Genius in the Water

If I wrote about every schlock thriller in circulation on the American market, I'd run out of room, but I saw  Deep Blue Sea  (1999) on the ever amazing flat screen and I have no idea why anyone would like it. The computer graphics showed a blatant lack of integration. Jackson and the supporting red shirts get carried off like plastic G.I. Joe toys, and the overzealous doctor, played a bit smugly by Saffron Burrows, broke the rules so as to cure Alzheimer's Disease!

I am not going to be too pc about this, but I wish screen writers could take more responsibility for their plot lines, and maybe read a little AS Byatt, who at least has the courage of her conviction about the broken characters she trusses up, with no apologies.

Alzheimer's can be integrated into our creative impulses, but using it as a tacky excuse for more fish monster elimination games is a bit of a crock.

Paltrow's Slinky

In the sense that this is relative, the boys may not find this accurate from their point of view, but I do not find Gwyneth Paltrow particularly attractive, or sexual. She has a mild sensuality at best, a slightly fresher, if still wispy version, of Sissy Spacek, and even Mia Farrow. They are rather the studio workaday blondes, and this ability to be a blending chameleon may be a key to their success, though I may return to my theories on yellow hair and pale skin later.
With these reservations a given, however, I rather like the Farrelly brothers' Shallow Hal. It shamelessly puts the freakish aspects of the human body front and center, exploiting and courageous at the same time. I'd certainly take a cameo with them.

I will take aim at this in more analytical fashion as I can at a later date. This is a backdated post, added in during my 2012 transition, and I am bushed over what for most is a simple process of monetizing two blog accounts while I move from one to the other. I do not know how to add code from AdSense to Blogger while LiveJournal still has third party access, and I cannot afford to waste all this time.

Obesity, Shorter Life Spans, Untouchable Agenda

How are you?-- a courtesy

Why wasn't I strong enough to push Precious away? Short of what Michael Rooker's character does to women, in his fantastical composite of Henry Lee Lucas, or the legend of Lucas we think we know, Sidibe endure the worst of the worst. Shut it off, go to bed. You do not need to keep reliving the five plus years of your case management limitations.
The sexual jealousy of the mother is common in families destabilized by incest. "Amelia" was one of Ted Danson's first post-Cheers roles, near the height of his popularity. And the cadence of Harlem nigger speak was superimposed on the television special, pulled up like an old Dewey decimal index card in a catalog. I lived situations as comparably graphic to the film, when I lived on 1500 West Page Street. Eight years worth. Mariah Carey's emotional armor as the AFDC social worker is of the caliber which creates spree killers, 30 years of it.Yes, spastic was provoked, as Daniels and Oprah intended the provocation, but not in the direction of Enduring Love, although having that Daniel Craig vehicle pop in isn't a bad example of altruism in excess, putting James Bond in the suburbs.

Right now, I really cannot go on without alarming Blogger as to the extent, or seriousness, of a pathological pain breaking the bonds of what is humanly possible in a public square, but whether Daniels intended it or not, the climax of this movie is a lampoon, turning Dr. Sonia Sanchez and her African American studies students into the capuchin from Outbreak. 

When Summer Burns The Earth, Again

"Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid."-- I'm still standing

I am not trying to convey that my fervent appreciation of Elton’s discography was exceptional. The little big man gave The Who a run for their money, stayed relevant on the charts longer than he should have, his beats increasingly trivial by the time I stopped buying his albums, I simply reflect back, and remain uncertain. Taupin’s lyricism either kept me alive or nourished the root of my latter day scathing cynicism, merging my moody to his narcissistic, allegorical depth: tracks like “Meal Ticket,” after all, display a libertarian send up of the welfare state. It seems to illuminate upon my fundamental flaw, diving into this British rock melancholia on the basis of a grade school special education teacher’s recommendation. Neil Montgomery, my first puppy love, exceedingly masculine to a thirteen year old’s burgeoning sex drive. Much taken with “Bennie and the Jets,” and responsible for my slavering purchase of every album Elton ever recorded, this over adhesion remains a cautionary tale, Neil soon vaporized by other longings, never actualized. He probably grew florid in old age, reflective blue eyes, wavy brown hair, mustache. He taught me hockey, and it remains my favorite sport, never enough opportunity to view and follow the teams, not since Clarke’s Broad Street Bullies. This was the year they brought the Stanley Cup to the ward, and the dowager then in pigtails, got to touch the iconic trophy as compensation for orthopedic butchery soon to follow.

Was the masochism always there, or ingrained? Analysis cannot always cure the wounds of destructive implosion. If I felt threatened by my former program manager Linda Dezenski, my backlash, the cruelty of the vitriol I heaped on her afterwards was a form of self-cutting without physically engaging in the activity. Ditto the journey through the attendant care abuse. In spite of this, a lesbian indulgence would never be satisfactory. Attendant care itself assures me on this point, as the close physical contact with the Africans, however necessary, is undesirable, in the seven years winding its way through this account, toward the collapse of my machines and ensuing frailty, I lived in those elusive ballads. How is “Ticking” a lazy predicate for the spree shootings which flair up and recede straight through 2018? It blames Catholicism through flashback refrains for a mass murderer Bernie probably dredged up through Fleet Street. I did the same thing as a poet, while remaining not so sanguine about causal links between theology and violence. I drowned myself in this, music meant for LSD users of its age, and what did I purchase with all these intense investments?? Nothing but the folly of alienating myself further, condemned to a life of mostly brutal micro-management, while celebrity glides on double standards. A recording artist sues his manager, confesses to being strung out on drugs, like a prodigal son, while run of the mill opioid users constitutes a crisis. In the transition from actively living towards actively dying, (conservatives, while not wrong in relation to sanctity, seem to forget the hardship which goes in tandem with birth diagnosis) this woman is not having the easiest of times, but she’ll be glad to go. I am glad for destructors like Cruz, whatever neuroscience does to them. I'm glad, and there will be impaired individuals clever enough, in the future, to strike, evade capture, for the sake of what you do to us, what you do to teach us to pulverize each other.

Bedlam Proofs

I wonder if I should give myself a lone gesture, like Catherine in the opening of the film, and make a toast with my coffee to auspicious beginnings. Proof is not solely an agenda film, of course, and it is charmingly plagued by the romantic vision of mental illness that the West has held since Goethe bequeathed young Werther to an equally young Europe of the eighteenth century. Catherine may stick it in the face of Robert's mourners in the Rockefeller Chapel, but the film can still be viewed as a romantic metaphor, asking the questions I raised in my last post, and yet only touching on the real grit and hardship that comes with handling diseased brains and bodies: Robert stank? Try dealing with incontinence on a daily basis and not come out of that with some degree of belligerence to the ableist majority around you and not get ambushed for it.

I did, and in fact do get subjected to ambushes daily: my building managers, case managers from providers of one sort or another; my career, in fact, when I had it, was based on my ability to case manage those as marginalized as myself, based on my knowledge of the system. The gloriously modern notion of making sure we fit everyone in the right modality, and in turn fitting those into the right paradigm and expecting *compliance*.

The movie resists this aspect of modern society even while acknowledging it, especially in the flashback where Catherine finds Robert sitting at the table outside the house during an evening snowfall, believing that his machinery (mind) had come back to life. The scene might have been taken right out of a Bing Crosby performance of Silver Bells. In some ways the film can even be seen as a meta-accolade to Hopkins himself, for being the Lawrence Olivier of our generation.

I was less enthralled with Jake Gyllenhaal as Hal Dobbs, the former student of Robert's and would be lover of Catherine. He looks and acts like a muppet on steroids in playing his part, and was somewhat better cast as the cartoonist in The Zodiac Killer. Still, he and Paltrow both exhibit a refreshing fragility in a film that challenges us to think without getting sanctimonious about which version of the truth its audience should best believe.

Hopkins' Otherness

First up: The movie Proof, (2005) with Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins. I am not a big Paltrow fan, (I think she is a bit simpy) and I did not actually see the play by David Auburn on which the film itself is based, but the quality of the production transcends these issues, because the film is about doubt (much as the film version of Doubt was supposed to be and wasn't) about the nature of certainty, and never having the right answer, and what brilliance in quest of solutions actually costs, and what our fears of dissolution actually amounts to. Hopkins is as usual fantastic as the crinkled old man still trying to be relevant within his own self-importance, but vacant in the places where his daughter Catherine would have been better served if he could have fulfilled his role as a father, and Paltrow gets it down as the angry kid who makes too many sacrifices, and isn't quite as healthy as the preppy police would like--the role filled here by the older sister Claire, a nearly perfect foil played by Hope Davis.

Is it okay to be crazy? The film asks this, and simply offers the dichotomy between institutionalization and personal care without offering its audience any pat solutions on the matter. I'll continue on with this and tie it in with the same set of conflicts within the disability movement in my next post.

New Account, Old Retreads

I am a freelance disability journalist and creative writer interested in the theoretical applications of disability culture in entertainment. Obviously, this is a bit esoteric, and thus far has not made me much in terms of freelance sales. It isn't new, and I started rolling with this idea in Yahoo Groups, imitating a former supervisor who created a support group in the same venue. My group failed, and I cannot say what my former supervisor did with hers.

Very latter day, I started to blog about this at LiveJournal, and now I may be moving to Google Blogger. I do not cast aspersion on LiveJournal. I had to learn, but I am middle aged, to say the least, fairly cerebral, and perhaps fully integrating with Google is the quieter and better option. It will take me some time to move from one site to the other, monetize, and then close LJ off, if this will be what I wish to do. I can be dark, crass, probably offensive, sometimes pained, and will deal in adult content as far as that goes with the written word, but, to the extent that Google Blogger has gate keepers, I do not use pornographic imagery or clips, though it is fair to warn readers that I have biases, and have posted about that openly, marking it as adult content, which is apparently standard practice.

Shrink Wrap

I remember querying my relatively invisible audience about 127 Hours, and search is not coughing up the post, so I either left it at Live Journal, where I wiped out my account finally because whatever was left I decided would find its way back into my concerns, and I'm watching the film now on the CW, with the realization that both Aron Ralston and James Franco are of a generation long past me. (According to anecdotal dating, I am technically a baby boomer though I am almost a decade younger than the poet Robert Thomas.) Ralston is gen X? My era never looked at Utah's unique landscape as a thrill ride, a drug alternative, and I could never treat the landscape the way Ralston does. Those of my era did not see environment as an extreme sport. For us it was a spiritual responsibility, conserving environment. 

Rahman's score, however, was always the tempo at which my mind moved, a genetic inclination toward dance. All things being equal, I will not be passing on the torch with the same rapidity as Christopher Hitchen's fall to cancer, but it's Ralston's set from whom I'm seeking better solutions when bodies are vulnerable. I don't know if your ears are deaf, but perhaps they're tin, and I am a peevish echo in the reeds?