ONT vol 6 contents i. short review: The Intern ii. the confusion of Chinatown iii. we'll remember water, in Theology iv. Respironics versus ResMed v. i'd bet my life, my home & happiness vi. hypothetic as a deaththreat vii. the Mad Max deity viii. they'd kill my rat, not heal him i. short review: The Intern i hesitate to diss the later DeNiro. for his gifts of Jake la Motta, Travis Bickle, i can only return my thanks & awe, tho i've paid to see his many films since. his moral credit drains a bit with the trailer for Analyse This & when he speaks on Presidential politics yet, he's still over-zero, in my ledger. i've re-screened Casino, read The Wolf of Wall Street and his credit drains i'm speaking of Scorsese, now. he revels in the money & the mob. he loves the folksy psychopaths he once had artful distance from. Casino / Wolf of Wall Street are the porno Travis Bickle takes his date to: an exploitation cinema, intercut with a liberal public service message. Scorsese regresses, back to his seedy apprenticeship. to the invalid kid, bookish & bed-ridden, dazzled by neighbourhood thugs. in De Lillo, too: his loving mimicry of tiny Bronx toughies circa 1950. a culture of masculine pride i see in the lecture style of Leonard Susskind, a swagger of the fists about the hips. Raging Bull is not pro-boxing, Taxi Driver is not proguns but draws me into fantasies, persistent & intense, of killing sprees in local sites of wickedness. ii. the confusion of Chinatown it perks up Gittes, draws him up: that her husband works for Water & Power. it draws him in a plane and over ocean: up into the city's gods & archons. by genre, it's a Mystery: whose title is the problem & its answer, a Confusion. my sister, my daughter! my sister and daughter! regressing thru Theogeny, approaching Chaos/Unity, we're mired in incest. distinctions dissolve, there's a mingling in our origins: this is the meaning of Chinatown. iii. we'll remember water, in Theology we'll remember water, in Theology: Thallasis of the cosmic flow, the low and slow. Oceanus: lord of all the Ocean. today we'd say, what Poseidon rules the Mediterranean? if Pleiades were a Natural Kind, we'd de-capitalize. if Pleiades were the seven hundred thousand. iv. Respironics versus ResMed which is the brand of my C-PAP machine? i guess Respironics but my worry is prophetic for it's ResMed. my first machine was Respironics and it sticks. i couldn't get the airflow tight but it sounds like a Philosophy, a high-end line of workout gear. a future healthcare fast & mobile, app-based. my ResMed works, but the name is clinical. sounds too much like what it is: an end-of-life air supply. i thank my machine, yet not by name. ResMed, it's a failing meme. i now & then rinse its filter: a spongy white wafer that i seem to lack a back-up for. instead i have a travel bag full of thick ziplocs with the filters that i never changed: stamp-size & branded Respironics. framed in molded plastic that remind me of an X-Wing cockpit, the canopy fliptop. v. i'd bet my life, my home & happiness was so sure i'd rinsed it, the small crook of pipe for my breathing tube or hadn't yet rinsed it but had set it by the kitchen sink, or on the kitchen table that here's what i said, walking down the hall toward the kitchen: i'd bet my life i left it in the kitchen. or i'd bet my life it's there, in the kitchen - i can't recall my wording, after twenty minutes. and what would i gain? i named no prize, so brazen & inept was my gamble. good it was there, & the bet was hypothetic - good it was there, for my game's high stakes could call into our home a speedy demon who'd remove it as i came down the hall to whom i'd owe my life, my home & happiness, if what i'd said precisely was i bet it's there. vi. hypothetic as a deaththreat my bet was hypothetic as a deaththreat layered in irony. a deaththreat worked into a little-read brief on the death penalty. a principled argument whose targets are named in the author's e.g.s. vii. the Mad Max deity the god of Mad Max is their crumbling technology's implied completion so lies in their past, a perfection they recede from. ours is still to come, we say: we ramp toward an A.I. Singularity. our cities drown & jungles burn but the updates & the Versions stay regular. even in decline, our Science will insist on the Sacrifice. the data sets repeat and they privatize their findings so the Sacrifice of juvenile virgins shall re-iterate, mindlessly. viii. they'd kill my rat, not heal him. those monster docs, they'd kill my rat, not heal him. see what i get when i google for help with his bumblefoot: