Kicking The Buckets

"What Do You Have To Lose?"

"Round the world and home again, that's the sailor's way, faster faster, faster faster"

"Theres no earthly way of knowing, which direction we are going"

Meet the Contestants

Betsy DeVos as Veruca - The girl whose father bought up a half a million candy bars

"She only has to start screaming for it and she gets it"

 Teavee Militia - Look at all those crazy pistols

"Are the fires of hell a-glowing? Is the grisly reaper mowing?"

Pictured L to R : Augustus Q. Gloop,  Mike Teavee,  Mark Teavee

Charlie Bucket - Right close to us

"Yes the danger must be growing, for the rowers keep on rowing, and they're certainly not showing, any signs that they are slowing"

Lost on Mulholland Drive - "This is the Girl"

Adam Kesher

David Lynch's  cinematic masterpiece Mulholland Drive features a wealth of  memorable scenes  in which Lynch seems to be meditating on the esoteric significance of career paths in Hollywood.  Producers, Directors, Casting Agents, Actors and their machinations all figure into the plot.  Many people have noted the stylistic parallels between Lynch's character Director Adam Kesher and real life director J.J. Abrams. From the overall look, to the details like hair and eyewear, Kesher seems to be a stand in for Abrams, and the other young guns with clunky eyewear  who yell "Action!" on set.

J.J. Abrams 

An interesting anecdote related to the casting of Abrams' ABC sci-fi/drama project "LOST" bears a striking similarity to the scene in Mulholland Drive where  director Adam Kesher declares "This is the girl", after being set straight by his shadowy Producers. Abrams championed Canadian actor  Evangeline Lilly for the role of Kate Austen, even though she was an unknown at the time, and didn't have a work visa. Why?

"Encouraged by a friend" / "That's the girl!"

Evangeline Lilly

"This is the Girl" 

So, what is this all about? Why does one actor get chosen instead of another? What value do actors have in our culture? What do Studios and Networks and Nations stand to gain by controlling the mouthpieces and muses of our movies? Tellingly, Abrams' handpicked hottie is still making news headlines 15 years later, but now the stakes have been raised all the way up to national socio-politics of the utmost importance:

Evangeline Lilly/Kate Austen/Tauriel the Elf/The Wasp takes a dangerous stance.

Lilly as Middle Earth's Tauriel, and her quote that sounds quite a lot like a defiance of pandemic 'social distancing'. "We will hide within our walls.../When did we let evil become stronger than us."

Freedom is a double edged sword, indeed.

Of course, there are other heroes in the mix, chosen by other Directors and Producers for different Projects. Now we see princess Sansa Stark/Dark Phoenix enter the fray, sent to battle Tauriel/The Wasp on the battlefield of public opinion:

Sansa Stark urges the townsfolk to heed the warnings.

Lilly's quote as Marvel's The Wasp seems tailor-made as a response to Sophie Turner. 

Stay tuned to see what hero will deliver the decisive blow in the Pandemic Wars.

Three is a Magic Number Vol.1

"Zootopic Tiamat"

June 2016 (6-16) in  Orlando Florida. June 10th-13th featured  three consecutive days of  terror,  targeting places of singing, dancing, and family amusement. 

ACT 1: The Plaza 

Christina Grimmie, aspiring singer whose life was cut short at the Plaza entertainment venue by gunman Kevin Loibl in Orlando. 

"Before You Exit"- the Disney boy-band that Grimmie was touring with in 2016. 

The "Before You Exit" boys, showing off their phosphorous sigil tattoos.

Kevin Loibl: Another "mad-dog" shooter, another encrypted phone and destroyed laptop.

Before you Exit: What better way to start a tour? 

ACT 2 : Pulse Nightclub 

Gunman Omar Mateen kills 49 people in one of the largest mass murders in American history. The venue was the LGBT-focused Pulse nightclub. 

Why Orlando? 

Act 3: Seven Seas Lagoon

Epilogue 2020: Satan discusses Orlando

"Frankly, a lot of stuff in Orlando started out right here." 

Kubrick, Elan Vital, and Leon Vitali

                  Detail from a painting by artist Paul Laffoley, featuring the French phrase "elan vital".

I have been looking at a lot of Paul Laffoley artwork lately, I've always been an admirer, and only recently learned he left us in 2015. The focal point in one of his text-based works jumped out at me, the words "ELAN VITAL" - because all week I've been reading about Kubrick's loyal and long-suffering assistant LEON VITALI. The sync between the two names is potent.

The 2017 documentary film "Filmworker", features candid interviews with Leon Vitali and actors from several Kubrick films. The enigmatic Vitali portrayed both Lord Bullingdon in "Barry Lyndon" and Red Cloak in "Eyes Wide Shut".

After his role in "Barry Lyndon" and before his assistant gig on 1980s "The Shining", Vitali acted in another  film, the relatively unknown Irish-Scandinavian project "Terror of Frankenstein".  There is quite a synchronicity here, as the Bergsonian concept of the ELAN VITAL , or Vitalism, was on the mind of Mary Shelley when she wrote the original "Frankenstein". Its amazing that someone named Leon Vitali would land the role of Doc Frankenstein, the mad genius obsessed with the Elan Vital. The two names are near -perfect phonetic anagrams.  Kubrick, the crypto-alchemist that he was, undoubtedly noticed the delicious "twilight language" at play here.

Also of note, Vitali and his wife at the time, Kersti, worked as costume designers on at least two films together. "Costumes" are one of the things available, along with "Fancy Dress", at the Rainbow Fashions store in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

Vitali as Red Cloak on the set of Eyes Wide Shut

Leon Vitali's name is famously inserted into the 1999 Kubrick film "Eyes Wide Shut", in the brief scene where Tom Cruise is reading a newspaper article about a very untimely drug overdose that shakes him to his core. Leon Vitali is the name of the "fashion designer" featured in the story by writer "Larry Celona". Kubrick scholars have debated for years as to what kind of meta-trickery is going on here, with Kubrick putting the name of his real-life assistant  in the film. Lately I've been wondering if Stanley was simply using Leon Vitali for his initials, L.V., which are also the initials of the famous fashion design house "Louis Vuitton", now known as the LVMH conglomerate.

The aforementioned Larry Celona, whose name can be seen as the author of the newspaper article in Eyes Wide Shut, has again  made the news this year in 2019. Bizarrely, Celona is the figure who first reported the stories of the controversial deaths of both Stanley Kubrick in 1999 and also Jeffrey Epstein in 2019.  Some sync-sleuths have noticed that Larry Celona is an anagram of Royal Lancer, a British military unit. Maybe Kubrick knew there was more than meets the eye in regards to this interesting nom-de-plume.

I enjoyed the documentary Filmworker, but couldn't help wondering at times if the project was a kind of "limited hangout" about Vitali where hard truth is mixed and blended with a bit of obfuscation to cloak key sensitivities. Vitali claims that Kubrick wasn't sending messages about the moon landing or secret projects in his films. Maybe he's right, he was there. But then again, this man is a trained actor, and there is just so much occult and  parapolitical smoke around the Kubrick films, it stands to reason that there should be a little fire in there somewhere.