Originally posted on PinkRobotSox.
"Feature films are the most powerful and insidious shapers of public perception, because they fly under the radar of conscious exclusion."
That was in Julian Assange's letter to Benedict Cumberbatch.
I woke up out of a full musical belting out The Internet: Give me your naaaaame and thinking "Benedict is no Charlie Sheen." Too bad I can't rewind because not a clue what in the world was even going on. Yes, the internet was a seedy character in a 1950s suit and hat, and his character was black and white. Charlie Sheen and Benedict were both wearing bright yellow like Charlie Day in The Nightman Cometh. (Trivia- the play actually came through Springfield.) "The title of Charlie's play sounds like the title of Eugene O'Neill's classic play The Iceman Cometh. O'Neill's play is a searing existential drama in which a group of patrons of a bar are forced to confront the reality of their meaningless existence, while Charlie's play is more about a princess in a coffee shop who wants to bang a little boy."
And off we went into free association land. It's raining out so my internet is blinky, I have coffee percolating through my brain, just waiting for sunup so I can go to town.
Anyway, the wheel. From a post on Sadgeezer about a Lexx episode, quoting Kai, the Divine Assassin (already dead himself) going wonky on a planetoid full of zombies (previous Divine Shadow host bodies that had been discarded).
The billowing clouds. The burning hills. The billowing clouds that puff and flower, Are calling me to an ancient bower. I must sing my song. The wheel. Swings. Spins. Turns. Where no thing is, shall nothing be. Only then will I be free. The wheel, it turns, it comes around. It makes an ancient rumbling sound. The wheel, it turns, it comes around. It makes an ancient rumbling sound. The wheel doth turn, it rolls around. Gather ‘round the wheel, my friends, And make amends, and make amends. All this is about to end. The night doth bleed into morn, Sunlight seeping through the dawn, Decayed, forlorn. The wheel doth turn, it rolls around. It makes an ancient rumbling sound. The wheel, it turns, it spins around. Fellows, come, come. Share with me your tired tales, And let my windy words fill your empty sails, As you travel across gray hills and brownish dales. Around the hub we The grinding wheel It makes an ancient rumbling sound. Around the wheel we lightly prance, Around its hub we sprightly dance. The grinding wheel, it rolls around. It makes an ancient rumbling sound. The fickle fates, the cosmic grind, Conspire to leave our friends behind.
Who knows what it all means, but for me, the internet being the wheel fits perfectly. It's both alive and not alive. It will go on long after us, like a dead planet full of server activity. The grind will go on, and the answer to the question about whether a tree falling in the woods really happened if there was no one there to hear it will finally be answered, but who will be the one who gets that answer? In science fiction, humans have encountered this very thing, and humans are the ones who find out the answers. And basically, it's about whether the robots really care, can they care, do they even want to care, and what does caring actually mean anyway when you can't feel the existential conundrum.
I know no one will take me seriously. I know I've presented with all honesty about my psychological challenges, so anyone could brush me off as delusional. It won't matter that I've openly challenged an industry with my own allusions to murder and mass brain training via entertainment as a social control mechanism. None of that will matter. Everyone knows I'm ill. On meds.
It's cute when it's Jennifer Goines. It's not cute when you're a meemaw blogging about philosophers and l'histoire and openly sharing statistics.
Here's the thing.
Everything on Friday Prime made it big worldwide. Farscape fell off because it was bizarre, so everyone missed what it was saying, although it was as close to MK as it gets on television. Stargate never stopped. Pyramids, stars and gods, symbols- all this is still going on in real life in the form of conspiracy theories around everything from the U.S. govt to CERN's hadron collider, NASA programs are named after gods kind of thing. There is even an episode where one of the aliens living on earth created a TV show about the Stargate. Interestingly, people who've never seen Stargate and don't have a clue what the franchise even is are speculating that television is actually showing us truthful stuff in fictional form so that we won't be so shocked when the real truths come out. They are keeping us panicked about things we dread so we'll be more accepting of change once we realize it's already here, because it's not nearly so bad as what we keep seeing on television. This is a very real philosophy of thought across the internet. I'm not the only one saying it, certainly not the first, but I'm openly blogging and even mocking.
Lexx disappeared. Why? It was part of the Friday Prime lineup on a station owned by the people who also own our biggest news and entertainment media. Why did Lexx disappear like that, and why is it so hard to reboot?
Lexx tells the real story, and it's not cute. Lusticons. Sex slaves. Human savagery on a multi-galactic scale. Cannibals. Bureaucracy. Hell itself. All these things go on behind the scenes in all religions on our planet, even in the religions that kill women for the faintest thought infidelity in the form of being kind to a stranger. If you do not think your nation, your city, your church is infiltrated, you are super dense. The underground is all around us. This has been going on for time out of mind, and we are not that far in history from legalized cannibalism and slave ownership in a number of countries around the world, definitely within some of our lifetimes. Whatever cushion of comfort and safety you think the world is because you are allowed to live like that for awhile, remember that most of the world is still fighting for freedoms that already hold us to a new kind of slavery. We are born citizens, we are owned.
Back to the panacea of the mind. Amid all the vampires, werewolves, Satan spawn, and whatever else plethora of shows gorging our brains on entertainment (ultimately creating a callous area in your brain where you'll blow taboo off as fiction, even when it's real and right in front of your eyes), Lexx disappeared. Why?
Lexx held out no hope, no happy endings, no moral to the story. Lexx was brutal and graphic and ultimately rested on everything and everyone simply being evil. Our people who hung on and escaped and even blew up evil over and over simply hung on. They created their own family apart from any authority. They navigated their way through psychological and physical labyrinths with nothing more than each other and a stolen key to the most power weapon of mass destruction in two universes. They could have done whatever they wanted with the Lexx. They could have become a reign of terror themselves, but they didn't.
Lexx didn't do it right. Entertainment is supposed to be about alternating a current between brain yanking and brain numbing. Entertainment is supposed to be about moralizing and platitudes. Entertainment is supposed to be about pulling all our brains into sync, like the world premiers of certain shows do nowadays, called global events.
Lexx immediately made fans more aware of govt atrocities and human history and a severe lack of morals all around us in real life. Lexx fans spent hours and months and years underground discussing real philosophies and human conditions. Lexx, as a TV show, clearly failed in its mission to subdue the human mind, instead waking it up, stimulating it, and even making public stands against groups and govts for 'being like Lexx'.
Now it's just a relic, an old TV show that is no longer ahead of its time. It's a story lain dormant so long that it is now dying off with older fans, and all the cries for more are lost in the long, dark night of the internet. The underground that understands is wilting away while the brains above lustfully throng around fictionalized murders.
It's really too bad if you haven't seen Lexx, because you don't get the portent of what that last paragraph just said.
All the best shows have 'wheels' of some kind in them, and they all have strange symbols on them. Pay attention. (*cough*Xena*cough*) The wheel, it turns. Even the Mayans had a circular calendar. Wheel of Time in history- this is actually worldwide on our own planet in our very real history. Anything that is a wheel is a big deal. The invention of the wheel was not about round tires, guys. The wheel of time is the key to civilizations and power structures. Lexx blew all that up.
I'm a worse crackpot than my dad... But then, so is Julian Assange.
Anyway, yeah. Pinky blog dared to whisper 'Vivendi', and the stats shook even more. I'll go back to regular Pinky silliness now, but I doubt my stats stop for a long time.