Jane Eyre (movie review)

That I’m on some kind of Film Studies kick makes sense, given the proximity of MMU. I also credit my book club (“Mercado Group” if you’re into search), for always pipelining curated content. 

I always have a full queue. Last night it was the 1943 Robert Stevenson version of Jane Eyre, the one with Joan Fontaine (as the older “Jane”) and Orson Welles.

“Why play up the MMU angle when we can all watch this movie on YouTube?” asks one of my imaginary mental chat box bots. Because the DVD versions come with loads of Special Features, only some of which I’ve taken it at the time of this review (I also have a whole other version of Jane Eyre waiting, from yet further back on the timeline).

My particular curriculum (the one I develop, the railroad I work on) features Orson Welles through a number of segments, with a double underline for Martian Math, where science fiction and Synergetics converge. 

From War of the Worlds (and that fateful Halloween evening in radio land, back to Orson) we might segue to H. G. Wells and his corpus, including Morlocks (geeks) versus Eloi (politicians), my adaptation of The Time Machine for a contemporary audience.

Speaking of contemporary audiences, Jane Eyre has a plot line that resonates with its script, and behind the script, Bronte’s novel. Perverse religion oppresses the young Jane, an orphan, and through referrals, she gets trafficked into nightmarish situations wherein she remains essentially powerless.

As things got underway, I felt convinced I’d fallen through the cracks in not knowing this story, whereas at Princeton I knew my share of Brontë fans. But when we got to the “troll in the tower” subplot, an obstacle to the romantic interest, I started remembering to the point of déjà vu. Of course I knew this story, this nightmare dream.

Be that as it may, I’d never seen this movie, and I found it edifying in terms of my Film Studies / Film History focus (I’ve been at this for a while).

Anyway, I was alluding to 2026 headlines and dashboards, all about how the underprivileged get sold to the more privileged as sex slaves, or at least as servants. The degree of depravity depends on the subculture. Not everyone gets to be in presidential circles (or even C-suite).

Speaking up for the women was medical science to a small degree, underwriting a new kind of skepticism towards more established religious rackets and their codifications of the various pathologies, sometimes as templates for a religious life.

The revenge Jane has is her childhood tormentor, a brat her own age, grows up to be  a total loser, hangs himself (she finds out in the end; not a major plot point), plus she’s able to restore her crazy guy to health and sanity (unlike the tower bitch), without that much damage to her orphaned self pride. 

In the real world, outside of fiction, vengeance would rarely be so sweet.

We know as the movie fades that Jane will likely get to see those great cities after all. Her guy is a man of means after all. Their child will know its parents.

More Lesson Plans from School of Tomorrow

The Glass Key (movie review)

The Hollywood, on Sandy Blvd, exhibited in miniature at Movie Madness

I texted David I was "working through the 'The's" at Movie Madness, meaning titles starting with the word The, which librarians know not to alphabetize by, as, as tokens go, "The" is too frequent to be a good hash table marker (lookup feature). Skip the "The" and go on to the next word in the title, is the rule of thumb. 

Sorting by too-common features is like sorting fruits into "round" and "not round". You can do it, but it'd be a jumble. And how "round" do you have to be to count as "round"? What's a "fruit racist" gonna be like?

The Glass Key is filed under genre "Film Noir" at MMU, in the Classics section. Their filing system is interesting, and the key to it is a computer lookup service, as the filing system is mainly just a "where to go" map. Every DVD has to be shelved somewhere; here's a coherent system. 

I agree: it's coherent as long as the computer is up and running (these days it seems to always be, Praise "Bob").

What I learned from this classic is (a) Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an established generator of trend-setting crime fiction (a John le Carré in his niche), his novels adapted to movies well, The Glass Key being one such and (b) Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, the pair of them, were a thing, like another Bogart-Bacall.

The Glass Key makes you keep track of quite a few relationships, chiefly siblings and offspring among two families, so somewhat Romeo and Juliet in that sense. Indeed, one family is blaming the other for the death of one of its sons, the one with the gambling problem. 

Alan Ladd is not actually a blood relative of anyone, but he's a main character nonetheless, and the sparks are between these two camps, the one with the murdered son, and the politically ambitious family seeking to run the town behind the scenes.

What's interesting is how characters are "on the spectrum" but by that, what "spectrum" do I mean? This film explores impulsive unthinking behavior versus planned out conniving. 

The "brusque brother" as I thought of him, chief suspect in the murder, Ladd his fixer friend, is impulsive but also a planner, and therefore less extreme w/r to said spectrum than the big dope beat-um-up type who gets suckered into doing the dirty work for others. 

Ladd is the epitome of a deep thinker and has a Sherlock Holmes super detective role. Veronica is starving for guys with brains (in short supply) and begs to join his thread (program). He declines pending permission from his parent process, which comes at the end (not to spoil it or anything).

Fine Tuning some Lessons

We're doing some pedagogy today, meaning mapping out more of the graph, such as filling in a picture connecting Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters to Russell Towle, a zonohedron master. They were not intimately connected, more adjacent, same neck of the woods. Russell was in my network.

STEM-wise we have two lesson plans (flight plans) under discussion: 

• the density of the CCP (cubic close packing) using S3 (Synergetics Constant) to make a ratio of S3 times XYZ ball volume, divide by six, its domain's volume, that of the "spheric" or rhombic dodecahedron. Answer: about 74% full, 26% empty.
  
  
• the dimensions of the six Vanes, we call em, in our homebase tetrahedron, the "gossamer membranes" as we might think of them, sectioning off the four quadrants, congruent isosceles triangles with an included angle of about 109.47 degrees, or acos(-1/3) to be precise.

The two plans go together in that the homebase tetrahedron is defined by four CCP balls, intertangent, of radius R and diameter D. 

Those Vane dimensions give a D-edged tetrahedron say of edges 1 (so R = 0.5), with four center-to-corner spokes of about 0.61237, or sqrt(6)/4 to use a symbolic expression. Our segue here is to the A module of Synergetics, where all these lengths and angles come into focus.

Make any sense?

Russell Towle was aware of my early work and saw I was using a squashed aspect ratio he knew how to fix, as he'd also used POV-Ray. I followed his suggestion and my renderings have looked better ever since.

The term "vane", associated with windmills, also has currency within the Urbit realm, Urbit being a kind of internet-like communication technology with its own shoptalk and indigenous computer languages, higher (Hoon) and lower (Nock). 

In Urbit, the operating system kernel Arvo, is in touch with its world by means of vanes. Ames and Clay would be vanes, in charge of networking and the filesystem respectively. I'm not the expert. I had a planet up and running, but then it crashed.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (movie review)

One never knows when I’ll dig up an oldie (1949), living in close proximity as I do, to Movie Madness. With expert guidance from elders with past careers in curating, I’ve been getting advice on how best to catch up in certain genres, such as The Western (basically cowboys and Indians, I’d say usually after the Civil War up through when horses got phased out as a common source of horsepower). 

I was doing noirs. I’m also still into books. We finished Pluribus (E9 of S1 is as far as it goes at this point).

I wanna circle (on my own, no prompting) the importance of alcohol in this picture. It actually explores alcoholism in various forms in quite a few scenes, more of them comical than not. John Wayne, their leader, is sober but not harshly judgmental of drinkers. On the contrary, in AA jargon we’d have to call him an enabler, but among soldiers in those ranks no enabling was needed, just steering.

The Indians were actually treated with respect, contrary to my expectations, more like an alien feature of this already exotic, Martian-like vista, strangers in a strange land, and so foreign to the world of Victorian gardeners and the horse and buggy types back home in the homeland. So many mysterious tribes on the move, each with their signature chest-piercing arrows.

The movie opens with people mourning about General Custer’s loss at Little Bighorn, all well before my time. I don’t go out of my way to construct an identity based upon what I read in those particular history books. Some might say I should or need to because of my socio-economic demographic (“Caucasian” as in “from the Caucasus” (not)). That’s not how I use my “we” pronoun, more on that elsewhere (remember, this is Portland, weird around pronouns).

This is one of those epics with the booming voice narrator (at key junctures), telling us the story from some higher level management point of view, with a lot of benefits from hindsight.

The trend in filmmaking would be to lose the narrator, although he (usually it’s a he) makes a big comeback in the spoof Idiocracy, helping us remember how much we might miss him.

The Indians weren’t portrayed, like in many films, as slaves to demon alcohol, not nearly to the level of the white men in uniform (I recall no blacks in the ranks, plus a confederate flag featured in one of the few burials). Not to any level at all. The main chief we encounter towards the end, seems more into weed (or whatever goes into that pipe he shares). He was jovial in any case.

That’s a good word for this film: jovial. John Wayne’s character is so resolutely upbeat and an inspiration to those around him. He’s a role model leader, next to which his number two is aberrationally more immature. We know from the start of the film he’s in his arc of retirement, from military to civilian life, where he’ll have no rank (horrors), a fate from which he’s ritually saved, deus ex machina style, at the end.

The horses are splendid and the speed at which they gallop, the terrain over which they navigate is spectacular. John Ford goes out of his way to show some of the difficult situations one faces if bringing along a horse-drawn wagon, which this convoy was, with women in it. That changes the whole character of the expedition, making it more Oregon Trail in flavor. Familial rivalries break out. Who’s gonna marry whom?

The screenplay focuses more on celebrating the gorgeous southwest, the outdoor life, than it does on gunplay and violence, of which there’s some, but without much in the way of blood and gore. There’s no need to traumatize the audience to tell the tale. This isn’t 28 Days Later: the Bone Temple, even if it does have an otherworldly flavor. Not a scary zombie movie. PG if not G.

I wanna add about Westerns that I haven’t avoided them studiously. I think of two chapters in my life, living in Rome, living in Manila, when I was hungry for movies in general and didn’t much care to pick and choose, although I preferred English audio track to subtitles to pure Italian with no subtitles, which I wasn’t so good at following, although in some movies they make following pretty easy.

So like in Italy I took in quite a few so-called Spaghetti Westerns and have dim memories of driving by De Laurentiis Studios somewhere in the outskirts of Rome.

In the Philippines, going to movies was a lot about air conditioning, getting out of the tropical heat and into a more polar bear friendly environment. The lineup in Makati was first run and the theaters world class. TV was pretty good too, for an American living abroad (an expat).

In Italy I was hungry for stuff in English, given that culture is not so Americanized as I would find the Philippines to be. I’d actually make my way by bus (or maybe mom might drive me) to the British Consulate on Piazza del Popolo as I recall, to watch black and white 16 mm Charles Dickens movies. Their library was pretty decent too, with all those Hardy Boys and other British authored books for children.

Those wouldn’t have been westerns though. More like C.S. Lewis and his Screwtape Letters. I’d gone to a British school when I first got there and took advantage of that special relationship.

Yellow Ribbon does portray the US Calvary as multi-ethnic, in the sense of different flavors of white, such as Scots, Irish and German. The US military is certainly a melting pot, but not like it’s going to be in the Vietnam movies to come (another genre, which I’ve already more explored, not that we’re done with those, as I’m sure there are more in the pipeline).

D is for Dogma

American Donbas

As the Union starts to unravel on television, thanks to DC's drift towards fascism, it becomes easier for ordinary Americans to empathize with what it's like to live under an authoritarian regime. 

The experience of eastern Ukrainians, now Russians, after the Nuland Nazi takeover of Kiev, was somewhat similar: Feds driving tanks through their streets, calling anyone with "wrong views" (e.g. anti neo Nazi) a terrorist. Like the people of Minneapolis.

I still think Oliver Stone’s movie was pretty on target, or at least more informative than anything coming out of NATO. It never worked to disguise the Nuland Nazis for who they were. I tend to avoid discussing Project Ukraine with people who haven’t seen it. Why should I? Life is short.

Imitating Wikipedia regarding the Donbas (“Russian occupied”), I’d say the American Donbas (e.g. Cascadia) is still occupied by the Feds, but its control is loosening. We know the Feds to be a Beltway Mafia of literally soulless corporations, a giant bot, like the Borg. “Resistance is futile” says Stephen Miller, Hegseth and other sycophantic pretenders to the throne. 

So far I see little need to resist, as the prophecies seem to be self-fulfilling (the Feds are too bungling to keep a grip — politicians aren’t generally in the top half of the Bell Curve if you know what I mean (I’m being mean)). But I get why people wanna vent.

I think back to that anthropologist dude at Reed College, warning us that all this export of violence against Afghanis would eventually be coming home. He was right. They’re back.

MLK's Legacy

From our listserv on Sat, Jan 17, 2026:

Dear SMAD members,

Tomorrow is the day we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He is often recognized for his "I Have a Dream" speech. I consider this unfortunate because he stood for so much more. We have two queries:

1. Name one other quality or action you admire about MLK. Elaborate on why you chose this.

2. Think of a dream that you would choose for our society. What would the realization of your dream look like?

What I'm thinking:

1. I admire MLK's scholarship, his commitment to a life of the mind.

2. My dream is for more civil polite even joyous sharing among subcultures who need to bury the hatchet between them, for example Freemasons and Catholics, Jews and Muslims, Friends and militants.

In practice, I follow MLK's scholarship into Mithraism and look for ways to intertwine my Quakerism with same. 

Sacrificing the bull is maintaining control (self control) over the stubborn (bull-headed) Ego; mind-over-brain in Bucky's talk.

With Mithraism came a kind of egalitarianism among militants that negated and/or transcended rank, making us all equals in the eyes of God, and/or in having God within. 

Imperial Rome may have found Mithraism less adequate as a tool of authoritarianism than Pauline Christianity, per suggestive lectures by predictive history expert Xueqin Jiang.

SMAD = Sunday Morning Adult Discussion, a program offered through Multnomah Friends Meeting.

XRL: Extreme Remote Living

CLIP: CAMPGROUNDS

CLIP: TRAIN TUNNEL

Work and Play Patterns (GST)

The design based on volunteers working many jobs, playing many roles, in succession, not necessarily in the same order as one another, has an egalitarian flavor when you assume everyone eventually does every job (even if that’s impractical in some situations). Because in a sense there’s just one job: to perform all the roles of the community, and everyone does it.

That’s how we did a lot of stuff around the Centers Network. When I say “we” I mean I was one of the volunteers, and there were sequences, like in college. You needed to be a mic runner before you did some job that involved supervising the mic runners. 

I rose to the level of Logistics Supervisor, which in the New York City situation might mean hailing a Checker cab and transporting beaucoup bankers boxes full of supplies from Port Authority East Side Bus Terminal (where NY area center had space) to whatever hotel ballroom venue (we’d book some of the bigger ones, right downtown). 

When I look at it that way, I realize my high comfort level around being in hotels and mingling with its paid staff (Centers Network did have paid positions, in addition to us volunteers), did not all start in a later chapter, when I’d work with Holdenweb and later Open Bastion. 

In fact, come to think of it, may comfort level around hotels might trace back to Kent Bondi days. His dad was manager of the Cavalieri Hilton and their whole family lived on the premises. Room service every night seemed ideal to me. Get on the phone: “send me a milkshake”. Utopia. And lets not forget the Fairmont.

However, hotels are not usually run on the principle of volunteers rotating (more could be). You’ll find more of that in unprogrammed Friends, the Quakers, where million-dollar properties with substantial budgets, as certified nonprofits, might be managed entirely by unpaid yet committed Meeting people. 

When the offspring of said meetings (GWYF) gathered at near Myrtlewood, Oregon, renting facilities at the Church of the Brethren’s Camp Myrtlewood (with paid caretakers, whom we cherished), we’d rotate through meal prep, dishwashing, cleanup and janitorial, fireplace duty, other duties I could continue listing out.

Amidst all these amiable volunteers, we’d have stars who would take up pre camp duties, such as meal planning and supplies procurement. This place was remote, so we packed in most of our requirements, think a hundred people over four to five days (mas o memo). The commitment to specific standards in cuisine is a marker of ethnic identity and we were mostly Cascadians which has its Asian characteristics (not limited to fresh tofu, which we brought in by the bucket full).

Those involved in these role would likely be foodies who also wanted to serve as chefs. Their roles were somewhat typecast. When they showed up, that’s what they did, and were expected to do. I recall helping out with procurement and transport, but in the kitchen I’m usually not the head chef although in Food Not Bombs days I’d be close to that sometimes.

A skilled ski instructor might be a harder to find and would tend to spend relatively less time doing dishes, though doing some of that might be welcome respite for hard work on the slopes. 

A lot depends on a camper’s goals. Are you joining in gain experience and acquire skills (soft and hard) or are so-called chores entirely ancillary to your main purpose, and so you are fine with doing your share, but without great ambition to do more?

Speculative Screenwriting

:: old haunt; more built up than in my day ::

Since everyone is speculating like crazy about what unfolded the other day in VZ, I feel as a kind of screenwriter I should offer my own idea of a recap. 

I’m not suggesting Netflix pick it up for the official version. That’ll be Frontline’s job, right?

I’m gonna have the VZers portrayed as still not entirely persuaded that Monster U is outta control. They were speculating the inner circle had moderating handlers who could keep it melodramatic without going over the top, to use Biden’s phrase. 

But when like-minded meet in Florida, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. 

As “commander in chief”, there’s this mystic ability to green light what anyone else would consider a highly improbable scenario. You need a scapegoat to really commit to the most unpopular decisions. When JFK red-lighted a couple outrageous things (vs green-lighted), deviating from his script… we saw the consequences.

What am I saying? That the VZers were taken by surprise and so didn’t mount a significant resistance. They were disbelieving the months of hype and bluster?

Even with all the big arrow armada movements, they still didn’t think the escalation would be that steep (as in vertical). Wasn’t this all Made for the USATV couch potatoes? They like to see glorious victory celebrations with lots of pomp and circumstance (lots of ribbons, hero awards). When in Rome. 

Now they know.  That’s why people are now saying: Greenland, get ready. Canada too. Cuba, Columbia… Nigeria… we’re just getting started.

So now the world knows too: there are no brakes left in Washington DC. That city is indeed a Monster U. Its think tanks are world-renowned for their inferior quality.

I used to call it the City of Morons. Same diff.

Maybe the miscalculation was the Pentagon brass thinking a “stony silence” — as they were being harangued to go against their oaths — was somehow going to mean something to their commanding bosses. It meant compliance is what it meant.

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