Tuesday, May 1, 2018

red dresses, dead malls, and local politics

This blog post is related to the imagery in my dream journal entry from this morning, which can be found here.

A lot of the imagery and atmosphere from last night's dreams still comes, I feel, from the Fred Astaire & Cyd Charisse movie The Band Wagon, which I watched a couple days ago.



The busy diner scene and the talk of the movie business in the third dream definitely come from The Band Wagon, as do the marble staircase and probably even the jewelry commercial (where the woman wears a red dress) in the dead mall in the first dream.

Image from Video City website.

But probably the weird scene in the lounge room in the third dream, where there's a fight scene put on and then repeated for the benefit of rich people, is also related to The Band Wagon, namely the part where Cordova is pitching the new play to the rich backers.

Image screen grab from YouTube, via Warner Bros.

But I also believe that the imagery of the jewelry commercial in my dead mall dream was likely related to my recent superficial study of 1990s adult entertainment star Alexis Christian. Adult entertainment from the 1990s that carries the glam of the 1990s, and maybe the 1980s, too.

Image from Listal

Obviously, dead malls are always on my mind, as they are, I'm sure, for a lot of YouTube junkies like me. The Dead Mall Series by Dan Bell is definitely worth checking out.



I feel like the imagery of the dead mall in my dream was also related to Grand Central Station, which likely would loop back to The Band Wagon.

Image from Wired New York

The strange deed in my dream likely comes from my recent reading of the 12th volume of the Nancy Drew mystery The Message in the Hollow Oak.



In that story, which I'm still reading, Nancy wins a radio contest and gets the deed to some land in Canada as a prize. The deed very quickly becomes a strong, yet really strangely played, element of suspense. So the strangeness of Nancy Drew's land title echoed into my dream.

The imagery of the rich woman in a flapper outfit in the third dream reminds me of The Band Wagon again. But the glasses the rich woman wears reminds me of a Rifftrax short released last night, riffing an educational film for young kids getting eyeglasses for the first time.


The strange martial arts performance relates to a video I saw last night on YouTube where San Francisco-based dance company ODC/Dance performed for San Francisco's city council at a pre-council ceremony honoring ODC's ruby anniversary.


And while the marble and stone surrounding in all three of my dreams relate partly to The Band Wagon, they also relate to my personal life. A lot of my "social life" is based on attending political events in Colorado as a spectator. I obviously see a lot of polished stone in government buildings, including Colorado's Capitol.

However, I've felt myself transitioning away from having any sort of personal goals as it relates to political life in Colorado. I think my fourth dream from two nights ago shows that. And a lot of the personal conflicts in last night's dreams, especially the second dream, show why I feel myself transitioning away from thinking about how I involve myself in Colorado's political life.

The discussion of Ron Paul, or The Ron Paul Show, in the second dream probably relates more to Bernie Sanders than to Ron Paul, as some of my favorite local political candidates in this year's election have been big supporters of Bernie Sanders and have as a consequence of that been shunned by Colorado's Democratic Party.

The big book I read in my second dream is also sort of related to my personal social life. The book is by Winston Churchill. But it's a huge book. I have a lot of books by Winston Churchill in my library. I inherited them from my grandparents after my grandmother passed away. And I'm aiming to read them soon. But the big book is definitely a reference to the Marquis de Sade's Juliette, which is enormous.



Winston Churchill gives some pretty important warnings against letting Nazism rise again, I believe. And we should probably pay attention to those warnings. But when brown people like me start talking about those warnings, even on a local level, we're thought of as speaking out of place or out of turn. We're looked at, in my opinion, as being as scandalous as the Marquis de Sade -- who, in my opinion, wasn't punished because of the sexuality of his writings, but because of their politics.

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