Mysterious Skin

I saw Mysterious Skin Saturday at the Seattle International Film Festival.  If you haven't heard about this film yet, you will.  It is the most emotionally true films about childhood sexual abuse that I have ever seen.  It blows Happiness out of the water (though that was told more from the abuser's point of view, rather than the victim's).  The film follows the lives of two boys, Neil and Brian, who are abused by the same man at the same time (their little league coach).  They share essentially the same experience but as they mature, they develop different ways of coping with the trauma.  Neil becomes sexually obsessive and irresponsible.  Brian withdraws into himself and represses his experience with visions of alien abduction.  Joseph Gordon-Leavitt gives a rock solid performance as Neil, which is the flashier of the two roles.  Brady Corbet plays Brian, the "worst player on the team," with tremendous sensitivity and nuance.  It is a masterpiece of cinema, a film which will ignite the world to this issue.  More than any other film I've seen, it tackles the subject head on, and dramatizes the years of emotional turmoil that follow the rape of a child.  Yet, the film is never preachy or polemical.  It doesn't wrap things up in a tidy way at the end.  The aim here is character.  There is no vengeance, as at the end of Long Island Expressway (L.I.E.) and that makes it more truthful, more real.  It will unsettle you for days.  If Aristotle was right, and we attend tragedy for the purpose of purging the strong emotions, this film is as effective as it gets.

On the Record with Furor Scribendi

Have you ever been a juror?  I have.  The case involved three counts of first degree rape of a child.  In Washington State, the law makes no distinction between types of illegal sexual contact between adults and minors and refers to all of it as rape.  Most interesting about my experience was the way in which the jury, having heard all of the evidence, have sat in the same room with each other, could be evenly divided, 6 to 6, during the first poll in deliberations.  More astoundingly, though, we managed to reach a verdict.  It was a compromise verdict.  We found the defendant guilty of one count of the three counts against him.  In retrospect there was proof beyond a reasonable doubt.  Actually, there was proof beyond a shadow of a doubt.  By implication of his guilt on that count, he was guilty of the remaining two counts.  But implication is not good enough. 

I can say with complete assurance that the entire case hinged on the testimony of the victim who was seven years old at the time.  That's a lot to rest on the shoulders of one so young.  There was no evidence other than testimony, no physical evidence at all.  The court required us to weigh the testimony in the balance and determine the truth of the matter.  That is a higher burden than you might at first imagine.  Sending someone to prison without some sort of corroborative proof is daunting. 

In the end, our jury compromised.  We found the defendant guilty on one charge, not guilty on two. 

Likewise, I feel, the jury in the Michael Jackson case will weigh the testimony of his accusers against the impeachment of that testimony by the defense, and they will be unable to convict.  From what I've heard described in the media, the defense sufficiently impeached the testimony of the primary accusers to the point that renders them insufficiently credible to support a conviction on the most serious charges.  I predict that the Jackson jury will compromise, and find him guilty of some lesser charge, such as supplying a minor with alcohol.  That is, if they are able to reach a verdict at all.  More probable than not, the jury will hang.  If not, then they will return with a compromise verdict.

I do not believe that Jackson will spend a single day in jail, nor will he ever be in handcuffs again.  At least, not for a charge of this nature.

By the way, and apropros of nothing--Michael Jackson was married to Lisa Marie Presley who is a celebrity Scientologist.  Greta van Susteren, the Fox News legal maven, is also a celebrity Scientologist, and perhaps that's why Fox News takes a very even-handed approach to this trial. 

Oh, It Just Makes Me Bilious!

Jim West that is.  He was on the Today Show today, and made the comment that gay people can be conservative, that he was representing his constituency and not advocating for himself when he voted against every gay friendly bill that crossed his path in the Washington state legislature.  What gaseous, bloated, cancerous hypocrisy!  It makes me freaking insane.  First, would those same constituents he claims to have served have ever VOTED FOR Jim West had he been forthcoming about his sexual orientation?  NO!!!  Second, if your goal is to conceal your homosexuality by bashing other gay men and women, which is what all gay bashers really are, then perhaps you ARE advocating for yourself when you vote against gay rights--because in that way, you get to repress your profoundly sick self-disgust and loathing by projecting it on someone else.  Neither his constiuents to whom he lied, nor the gay community he continously bashed for decades, should support him now.

Dream House

I had another extremely vivid house dream last night.  As usual with my house dreams, I was the new owner of the house.  It was an old house, a bungalow, and it looked very small.  It was much bigger on the inside than the outside.  Rooms kept expanding and giving way to more rooms.  There were three refrigerators in the house.  One of the refrigerators hid the entrance to a commode right off the kitchen.   There was a sack of hamburger half defrosted on the floor in the cellar and I put it into the freezer of one of the refrigerators.  The refrigerators were full of supplies.  There was a root cellar off to the side of the main cellar, painted white, full of old furniture.  Old upholstered chairs, picture frames, a mirror, cob-webs.  That cellar was cramped and very tight.  It was difficult to move.  I had to bend over, and crawl over many obstacles in my path.  I also remember that in the bathroom off the kitchen there was a metal cabinet of supplies that had been left there by the former owner.  It was a large cabinet, stacked very neatly with all kinds of supplies, soap, cleaning materials, cigarettes, deodorant, as well as tools: hammer, pliers, wrenches.  Everything was in perfect rows and arranged in alphabetical order.  The objects in my dream were very colorful, greens,  yellows, pastel reds.  The walls of the house were white.  There was a white and yellow striped shower curtain in the bathroom.

Is it significant that earlier in the day I had completed the first draft of the novel manuscript that I had been working on for two years?

On the same theme as yesterday...

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

     --Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

Perfect humility would be a full willingness, in all times and places, to find and to do the will of God.

     --Bill W[ilson], founder of A.A.

Is there no middle ground?

There is nothing either fundamentally good, nor anything fundamentally evil; everything is relative, relative to our point of view…This point once established, it is extremely possible that something, perfectly indifferent in itself, may be indeed distasteful in your eyes, but may be most delicious in mine; and immediately I find it pleasing, immediately I find it amusing, regardless of our inability to agree in assigning a character to it, should I not be a fool to deprive myself of it merely because you condemn it?

—The Marquis de Sade from The 120 Days of Sodom

Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and "swept along by every wind of teaching," looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today's standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.

—Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI)
Homily at the Mass for the Election of the Roman Pontiff, April 18, 2005

Mortal Thoughts

Sometimes when the work flow gets unmanageable, and attorneys get snarky and unreasonable, it salves my spirit to meditate on Lady Macbeth's monologue.

Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts
Unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe
Top-full of direst cruelty.  Make thick my blood.
Stop up the access and passage to remorse
That no compunctuous visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose nor put peace
Between the effect and it.  Come to my woman's
Breasts and take my milk for gall
You murdering ministers, wherever in your
Sightless substances you wait on nature's mischief.
Come thick night!  And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of HELL!
That my quick knife sees not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark to cry,
"HOLD!  HOLD!"

This was typed from memory--so the line breaks may not conform to Shakespeare.