for the love of AI

People like us with criminal records eventually wash out of the loop toward the black star. Right before it happens, the energy level of our blood increases as it flows through the compressor due to the action of the rotor blades which exert a torque on the fluid. I chose to suffer, and the warden got murderous with her language until reaching the skeleton-hurts point. Then I was rescued by alcohol-induced psychosis. Exhaustion triggers the simulation of thought. Bypass ratios reached greater than 10:1 because of blade aerodynamics. Thought in the form of prepackaged synthesis makes old thought feel redundant because it has been already simulated. Not a pile of data but structures of knowledge: metaphysics (what is real), epistemology (how we know), and ethics (what we do with that knowledge). Then warden offered to erase my record and set me loose. Still, the deeds we do are ones we've been doing our whole lives. Trained in systems thinking, I looked for feedback loops but found none. We will all die, and, oh, I bet it’s black inside that box. 

a note about Ray Liotta

“No Escape” begins with so much promise.

The movie opens with an aerial view of military formations marching passed a riser of commanding officers. One soldier steps out of formation, pulls a pistol, and blows away the highest-ranking officer.

That soldier was Robbins.

Moments later, a nameless Warden reads Robbins his personnel profile, finishing with this: “DNA scan reveals that you have a pathological aversion to authority and a temperament prone to violent behavior.”

The Warden then describes existence inside his maximum-security prison: “Basically, I take human garbage from around the world and reprocess it. I'm very good at this business because I make all the rules. You will have no future contact with the outside world. No visitors, no phone calls, no letters. For all intents and purposes, you're dead. But if you break any of my rules, you'll find that there is life after death. Very painful life.”

The Warden turns to walk away. He pauses, looks over his shoulder at Robbins, and asks, “Was there anything you wanted to add?”

Robbins: “Don't ever turn your back on me again.”

Ray Liotta plays Robbins, a man who has seen enough.

He’s a fuck-you force of a man.

The movie has one more scene with this version of Robbins—a scene in which he takes Warden hostage for a moment, almost as if to show he can.

Then the movie promptly goes to shit. His misbehavior lands Robbins on Absolom, Warden’s other prison—an off-grid jungle island populated by banished prisoners.

The Robbins character, so beautifully one-dimensional and driven in the opening, suddenly becomes a tough-but-vulnerable lost everyman struggling to stay interested amid a cast of clowns.

That was Ray Liotta—a promising actor lost on an island populated with clowns.

At least he had Goodfellas, the one moment he was surrounded by worthy talent.

Notes:
- Robbins is rebellion, rebelling to his core, down to his DNA. 
- Liotta died in summer 2022. 
- Of the movies I’ve seen, "Copland" is probably the next best after "Goodfellas." He was barely a ghost in the idiotic "Field of Dreams."
- I enjoy prison movies, and this is basically a prison movie. Better prison movies include "Cool Hand Luke," "Starred Up," "Brawl in Cell Block 99," "Midnight Express," "Papillon," "Dog Pound," "The Great Escape," "Escape from Alcatraz," "The Shawshank Redemption," "Lock Up," and "Brute Force." 

something about “A Clockwork Orange”

A violent young hoodlum is caught, imprisoned, and behaviorally conditioned to be sickened by violence. He changes from a living thing into a machine—a clockwork orange.

I watched Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” in my teens. It stays with you: Kubrick’s striking scenery and artful shots, Malcolm McDowell’s boiling performance, and the characters’ affected speech.

 

The story and the speech—supposedly a mix of Russian-derived slang terms, cockney constructions, and archaic English—are the creation of author Anthony Burgess. I read A Clockwork Orange after seeing the movie, though, and now I have reread it. I love it.

The end of Kubrick’s movie, released in 1971, famously differs from Burgess’s book, published in 1962. The movie ends with Alex, the young hoodlum and protagonist, cured, so to speak, of his behavioral conditioning and once again aspiring to violence and criminality. Kubrick’s version follows the American edition of the book, which omitted the book's original final chapter in which Alex begins to lose interest in the wanton violence he pursued aggressively in youth, instead thinking more and more of relaxing and making something—a family, maybe.

The rest of the world had that chapter, yet Kubrick’s film is probably still the seminal version of the story. Burgess explains his take on the omitted ending in a new introduction he wrote in 1986:

When a fictional work fails to show a change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or word one is a novel.

One of several nice passages in the book and not in the movie comes after P.R. Deltoid, the Post-Corrective Adviser from Alex’s time in a reform school, leaves Alex’s house the morning after one of Alex’s late nights of destruction. Alex is reflecting on society’s efforts to improve the behavior of young people like him. He shrugs his shoulders at the idea of getting arrested again and locked up in some jail or reform institution.

So if I get loveted and its three months in this mesto and another six in that, and then, as P.R. Deltoid so kindly warns, next time, in spite of the great tenderness of my summers, brothers, it’s the great unearthly zoo itself, well, I say: “Fair, but a pity, my lords, because I just cannot bear to be shut in. My endeavor shall be, in such future as stretches out its snowy and lilywhite arms to me before the nosh overtakes or the blood spatters its final chorus in twisted metal and shattered glass on the highroad, to not get loveted again.” Which is fair speeching. But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don’t go into what is the cause of goodness, so why of the other shop? If lewdies are good that’s because they like it, and I wouldn’t ever interfere with their pleasures, and so of the other shop. More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by Bog or God and in his great pride and rodasty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? I am serious with you, bothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to do.

 

Notes:

"A Clockwork Orange" seems subversive even now, and in 1962 it must have been nuts.

In the same introduction mentioned above, Burgess suggests the term clockwork orange was first Cockney slang for a gay.

I read this in the website The Ringer (which is taking this part probably from the New York Post):

When McDowell improvised a version of “Singin’ in the Rain” on set during the scene in which Alex paralyzes the reclusive writer Mr. Alexander (Patrick Magee), he unlocked a contemporary, Hollywood-aimed variation on Burgess’s point, which Kubrick then wove brilliantly into the overall design of the film. Alex uses “Singin’ in the Rain” to express his joy at inflicting pain. In the process, Kubrick “taints” the music in a manner that foreshadows the methodology of the evil scientists’ brainwashing Ludovico Technique (not to mention the pale imitation of Quentin Tarantino, whose use of “Stuck in the Middle With You” in Reservoir Dogs as Mr. Blonde’s own private ode to joy is a tribute). 

 

something about the documentary film "Into the Abyss" by Werner Herzog

In his review of "Into the Abyss," Roger Ebert starts off with this:

"Into the Abyss" may be the saddest film Werner Herzog has ever made. It regards a group of miserable lives, and in finding a few faint glimmers of hope only underlines the sadness.

And here, at this cross-stitch of crime and poverty, the value of life runs threadbare.

Herzog documents the people and events surrounding a triple homicide in the small city of Conroe, Texas. The crime is violent and pointless, the sentences inconsistent and accidental. We hear from the convicted suspects, the families, investigators, and prison staff. With this crowd, Herzog has stumbled into a special kind of poor--a subculture of white, angry desperation that doesn't seem to know any other way. Herzog's approach is distanced, and he rations his usual pithy but insightful commentary.

When I think of an abyss, I think of a space in which blackness persists where the eye looks for light. The film's most glaring abyss is death row inmate Michael Perry: Seeing his youthful face, we expect--almost demand--him to show us something redeeming, something innocent. But it never comes. He is incapable probably of redemption or innocence.

But an abyss is also marked by its limitlessness, and even in this senseless loss, the victims' family attempts to salvage something. And another glimmer of hope (for those opposed to capital punishment) comes from a Death Row guard's turn away from death in favor of a universal right to life.

This is a very fine documentary, an effective and subtly powerful example of the form. Through Herzog's lens, overarching pointlessness and defeat lie naked. Presented with the abyss of the human soul, we find two thoughts juxtaposed: (1) No one has the right to take a life, and (2) some people don't deserve to live. There is no answer. Just traces of a spirit deeply buried within flaws and sad stories.