Installment #2 of the drama series, Cimmerian by Terencio Safford, Managing Editor of Secret Laboratory.

In this episode of Cimmerian, we continue to follow Dmitry in his quest to cleanse himself of the haunting stench of societal failure and rejection. He laments on his troubles trying to find sustainable employment and we get a brief glimpse at the preliminary frustration that he endures throughout his day.

Today, my boss, Dave, showed his trust in me by putting me in charge of finishing the shingles on the three-season porch that we’ve been working on for the last month. I like working for the construction company. I’m learning the business inside and out. Dave has taken me under his wing as his apprentice and I hope to become a bigger part of their company as I continue to prove my worth. I am grateful for this opportunity.

However, as  I sit at a bus stop outside of Byerly’s in this dreary city and wait, partially sheltered from the cool rain, reality becomes more and more clear to me. Technically, I am still unemployed. I work on a part-time basis and since I am not licensed and don’t have Limited Liability Corporation status, I’m paid only a modest hourly wage for the work that I do with Dave.

Suddenly, I feel a little down and out. I don’t have a car or my own place. I live with a friend whose small apartment is already overcrowded and the Metro Transit system kills hours of my days. My writing business has been slower than normal lately despite my many ads on Craigslist.

I think about Amicus. I don’t know why really, but I feel a sense of accountability to Chris Doege because of his efforts to pair me with a great friend and mentor, Gary Oldmen. I feel as if I’m a stranger to Communications Director Steve Nelson because we have an agreement that allows me to write guest posts to the Amicus blog site and I haven’t done much writing. It’s been a couple of weeks since I talked to him last. I feel as if I’ve let Russel Balenger down. Russel, the Sr. Vice President, has so much faith in my abilities and motivation that he went out of his way to become a great friend to me, offering insights, ideas and inspiration.

As I sit on this bench somewhat embarrassed as people drive by me in their cars with what looks to be contempt in their eyes, I know that I need to make contact. I feel ashamed and defeated. The wind picks up with the rain and I’m exhausted. But this is what I have to do. I have to keep pushing. I have to keep trying because I know that this is how I get my life to the point where I need it to be. I don’t make a lot of money right now and most of what I do make comes from what I can generate under my writing service. I keep in mind that many successful people became who they were because of the adversity that they were able to overcome. Some say that overcoming challenges in life builds character. I think they are right but I also believe it defines strength. It’s not always easy to recover from a major setback such as a prison sentence, especially when you have little to no family/friend support.

I stomp out the cigarette that I’ve personally vowed to quit smoking…at least five times already! When I look up again, I see the giant time machine known as public transportation lumbering its way toward me. I call it a time machine because by the time you get off of one, several hours seems to have vanished from your life unaccounted for. I prepare my buck and three quarters for my fair and patiently stand on the curb. I will make the call to Amicus soon. They have been instrumental in my success and I don’t want to let them down.

“Fear not that which oppresses you, but rise, my child; rise above the clouds, the moon and the stars. Rise and be glorious.”

Terencio Safford

Born in Atlanta, Georgia and raised in the small town of Anniston, Alabama, there’s no doubt that country living and sentiments still reside in Terencio Safford, Secret Laboratory’s managing editor.

He came a long way from his roots. He had a very unique childhood which allowed him to experience different cultures, religions and family values; this ultimately gave him a sense of awareness and acuteness that formulated his inspired outlook on life.

He graduated from Anniston High School in 2001 in Anniston, Alabama. He was recruited as a high school senior by the U.S. Army National Guard where he served two years as an Aircraft Electrician. After leaving the Army in 2002, Terencio migrated to Minnesota in 2003 in search of a better opportunity. He attended the Minnesota School of Business in Richfield studying Music Business before realizing that he wanted to pursue music as a hobby and not a career.

He has dedicated his time and talent to writing professionally. Terencio discovered his gift at an early age but pursued other talents and interests with the thoughts that writing was boring and time consuming! Now he finds pleasure and peace in formulating thoughts into creative treasures of literary prose!

Email him at terencio@secretlaboratory.org and visit him at http://www.wix.com/literaryprose/byterencio

Introducing the new real life drama series, Cimmerian.

“Follow me now; for I will lead you there.”

This series is inspired by true events involving real people. The story is told from the perspective of the narrator. For the sake of privacy, the narrator shall herein be called, Dmitry. We will follow Dmitry, who has been so kind to lend his story to the Secret Lab, chronologically through time in his ever challenging quest of finding life after incarceration. Dmitry is receiving help from the community organization that specializes in providing direction for those who may have gotten off track, AmicusUSA. Dmitry has gone through rehabilitation and is now struggling to find his redemption. He cannot accept defeat although defeat has become the bane of his existence. The deck is stacked against Dmitry and the pressure to overcome adversity before it is too late is overwhelming. We accompany Dmitry on his difficult journey without the knowledge of what is to become of him but with the hope that his efforts will begin a new era of humanitarian equality and societal acceptance in a world that is inherently cruel and hermetically unforgiving.

All names and some locations have been fictionalized to preserve the identity and protect the privacy of individuals and businesses.

MARCH 2, 2012

Last night I edited my best friend’s mid-term paper for him. My friend, he’s not much of a scholar; he’s a wounded warrior, home from Iraq. I sometimes proofread and edit his school papers to help him out as much as I can. You see, when I was down and needed someone to talk to or just hang out with for a couple of days, Dave was there. When I didn’t have money, Dave paid my way (countless times). When I didn’t have a place to go for refuge, Dave offered his home, his food and even his vehicles to me. That’s Dave. He’s my friend. And in my experience, friendships are what keep me inspired. I care about myself more because I care about what my friends think of me. I woke up this morning and realized how far behind I’d gotten with work. I needed to get caught up, but I didn’t want to start. That’s the hardest part of anything, right? The beginning? I just wanted to continue to lie in my blanket and sleep while waiting for the cows to come home.

ENT! ENT! ENT! ENT! My stupid alarm clock. It was 9:40. I had better get up and start writing. I had been hitting the snooze button since 7:30, the time I normally like to get up and work. It wasn’t easy, getting up. It never is. After a heart-wrenching break-up with my girlfriend during the Christmas holidays, I didn’t think I could recover. But then, I never knew how great my friends were.

Staying the course; not giving up; visualizing your goals. Amicus stands behind all of these ideals through volunteers such as Gary Oldmen.  To me, Gary is more than a volunteer.  He is the mentor who was assigned to me through Amicus to help me stay focused and positive. We’ll get together for lunch, go biking or just sit down for a bit, with Gary providing an ear and advice. He’s in his mid-60s and I am in my late-20s. What could we possibly have in common? Nothing! And that’s the beauty of how it all works. Gary has experienced a higher quality of life than I have. When I need a boost to keep going, I call Gary. He gives his advice and opinions to me straight. Sometimes it’s not always what I want to hear, but every time it’s what I need to hear. I commend him for his patience and his willingness to help someone who truly needs a good friend. That’s Gary. He is my friend.

That’s also what Amicus is all about – helping young men and women stay focused and determined. I fell pretty far down and didn’t think I’d ever be able to get back up again but just like this morning, I knew I had to. I fumbled to the kitchen, made some hot tea and booted up my laptop. In the back of my mind I know that failure is not an option for me. My future is important to me and that is what drives me. I am the custodian of my destiny. I hold the reigns to the beast that will carry me to success. I alone, stand before the helm, overlooking the seas, taking in all of the wondrous mystery that she has in store for me. Supported by my good friends and organizations such as Amicus, I have courage.

I am a writer now. From website content and strategic writing to college papers and article summaries, I write. All while finding time to finish my own novel and short stories that reflect both the realities and fantasies of life as I experience them. I operate a real business that I created, nurtured and am now supporting. I am up. I am awake. And there is no way that I could have done it without my friends.

“There will be sufficient bridges to cross on tomorrow, but today you shall learn from the last.”

Terencio Safford

Born in Atlanta, Georgia and raised in the small town of Anniston, Alabama, there’s no doubt that country living and sentiments still reside in Terencio Safford, Secret Laboratory’s managing editor.

He came a long way from his roots. He had a very unique childhood which allowed him to experience different cultures, religions and family values; this ultimately gave him a sense of awareness and acuteness that formulated his inspired outlook on life.

He graduated from Anniston High School in 2001 in Anniston, Alabama. He was recruited as a high school senior by the U.S. Army National Guard where he served two years as an Aircraft Electrician. After leaving the Army in 2002, Terencio migrated to Minnesota in 2003 in search of a better opportunity. He attended the Minnesota School of Business in Richfield studying Music Business before realizing that he wanted to pursue music as a hobby and not a career.

He has dedicated his time and talent to writing professionally. Terencio discovered his gift at an early age but pursued other talents and interests with the thoughts that writing was boring and time consuming! Now he finds pleasure and peace in formulating thoughts into creative treasures of literary prose!

Email him at terencio@secretlaboratory.org and visit him at http://www.wix.com/literaryprose/byterencio

Beware, dear reader: spoilers ahead.

In October 1929, on a Black Tuesday that marked the depth of what economist Irvine Fisher described as the “great plateau,” foreshadowing some pretty heinous irony, (or in other words, embedding what Welles would have described as an excellent plot catalyst) Orson Welles was probably examining the ideal life, trying to understand not only what he was supposed to do with his own, but also how he was supposed to interpret the sort of aimless circumstances he routinely had to contend with. And what he found, clawing through the depths of what he would come to know as loss and abandonment, could have been the origins of something that would one day be meaningful and honest, that the rest of us would be able to look at from the outside in, and see what he never could – an ideal life. A sense of home. Our own cherished Rosebud. Burying both of his parents before the age of 15, at a time when our nation was crumbling to pieces, just before deciding to pack it all up and head across the ocean, I can imagine young Orson coming to the conclusion that an ideal story, and the best kind of performance, comes from a deep yearning for validation.

Citizen Kane wasn’t relevant when it was first released – it was in fact a box office flop, received with such distaste that some circles would actually throw things at the screen whenever it was shown. Citizen Kane would eventually receive the ultimate vindication in the ensuing decades, but at the time it was considered nothing. Lower than nothing. Vilified. Booed on several occasions. People were so angry with the film that Orson was even denounced as a communist by those hoping to get him lynched. If there’s anything we can learn about the production and ultimate success of Citizen Kane (besides the litany of other stuff) it is the fact that tastes change. Relevance is routinely shifted with the times, and we along with it. Welles himself once said,

“In the old days the greatest thing to be was a movie star. Today, the greatest thing in the world to be is a pop-singer. There will never be a great star unless the greatest thing in the world to be is that kind of star. At the end of the last century and before the first World War, the greatest thing in the world to be was an opera singer. People used to faint in the streets when they saw an opera singer. And then there came the movie stars. You see, I think any form of entertainment only exists because it corresponds to a moment in time.”

I couldn’t appreciate Welles until I was much older. I had no precedent for him. Rather, what precedent I did have was from films that had already taken his techniques and made them common – that had mined his methods and refined them so extensively over the years as to make them part of the landscape of contemporary film. It wasn’t until film-studies in college that I discovered why Citizen Kane was even relevant in the first place. I didn’t get it – I had seen the layered dialogue, the tricks of lighting, the editing, the long shots, the extended takes, the usage of cranes, the realistic sets and similar character development done a thousand times before, and done better – it wasn’t anything special. I hadn’t realized that what I would come to understand as contemporary film wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for Welles barging into Hollywood the way that he had, pissing everybody off. I remember a few years back how everyone was impressed with the frenetic editing of the Bourne Ultimatum, and how revolutionary it was. Orson was doing similar cuts forty years earlier in his film Chimes of Midnight.

One of my first experiences with film was pretty definitive. My mom had some business or other to attend and plopped me with the nearest willing neighbor, who could think of nothing better to do but plunk me in front of the old CRT and VCR, stick in the first cassette she could find and hit the play button. I watched, rapt, helplessly ensnared by what unfolded until the film was over and the credits finished rolling. When the cassette clicked the end of its tape, the VCR would automatically rewind back to the beginning, instantly replaying the film, starting the whole process over again. And so I sat for at least six hours, perhaps longer. I watched the film, click, rewind, play and watched again. I didn’t have to do anything but sit there – the VCR did the rest. Five years after Orson’s death, at six years of age, in an apartment belonging to a person I had never seen before, I fell hopelessly in love with the medium he helped pioneer. That film was Predator.

It would be a ridiculously stupid mistake comparing the two men, John Mctiernan and Orson Welles, considering Mctiernan’s recent prison entanglements and Orson’s unquestionable genius. There’s no comparison, and I don’t want to give the impression that this was my intention. But screw it, let’s do it anyway.

It is interesting to note the contrary arc of each director’s career. Aside from being assigned writer Shane Black as a chaperon, Mctiernan was given absolute confidence of the Hollywood machine. Welles was countlessly written-off by it. Mctiernan was essentially enabled by his producers while Welles was continuously stifled by them. Mctiernan’s career came to a crashing halt while Orson’s accelerated into the annals of filmmaking legend forever. Both men were essentially directors who ended up specializing in hammed up B-pictures. Both Citizen Kane and Predator were equally hated by critics upon release, only to earn more respect over time.

I think both men would agree that the success or failure of a film isn’t entirely a credit to its direction. You must have the right producer, for the right actors, for the right author, for the right script, for the right production crew – the stars have to align just right and, with a little bit of luck, you may end up with something special. It’s a collaboration which partly has to do with the director, but primarily has to do with the whole, unless, as Welles liked to put it, there were those rare occasions when an exceptional director came along – one who was comfortable handling everything. For Citizen Kane, Orson had Greg Toland and his Mercury troop; Mcteirnan had Donald McAlpine and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Even still, at the onset of Predator’s production, I can just as easily imagine a younger Mctiernien burning in the same need for validation in which Welles burned when he decided to forego stage acting, and conquer Hollywood. In fact, I don’t really have to imagine it – it’s in plain sight, immortalized forever in B-movie one-liners, hyper-masculine machismo, brutal death-scenes and spectacular firefights. I don’t believe Mcteirnan had any delusions about what kind of picture he was expected to make when he was handed the unfinished script, but I believe he wanted to make it special. If it was going to be a B-horror/creature-feature, he was determined to make it the best B-horror/creature-feature ever made. What the actors, writers, and producers pulled off was nothing short of a masterpiece, considering the source material. A flawed masterpiece, perhaps, but a masterpiece nonetheless.

Again, there’s no comparing Mctiernan and Welles. Hell, there isn’t even a justifiable comparison between the films. It would be pointless to even begin to try. That’s not really what this is about. Since I wanted to talk about masterpieces of film, I couldn’t get away with not mentioning the greatest masterpiece of all. Predator was a great film, maybe even the greatest, but what made Citizen Kane and Predator great movies are completely different circumstances: Citizen Kane was great because Orson Welles was great. Predator was great because it corresponded to the most appropriate moment in time.

Orson liked the occasional B-picture – he wrote many, directed few – and I’d like to believe that he would have enjoyed this one. The biggest trick Predator pulled off was masking its very deep philosophical questions with an actionfest exterior. The way things are in Hollywood, I gather that artists can’t get away with affecting us on an emotional level anymore without violently snatching our attention. The money wouldn’t be there otherwise. Art typically sells a couple hundred grand at the box office, maybe a few million if it’s lucky. Unfortunately, the mass market doesn’t go to the movies to see art. We go to be dazzled. We pay billions to have our belief suspended, to see unbelievable and impossible things. That’s another lesson from Citizen Kane. Sure, you could go out and make the greatest film in history, but you will never pull as much revenue as spectacle. The trick is, if you’re an artist with something to say, to get the financial backing you need in order to have a voice, you have to convince people that you’re planning to give them all spectacle, while sneaking the rest through the back door – Orson knew this, and actually resorted to lying about making Treasure Island at one point so that he could get the money to make Macbeth.

The goal for the artist is to sell the spectacle, so that you can then make the art. Predator is like that. From the opening shot of the alien aircraft descending into the dark jungle, to the closing shot of the human aircraft rising out of it, the structure of Predator is a closed loop, shedding more light on the brutal nature of survival than any other film.

The idea for Predator was initially meant as a joke: someone remarked after the release of Rocky IV that the only people left for Rocky to beat up were aliens. Screenwriters Jim and John Thomas heard the idea, and immediately began brainstorming different ways to tell such a story. It’s very similar to a short story called The Most Dangerous Game, in which a man is hunted on an island by a wealthy big-game enthusiast, only Jim and John tell it from a perspective of a man being hunted in a jungle by an extraterrestrial intelligence.

The movie opens with a group of commandos being choppered into a jungle that looks very similar to Vietnam or Southeast Asia. Out steps the cadre of badasses, ready to help dish out your typical AHnold fanfare. The chopper’s landing-zone is mired with humanity – Iron I-beam tetrahedrons spreading across the beach, soldiers bedecked in contrast military regalia everywhere accompanied by stark military vehicles whipping along the jungle’s border. The rainforest looms overhead like a dark cloud of uncertainty, stretching off into the inky blackness therein.

Schwarzenegger’s character Dutch is immediately isolated as the lead – the biggest, most quintessential schematic of masculinity in the entire film. He’s briefed by an old war buddy turned CIA liaison named Dillon, played by Carl Weathers. He explains to Dutch that a group of South American cabinet ministers have crash landed somewhere in the jungles of Guatemala. Their mission is to go in, find ‘em, and get ‘em out safely. There are obviously plot twists, but they’re merely a call-to-action, a way to get the story into the deep dark jungle where all the fun can happen.

This brief exchange at the beginning is relevant, however, and segues nicely into my first point: In those first few minutes, we’re shown that one, Dutch is a passionately loyal leader. Two, he has a very strong code of ethics (his unit is solely an operational rescue detachment, not a strike force). Three, that he is driven, competitive (arm-wrestling match with Dillon), shrewd, intelligent and rational (he’s skeptical about the cabinet minister story, and as soon as Dillon informs Dutch that he’ll be tagging along, friendship-mode is immediately deactivated). Four, he’s a perfect image of the human male – the perfect balance of intelligence, honor and strength.

What Predator did that no other film accomplished before it, was implement the literary concept of “tagging” to such success that it would serve as an example for how it was supposed to be done from then on. Every character in the film was relevant, memorable, and distinguishable from each other. They weren’t contrived. They weren’t corny. They were detailed in such a way that utilized the least amount of exposition and narrative as possible – which left more room for spectacle. Predator pulled this off perfectly.

We saw that each character was given a defining moment through some dialog, and also a physical tether that not only attached them to the story, but differentiated them from every other character. It was seamless, clever, and perfect. This method of characterization wasn’t anything new – movies and television serials have been doing it for… well, since Orson’s day – but none before Predator had anyone pulled off that kind of characterization with as much economy. Jesse Ventura had maybe six lines of dialog, yet we knew and could identify with his character Blain, and thus care when he was taken out of the picture. Everything about Blain told a backstory – the tobacco he was chewing, the resentment he had for Dillon, his snakeskin boots, his safari hat, his MTV t-shirt, his close friendship with Mac, even his dialog –  which still consists of one of the most famous lines in modern cinema,

“I ain’t got time to bleed…”

It’s sheer badassery – he’s somebody we can look up to, somebody we could definitely turn to if shit hits the fan. But it doesn’t stop with Blain. You have Sonny Landham’s character, Billy – expert tracker, realist, brave and fatalistic. Interesting sidenote: when Billy was having his Sergeant Rock moments, peering into the trees as if he had some sort of psychic perception – there wasn’t anything supernatural about how he was sensing the predator. He was such an extremely effective tracker that he saw the Predator while it was cloaked, and unconsciously recognized that something was wrong with the landscape – something that he couldn’t articulate in any meaningful way, simply because he had never seen anything like it before.

You had Blain’s friend, Sergeant Mac – played by Bill Duke – who was tagged in one of the film’s more memorable moments, when the razor broke on his cheek, drawing blood. Then there was Hawkins, played by Shane Black, who had the giant glasses and comic books. Poncho, who had the tiger-stripe facepaint and grenade launcher.

Not only were each of the actors brilliantly tagged with things we could recognize them by, they each had excellent, character defining lines, and character defining moments – Blain’s chaw spit and minigun; Aside from the razor, Mac killing the scorpion on Dillon’s shoulder, and his impassioned oath to the moon; Dillon’s redemption; Hawkins’ glasses and his jokes; Billy drinking from the severed vine, and later drawing his own blood in preparation for battle with the Predator. Anna telling the story about El cazador trofeo de los hombres, the Demon Who Makes Trophies of Men.

It was as if each actor were written as the same character, just expressed at different volumes, entirely capable of carrying the plot of their own film. This was probably an accident, mind you – the script was originally written with Schwarzenegger running around the jungle alone – he didn’t like that idea, and asked before committing to the project that it be rewritten to have a squad of commandos, instead of just one guy. In either case, it worked out splendidly, but here’s where it really gets fun.

As the men move deeper into the jungle, you begin to notice that there is more and more flora between the camera and the actors. It’s subtle, but look closely. It’s rare that you don’t see a shot in the film in which there isn’t some jungle obstructing at least a part of the actors from view. It gets more noticeable as the film progresses. The jungle slowly takes over each frame, becoming more flora and less actor, until finally Arnold sheds his clothing, covers himself head to toe with leaves and mud, and completely separates any boundary between he and the jungle. The thing is, as the soldiers get farther away from civilization, they gradually melt into their environment, essentially becoming a part of it.

You see, one of the recurring themes in the film is this notion that the jungle makes animals of us all. The bravado, all of the badass testosterone and machismo mean nothing in that dark milieu of teeth, where everything – from the largest animal to the smallest blade of grass – has been selected by millions of years of evolution to eat you, suck the nutrients out of your corpse, and decompose your empty husk back into the closed system of life. All of our psychological constructs – chivalry, honor, decency, face, justice, duty, friendship, pity, guilt and humor – mean nothing to the jungle. These concepts are luxuries of a big protein-dependent brain, which has over the course of its existence thought its way out of the darkness and into civilization.

You take a modern man and put him in the jungle on his own for an extended period of time, that man will not survive unless he knows how to strip himself of his ideals. He cannot expect to live unless he remembers what it’s like to be an animal again.  As the film progresses, the commandos are systematically stripped of concepts such as macho and badass, and slowly succumb to the terror by which our ancestors have survived. Their pithy, wise-ass one liners completely disappear near the end of the film, giving way to cries of terror and exigency. Those who resist this transition die.

Billy can’t let go of his sense of honor, and dies. Mac can’t let go of his sense of revenge, and dies. Hawkins can’t let go of his sense of chivalry, and dies. Dillon can’t let go of his need for redemption, and dies. Blain can’t let go of his arrogance, and dies (remember, a complacent Blain snickers at the porcupine just before lowering his guard). The reason Arnold survives is because he’s the exception, not the rule. He’s the ideal human, not the mean. He simultaneously deconstructs himself while holding onto the deadly strategic presence of thought that makes humanity in fact the most dangerous game in the universe. The reason our species has survived the brutal process of natural selection is not because we have the biggest muscles – it’s because we have the biggest brain. Instead of adapting our bodies to nature, we have figured out ways to adapt nature to us.

The Predator in this film represents the jungle, which is really quite alien when you think about it. It’s a place where strange, chitinous, crawly things with pincers, antennas, bristling arachnid appendages, and hollow venom-filled teeth can be found literally everywhere. Under every stone, inside every tree, and floating in every source of water are parasitic rubbery things capable of burrowing into your flesh. Viruses. Flesh eating bacteria. Neurotoxic plants.  Venomous spiders as big as your face. The jungle is a closed recycling bin of caloric energy, and you’re simply a meal. Part of what the Predator represents in this film is nature in its rawest, most prehistoric form.  Part of what Dutch represents is humanity’s endless war with nature. You have to understand that what makes us human is our ability to bend nature to our will – to understand how it works so that we can defy it, and thus create the meaning of our own existence. That’s Dutch: the ideal human who remembers what it’s like to be an animal, but doesn’t forget what brought us out of the jungle in the first place.

The Predator is also a dichotomy of two concepts. Part of what the alien represents is nature, and the other part is us. You have to also realize the most arresting, mind-melting part of the film is the complete annihilation of conventional action fare. Imagine for a moment if Arnold and the Predator reversed roles, and the Predator was a human on a foreign planet, taking out an army of alien combatants. There is one movie that describes this situation perfectly: In First Blood Part II, Sylvester Stallone’s character Rambo escapes a POW camp and, after burying his beautiful, in-country attaché under a cairn of stones, he conducts almost a ritual of tying a strip of her red dress around his head like bandanna, and then goes on a murderous rampage, picking off Russians and Vietnamese one at a time with his bow and combat knife. At one point, Rambo is like an invisible wraith of the jungle – a Predator, even – bursting out of the landscape to bury his blade into the throat of an unsuspecting soldier, or snap another soldier’s neck.

What Mctiernan and company accomplished made every action flick that followed almost a parody of itself. In Predator, the humans play roles typical of what most villains are assigned in other action flicks. The Predator plays the role of your typical action-hero – an unstoppable force of violence, an army-of-one with his own unique code of honor, cleverly dispatching the enemy one at time through various methods. He even chooses to have a man-to-man battle of honor with Dutch at the end, dropping all of his weapons (he could have easily blasted Dutch’s face off, or chopped him in half with his wrist-blade, or snapped his neck against the tree whilst holding him a foot off the ground). The Predator, we realize, exhibits a courtesy not even the most heroic of our action heroes would give, thus single-handedly ending a genre – with very few exceptions (Aliens being one of them). Predator is a masterful destruction of the eighties action film.

I forgot this was god forsaken blog-post, not a thesis paper – I was planning to get into more detail. Look, there’s nothing special about Mctiernan. What’s special about Predator is how everything sort of accidentally fell together in a hodgepodge mess of perfection. Orson made the greatest motion picture in history because he’s a genius. Quentin Tarantino made one of the greatest motion pictures in history because he’s a flippin’ genius. Mctiernan made one of the greatest motion pictures in history because he was lucky as hell. He would later go on to ultimately seal the action-genre’s fate with Die Hard a few years later, but that’s another story.

How Predator turned out to be such a psyche job is nothing short of a movie miracle, which ended up inspiring a whole generation of filmmakers.  Keep in mind that if Predator hadn’t happened, James Cameron wouldn’t have thought to make Aliens the way he did – which ended up being a far crisper, more exciting film simply because it expanded on the style of characterization, relentless storytelling and themes in Predator. The method of characterization combined with the phenomenal cinematography used to tell an action/slasher story was something nobody saw coming, not even the producers. Not only was the story gripping – something happened on every single page of that manuscript, which moved the plot in a way that was fluid and organic – there was nothing forced about it.

Maybe I’m biased. I mean, there’s no question I’m biased. Predator is my Rosebud, so I’m obviously going to try and champion it. But I truly believe that great films are rare, perhaps even unnoticeable at first. Similar to what happened with Citizen Kane, what’s great will ultimately be determined by the passage of time. Looking back from where I am now, there’s no denying that Predator was a great film. In my heart it’s the greatest.

If you like what you see, please head over to my blog and subscribe to my RSS feed up and to  the right – also head over to my facebook page (www.facebook.com/shanelindem) and hit the LIKE button. Thanks for reading!

-Shane

Shane Lindemoen is an American author, journalist, and an occasional literary critic; he is also the National Affairs Editor of Secret Laboratory. Shane is a self-described, “poor white boy from the east side who happens to read about politics and stuff.” He has a science-fiction novel set for an August 13 release called Artifact – published by Boxfire Press. You can learn more about Shane’s upcoming novel at www.boxfirepress.com. Also, check out Shane’s blog: www.shanelindemoen.org

For those of you who regularly read my articles, you know that I generally write silly, funny things and tend to stay away from political issues, especially ones where I take direct quotes from newspapers, as I will in this article. But an article I read yesterday in the Sunday Edition Star Tribune got my nipple hair into such a twist that I couldn’t resist chiming in with my two cents, whether anyone else wants to hear it or not. For those who missed it, there is an article about gay marriage front page center. While the Star Trib did a decent job of staying impartial on the issue and reporting the facts, some of the quotes they pulled are completely ridiculous. Where did they find these people?

I am all about equality. Even before I actually knew any gay people, I always maintained that you love who you love and that everyone should have the right to be together. And I accept the fact that there are others out there who don’t share my point of view. Which is fine, until you confuse the issue and try to turn it into something it is not. Which is why this specific article annoys me so much. The people who are against gay marriage seem to have no arguments other than religion and personal biases. One woman says “If they want to have a committed relationship, that’s fine. But it’s not a marriage.” And why the hell not? Because people like you won’t let it become one! Just because two people who are in love happen to have matching genitals does not make their feelings any less powerful, nor is their relationship any less committed. There are heterosexual couples out there whom are married and divorced within a year… is their relationship considered “real” because it happens to be conventional? Oddly enough, the woman who made this statement looks like she used to play for the WNBA, if you catch my drift.

One deeply disturbed man makes the dubious claim, “Marriage is not so you can love the person you love. Marriage is for the children, it’s an institution about strengthening families.” By that logic, childless couples should not be allowed to marry either. What about people who want kids but can’t conceive? Would they be allowed to get hitched based on their good intentions? If we are going to exclude people, let’s exclude people across the board instead of one specific group. Let’s turn this theory on it’s ear… let’s say straight marriage was to become banned. Let’s say us hetero people got just too damn good at crapping out babies and we had a serious overpopulation problem. In this scenario, the government decides to ban hetero marriage in an effort to decrease the amount of children being born, and deeply discourages hetero relationships of any kind. How many people would shout about their rights being trampled on? How many would resent being forced to be someone they are not? Welcome to the world gay people live in every day.

And of course, there is the earnest huffing and puffing of the God-and-Jesus fellows that take their own beliefs and try to make the world run by them. Is there anything wrong with having religious convictions? Of course not. But this is supposed to be a country divided by church and state. If marriage was a solely religious act, it should take place only in a church, or in a ceremony performed by a preacher, not a simple document signed by your local justice of peace, or a drunken accident that happened on your trip to Las Vegas. One of the newspaper quotes says, “We have our laws, but God’s laws overrule all…” In your world, that holds true. But what about God’s law on such issues as slavery (Deuteronomy 15:12–15), incest (Genesis 19:31-36), and divorce (Matthew 5:32)? Those issues are pretty lax, but once men start to kiss, you break out your Bible and declare it an act against God. Another woman offers this gem; “It’s not right. It doesn’t say in the Bible that same sex people can marry. That’s all there is to it.” Fair enough. But you know what the Bible IS clear on? That eating certain foods are a sin (leviticus 11:7-87). As is cutting your hair (1 Corinthians 11:6) and getting a tattoo (Leviticus 19:28). These were edicts spoken straight from the Lord. Why do ones like these get ignored? Why is there no call to arms when these crusaders of right come across the bacon aisle at the supermarket?

The one quote I can almost respect comes from a 69-year-old man who simply states “They shouldn’t try to push it in my face. No one can force us to accept their way of life.” Despite the obvious hypocrisy of this statement, at least he doesn’t try to hide behind religion or faulty logic. This guy is straight up admitting that gayness makes him uncomfortable. At least he can cop to his feelings. But how come straight people are factoring only their own discomfort into the equation? How do you think gays feel who have had to hide their personalities their whole lives? Or people who are trying to live their lives open and free, only to be gay bashed or brow beaten by religious zealots? How come their feelings are brushed aside? How come it is socially acceptable to have a straight lifestyle “pushed in their faces”? If people like that can’t handle having to witness a gay relationship, and consider being tolerant the same as being “forced to accept their way of life”, how do gay people feel every day? Giving people equal rights to marry the person they love is not being “forced” into anything. Unless you are being gang raped by a group of immaculately dressed men with good personal hygiene, you are not being “forced” into anything.

What this really boils down to is personal feelings. If you feel that gay rights is not for you, then fine. Don’t support it or be a part of it. But to actively try to sabotage a way of life for people who have worked this hard just to gain acceptance and equality is despicable. No one is trying to hurt YOU personally by being with the person they love. No one is trying to devalue your marriage and lifestyle just because two persons of the same gender want to be recognized and acknowledged as having a legal relationship. If you honestly think that’s what this is all about, perhaps you need to step back and re-evaluate your own life.

Liliana Grace

Liliana Grace is Secret Laboratory‘s Women’s Affairs editor; her dream job would be sitting on her patio all day, drinking margaritas and alternating between reading and writing–and once she was sufficiently drunk, getting a massage from one of her several hot man servants. Visit Ms. Grace at http://ouischbabe7.blogspot.com/

Email Ms. Grace at lilianagrace@secretlaboratory.org.

(Despite my better judgment I felt the need to pull a comment from a recent email I received, which addressed my common use of the word determinism)
Cite the exclamation, to whom I felt compelled to respond.

“Time is movement. Nature doesn’t determine it. The only thing up for debate is the decision to act one way or the other.” 

You may be asking yourself what the heck this means, so I’ll try to break it down for you: this person says that time is the same thing as movement through space, that nature doesn’t determine this process, and the only thing that can determine it is how we each decide to live our lives. Hmmk…  that’s very poetic, but what?

Now, I pulled this out of context and I’ll not share the entire email (out of respect for those reading along and because most of it has to do with tangential things like faith and the will of God) but right off the bat you can see that this is a statement of ideology, not fact.

For much of the known history of the known universe, the concept of choice hasn’t been a prevailing force in nature. In fact, it’s only since roughly 1000 BC (I’m thinking I Ching and the emergence of philosophical Taoism) that you couldn’t imagine your life without being dictated by the will and whim of one anthropomorphized god or another.  And then there was Zhouyi and the Classic of Changes, followed by the Indian concepts of Karma and the cycle of Samsara (the cycle of cause and effect) and then Western ideas of Stoicism, and then Aristotle and his paradox of free-will. My point is that there’s a long documented history of discourse between determinism and free-will, but that’s not all.

I’m not entirely sure how or when (I can’t find much on the interwebs – and I spent some time last night flipping through my Bibles and Quran looking for some reference to predestination, finding only examples of people being described as having the ability to make decisions {Deut 30:11-19, Gen 1:26-27, Luke 6:43-44, Luke 6:45, Kings 11:6-9} but also UNQUANTIFIABLE declarations that less happens without God’s intention, which sort of cancels out the idea that we can even make any sort of decision at all) but somewhere along the line it was decided that suddenly God would give his people free-will. I’m sure it had a lot do with the idea that if everything that happens in life is determined or written by God, and if literally nothing occurs outside the purview of his will or intention, then that would mean he creates certain people just to send them to hell to be tortured for eternity. You begin to see how Free-Will suddenly becomes necessary – the concept of a loving God that would create such a mechanism doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and that’s understandable. If he is omnipotent and omniscient, then his non-interventionist stance on human suffering doesn’t make sense unless you give humanity free-will – by giving us free-will, it shifts the responsibility of suffering away from God onto us – the existence of suffering in this case being a lesson that God has undertaken to teach us about how it is within our control to prevent. God’s wise again – not some psychotic cosmic alien that either doesn’t care about us or likes watching us suffer.

For those of us that have yet to experience it, we are undeniably reliant on the affirmation of others as to the will of God (or gods, or whatever your belief is). So the only thing we can do is either take what we’re told at face value or measure those testimonies against what we as a species have learned about nature. And what we know about nature – chaos theory and reductionism, natural selection and evolution, game-theory, astronomy, cosmology, spectroscopy, chemistry, neurobiology, biology, geology, thermodynamics, molecular genetics, physics, mathematics, quantum mechanics, endocrinology, psychology and sociology – Nature (and/or God) doesn’t seem to give two shits about the human concepts of choice and free-will.

To assume that what decisions you make in your daily life is somehow isolated from the domino effect of lighter elements cooking into heavier ones, extending all the way back through fractals of cause and effect to that first (or most recent) singularity fourteen billion years ago, is egocentric and wishful thinking. I know this is hard to think about – take punitive law, for example: how can we hold people responsible for acting on variables that stretch back before this planet even existed (don’t go having an existential schism now – that murderer may very well be a margin variable of astronomical cause and effect, but we still hold him accountable to how we’ve defined our morality and ethical standards – which are themselves deterministic limitations that affect others, deterring similar expressions, potentially saving lives, threatening others, maintaining social order, inciting disobedience in some cases, restoring civil balance in others, etcetera).

The email said that time is movement (I’m with her so far), that time is not determined by nature (which makes no sense) and that the direction of our future is decided by US (which I agree with partially, to the extent that we control our destiny insofar reality and nature allows us to).

An interesting point is that this ideology fits very well as a match for the political ideology of the anti gay-marriage movement.  The idea this person was trying to convince me of was that homosexuals decide to be homosexual, and can just as easily decide not to be – never mind the social and psychological pathology that comes with that decision. This is because I made a single comment a few posts back in support of gay marriage.  I’ll say the same thing here that I said to her – it makes no difference to me whether or not it’s a conscious decision or written in the stars. The fact is that there are free-thinking, consensual human beings demanding fair and equal treatment in the eyes of the law – whether they decide to be who they are or not doesn’t even factor into the reason I support their cause.  The fact is that some people are born with a genetic predisposition for homosexuality, and some end up developing associations between their sexuality and the same gender through life experience – my point is, the why has nothing to do with it, unless you happen to believe that God allows people who disobey him to be tortured for eternity. And I’m sorry, the fact that you think it’s icky isn’t a good enough reason to deny a whole demographic of your fellow human beings the right to live the lives they want. I was countered with the standard pedophilia, bestiality nonsense – no, allowing pedophiles and animal rapists to marry children and animals  is not the same thing: a seven year old doesn’t have the maturity to understand what consent is, and a dog is incapable of giving consent – not to mention the fact that the dog depends on its master for food, shelter and overall survival, so we have to contend with positions of authority, manipulation, control and dominance…

I guess what I’m trying to say is that you should stop trying to use God to discriminate against people. It didn’t work for ethnicity, and it’s not going to work for sexual orientation.  If there is some sort of God out there that created all of this – all of this complexity and every particulate therein – it doesn’t make sense if it isn’t MORE than who WE hate or don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense if God cares about who we sleep with and how, and in which direction our bed faces, and whether we’re allowed to eat frog legs or not. It’s downright silly. It doesn’t make sense if the engineer of every natural process is as petty and hateful as everyone makes him out to be – who conveniently has the same opinions about certain things as you do. Remember this the next time you want to use the idea of god to deny the rights of others.

The doctrine of disobeying God through choice is not functionally coherent; it runs into the recurring truth that everything that happens only happens because of what precedes it, and so on. It is in principal possible to make a choice; the problem is that, in this polycentric chain of events, it isn’t free-will if we’re choosing from a very limited list of options. When whatever pushed the on-button of reality all those eons ago, stasis was made impossible. Reality is the process of change. This idea of change accelerates the culmination of every possible preceding moment and so on until… whenever – this is how it’s conceivably possible that a butterfly flapping its wings in Peking can alter the tiniest variables all the way up the chain until you eventually have a nor’easter colliding into the Atlantic seaboard.

My use of the word determinism happens as frequently as it does because I’m a hard determinist. There, I said it. You wouldn’t be who you are if that particular mammal hadn’t eaten that particular insect seven hundred thousand years ago. Sorry to say. An inscription that sums up my position rather clearly:

“But we have soothed ourselves into imagining a sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, irrational change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is. And chaos theory teaches us… that straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist…

Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in wholly unpredictable, even devastating ways… 

That’s the deep truth about the structure of our universe. But, for some reason, we insist on behaving as if it were not true.”  – “Ian Malcolm,” Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park.

Time may very well be movement, but it is defined by nature, of which we are, as far as we know, its best attempt at becoming self-aware. Free-will is an illusion and completely irrelevant as an argument against any sort of civil-rights movement. Because whether homosexuality is the result of either cosmological or biological determinism, written into the fabric of reality by God, or an association selected by the environment, those who are pro equality are always going to be on the right side of history.

-Shane

Shane Lindemoen is an American author, journalist, and an occasional literary critic; he is also the National Affairs Editor of Secret Laboratory. Shane is a self-described, “poor white boy from the east side who happens to read about politics and stuff.” He has a science-fiction novel set for an August 13 release called Artifact – published by Boxfire Press. You can learn more about Shane’s upcoming novel at www.boxfirepress.com. Also, check out Shane’s blog: www.shanelindemoen.org