Well artificial intelligence is really something, I just kinda really recently figured out I'm a white Sox fan, I really didn't know! But now that I'm out of the closet with that, google artificial intelligence is hot on my heels and totally giving me updates. Same time google and Facebook don't think I'm a Texans football fan, and actually I'm not convinced about them. Amazing.
So talking about Robert Rodriguez's Alita. We covered this when it was out at the cinema on this blog. In those days google would let me upload little one minute videos directly from my phone. Not anymore, and there was no virus either.
Look I'll tell you a secret. Not Corey Haim's secret about Charlie Sheen. My secret. My whole life is obviously pretty dark, there have been suicides everywhere. I'll tell you about my cousin Marcos, he also suicided. I mean it's ridiculous, that's not the secret I wanted to mention, but a scary dream I had. Although my intention in general, reviewing Alita, since I've already reviewed it, I'm just going to tell about my cousin Marcos. But since I mentioned one nightmare from 2017, and all the suicides everywhere. I mean my son even made friends with a kid at his school and that kid, with two siblings, his dad just up and suicided also, like in 2019. What a nightmare. His wife is cousins with a girl in my elementary school classes. But not by blood but by marriage, like my classmates stepfather was this lady's mom's brother or something. Anyway this lady, my son's buddy's mom ended up a widow coz her husband wasn't healing well from a motorcycle accident and fell into a depression. I couldn't even tell, when I met him he seemed fine physically and even friendly to me. Walking through such dark clouds myself, I didn't pick up well on becoming buddies with him. Generally I'd say I'm damaged goods.
Anyway it was shocking to learn that guy had suicided and I tried to be a good friend to his widower and she's a strong woman, she ended up falling into a relationship fairly quickly. I understand how it feels to lose close people to suicide which is why I befriended her and even was happy for her to quickly start dating again with her new boyfriend Mitch. Even though I barely knew her!
Anyway that nightmare was like something from an Alita movie. There was a character like Nova but it wasn't like dopey Ed Norton it was like God. But even though it was God, everyone was like a robot. I mean everyone is in a master slave relationship to God, ultimately. It's very one sided. I never made the association until now that God, in this nightmare from 2017 was kind of like Freezer from Dragon Ball Z. I mean I'm just realising that now. But it was really terrifying because in the nightmare God was all like: 'disintegrate' and kind of impelled it like a command and I was absolutely terrified and my heart was really in my mouth so to speak. It was one of those nightmares that wakes you up immediately and you feel terrified. Also in those days my mom and I had the illegal alien guy staying with us. The guy from Quetta in Pakistan. He suicided shortly after that and it's like you don't see that stuff coming you're just acting out your life in the moment. Total nightmare I can tell you.
Anyway on to Marcos. Marcos is the only guy on my mom's side of the family to suicide. My sister Trish is tight with his father. His mother was my mom's sister. She's still alive but my mom had passed on just over a year ago. As I mentioned, there were no suicides on my mom's side of the family until Marcos, that we know of. We normally attribute suicides in my direct family to my father's side of the family where it may be genetic. Also the hardcore Jesuit education my father and his brothers received probably didn't help.
Anyway when I spent five months in Spain in 1992 when I was 16, this is when I learned Spanish (which was a good thing). I was suffering a fair amount of depression and anxiety and just trying to make the best of things. I also realised that challenging myself mentally to learn a new language was a fantastic antidote to morbid and idiotic thinking (such as self pity and dumb English redneck psychology). Anyway there's plenty of nasty psychology to go round in Spain without the English there as so many people are reactionary to the Catholic church they're always blaspheming nasty things about God and Mary. Strange to say people only mention Jesus when you sneeze, by saying Jesus (bless you/gezuntheit). The Catholics being the way they are, even when not actually blaspheming, tend to profane holy things like the holy spirit by making them mundane everyday things. It's really the Catholic way and maybe the Latin way to philosophise in this way (Nietzsche never liked it), I'm still reserving judgement. Definitely too much institutionalization of the church can take away from Jesus's actual practical philosophy such as serving others even by washing their feet, something even Mary Magdalene did for Jesus. Anyway I never saw the Catholic church much interested in her and overly interested in Mary (as a Virgin, despite she married and carried many children with Joseph, quite a number - a gospel fact that doesn't fit into the black magic church of the Catholics). But it's not something I think about at all much anymore these days, as I don't live in a Catholic country or associate with Catholics much, in the most part.
However, as I'm trying to discuss Marcos, I mention these things as I only knew him in Spain and it's an extremely Catholic country so everywhere you go there's some kind of allusion to the holy and divine and sacred things that should not be profaned the way the Catholics do, turning them into street names and associating them with worldly things too much. Certainly northern Europeans consider this madness. Anyway as mentioned I was educated with English rednecks in western Sydney (and I was very fond of my student body, as a whole) like aforementioned lady's cousin as my classmate, not Catholics.
So anyway Marcos was two years younger than me. When I was 16 he was 14. He and I were fast friends however his father was unable to discipline him in a way that would make him respectful to his mother. Many times he'd lock himself in his room and his mother would be knocking on the door. He absolutely didn't care that he was upsetting her and often seemed to upset his sister, who was slightly older than me and also living with us. I never tried to encourage Marcos' insolence to his mother and showed her utmost respect that I was capable of, as a teenager. Marcos grew older and went on to use drugs like LSD that I never wanted to use. Drugs that seem to have a tendency to destroy people's actual ability for compassion and make people selfish, in my opinion. Anyway Marcos was definitely selfish and never seemed right in the head. But I was so stuck in my own neurosis and mindf*ck I never used to judge anyone much in those days or assign blame to anyone much, definitely a lot of that was due to oppression. Marcos was very passionate about Manga and insisted I watch dragon ball z with him. He was so serious about it that I ended up learning so much Spanish in the space of five months like this, I became proficient and had built a bedrock foundation in the language in that way.
Marcos was definitely a good teacher. We caught up again later in 1996/97 during my year in Madrid in those days and I might add to that here later....
Dragon Ball Z, Freezer... Always more enjoyable in Spanish over English....
https://youtu.be/rIS338raSkM
BTW, Google has provided a pretty good widget option: it shows the updated score for White Sox games in real time. Now there's a widget on my screen that says bottom of the 6th and the Sox just scored the games first point. So it's like you don't even need to watch the game at all...
Actually I'll skip the 1997 period when Marcos and I were 18 & 20 respectively and fast forward to the last time I remembered him. It was 2001 and we were around age 24 & 22. This Rodriguez had just brought out his piece de resistance Dusk til Dawn the hangman's daughter. Marcos and I still shared our beloved abuela in common. How she would pine for the orderly, autocratic facist days of the Franco dictatorship when the youth weren't on drugs and didn't wear scary boots and act disrespectful. Noone could protest march without expecting a police smackdown such as is common in Russia today. Drug addicts were almost unknown. She would pass away in late 2002, the next year. But that event seemed galaxies away to me as I would yet discover America, Virginia, for three months then Paris for half a year. New discoveries. Just like the Voyager probe from NASA or something. Marcos had become a real estate agent but wasn't making much money and had shacked up with an English muchacha from England proper. They were a match and it was something else seeing Marcos in a relationship. To be honest I think they were both doing drugs together like acid and ecstasy. I believe Marcos' mom was happy about them finding each other and having each other but was naive and ignorant about democratic freedom and drugs. And also our beloved abuela, again clueless. There's always going to be an element of feeling guilty when a loved family member suicides. Mostly Marcos' mother tried to keep it secret, even to this day. That was wise. It's best to avoid talking about suicide where possible in many events. If you can call it a motorcycle crash or whatever, so much easier to explain the awkward reality. By the time he passed away I was long gone. But he was a nice guy to me. I think he was selfish and on his drugs. I don't know what happened to his English girlfriend. Maybe I can ask his mom. She never sounds happy to talk to me and it won't be pleasant for her, burying her own child. I just don't think her generation in Spain have a clue about the younger generation and their drugs. At least the dopey hippie druggies in America from the 60s, or in Australia, will understand democracy and drugs first hand from their own youths.
ok moments later, just watched a lot of Alita again, this time with the mrs, sunday night was with Scarlet mostly as the other two kids left. Probably helped her with her psychology, poor thing, strange to say.
Ok look, i mentioned in my review months and months ago about Ed Norton and Norton street Leichhardt (pronounced 'like art') here in Sydney. I have a cluster of memories visiting my sister in the neighborhood there like after i graduated high school or before that whatever. Nowadays she lives in Madrid and keeps in touch with Marcos' father, as i mentioned. for a while she was living in holland like in contact with the sister of her friend in Leichhardt. She even speaks dutch fluently and spent like five years there.
Anyway, I also drove a bus through Norton street a helluva lot, apart from just catching it as a passenger when i was younger. And i'm telling you all this shit as i don't know if there'll be an Alita 2, if there will be, it might be interesting to see what Norton gets up to. Failing that i can only go with my own Norton street memories. The one that is of interest is not the aforementioned memory clusters. But about eight years ago or nine maybe, i was driving taxi through Norton street. The cops were out in huge numbers as there had been a major brawl at one of the nightclubs on Norton. I probably made a mistake, not pulling my taxi up next to the cops and telling them to check out my passenger coz he was one of the guys they were looking for involved in the big brawl. That was probably the best thing i could have done in that situation. The drawback would have been probably having to quit my taxi base and also worrying about the crazy lebanese criminal guy in my taxi tracking me down some other way. Even though he was trouble, i guaged he wasn't involved in anything more serious than a crazy pub brawl and if it was something worse i'd probably hear about it in the news and talk to cops about it later. I was just going to bring him right under the cops' noses without them even finding out about him. It was a judgement call, possibly the wrong one. I learned all the facts from him as he was in an excited state after some kind of troublemaking cowardly brawl his posse had started (probably all crazy lebanese ppl). He was trying to get his girlfriend to get dropped off on Norton street so we could scoop her up in the taxi and head to his crib around Yagoona way (where that guy in the kneed police video i just posted lives/got arrested) - a lot of crazy lebbos out that way. Anyway this guy gave me two fifty dollar notes after we stopped on the way at a service station. We proceeded to the final destination with his dopey girlfriend, a fool for being with a psycho like him i guess. I asked him: how much change do you want? Typical lebbo berserker, he is about to go ballistic and totally lose it. I am ready to fight him however i'd need my car so i'd be doing donuts with my right hand on the steering wheel while defending and punching with the left hand. It was no joke. The guy was really starting to lose it and i totally wasn't afraid. 'how much money did i give you?' he says. I mean i'm not going to say $100 because i have the thief's code of honor as a taxi driver. 'how much change do you want bro?' i mean we had like $55 on the meter and he could have just said give me a $20 note or keep the change. what a jerk.
in the end he left. but if he had started some jazz, there's a good chance his girlfriend could have been injured falling out of the car as it was about to start doing donuts to knock him off balance and i was going to hit him for sure.
also, with regard to tarantino's death proof car, i have only seen the scene where the girls start attacking the driver with poles. just not that interested bro. God speed.
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