Space Forum / Astronomy / April 2007

nightbat wrote

nightbat

        No wonder the coffeeboys keep on trying to crosspost into Art
Bell's newsgroup, it's all so clear now. They sense your excellent
remote viewing predictions of a world dying without bees and left to the
coffeeboys to try to pollinate the remaining plants and they meet
without adequate success. Oh mercy!, but where is desert Saul he's been
missing too! We need Darla to help rescue the remaining worthy life
forms before the worst hits the fan. I can't imagine cherries at a
hundred dollars a pound, oh the humanity!

Why, oh why, what did the coffeeboys do to the honey bees? Was it that
fake grass Officer Bert reported about, insecticides, a rare killer bee
flu virus, or too much rainfalls? Trade winds gone a mock, planet
overheating, is it that they know about Officer Warhol's Wormwood
pending predicted comet hit, or are the poles shifting or reversing and
they lost their magnetic due north heading? Are Sun flare UV eruptions
cooking them, is the queen fed up with too much sex and gone modern
liberated, the burning and clearing of the rain forest, China going
polluting autos instead of bicycles, Russia's runaway nuke plants, or
maybe Desert Storms burning of the oil wells?

UV glasses are a must for fido and kitties now, bring in those pets, oh
the humanity! Darla we need you.

        carry on,
        the nightbat

Have you talked to "Darla" with your "radio"recently?

You scientist-wannabes are pathetic.

Says the man measuring picoseconds with voice commands.

It is obvious that Art Deco and his ilk are capturing the bees for the
making of honey lubricant for their perverted Lifestyles!  We have one
documentary of that Lifestyle here!:

http://tinyurl.com/2so3or

Into the Shadowy World of Sex With Animals

Sundance Film Festival
An image from "Zoo," a film inspired by a real-life incident in which
a man died after having sex with a horse.

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: April 25, 2007
The director Robinson Devor apparently would like viewers who watch
his heavily reconstructed documentary, "Zoo," to see it as a story of
ineluctable desire and human dignity. Shot on Super 16-millimeter
film, with many scenes steeped in a blue that would have made Yves
Klein envious, "Zoo" is, to a large extent, about the rhetorical uses
of beauty and metaphor and of certain filmmaking techniques like slow-
motion photography. It is, rather more coyly, also about a man who
died from a perforated colon after he arranged to have sex with a
stallion.

Multimedia
Audio Slide Show
Pastoral Noir
Mercifully, you don't see this death on camera, though if you sit
close enough to the screen, you will see a few fairly brief images of
one sexual event, accompanied by graphic sounds. It isn't pretty,
which is why the images appear only on a small television monitor. Art-
house devotees may be a tolerant lot, but it's doubtful they want to
look at a stallion's erect penis stretched across the big screen like
a sailboat boom, at least in public. Certainly such an image would
work directly counter to the self-conscious poeticism of Mr. Devor's
film, to its carefully confected narrative of misunderstood barnyard
love and baleful testimonial. It is, after all, difficult to sing of
the bodies electric and equine amid a chorus of "yucks."

It is, however, very easy to hide behind aestheticized imagery, as
"Zoo" soon proves. Much has been made of the film's look, and it's
easy to see why. The cinematographer, Sean Kirby, who also shot Mr.
Devor's "Police Beat," a fiction film about a lovelorn Seattle bicycle
cop, has done some striking work here. The prowling camera and dusky
colors give much of "Zoo," which opens with the portentous image of
what appear to be miners emerging from a tunnel, a sumptuous, almost
velvety look and vibe, an effect enhanced by the repeated use of slow-
motion photography. Characters don't just walk in this film; they
float across the frame, pouring like liquid toward their inexorable
destinies.

Written by Mr. Devor and Charles Mudede, "Zoo" is nothing if not
artful. Even before its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in
January, it had attracted a fair amount of attention that quickly
morphed into a reassuringly familiar drone. Documentaries,
particularly the kind shown at festivals like Sundance, tend to
reaffirm the audience's worldview, partly by appealing to its
presumptive tolerance and partly by underscoring the artistry of the
endeavor (the vision thing). Like many such documentaries, "Zoo" wraps
its sensationalistic core in a seductive mantle, an approach that
appeals to viewers already predisposed to art and the Enlightenment,
"Sesame Street" and all things not Rush Limbaugh. These are films as
documents of reason (yours, mine, the creators'), the cinema of indoor
voices.

In "Zoo," three of those voices belong to men who, along with a group
of unnamed, unnumbered other men, regularly met at a farm near the
small city of Enumclaw, about 45 minutes southeast of Seattle, to
party with one another and animals, occasionally recording their
activities on video. Some of the men are identified only by their
Internet handles (they met online), like the dead man, "Mr. Hands."
What Mr. Devor doesn't explain until right before the end credits is
that almost everyone who appears in his film, including most of the
men who call themselves "zoos" - for zoophile or lover of animals -
are played by actors. Structured like a mystery that taps many of the
usual suspense beats, the story unwinds through dramatic
reconstructions that show what happened, if not really why.

Reconstructions are old hat in documentary, employed by reality-
minded, dramatically inclined filmmakers from Robert J. Flaherty to
Errol Morris and of little aesthetic note or interest here. Far more
interesting is Mr. Devor's decision not to name the dead man,
identified in news reports and even the film's production material as
Kenneth Pinyan, a divorced Boeing employee. This refusal to give the
dead man a name, as well as the penumbral lighting, go a long way
toward keeping Mr. Pinyan and the rest of his adopted community in the
shadows from which Mr. Devor otherwise seems eager to retrieve them.
Given that Mr. Mudede identified Mr. Pinyan in a February 2006 column
he wrote for the Seattle newsweekly The Stranger, this silence seems,
at best, poorly considered.

It's hard to know what Mr. Devor is after, though a clue materializes
during the only on-camera interview. Late in "Zoo," the actor Michael
Minard suddenly pops up on a blindingly white set, talking about how
he was hired to play a cop in the film. On a banal level, his
recollection about landing the role underscores that each of us -
actor and zoophile and doubtless filmmaker alike - plays a role. But
his performance here also appears to be a veiled statement of purpose.
"A man bled to death," Mr. Minard reminds us between clichés ("it hits
close to home") and memories of a young boy who died in his arms after
a drowning accident. Looking into the dying child's eyes, the actor
says, he saw his own reflection.

Reality is in the eye of the beholder, and so too, Mr. Devor would
seem to have us believe, are death and deviance. Not that he labels
man-horse sex deviant or comic or icky or anything much at all.
Instead of taking on the serious moral and political objections to
bestiality, including those in Leviticus (thou shalt so not) and by
animal-rights proponents who reject the instrumental use of animals,
he offers haters shrieking on the radio and other opportunists. Yet,
paradoxically, it is precisely because Mr. Devor refuses to
acknowledge the murkiness that clings to every frame in his film,
because he refuses to engage with the world beyond that of the
zoophiles, that they seem like creatures from some never-ending night.

That's too bad. After all, Bible-believers notwithstanding, if you eat
and wear animals and agree that it's O.K. to torture them in the name
of science and beauty, what's the big deal? Human beings subject
animals penned in factory farms to far more grievous abuse than
anything apparently done to the horses in "Zoo," and on a daily basis
human beings also subject themselves to greater risk. One zoophile's
fond memories of cooking up ham for his brethren indicate that theirs
was not a PETA-approved animal love, true. But, as Mr. Devor makes
clear, again and again, these were men who truly loved their animals
in sickness and in health and, at least in the case of one unfortunate
soul, till death finally did part them.

ZOO

Opens today in Manhattan.

Directed by Robinson Devor; written by Charles Mudede and Mr. Devor;
director of photography, Sean Kirby; edited by Joe Shapiro; music by
Paul Matthew Moore; production designer, Jeanne Cavenaugh; produced by
Peggy Case and Alexis Ferris; released by ThinkFilm. At the IFC
Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich
Village. Running time: 76 minutes. This film is not rated.