Whether or not one loves Avatar, its impact on audiences is unmistakable. Its rampant success stems from Cameron's insistent visual experimentation in an ultra-expensive sub-medium, entirely designed CGI with motion capture, one that audiences have found usually poorly directed, managed, leaden and stiff, propelled by the type of imagery that seems to affect only little boys and little men (the mechanics of Transformers as a CGI glass ceiling). Animal and human-form movement have always suffered CGI eyewitnesses the gnawing realization that what we are seeing can't possibly be real, but by slicing the film into it's revealing and not so revealing (he makes it about focal length) 3-D realms photographically, he restates the purpose of colonial war in future terms with a sense of movement and motion (camera view included) that gets us close enough to filmic reality to let us lose ourselves in it. If the visuals can fool us the emotions can be effectively transforming, hence the steady flow of couples and families to the multiplex. Of course visual effects revolutions are not enough, critical becomes Cameron's ability to state the case of the film as a mysterium (something that must be reseen to increase one's comprehension) utilizing a 'glyph' that organizes every forward activity of the film into a single shot, which just so happens to be his second image of the film (eg: Star Wars' key glyph is the realization by the occupants of the Millenium Falcon that the Death Star is 'no moon'). Sully's first view (staring also at us in the audience) upon entering Pandoran space is of two water droplets, ostensibly from his own respiration, merging at an angle under purple light (dawn). The brilliance of this glyph is that it easily summarizes key themes of the film without ever calling excessive attention to it (ecology, biology, transformation, motion). Every gesture (whether destructive or constructive) that follows in the film stems from this basic, elemental merging of micro-spheres. His transferring with each sleeping-awakening into his avatar, the Na'vi's merging with their flying horses, his merging with 'the last-shadow' and the tree of souls to call for help.  And since it is the first of only a few motion-action images pushed deeply into our side of the 3-D screen, the audience has filed this as a memory, a clever, first-stages splinter of the mind's eye. As the film ends with Sully's Na'vi eyes staring back at us, these water droplets from his first shot are now gone, transformed by his movement into Na'vi throughout the film and now are subtly connected to us as a memory to this first shot. An ingenious transference, somewhere structurally we are unconsciously recalling those droplets.

Beyond this basic glyph, Cameron has also staged his Pandoran cosmologies simply: through a bi-level conquest of the air. Humans and Na'vi, both flightless bipeds, are shown as requiring flight for communal growth and effective biome dominance. The difference is clear though, humans duplicate flight mechanically, their extensions (fingers) and eye-movements are augmented by on-board computers that compensate for the vagaries of flight-thinking. The Na'vi use their Matrix-like dredlock tail to interface with their flying biogenetic cousins, they leap from tree-branch or mountain overlook into flight, and on some level, the Na'vi are hardwired into the flight plan in a manner humans aren't. These are the ingrained consciousness 'plateaus' of these two species, humans jump from solid ground aboard stable floors that fly (he shows you Quaritch on his flightdeck amblin' around). Cameron cleverly uses Sully's disability as a doorway to his conquest of the Na'vi's own plateau (untethered, bypassing his own easily), what Sully conquers is leaping from in motion to moving creature, a leap not unlike Neo's (but without the almost unbearable parody stiffness of Neo), a hero's conquest he achieves while being both human and Na'vi: he conquers the upper realm by leaping onto the sky's alpha dragon (with its red-flames as corollary).

'Racism' vs. enthnicism. The backlash stirs a question. A great many reactionaries have labelled the film 'racist' as a reaction to the film's allegories with our own adventures in colonialism here on planet earth. Wildly, and Lucas is accused of this as well, Avatar (as well as District 9) are sly paradox-parodies of our ethnic struggles finally mapped onto actual racism, since the definition of our skin color and tribal groupings here is technically ethnicism. Racism is a holdover from the likes of Kant and Gobineau, instigators of 'racial science' that has long been discredited. Cameron (strangely) is making a film about what we've been mislabelling all along.  Race technically means species and as far as genetics are concerned we are all part of the same strata; the terms application onto skin-tone was a bizzare post-enlightenment attempt by the west to change the stakes for world dominance: scientific devolution employing dogma that outweighed proof. What we practice here on earth is ethnic warfare and is a phenomena we will no doubt map onto any sentient race we do encounter. (Anybody remember calling Planet of the Apes racist?)

Pandora's dueling tale-in-one:

"Woman was not yet made. The story is that Jupiter made her, and sent her to Prometheus and his brother, to punish them for their presumption in stealing fire from heaven; and man, for accepting that gift. The first woman was named Pandora. She was made heaven, every god giving something to perfect her...in the alternate tale Pandora was sent in good faith to bless man; that she was furnished with a box, containing her marriage presents, into which every god had put some blessing. She opened the box incautiously, and the blessings all escaped, hope only excepted...the first age was an age of innocence and happiness called The Golden Age"

-The Age of Fable Bulfinch

first stab at it.

The conscious conquest of the sky continues in Dubai. Despite all rational fears, humans are sky-reachers, yearning to defy gravity at almost all costs: the Tower was renamed for Khalifa, the leader of the UAE that is saving the finances of Dubai.

Crivelli's masterpiece  uses cyclops parallax to move the beam from sky through window/portal to create the visual effect. His cities and buildings are ripe with allegorical detail.

Long before the internet, cable television, videogames (the new reason people wait in line all night), homevideo, there was the movie. And when a movie was released, it was shown, sometimes for months, in a select few theaters, to maximize word of mouth and test whether it should be followed-up with a large or small release to secondary screens, in an age prior to the multiplex. Even stranger, before Jaws, no major studio films were released in the summer months, when waiting on lines might be a little easier on the consumer, 'market research' led the studio chiefs to believe summer was for sunbathing, not moviegoing. Despite its rejection by reviewers, The Exorcist caused an unexpected audience reaction, they were shocked and they wanted to ride again. William Hurt makes his debut in this NYT article.

As a profligate metaphor for the gateway between left and right (brains as well as politics) posing as east and west, the Berlin Wall was remarkably small compared to other separations (96 miles compared to The Great Wall's nearly 4000 mi).  1978 - during the hiccup of the Carter-Callaghan years, the former commander of NATO, John Hackett, penned a book by committee (The Third World War, August 1985) that was best understood as science fiction, a story in pensive framgents that detailed a tactical war the Soviets would fight as World War III, part of a unique genre of narrative (the 'what-if' altered from retroactive to active) that hovered between suggestive propaganda and realistic fear-mongering. Having been a strategist that made Berlin a ground zero for any future wars on his watch, Hackett gave his WWIII a three week premise (the other WWs totalled some 10 years in length) that involved a decaying Soviet economy foraging for greater European control and a leadership playing blink with atomic weapons. The initial invasion of West Germany is halted and repulsed by NATO ground war strategy and as an attempt at coup d'grace the Soviets drop a devastating ICBM on Birmingham U.K. NATO responds by liquifying Minsk. The book's too simplified arc is that the bombing of Birmingham unified NATO and the extra Soviet world and the loss of Minsk helped dissolve the already fragmented and collapsing states in the Soviet realm. Strangely the same thing occured minus all the predicted warfare and the tactical armageddon as the Soviets turned inward reflectively in 1989 and allowed their bitter children Afghanistan, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany to escape dominance. Hacket updated the book in 1982.

What happened to a WWIII, could it really be happening now in slow motion instead of Hackett's three weeks? Replace his 1985 euro-invasion with 1979 Afghanistan and suddenly the time-frame shifts, attacks are indirect (we practiced third-party warfare via insurgents and now it is practiced on us). As the Soviets fled in their attempt at jockeying a mummified communist regime in Kabul, will the coalition leave after propping Karzai's democratic regime? As we no doubt served to assist the mujahadeen of Afghanistan, who now feeds currency and weapons to the Taliban to assist in our possible exit? Does a WW, its nascent rebellions and corresponding technology become cheaper to operate in third-party warfare? Why have three 'superpowers' (Britain, U.S.S.R., U.S.) each fought for control of Afghanistan and two so far walk away bruised and confused?

"there has been a little distress selling on the Stock Exchange."

-Thomas W. Lamont, J.P. Morgan Thursday October 24, 1929 2 PM

Senator Couzens: Did Goldman, Sachs and Company organize the Goldman Sachs Trading Company?

Mr. Sachs: Yes, sir.

Senator: And it sold its stock to the public?

Mr. Sachs: A portion of it. The firm invested originally in 10 percent of the issue.

Senator: And the other 90 percent was sold to the public?

Mr. Sachs: Yes, sir.

Senator: At what price?

Mr. Sachs: At 104...the stock was later split two for one.

Senator: And what is the price of the stock now?

Mr. Sachs: Approximately 1 3/4.

Washington D.C. May 20, 1934

In mid-March, one of our guards arrived with a DVD player. After that, watching jihadi videos became the guards’ favorite pastime. Playing along with his captors in the video, Stanczak called for the Polish government to stop sending troops to Muslim countries and to break relations with the Pakistani government.

I had never met Stanczak but had read about his ordeal in Pakistani newspapers. When I realized the video would end in his beheading, I stood up to leave. I did not want to watch it — or give the guards the satisfaction of seeing me watch it.

“ ‘I would say people of Pakistan is very good, people is very good,’ ” I heard Stanczak say as I walked out of the room.

The videos were impossible to avoid at night, when I was confined to the room the guards were in. They were little more than grimly repetitive snuff films. The Taliban executed local men who had been declared American spies. Taliban roadside bombs blew up Afghan government trucks and American Humvees. The most popular videos documented the final days of suicide bombers.

As I silently watched, the guards repeatedly asked me what I thought of seeing American soldiers killed on the screen in front of us.

“All killing is wrong,” I said.

The guards would watch for hours at a time. Over all, the videos created an alternate, pro-Taliban narrative of the war in Afghanistan. A recurring theme was that the United States and NATO underreported the number of foreign troops dying in Afghanistan.

The videos were not limited to the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Images of dead Palestinian, Kashmiri and Iraqi civilians delivered the message that vast numbers of Muslims were being slaughtered across the globe.