Exterior Day

EXT. DAY - The camera is lowered down from a GREAT HEIGHT amongst sky scrapers and plush apartment buildings into an anonymous CITY STREET. The street is bustling with motorists, bicyclists, pedestrians and PEOPLE from every social STRATA. Once the camera has SETTLED to eye level the camera moves FORWARD and begins to TRACK a young ASIAN MAN WITH A CELLPHONE. He finishes a phone call in MANDARIN and we see him slip it into the cuff of a DEEP TRENCH COAT POCKET. Once that action is completed the CAMERA is passed off, like a baton in a relay race to a YOUNG WOMAN who is walking swiftly and overtakes him, she too is on her CELLULAR PHONE, and we hear her utter the words

YOUNG WOMAN

(Garbled as though through a POLICE SCANNER)

I know I just got it. 

(Director's note: I leave the particulars, such as art direction and casting entirely up to you and your crew, you get that I'm going for an enormous metropolitan, heart-of-the-city scene here, right? And this really IMPORTANT initial camera shot that I actually spent ten minutes thinking of with the question "How can I visually re-enforce the social standing in the great chain of being of our two protagonists that are sitting undercover in a refurbished 1993 Ford Taurus at the corner of what could be W California AVE and W Cermak Road in Chicago ; could I perhaps integrate a vertical camera movement that is neither a PAN nor a CRANE SHOT that would descend from the rare air where the good and the great live down to street level, the sordid underbelly of this apparently flawless beacon of progress and modernity?"on my mind, doesn't count and will most likely be disregarded, overlooked, on the editing room floor. The only reason I feel safe typing this is because I know nobody, and I mean NOBODY actually reads these things. But Hey, It's your money, actually it's the studio's money)

INT. FORD TAURUS - DAY - Two young overpaid Hollywood-type detectives with bronzed skin and flawless, pearl-white smiles sit pretending to pay attention to something the director tried to explain to them two minutes ago, but are just thinking about the one make up girl they both want to bang. They will have a fight about it two days from now, and one contract will be renegotiated. But that is neither here nor there. Ahem...TWO HARD-BOILED Detectives in PLAINCLOTHES sit in the FRONT SEATS. THE DETECTIVE in the DRIVER'S SEAT is DWYER, the DETECTIVE in SHOTGUN is ROURKE. Over the POLICE SCANNER we hear the YOUNG WOMAN'S VOICE

POLICE SCANNER

I know I just got it

DWYER

(to ROURKE)

She the one?

ROURKE

No.

DWYER

How do you know?

ROURKE

Because I know.

DWYER

This is the 8th person today that fits this profile. What makes you so fucking sure that that ain't the lady that we're looking for?

ROURKE

Detective Dwyer, how many people did we see the first time we had a match?

DWYER

We saw that hot blonde, about shit, I dunno, around 11:00.

ROURKE

And then...(he waits for DWYER to consult his NOTES)

DWYER

Then at 12:00 we saw one, and at 1:00 we saw two, at 2:00 we saw three. And at Fuck we saw You. WE could have been DONE.

ROURKE

one, one, two, three, five...(Nothing registers with DWYER)...Look it's just after three o'clock now, I'll bet you all of my O.T. tonight that before 3:05 we see and HEAR four more women matching the same profile either receive that text or give us some kind of confirmation that they're being contacted by the same individual, group, individual group or group of individuals who are or who is the subject of this, our investigation.

DWYER is LAUGHING. Through the REARVIEW MIRROR we see a small group of NATTILY DRESSED, ATTRACTIVE WOMEN gather on the SIDEWALK. They appear DISTRAUGHT.

DWYER

You're bullshitting me, it's already after three?

ROURKE

Amicule, deliciae, num is sum qui mentiar tibi?

DWYER 

I don't play that Altar Boy shit, you gonna welch now?

ROURKE

Baby, Sweetheart, would I lie to you?

(This is the part of the movie at the very beginning when our two lovable rouges start grab assing in the stake-out car and a crucial piece of shit happens in clear view of the audience that would have put this baby down like a lame horse if they weren't fuck-ups. But that's what we love about them, they're fuck-ups, like you and me. Always fucking up. Actually it's more DWYER'S FAULT and ROURKE brings this up to him in a crucial a.)Bar b.)Lockerroom c.)Social d.) Formal e.)Meeting with the Boss f.) All of the Above -scene in which tears are shed, punches are thrown, Rourke's formal education is made fun of and somebody is asked to turn in a badge. Oh and the killer, he's texting rich ladies, and killing them with their cell phones because he's rich and powerful and a psycho and the programming algorithm is Fibbonacci's Theorem for some reason, and ROURKE picks up on this because of something DWYER said when DWYER was shitfaced. See, they need each other, and NOBODY important died.

THE END

I hate you.

Pods of Speech No.16/19

Pods of Speech No.16/19

This Podcast has...

Pods of Speech 
easy listening 
Last post: Sep 05, 2009 at 02:01am (23 days 10 hours ago) 

This Podcast has received 2,880 subscribers.

Straight from Garageband.com 

- damn, it has grown, a little, in my absence. 

I promise this Saturday, October 3rd I will be publishing Pods of Speech 16-19, however you want to count it during the three week hiatus. In the meantime spread the word let's try and get it above 3,000.

Just to reiterate though I was busy with the editing of this Movie that we've made. It's called Cry of the Eagle and the premiere is the 10h of October, not the 9th. 

Oh and Congratulations Mr. and Mrs. G.  Not to name names, but what a great wedding.

The Venture Bros.

RepRap

In the future we will all have one of these.

Competing Epistemologies.

Already the emailers in an act of rendition have me shuttled somewhere people like me are dealt with. It smells like mold and stagnant water on a cracked linoleum floor. I made the mistake of saying something about waterboarding and before you know it I'm strapped between two Church basement fold out chairs under the tenebrous halo of an arc lamp . My knees are bungied through the opening back-panel and my toes are curling in knots of agony. 

"What were you trying to say in your last podcast, sir?"

"Just" gasp "something about competing epistemologies" gasp "it's not even my scholarship" gasp "there was extensive paraphrasing of other major works."

Hmmm....

They move in for the fingernails.

Let's look at my notes here:

Yes, I was trying (in my rambling and incoherent manner) to define my world view, or Weltanschauung 

at the behest of a general feeling I was getting from the content and timbre of not a few of the emails.

And I made it clear that we needed to do some etymological dismantling before I began.

I was specifically recalling a class I had taken that cited in detail, the castle theory of history. A theory we can talk about later. It's also known as ubiquity. There is even a book called Ubiquity. Good stuff. Can I move on here? The main thrust of the talk was about competing epistemologies.

As a lazy, whiny, self-pitying, self-indulgent, and weak-willed lay-historian of the bar stool variety I enjoy asking the paralysis inducing questions like "What's it all about?" 

In my "research" I think that it is fair to say that we have seen the rise of one form of epistemology and that one form of epistemology is meant to bestow absolute metaphysical primacy upon the empirical, the quantifiable and what is quantifiably demonstrable and it completely and totally rejects any and all realities outside the ontological plane of the physical universe.

I made it clear that the beginning of this kind of epistemology, kind of goes back to William of Ockham who confused ideas which inhabited the intellect, with the subjective images that inhabited the imagination. And now we have a competing idea because (and this is who I subscribe to - and I'm not saying you have to) Aquinas in the Summa makes it very clear that images only capture things in their singularity but ideas capture things in their universality.

(Side Note: Someone actually wrote to me quoting Jodie Foster from the movie "Contact" whose character in the film cites Ockham's Razor, which this person quoted to me so as to prove that "my theory of history" was too complicated, so a simpler "theory" had to be "more correct". Clarification: I wasn't describing a theory of history, I was just describing...HISTORY and COMPETING IDEAS...I swear...) 

So where was I? 

Why is that Important?

Well, it's Important Because If Ockham didn't make that distinction IDEAS were just impressions on the imagination from sense perception and this epistemological confusion lead Ockham to reject universals.

So he ended up having to deny the objective Character of God, which was a self-evident cornerstone of society for hundreds of years  - but -  If you look at the word for faith in the New Testament, it is Pistis which means "Proof", especially evidentiary proof.  But Ockham can't make any kind of evidentiary claims to faith because he has denied the objective character of God, so he was left to conclude that faith is blind.

This new epistemology came to be known as Nominalism which led to the bifurcation of epistemology into what is quantifiably and empirically demonstrable and what is believed. So what we're dealing with is the belief, and it is a belief, that ALL things quantifiable, all things empirical represent the totality of reality.

So everything that defies quantification (for example: GOD, the good, the soul) are relegated to impotent and ambiguous subjectivism. 

This epistemological rigidity underpins SCIENTISM, which is the belief that the universal imposition of science upon all fields of inquiry is somehow a desirable thing and the modern mind, chronocentric as it is, considers this imposition favorable. 

And this is the kind of epistemology that we have seen the rise of, especially in the last hundred years.

But it is very dangerous when it's extended beyond its legitimate fields of application because science becomes a rigid template to which even the most complex of entities like man, must conform. The scientific outlook also acknowledges no moral master, it gives no assent to moral or aesthetic judgements.

Look at Anton Shugur in No Country for Old Men.

If you want to see the consequences of this. 

"Call it"

"But it doesn't make any sense, it's still you, you're the one flipping the coin."

"I got here the same way the coin did."

Chilling.

BF Skinner, a disciple of this, well he was a behavioralist which is a direct descendant of nominalism said that it "dehomunclises man." He meant it in a good way.

And Dennis Diderot, compiler of the encyclopaedia, the enlightenment thinker himself wanted to represent, in his own words - "gnostic doctrines, presented as revolutionary doctrines." And the enlightenment was the crucible for all modern sociopolitical utopian movements. 

And all of these movements demonstrate clearly, the dangers of scientism in the context of governance because science invariably becomes an oppressor because the scientifically regimented state must jettison the concepts of freedom and diginity because they are unquantifiable.

Do I really need to cite examples of this? 

William Golding, whose optimism was rivaled only by other utopianists of his day wrote after World War II 

"I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head."

So the citizen in the scientifically regimented state becomes little more than an amalgam of behavioral repertoires whose every thought feeling and idea is the product of external stimuli and from this scientistic vantage point the populace's motivations can be calculated and systematized thereby allowing those few conditioners who are accountable to no moral master to develop economic and technological stimuli that can produce the desired patterns of mass behavior and such a societal model is known as technocracy which is a society (in classical political terms) in which technically trained experts by virtue of their specialised knowledge are in the dominant political and economic institutions.

Aldhous Huxley called it the scientific dictatorship, the rule of scientism. And by science I mean the modern form of science, which is very Faustian.

Thought Experiment:

If I was to ask you to group the following four things into two groups of two, how would you group them?

1. Science

2. Religion

3. Magic

4. Technology

Most people make the Magic/Religion, Science/Technology combo. I did. But the fact is that Modern Technology has more to do with Magic and Science has more to do with Religion.

This guy explains it better.

Science before the rise of nominalism acknowledged the existence of universals.

This goes back to Protagoras - man is the measure of all things

actually it's Gnostic - man facilitates his own salvation through his own cognitive powers

actually it's Promethean - man is the arbiter of his own moral precepts through technology, a technique, a craft

actually it's Luciferian - Man is God without God, he'll resculpt morally himself. 

See Genesis Chapter 3 for details regarding this.

You guys have enough moralising here?

Now get me off of these folding chairs my Mom just sent me a text message.