme was not the main point of Avatar, but added that Americans had a "moral responsibility" to understand the impact that their country's recent military campaigns had had.
"We went down a path that cost several hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. I don't think the American people even know why it was done. So it's all about opening your eyes...."
Referring to the "shock and awe" sequence, he said: "We know what it feels like to launch the missiles. We don't know what it feels like for them to land on our home soil, not in America. I think there's a moral responsibility to understand that.
"That's not what the movie's about - that's only a minor part of it. For me it feels consistent only in a very generalised theme of us looking at ourselves as human beings in a technical society with all its skills, part of which is the ability to do mechanised warfare, part of which is the ability to do warfare at a distance, at a remove, which seems to make it morally easier to deal with, but its not."
Walhydra is willing to hope that the beauty of this movie will underscore Cameron's intended critique of violence...and not be outweighed by the typical moviegoer's visceral and unquestioning fascination with violence.
Ah, well....
