Homeless and Hopeless

James LaFond has a brush with the future:

On my way into the supermarket today, I got to thinking about how the bottle return areas of large supermarkets remind me of what an ancient slave market might have looked like. The dregs of society, conquered and diseased, standing in line, awaiting an uncertain, but sure to be unkind future. The number of homeless seems to be growing exponentially, to such a point that, given the current trend, we’ll all be homeless one day.

Both the bottle return station–probably not as bad here as in his neighborhood, but inspiring the same feeling of dread–and the increase in homeless people are depressing realities here. Hobos crawl through downtown scavenging up recyclables along with anything else they can use at night, sometimes angrily leaving piles of garbage around dumpsters they’ve broken into. The trash cans on the street are locked in little cages so they won’t be turned over. I’ve seen more than one homeless man furiously pulling and kicking away at one of these.

A little while later, as I walked back out to my car with half a cartload of groceries, I see someone sitting on the hood of my car. I’m a easy going type, so I cordially observe, “You’re on my car, dude.”

Like a flash, he hops off to face me, and I notice the hunting knife in his left hand. “So what about it, huh?” he inquired, while moving within a couple feet of me. His eyes tell me that he’s tweaked.
Wait a second. “What’s up Mike? I didn’t recognize you without your glasses.”

He smiles and tells me he lost them during the last snow storm. While we talk, he keeps the knife behind his back, blade pointed outward, tilting it back and forth, rocking on his heels, and craning his neck this way and that to get a better look at his surroundings.

“What’s with the knife?”, I ask.

It’s so motherfuckers know. Keep away! Danger! HaHa.”
His mental state has deteriorated since the last time I saw him. We used to be neighbors.

Mike’s in his late 40’s, and looks older. He talks with the sibilant “S” that is indicative of long term meth use. He’s become what I call a TOM. Tweaker On Mountainbike. I actually witnessed the moment he joined the ranks of the city’s homeless population.

In the late seventies PCP was introduced, and flowed into my Norwalk neighborhood by way of Compton. The drug is devastating, and long abuse left users with slurred speech. They became known as “mush heads” locally.

More homeless appear better outfitted with tents. They can pitch them right on the sidewalk overnight downtown. One remarkably elaborate construction, combining tarps, umbrellas and other things, last I checked, appears each night and is gone each morning on the same patch of sidewalk near a church.
A small encampment on a plot of land across from a church that feeds them will appear and grow, and then grow menacing, before being taken down by the police, and starting the cycle anew. The night belongs to the homeless in downtown Portland, and in the day they move about with visible frustration and difficulty, having to navigate the normies. Crazies walking down the middle of a boulevard mid-day are fairly common; people barely react.

The next political movement to challenge the status quo, whatever it is, will have to be some part therapeutic. It must seek to reclaim and heal some part of those lost to degeneracy, sloth and foolishness.
Won’t be long til summer comes.

The Picture of Alice

The porch was a concrete block with steps formed into it and a visible tilt, or so I thought, like some chunk of brutalist architecture that had fallen out of the sky. It was about five by five feet. Young people were crowding there to smoke, despite the rain having lapsed into the faintest trace, with individual drops coming like random stragglers.

She stood on the corner of this grotesque pedestal facing me on the lawn below. She was a standing shadow shrouded in the halo from the bare porch light behind, a white trash Birth of Venus, and, I knew, no less beautiful behind the dark there, mercifully hidden from my searching eyes.

The outline of her hair was the only discernible, familiar thing about her–otherwise it could have been anyone there–but it was undeniably her. This minimalist sketch evoked the full light of memory, the memory of her still compiling that final version to take her place when she’s gone, the dead thing to replace the living, the trace of her arc across my life, documented and filed away on paper already yellowing.

That was Alice up there on the porch, looking down on me with–what? I couldn’t see. Was she talking? I couldn’t tell. Was she talking to me? Was she smiling at me? Did she see me, finally? See my desire?

That was Alice, midway through her ruin, long after mine.

March or April 2017

Growing Pains

The current Hollywood sex abuse hysteria follows a pattern set in American universities during the first wave of political correctness in the late eighties and early nineties, wherein charges of sexual abuse by men are encouraged, accepted unquestioningly and quickly leveraged into some form of institutional loot–departments in colleges, board seats in the corporate world, parts in Hollywood.

Hollywood gets to come late to the appropriation phase of American history that it’s been so very instrumental in bringing about. That is, it gets its turn now to be shaken down by the fringes, starting with the fringiest of all, actresses.

Therein lies part of the problem. Unlike universities, where captured tax dollars provide a haven for theorists who might starve in the gutter without them, Hollywood is a serious business about serious money and much closer to the sort of meritocracy it too has been denouncing as racist, patriarchal, etc.

The universities can endure, apparently, thousands of intellectual mediocrities, whereas Hollywood can’t. The universities manage to get away with replacing solid academics with crap theory, but Hollywood is a business. You don’t replace good directors with bad and get away with it for long. And there aren’t enough female directors and producers to replace the voracious Harvey Weinsteins of the world.

So just who appropriates what and how remains a difficult question. At some point women might long for the quaint custom of the casting couch, and its relative simplicity.

The Hollywood Reporter:

A leaderless group “became a brand overnight,” say insiders, but the anti-harassment crusade now seeks structure and a real leader amid skepticism about CAA’s role and “movie star cliquey” meetings. On March 1, members of the Time’s Up anti-harassment organization met the media to deliver a 60-day progress report on its campaign for “basic fairness in the workplace,” as Bad Robot co-CEO Katie McGrath put it.

The timing was right. Hollywood being what it is, and people being what they are, there has been speculation and some suspicion about where Time’s Up came from, who gets to participate in the group and what its priorities are. At the meeting with the press, A Wrinkle in Time director Ava DuVernay assured that even though Time’s Up “started so splashy on the red carpet, there’s real work being done.”

 Ava DuVernay is going to want some of that Time’s Up largess after her weird-looking Oprah film fails.

 Some of the distrust around Time’s Up can be traced to its beginnings in late 2017 in the crisis atmosphere that prevailed after accusations against Harvey Weinstein became public. Early meetings took place at CAA, with the agency’s chief innovation officer Michelle Kydd Lee and agents Maha Dakhil, Hylda Queally and Christy Haubegger among the founders. When certain A-list actresses (such as Kristen Stewart and Emma Stone) and major players repped at other agencies (such as Shonda Rhimes, handled by ICM Partners) were invited to meetings while their agents were not, some suspected that CAA might use the gatherings to try to poach clients. “There are people cynical enough to say it’s about getting Shonda,” says a producer who is a member of the organization.

The great unappreciated irony of Hollywood’s self-inflicted sexual hysteria is that it’s hard to imagine it without the Pussy Hat protests against Trump. Weinstein’s exposure was like ripping a hull in Hollywood’s side in this increased pressure. Further irony in that Trump was boasting of celebrity sexual advantage and speaking frankly of a system most working Hollywood women were as complicit of or indifferent to as similarly situated male colleagues–who generally don’t have the opportunity to trade on sex if they desire.

Mighty interesting times.

Learning from Higher Learning

The ground for Hollywood’s current sex hysteria was being laid decades ago in higher education, where, like Hollywood, rampant messy sex presented feminists first with a crisis, and then with an opportunity: to leverage sexual abuse accusations into the loot of professorships and programs. So far the crisis it presents, to feminist theory, which no one cares about, even the feminists, has been no barrier whatsoever to that.

The very real crisis for young women wading into this sexual chaos is likewise ignored. But, give the feminists credit, they are trying, unaware, to bring sex back under control.

At least the universities once promoted moral virtue; Hollywood not so much. So the specter of that beast consuming itself in this fashion makes me think this is feminism’s inevitable end every time, hectoring impotently the sexual abandon it continually produces. But the pattern in Hollywood follows that set in the schools and boardrooms, where charges are quickly converted into seats or sinecures.

So if this practice migrated out of the same place as critical theory it’s only fitting that the prosecution of individual assault accusations should migrate out of the university and into the courts where they belong, where accusations have to meet some burden of proof.

From the New York Times:

A Yale student who had been suspended by the university was found not guilty on Wednesday of sexually assaulting a fellow student, in a rare college rape accusation to be tried in the courts. The verdict laid bare seemingly gaping divides in the national reckoning around sexual consent and assault.

Those “seemingly gaping divides” are between higher ed’s guilty-until-proven-innocent model and due process, of course, and probably don’t indicate a true divide in public opinion. Even the dependably liberal readers of the NYT were skeptical of the article’s (naturally) bias for the prosecution.

Over several grueling days on the witness stand in a New Haven courtroom, the woman described what she said was her rape by the accused student, Saifullah Khan, 25, on Halloween night 2015. The testimony, in open court, offered a glimpse into the kinds of encounters that are more often described behind closed doors, to university panels or among friends.

Indeed. Any rape allegation on campus should be treated like a rape allegation off campus; it should be reported immediately to police. Real police.
How is it universities aren’t required to report serious sexual assault allegations to police immediately any way? Because they’re not providing due process in the first place? How do they get away with that?

That the trial was happening at all was already noteworthy. Statistics on how many college rape cases go to trial are elusive, but experts agree that the number is exceedingly low; the Department of Justice estimates that between 4 percent and 20 percent of female college students who are raped report the attack to law enforcement.
But unfolding as it did in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the fierce, unresolved debate over whether campus rape cases are best handled by universities or law enforcement, Mr. Khan’s trial also took on political significance, with defense lawyers accusing Yale of making Mr. Khan a scapegoat for its own poor handling of previous sexual assault claims. Representatives from Families Advocating for Campus Equality, a group that has criticized university hearing processes as skewed in favor of accusers, attended the trial in support of Mr. Khan.
In an interview after the verdict, Norman Pattis, a lawyer for Mr. Khan, said he had tried to challenge “the outer limits of the #MeToo movement,” which he called “a form of mass hysteria.”
“Sex happens, especially on college campuses,” he said.
After a two-week trial, the six-member jury deliberated for about three hours before returning a verdict. In an interview afterward, a juror, Diane Urbano, said the #MeToo movement had not figured in the panel’s decision.
“It was not part of the case,” she said. “We put it aside.”
Instead, she said, they considered the evidence. “There was sufficient doubt on every charge,” she continued. “So we came to the verdict we did.”