Phase IV and the 101st monkey

Phase IV, originally from 1973, is available to view streamed on lovefilm.com - it's one of the free ones, you don't even have to register for the site. I had never heard of the film until yesterday but then someone talked about when we were sitting around. I was electrified, galvanised when I heard what it was about, ranted excitedly at everyone, went to watch it right away.

In the Arizona desert, scientists discover ants behaving in ways that ants just don't. Different species co-operating and communicating, building strange structures in the desert, setting out to drive first species that are ant predators and then humans out of their area, declaring war on humankind. Not "It Came from the Desert" giant ants, just normal little ants that have a new agenda.

It was uncanny - you may remember even from this blog - this has been a theme I have been playing with for years. I am obsessed with the thought that, while I believe we will reach the stars from this planet one day, it may not be us, but the evolutionary descendants of the ants who cross the interstellar void... Once when I began to write it as a script, I began with "Scientists discover an ant colony in the Arizona desert somewhere that seems to have begun developing technology...", down to that detail about Arizona.

You know the 100th monkey phenomenon, of course? After the 100 monkeys have reached their critical mass and suddenly monkey minds everywhere flash with new knowledge, and you're one of the monkeys left thinking: "Ahhhh - that seems so obvious now! Why didn't I catch on in the beginning like those other monkeys?"

I feel like the 101st monkey... So. Somebody already had the idea. And somebody else just changed the name of their band to 101st Monkey, try looking it up on Myspace or something.

It is a very interesting film. It used the then-new technique of ultra-close up photography of ants, and real ants star collectively (unwillingly or unwittingly) as a major character of the film. It is not a B movie; more thoughtful than that. It has beautiful cinematography and some clever lines. And some stupid ones. It is different from my vision, where ants evolve high technology spontaneously (in the film, it ends up being some sort of alien radiation that speeds up evolution - which gets the humans too... hence Phase IV of evolution on this planet).

There's a nod to Un Chien Andalou, with ants crawling out from a hole in the palm of one of their dead human victims.

I am in touch with Hollywood people about doing the script for the remake.

Un Chien Andalou

got me a movie
i want you to know
slicing up eyeballs
i want you to know
girlie so groovy
i want you to know
don't know about you
but i am un chien andalusia
wanna grow
up to be
be a debaser

Facebook

Being switched on hip media heads, you doubtless already know all the paranoid stuff about Facebook, how In-Q-Tel (CIA-controlled venture capital fund) invested loads of money in it (for use as a data-mining laboratory I guess), cops and employers and benefits and tax investigators and spooks trawling all over, all that stuff.

Yes, good to be aware of things, but whatever. It has allowed me to re-connect with people I would never have known what happened to them. I grew up in three countries and everyone I knew dispersed to thirty or forty more, and it has been nice to see someone you never expected to to become an Orthodox priest or raise a kid in a lesbian marriage or become a pilot or a professional poker player or join the French Foreign Legion.

Then there is this phenomenon of people who just promiscuously collect Facebook friends, just anyone, add 'em all, like it's a popularity contest. Get all these requests from "and who the fuck are you" people? "Uh, well, it said we might know each other cause we wrote an email to the same person once or something."

I do have some Facebook friends I have never met, though, and some of them do sort of feel like actual friends. Alex - (S)wine Alex - is a good one - I don't know who he is, but if he showed up at my door I would give him a place to live, feed him and get him extravagantly drunk without any questions. I'm also friends with Luke Reinhart, the guy who wrote The Dice Man, who is actually George Cockcroft, cause he seems to have liked my little review of his book. Oh, and with Andrew Bonner-Walker, who did Luke's website/Myspace for him, and who is producing a Dice Man film. And, yes, with Ed Conn, who guided me through the ibogaine space over the telephone (and David Graham Scott on camera).

When I last went to Afghanistan a couple years ago, it was about the time of the great Facebook explosion. At the time, the privacy defaults left most pages wide open to people who didn't realise. I joined the Afghanistan network, with its fake profiles (in Arabic and Pashto) for OBL, Mullah Omar, etc etc. I found servicemen's pages with wall posts like "Hey it'll be great when you guys from the 7-2 take over from us at FOB whatever on May 5 - we'll have a party when we're out of here. You guys are gonna have it so easy with the new Apaches covering your asses, but they've been saying we'll get em next week for a month now" or whatever. (And talking about paranoia - there were loads of weird goings-on on that Afghanistan network...)

I shot off loads of messages to loads of different people on different pretexts and with different stories and met up with some in Kabul. This is how I got to know Alex - Kandahar Alex - whose Facebook updates normally get me the big stories from Kandahar/Kabul days (or months) before the BBC or the press - and a few other people on the Kabul international scene. This is also how I met Wali Ahmad, who showed me his town.

Oh and then there are the Brazilian girls, of course, but they were socially promiscuous to begin with, before Facebook.

"Everyone I know is on Facebook, but everyone I want to know is on MySpace..." (-Zoe)

Моя цыганская - Владимир Высотский

(in the morning everything will be fine.... just a little more time, a little more time.... but morning comes, and everything is wrong... you smoke on an empty stomach, or you drink away a hangover....... everything is wrong - in the bar, in the church, everything is wrong....)

Lazy now seems determined to take back everything that drugs have taken away from him in his life

Mind you, drugs have immeasurably improved his personality, too

monsters in the deep

fuck with the abyss
and the abyss fucks also with you

and then it's just chin high, head up, and walk it where it needs to be walked

the demon-possessed can spit out nails, jagged pieces of glass, father amorth tells

i walk around spitting match-sticks

i am desperate. i buy lottery tickets. i would suck cock for a break.

i don't believe the things i find myself doing, and this time around, they don't even feel entertaining or worth writing about

life isn't a competition in brinksmanship. the palette doesn't have to be these colours of endless rainswept brutalist urban decay. there's no need to be shivering in these poisonous states

i should have taken photos or you won't believe me

it's just more of the same thing over and over again, a little bit more robbed of its magic, a little less beautiful

recursively

it's cold

i miss you, baby