In the House of the Hangman 1100

A man played a bamboo flute, a woman sang and then a man sang -- smashing the bones over the heart with each sound. At one point, I lay beneath an azalea bush outside, on an immaculate green lawn where a Hindu priest once found the child-me absent-mindedly plucking the grass out to get at the mud. “You are a killer,” he said -- something I never forgot. (And neither have I, Richard.) Afterwards, we went to the Tesco Express in Watford where my credit card was rejected. There were only three loaves of sliced bread -- wholemeal, white or otherwise -- left in the whole store. You could see the garudas in Splatters riding the updrafts between and above the abandoned-unfinished apartment blocks if you knew what to look for. Imagine a clock that will keep perfect time forever, even after the heat-death of the universe.

        grey whiteness of fog against invisible

        ridge, song sparrow calling from branch

        in foreground, sound of wave in channel

In the first future, where most of the film is set, Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a hit man with a fairly easy job. His job is to wait in a field for hooded and handcuffed people from the future to appear. He then shoots them, and collects the silver bars strapped to their body. He does this day after day, with other monotony. The hit man, that last bastion of skill and danger, has been rendered utterly routine: one only needs the coldness to kill, not the talent. This is reflected in the hit man's preferred weapon, a futuristic blunderbuss which, as the movie explains, can hit anything within fifteen yards but nothing past that point. A crude tool for a deskilled job. The hit men, or “loopers,” as they are called, disposes of people with this weapon day after day. Until, one day, the looper finds a body with gold bars strapped to it. “Lamar prompts Jim to tell me about the sister of his former business partner. Jim says, “Oh yeah, well my partner’s sister invited the entire Manson family to her home.” Jim spreads his arms and looks from side to side to emphasize that there are a lot of them. “So they’re all sitting there, and Angela Lansbury walks in and takes one look at them and says, ‘You’re out of here.’” “What does Angela Lansbury,” I scream, “have to do with this story?” Jim pauses, then says, “Angela Lansbury was my partner’s mother.” He looks at me perplexed, as if anybody would know that. I love this anecdote, the way it starts out as a friend of a friend tale and morphs into pure tabloid. ANGELA LANSBURY IN MANSON LOVE NEST. ‎:: Let’s just say: the portal slide down the thirteen story hotel ended on the twelfth floor where the swim meet was being held. All eleven stories below were training floors connected by video-surveilled elevators whose doors were guarded by front-desk women in red carpet attire. We were five in the team, and they were after us, until we reached the underground. But to get there without being captured, we had to dance salsa, tango, waltz, and jigs to the same rhythm as the guardia civil rat monitors.

[Note: Sources: Bhanu Kapil, “Robbers”, at Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, 30 Sept 012; BR (for the garudas etc see China Miéville, Perdido Street Station); Imp Kerr, “Triple Decker Weekly, 28”, at The New Inquiry, 30 Sept 012 (“This is the “wow” factor behind a device known as a “space-time crystal,” a four-dimensional crystal that has periodic structure in time as well as space. However, there are also practical and important scientific reasons for constructing a space-time crystal. With such a 4D crystal, scientists would have a new and more effective means by which to study how complex physical properties and behaviors emerge from the collective interactions of large numbers of individual particles, the so-called many-body problem of physics. A space-time crystal could also be used to study phenomena in the quantum world, such as entanglement, in which an action on one particle impacts another particle even if the two particles are separated by vast distances.” [Berkeley Lab]); Stephen Ratcliffe, “9.30”, at Temporality, 30 Sept 012; “After the Future(s): On Looper”, at Unemployed Negativity, 30 Sept 012; Dodie Bellamy, “Crimes Against Genre”, as seen at Aimee Louise, 29 Sept 012; Anastasia Hager, FB post, 30 Sept 012]

Comments

[Omo Bob]

as the woman once said, "you look like Lee Harvey Oswald..."

[john]

I should have replied, "but I feel just like Jesse James".