Corrosive Postures

"It becomes just what it should not be, the story of an escape."

Roger Ebert should have never appeared on television nor gained the international recognition he did, nor made his saliva gland cancer a documentary special. He debased his critical acuity by becoming a buffoon, even if this is in part my resentment at my own lack of recognition, it is still more than that, because one thing that is gone forever, outside of the studio make-up room, is public deportment-- and I hear at least 10,000 bloggers stampede on my skull. "What about you?" My "public behavior," which would lead to Google's sanction if I had the money or the acumen for advertisement, is merely symptomatic of the disease: We only look "our best," to use fat man's phrase, in front of the camera.

Heaven surprised me because I knew nothing about it; had I seen it before I saw Babel perhaps Inarritu would not have traumatized me so forcefully, despite the fact that I cannot give the man his leftist victory, leaving it at that-- which is not to imply I want to argue against his movie-- far from it. Every director needs to care as much, even with lighter fare. 

The question, unresolved, is whether Tykwer cares as much as Alejandro, and I am absolutely undecided, because the escape to which Ebert refers may be one of forgiving grace, but it also may be one of consequence. The opening with Blanchett engaging in her violence made me think yet another political thriller along the lines of The French Connection, and I was entirely unprepared for the fact that it transforms into a secular Christian allegory with a touch of genocidal overtures to its lighting and costume. A hardened ideologue would not be imbued with Blanchett's vengeful remorse.

Amore and Hairy Monsters

"B+-- you seem to despair of the whole process." An intuitive foreign policy instructor

Alejandro González Iñárritu is the only Latin American leftist to whom I concede my argument, and I would luxuriate in your stunned silence over this admission, except that I do not believe in it. Babel should not be viewed on network television. These idiots butchered the full extent of the film and its implications with their edits and jump cuts to commercial, and I am going to hiss at them in protest. 

My critical faculties scatter to the wind with every viewing, and upon reassembly, I cannot recall which post it was I wrote that I have not been able to offer Alejandro's work justice, but the assertion remains as true today as when I wrote it into archive; I can stitch together a few threads. The police intervene in each of the three arcs of the film, with tragic consequences in the Moroccan  and US border segment. The Japanese police more or less waltz in on a denouement that began before the film started, with the death of Chieko's mother, and it is only the Jones couple who are not assisted by authorities after the mother is shot.

To the extent that I am able to enter into the posture Inarritu seems to demand, he is right, but that little bird of a cautionary tale fluttering so charmingly around the halo of Barack Obama, led to the botched investigation that gave us the Boston marathon bombing. I am super pissed off at both the FBI and what remnants seemingly remain of the KGB. Am I ashamed of the former attorney general Ashcroft, the CIA and military intelligence under Rumsfeld for water boarding and Jose Padillla? Yes.

Their replacement is a Harvard Constitutional scholar, killing the children of militants with UAV's in our blind spot, and with his other hand, he scratches Chechens behind the ears for that warm fuzzy feeling. Most liberals who have known me over the years, in our online projections, ward me off. Spastic is rude. Spastic is in pain, so much pain. Even if I throw you a challenge flag on the field as it relates to self-delusion, let me offer Mueller a few keen insights on what he can learn from a developmental brain injury:

"Gee, Russian security services send us a red flag over Tamerlan Tsarnaev. We cannot find anything, but let's hold him in Russia for the time being and get him on a watch list. Bush may have had constipation on civil liberties but this in Chechnya we're talking about."

Fucking assholes. I am never voting for another President. Ever. Period.

Mannequin Manufacture

Yom Kippur has been called the "white fast." That's because it is not a fast of mourning, but rather a fast that is supposed to help the faster contemplate his or her sins and relationship with God. A different fast, one that mourns for the destruction of the Holy Temple, is a "black fast."--Craig Oren, Rutgers School of Law

Was Clint Eastwood thinking about this almost laughable leading man flick when he produced Million Dollar Baby? The dated new wave kill the sex symbol movie and the contemporary morality play, for all their differences, carry the same message: breaking free of the entrapment of sterile environment can be costly, in mind in body and spirit. Asinine activists protesting a narrative that had something to say. Linear minds are so limiting, so unwilling to think, to be challenged.

I have mentioned Marshall Zacharias (bottom still) more than a few times in the course of my writings on Blogger, and I forgive the man. As long as there is a Henry James Society scholars will be throwing spitballs around on bad hair days. I took my arguments about peers and collusion public, however, because Greg would not reply to my private email about the matter, and, as I have told my page views in the past, I hate social cuts, virtual or the three dimensional variety. I would have preferred even an angry response from him to no response at all, and I have to forgive that too. Perhaps his honors program had a crisis, or maybe he did not like how I ditched Louise, but why do I have to be in charge of wounded starlings? I am not getting paid to do that anymore and I didn't ask her to either follow me around online, or follow my example.

Does he look happy to you, or, like half the universe, is he a Zolcroft user?

Yahoo did not ban me for writing this. Surprise. I truly believed a flock of angry posters would have come at me, not two thumbs up. The dawn of a new civil war? Ah, clever spastic, that's all, no doubt, simply clever.

Mads Mikkelsen, Closet Charmer

When I viewed The Silence of the Lambs for the first time, I thought the film was based on a real life American madman, illustrating that I did not pay attention to the credits to then wander off to explore Harris as a suspense author in print, though now I understand, given that the author is southern, why Hopkins was disparaging toward Jodie Foster. Let this be a lesson to you about the practice of being a keen observer.

Juxtaposed against what limited cable programming I do view, however, Hannibal is quite good, and alerts older viewers to its inside humor, referencing films like Hell Motel (yes, I enjoy some camp) and the notorious character, like Norman Bates. I like the fact that the script writers do not dumb it down. The entire cast can be applauded for maturity and subtly, including this cosmopolitan charmer. Actual fans of Harris may know how to rate Mikkelsen better than I, but I am as yet undecided as to whether Mads' Hannibal is too humane, too sympathetic-- nor am I sure that Fishburne's Crawford hasn't cast his net from the opening.

I will never read Thomas Harris. Slice and dice isn't really my thing, though I do read noir. Noir is a more contextualized genre and can lend itself to interesting experiments. Thrillers are normally too linear in print form-- not in this series, however. I have purchased one episode already, wasting money on television, but this is worth owning.

Kinetic Comorbidity

"You're being sucked into a void you that can't control." -- Joe Biden, secondary consoler

In the 2001 Hannibal, Gary Oldman plays Mason Verger, a survivor of Dr. Lecter's distinctive methods. In typical melodramatic fashion, Harris utilizes the character for didactic purposes, assuming the novel bears a family relation to the screenplay. Being utterly consumed with the desire to destroy evil puts you on an even footing with evil itself. How such a hideously deformed victim had the command to create an elaborate pit of boars with which to trap the psychiatrist stretches credulity, but it signifies the standard industry conceit of the diabolical invalid who barks orders at more able minions. Bongo Mbutuma, if I am accurate enough in my narrow casting, performs the same function in District 9, as the Nigerian warlord who wants prawn power. In earlier films such as Monkey Shines and Gattaca, Jason Beghe and Jude Law are allowed some latitude to flesh out the misery within their character arcs, but their own tyranny destabilizes their moral balance. I should not make this pun, but, as someone in the life, Monkey Shines is a fucking joke as far as its plot and its sex goes, but Beghe does deserve credit for encapsulating the frustrations of a sum zero mobility accurately.

The flip side of this is the Hallmark Hall of Fame paraplegic, the Roy Campanella bio epic of the week, the sentimental commiseration  tale of which I dunno if My Left Foot is an included nomenclature.

In entertainment, there seems to be no tertiary space just to be a real wheelchair user, unless you're Daryl Mitchell, with the fortune to be produced by David Letterman.

I am aware of the black actor with the respiratory ailment who was a recur on Malcolm in the Middle, but viewers of this popular comedy never got to see what it took for this character to engage in matriculation. The director of Ed was brave, toward the end run of the series, to take a long capture of Mitchell getting out of bed, then struggling to put on his socks. The power of the video age is such that viewers need to see more of this for their edification.

Salaam Devereux!

The Real Thing looks at James in the context of the very material world in which his novels were written, published and read. --Greg Zacharias

Hum. Those who know Erik would tell you I am being unfair to the dying doctor. S/He invests his zeal in a positive way, in contrast to my seething due to the fact that his adversary burned me, and burned me at a fairly crisp temperature. My rebuttal to this is that Erik and Cassie engaged in fraudulent activity to the point that the DOJ investigated, and I don't like excusing criminality because the individuals engaged in it have glaring chronic conditions, nor do I enjoy being neighbors with such people, and then expected to be civil due to the fact that they've had heart attacks and numerous strokes, regressing thereby. 

In the aftermath of the bombing, much has been made of the fact that the Russians asked the FBI to investigate Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and that our agents found nothing illegal. I am baffled by this dove cooing by the executive branches involved. Bortnikov is willing to see journalists murdered, willing to kill Berezovsky, but can't imprison an ethic Chechen on suspicions of radicalization simply because the Chechen had legal American status?

Romans know when dead fish begins to decompose, and the stench can overwhelm.

I made contact with a live Google voice yesterday, but will attempt live interaction again tomorrow to resolve monetization, because spastics need to prep the necessary data requirements. Perhaps I should take my proposal that I made on list when Greg and I were courteous seriously. I started this blog to generate projects along these lines, after all. Lot of work; would not need to contact Kidman necessarily. An alliance with Frigide Bargot would offer prodigal cover, nyet? Burn injuries move from acute to chronic with age.

Compliments to Jim Popkin

This is the type of journalism that I would live to be doing, except for the fact that I could not make a story on hearing loss come together, the last time I actually had an assignment. I would not even know where to begin to work sources like these, how to find them. But I put up with everything else The Washington Post does for learning from the high octane of such features.

Still, this is a very nuanced look at socialist ideology juxtaposed against the lions of free market economics, and is thus slated towards the juggernaut of American power derived from that free market, which is not always moral, to use Ana's sentiments.

I have always seen the Castro regime as a joke, so it is difficult for me to understand what drove Montes, despite her father. Not that I quibble with the construct Popkin creates, I just cannot see it in terms of a Marxist cause, since Ana herself is certainly intelligent enough to see that authoritarian socialist state models have failed, and Castro has only survived as long as he has due to our military inertia. Killing the squirrel makes us look bad, but I am as zealous as she, on the flip side of the coin. You may wonder how I can feel that way after the life I've led, but it is perhaps due to that life. If I had a way out of this living form of bondage, I'd renounce my citizenship, and leave the country.

Becoming an enemy of state would require too much effort, however. It only has anything to do with Barack Obama to this extent: Excellent movement candidate that he was, I expected to be able to get justice under his presidency. It probably won't happen-- in that context, the freedom to express my dissent doesn't mean all that much.

Simulations

Every company stands behind their products. It is a convenient blanket for the truth of the matter, which is that the electronic lithium battery is unstable. I ripped myself off and ordered two fresh batteries, as I tossed the receipt from Walgreens and forget the date of purchase, though I told you my trip on Locust street was unpleasant without going into detail about inner city minority insolence making it unpleasant. There are variations on every version of my posts of course. Erik was my source for my first paid byline, and both s/he and Linda, ruthless corruptors, would mope, along with another vacant spastic I'll call the Gladhandler, that they wanted to support me, and did, except Linda views giving her confidence as confessing to collusion, breach of ethics, and expects that the good lieutenant, being loyal, to understand, even while the lieutenant's life collapses, but Erik and the Gladhandler and my ex currently lead lives I consider to be nothing more than autonomic living deaths.

I'd be much better off if I could get away from it, and age as I must in a fresh clime without so much dead baggage, water logged albatrosses. I should not have to move heaven and earth to achieve this in my own looming weakness, bowels as recalcitrant in the seasonal humidity as is the norm for my body. I have tried everything short of getting physical to make Erik understand I hate what s/he is and stands for, if this level of dependency has to be so ironclad as to destroy the desire of ambition. I am now truly discomfited through sinus and my colon, and wonder what it is too late for. Happiness and the esteem of my own economic security?

Diving Bells

"You aren't welfare trash. You have your writing. You're intelligent." --Frank, whose unspeakable crime was attempting to make spastic_dowager his wife.

I cannot handle it when I visit Frank in his unit. He is not in a nursing home, but he lives within the community in name only. His studio looks like a hospital ward in precisely the relation that my studio looks like a train depot. He lies in a hospital bed surrounded by steel frames, pulleys, life alert buttons, and I did not enjoy anal sex on the end of his fist; he admired the lubricated intensity of my climax, however, and this, our creation of a third gender, one that I destroyed in horror, with the realization that the lead car was about to flatten me, has nothing on the failed queer intimacy between John Marcher and May Bartram. I have interacted with some of these scholars Tate refers to for years, and the best they can do is assert that homoerotic impetus subverts traditional Victorian bonds, and remain fixated there.

I think there is more to it than that, whatever the erosion of lesbianism's epistemological force, as if there is truly an erasure of the value of the breast as a container because same gender attraction to her own vessel was eradicated via the rise of Semitic monotheism. Literary scholars sometimes forget to stop making love and assuaging each other's ego. There is a third way into James that doesn't necessarily involve his orientation, whether he actively ejaculated into it, or not.

Simulation, and I think this is what has keep me fixated to the mastery of James, beyond my dead academic advisor giving me a lifelong quest, or my now very pained sexual security, which must, after all, have some bisexual proclivity, since I kept my distance from Alexandra but was impacted by the knowledge of her absence upon her decease, or my cling to Michael's memory itself. My own little plot for a divorced professor with two children, his younger daughter named for Emily, of course. I was there for his happiness when she was born, but this is simulation, just as Frank and I, had I married him,would have been an imitation of viability as husband and wife, and yet I am not finally surrendering, in the classical right wing trigger dynamic, to confess to self sanctified faggots that I am truly one of you, and that my depressive episode with Linda was a near lethal dose of gay panic and wallowing in maudlin strings, I loved her as an imprint of how I saw myself in her psychopathy, though I believed this for a number of years after our near deadly altercation with each other, my obsessively referenced supervisor. I believed that her conduct must have cracked me because I am a repressed switch hitter, but this is an error, at least in terms of self-realization, though I share many of her attributes: cold, analytical, lacking in empathy unless it is an extraordinary tragedy, like Newtown. She is a praying mantis in physique, which I would have preferred over my florid cellulose, but those are genetics.

Henry James penetrates the horror of simulated intimacy, even while Marcher acknowledges how this diminishes us in its very grasp, makes us perfect asses. I did not work at all Saturday, but I have the data I need to reconstruct my political representative contacts, as I need to get away from the dying doctor transvestite, before my anger at this figure overcomes my developmental condition in a miraculous display of strength; this is why I visited Frank, to spew the poison of Erik von Schmetterling out of my mouth.

Urethra Caffeine

Physically, I cannot continue to sustain my manuscript losses, and I am pissed at myself for being so worried about money to pay for technical support that I wound up making things worse. I evaded this date as opposed to overtly defying it, and have a lawyer to find, another missive to rewrite. I need to get out of Riverside without making things worse, and again, this is not easy.

I am not very well heeled when it comes to not posting, but I need to take some extra time. Make sure of my eternal drives in the future, utilize Google Docs for Christ's sake, my kindle. This cannot happen to me again. Barring the usual crisis, I will return Sunday evening.

Slavic Escarpment

"Look at him. He's just pissing himself to tell us about the fake Aryan Cosmetics conspiracy!" --Vincent D'onofrio

The narrative behind the rise of Catherine the Great is fascinating in its imposition. A fairly low key Prussian enlightenment era aristocrat marries well, excels in the game of court intrigues, has her husband murdered, or the truth around his death successfully repressed, and Voila, long live Czarina, the great Russian ruler who isn't Russian. I wrote a poem about her after extensive research. It is a poem in need of a tuning, but one of the last I showed to Robert before Trudy Richardson's hire at Riverside nearly annihilated my existence. If you think I am being unfair to the evasive minority who will tap dance any way but loose in order to avoid a civil rights lawsuit against her parent company, look at what we do to the damned; it is in this sense that I pity young Tsarnaev, regardless of his motives. David Brooks gives me cover here for incredulity at the sheer magnitude of the manhunt that took place in Boston. A kid is a kid, despite the marathon deaths, the loss of the campus security guard. Slavic conventions baffle me, but Alexandra published my poems that used those conceits to signify desolation, my Grecian editor who had to fucking die of breast cancer despite the fact that prim and proper lesbian was the best promoter I had. Here too, back in the day, initially, when I heard Alexandra's voice for the first time, I grew excited. "New literary friend!" This assertion ran in my mind until I met her in person. Flag went up and chilled any sentiment I had about confidential intimacy when she presented herself. The able bodied world can't even allow me confidantes in my own fucking field, and more still, she did not functionally edit me. This is what I asked of her when she was dying, and I could not get the manuscript out to her in time, and so she died on me also, a pissant of a hanging chad.

Doubtlessly, I stay with WaPo as a reader because of its national gridiron mentality, but let me respond to Joel Achenbach's points by objecting to his use of grid iron simplicity. I am as perplexed as any of you about the motives of the brothers, but the tactics of the terrorist is not about winning, it is about resort.

I am hesitant to press on with this in any thorough fashion in the moment given the national tempo and corporate suppression,  which I find absolutely ludicrous, but I am always mindful that I am letting my id, scars, analytics, dangle under the largesse of a powerful corporate tolerance.

Rock Hudson and Decoding Double Entendre

With only words to share.
You know that I was born for a night like this.
Born for a stolen kiss.
--Neil Diamond

The ACLU cannot argue that Stutzman was not engaging in a form of political expression when she refused to service these men, and I can also envision her attorneys arguing (as attorneys might for me one day) that those of us hostile to equality on the basis of sexual orientation are minorities whose views one day might need protection from the tyranny of the censor. This is how liberals damn themselves all the time.

I have read revisionists making their bylines decoding Rock Hudson's gay memes against Doris Day in Pillow Talk. The same level of equivocating can be found scripted in Blindfold. I have no doubt this linguistic vibrancy was mourned by Orwell well advanced from contemporary dangers opaque and present. Hitchens said his class took Orwell more seriously than what they were supposed to be  studying. It is difficult, however, not to see Animal Farm as a block of molten lava with a whiff of sulfur making a deadly stench.

Disenfranchisement, Patriot Pluck

Mmm, baby brother accepted my invitation to Google +, this after I gave his voice mail a furious tongue lashing, many weeks ago now, around the time of these events, though I cannot provide a date of the evening the tongue lashing occurred. Why our mother gave him the name of the most loved tribe, born of true love after years of deception, if Hebraic hagiography has any psychic validity, is mystifying, but it seems to suit him. I played chess with his deceased biological father, a schizophrenic who dived on top of my sister and beat her while I had a front row seat on the next pillow over. When he was lucid, I found him sexually attractive, and would have lived Fitch'es best dramatic arc before Oates persuaded her to make it a novel, but the man was on his death march at the dawn of conception. This is Benjamin's history.

He is still my kid brother, and I am his eldest sister, I know people, I know. I have rank, and toggling his blinders might have been harsh, and he has the most adorable boys, my nephews, but those blinders needed some jiggling.

I am not posting a damn word to him in the stream, not now. Lovely, isn't it?

Barring some catastrophic incident, I am not quitting, of course not, but I am not pushing myself hard enough either, not always, afflicted in and not in any good way like Mr. Ramsay, though I hope to hold on, break through.

Not this morning, however. Still need to install the printer. I know it is easy, but I am fearful around all this technology. I came on to reply to my sister citizens who cry out on Facebook asking when is it going to stop?

If you had been paying attention, you'd already know the answer, which is why I have taken so many risks in so many posts, being honest with the negations my dignity has borne, stripped away like a forensic anatomy puzzle. As a journalist, I know nothing, and hell will freeze over before I ever have anything like Ted Koppel's source list, but violence is not created in a vacuum. This is the cost of marginalization.

Jim Croce, Canonized

I work so hard on some of these posts, and then I scroll the account every so often and wonder if I should not simply delete, accept that some form of anxiety and early dementia is taking over. Alzheimer's is not yet an affliction, but short term memory blocks started to plague me when Frank and I were current. Growing in concern. Louise is the only online contact who gave me any worthwhile feedback, and Steve Tara interacted and helped me along when I was active on LiveJournal. Why Daniel Schneider invited me to his community is lost on me, and my Russian viewers are a criminal cyber nuisance merely looking for an opportunity to antagonize me with more of the same.

Once I found out Louise was disabled, her backhanded compliment of my published essay diminished, but Steve Tara's interaction was pleasurable, the difference between being being a good lieutenant under an obligation, and a chance meeting of the minds.

I'd enjoy having fun in digs somewhere in Sydney with Steve, but I never wanted to engage Louise once I knew what she had, and understood her lack of sustaining socialization, because the work I did for the supervisor who traumatized me was mentoring. I have had enough of not being able to make my own choices on who I choose to empower. Louise said that if she friended me "you will not talk about me," essentially asking me to honor accepted social manner; what she confided to me is not interesting, but I am willing to violate her trust, or, in a more conscientious fashion, know my own capacity for it. In the usual manner of binary oppositions, I appreciate her outreach, her attempted assistance on a source, and offer her this advice if she is "out there" lurking: Do not invest in safety valves like I did. Find a partner, be wise about your finances, learn how to assert yourself, and stay away from damaged women like me. I am bad news Louise, for a sheltered younger lady like yourself, and do not want people like you looking up to me, and I'll never mention it again unless for reasons unknown it comes up.

This is why I made the interaction cease: the potential to cause her pain, passing it down the food chain. The disabled community itself taught me how to be that vicious, let alone the fabulous homosexuals who familiarized my past, and if I queried those who view this account if you are getting any sense of my strategy, what I am trying to do, or even where I am too obtuse, if you haven't commented in 300 posts to brave the demonic extremism of a damned mind, you aren't about to start now.

Designed by Giambattista Valli

"I don't want my former students dancing over my corpse."  --Michael C. Clark, stoic lifelong forebearer

How much things have changed, even in the incipient nuances. ABC keeps up on those educating captions that it used in Lost. Madeleine Stowe and Henry Czerny are atavistic blood sucking comforts, meant to be. Vampires without the fanfare, either Gothic or overwrought in the histrionic sensibility of  Anne Rice. If you had to choose between mothers who outlive their children and the pulse of that living scar which diminishes them, and a rabid elitist such as I, would you find the decision agonizing? Sontag also died of leukemia, like Anne's daughter, and I can enter into the impact this had on her son, how it magnified for him, felt it in his words, how he kept repeating "she wasn't the same person," over and over to the interviewer, relating her medical battle with the blood cancer.

Michael, in contrast, is my beast in the jungle, a manufactured construct of the sort whom I should have married. This is what my philosophy instructor wanted me to see, but it actualized too late for my realization. What it points to, however, is why I am so invested in the James list and the scholars in it, whether they are gracious or catty. I just want to publish a few good articles to honor the memory of my stalwart academic advisor. He never abandoned me, whatever imposition I became so many years after the fact, and I simply haven't found my angle, cat fights with Greg Zacharias over my lack of regimentation notwithstanding.

Candy Land

"'I'm truly sorry I retweeted a spoiler."--  Kevin Bacon, local boy.

Why my tolerance is tested during episodes of The Following is something not entirely clear to me. The series shares other Fox family values where evil is clearly delineated, with hard edges, whatever commonality Ryan Hardy shares with Jack Bauer. I made an effort to watch one early episode of 24, the one with Mrs. Bauer in sweater and on cell phone, and that was it. Not that I never watched any other segments, just this, that its immediacy never held my interest.

Hannibal has style, but The Following triggers scar tissue, despite the fact that I was never raped by a megalomaniac. The series is certainly not as exploitative as Dexter, nor does it echo Cassavetes, and yet I need to keep my distance from it in modes of vulnerability, perhaps because it was a cult, a Catholic charismatic off shoot (not quite a true cult, but as close as I came in adolescence to it) which sheltered me from my stepfather.

What gifts we receive when heavy weights like Fishburne grow too old to be Morpheus. 

Braque Boxes

James once suggested to William Dean Howells that he should consider publishing a story on incest.  --Michael C Clark, shoulder ghost

I may not have had the diction on hand then that I have available today, but even before my father smashed my stereo to avoid smashing me, and there were several of those instances, signifying the luck of the draw that my immediate family wasn't subject to annihilation, I knew in my pre-collegiate days that Pete Townshend's solo smash was too effective as a corrosive force on my naivete. Elton and Bernie may have dangled homoerotic lyrics like a choice pork medallion, but they did it with an adolescent simplex. Townshend is darker in Empty Glass, a sick perverted bastard if ever there was one, and yet, in the musical traditions that fermented British rock, the album is a work of art, much like Birth of the Nation put the movie industry on the map due to its technical accomplishments, despite the ferocity of its repressions. Blomkamp speaks to this aesthetic complicity in District 9. He was speaking my language before my blogging unwittingly gave voice to my somewhat unrealized convictions, before I butted heads with secular liberalism, whether Zionist, academic, or LBGT.

The plot does have certain inexplicable elements. Christopher seems to be a lone intelligence amid a swarm of alien idiots who cognate slightly better than great apes, and Copley's Wikus survives a paranoid military of a paranoid government and its equally brutal gangland counterpart, but that given, it is a film that has caught up with what it is possible to achieve in science fiction when authors treat the genre with respect. In watching Blomkamp's mock analysts, we see reinforced how our own analysts stand as a bulwark, giving power the benefit of the doubt. When the Petraeus scandal broke, David Brooks gaffed, sitting in his Newshour chair, "I had lunch with him [the general] last week."

This signifies that Brooks gets access in the Beltway, but little else in what the public should know, could know, about the people we pay to run our governments; District 9 signifies this -- it is a film  integral to Africaan guilt (and those Dutch polyglots should feel guilty) but applicable to the rest of us. It is honest in its view that the legal collapse of apartheid does not magically fuse Europeans and Africans like Siamese twins, although Henry Louis Gates, whose chip on the shoulder practically vibrates, says we are all biologically African! How can caste subjugation be so pervasive? Gates makes Rand's ideological lunacy seem sympathetic.

Blomkamp should have won the best foreign film Oscar, but that would have been risky, an anti-establishment gateway.

Breaking Away

As an undergraduate, when I reached Circe I stopped reading.-- my intrepid Ulysses group facilitator, Lance.

I have also entertained the possibility of returning to Ridley Park. The borough was my last suburban territory before I ran, so unsuccessfully, from the block where I listened to Townsend's album so often mio padre stormed out of his bedroom and abused my stereo, smashing it, while I was reading a community college instructor's critique of one of my grandiose hand written stories. "I have no one to help me pack," I interrupted my neighbor Ed last week, and it is petty obstacles like this with which I am making myself ill. Ed is mildly befuddled by my need, my sheer urgency, to get the holy motherfucking hell away from this company, from African American stoic indolence.

It does not surprise me that Joyce had a daughter with schizophrenia. Ulysses is in many ways symptomatic of the illness, just as the novel itself foreshadows the ailments of the Lost Generation. Zelda was the flowering wound that made Scott the voice of the Jazz Age, and nearly all of Fitzgerald's output speaks to me as much through my Aunt Cecily as through my own creative intuition. Cecily was in the twenties as much as her sister Pauline was in the cloister. Telling you that I hate Joyce bothers me less than the fact that my preferences have passion, but I disservice myself by emoting it that simply, since there is much in Joyce with which I identify.

I told Lance not to read my account on Blogger, despite handing him my Amazon download page, lamely, but should he surf by, I am four and a half chapters behind, in Sirens, so it seems evident that spastic has had her fill of literary class instruction, ne c'est pas? Lance is the talent of the next generation, a kind, decent young man who yields to the humorous impulse. I am not in equal measure a decent and dignified old woman: we always continue learning, but with deceleration of a half century and the twilight of my ambition ahead, no more school, however lax the simulation. 

This posits the urgency. I cannot make Ed see it, that without a relocation, my moral compass will collapse. I need to make this happen this season, and if the drama of my sanity hinges on my failure or success, you'll no doubt read to tell the tale.

Neeson in Dublin

It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan's annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia's choir, any of Kate's pupils that were grown up enough and even some of Mary Jane's pupils too. Never had it fallen flat.  --James Joyce, The Dead

Perhaps Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo was attempting to do something more ambitious with After.Life than what she could deliver, but it is to her credit that I see things in her feature film that echo my undergraduate studies of the early Modernists, things that recall Eliot's grasp for an existence made inert through anesthesia, or Joyce's ability to show a mode of living entirely paralyzed. We have seen such things before. Virtually everyone with the ability to operate a video camera uses a nose bleed to suggest something sinister is afoot in the transient netherworld. We are not told why Ricci's middle school teacher has a bleed, uses meds, or why the mother behaves like a shellfish with a claw attached to your finger. We do not see Liam's Deacon at the initial crash site, and don't know how he gets his victims out of the ER, or why he can fool the doctors so readily with a muscle paralytic. We do not quite need to know these things for the narrative to work better than it does, but Justin Long, scion of Jeepers Creepers the first, is not up to pitting himself against Neeson's absolute and short tempered faith. Long's on and off panic switch is as much static as Ricci's desperate phone call. I am still waiting for little Ricci to inhabit a role I can believe in, her complicity in Monster aside, and I am not entirely clear on Canterbury's Jack. An apprentice, yes, but Wojtowicz seems to want him to stand as an ambiguous observer whose conscience is finally swayed.

More than suspense, Agnieszka seemed to be aiming for suspension, asking us how we live inside the routine entrapments we fear changing: There is the promise of more potential within the failure.

Cessation's Farce

A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.--G.K. Chesterton


I did not read Christopher Hitchens' last review of Chesterton in the Atlantic, but I did read Bennet's editorial note on kindle about the processes involved in editing a polemicist who was literally breathing his last on a hospital mattress, and I had to wonder if in the modern sense of the word, terminal conditions have become a consequential folly, a paradox that the Menippean G.K. himself might have appreciated. Ebert also engaged in a form of self delusion. His optimism could not bargain with death any more than anguish does not hasten it, unless the anguished utilize accouterments; the will to die must have to be very great indeed, and the bargaining with the limits of our biology is nothing new. On his deathbed Henry James bestirred himself to consider Napoleon's delusions of grandeur (again, oddly not uncommon among homosexuals) and it is asserted that Proust revised his lost time to his last breath; J Edgar Hoover, I believe, died in office at a near miraculous time of history. Hollywood would have us believe that Charlton Heston revived Rex Harrison from his deathbed.

Is it necessarily a good thing that Westerners refuse to yield to the inevitable? Cripples face the constant threat of annihilation, and the more astute are circumspect about ontology, but not Caucasians with contemporary bourgeoisie sensibilities. I do not mean to suggest that people past 50 should not fight disease and attempt to remain relevant, only that eradicating death as a ritualized transition, giving way to a sterile clinical environment where our cadavers are rolled to the morgue, seems too much of a trade off to banality. This is more than the residue of religious nostalgia. Death needs to be respected as part of the natural process of a living ecosystem.

Tron Beats

This is the difference between me and a dead optimist who is as vibrant as I am leaden: he keeps making the best of it and he's dead. I am calculating a pitch based on the cost of his saliva cancer as a rational argument for a federal euthanasia standard; if you're wondering if I am that ruthless, yes. What saddens me is the fact that Siskel & Ebert taught me how much I like to argue. I paid attention to the conversation as much as to the movie under discussion. What does Chaz do with Roger's online accounts, or the Chicago Sun-Times with theirs, for that matter?

I could not bring myself to take his twitter account off my following list, and now I'll never know whether it went like this:

EBERT: "Dan I have a dysfunctional groupie for you; look at her comment in response to my post on loneliness..."

Or like this:

SCHNEIDER: He won't mind if I peel off this spastic figure for my Cosmoetica lists. (and a week later). "Look at what I get for trying to be nice. She told me to fuck myself because I don't have a hard on for Marcel Proust."

Trail Mix

I wanted to discuss the Gilliam box set in depth, but the very nature of his direction makes this an arduous proposition, and The Fisher King, despite its humor towards social stratification and disruption, is too much Hollywood shellac on The Big Apple. This leads me to recycle Robin Williams and my wrestling match with his talent and sentimentality, his concealed diagnosis, and his interesting ambiguity in maturity, probably not a good idea to continue on in this vein, a bit puss weary from the radiator vapor, and good for me, I caught my drop in the toilet, but if not an accident, neither was it a clean run. IBS and Crohn’s disease doesn’t quite fit my issues with impaction; ulcerative colitis might be closer, and hence, I may not be able to struggle with Septa to go back to daddy until later tomorrow, or very early Thursday. Have I fucked myself royally? Should I take kimmy? I can’t really carry the carrier, meeting up with the wry Johnathan Pryce in the nuisance of Brazil’s blue dyed dystopia. Pryce was the best cast, and Brazil had the best doomed aspirational appeal of all four films, with its conclusion suggestive of clinical torture escaped through mythos with Kim Greist as nihilistic as it gets, gift wrapped in the fantastical, unless it’s Twelve Monkeys, with its muzzle flash panache. Willis and Pitt do a good job in this narrative puzzle, with its sinister subplot, but in terms of aesthetic criteria, this member of the box set pleases me least. Perhaps I will return for kimmy, but this opens more worms with futurist bag ladies and cats. If Brazil is midnight blue in its tenor, Monkeys is a garish yellow, a tilt toward Ra and the Earth’s inevitable roast in a nova, a proclivity toward human error doomed to repeat cycles of destruction. Both Monkeys and The Zero Theorem link mental affect to social disease, with mixed results, as any delusional state is a reflection of its place and time, like the rise of autism as an evolutionary subroutine. In terms of Gilliam’s legacy and his signature, a unique imprimatur in the marketplace of intellectual angst and our defeat by our own processes, this isn’t enough for my digestion, but I am disengaging my anchor at an age no one should, wondering how Robin’s hesitation marks apply. Brazil has a particular significance, of course, a shadow over my own aspiration, as fun as it was on the cinematic screen. It was not the last movie I’d experience in the traditional method of projector technology, but it was one of the best of the last, rivaled only by AI, with AI’s bummer of an end. 

Parisian Move

"We don't want ordinary cripples-- only elite ones."  -- Will Self

Defy Amazon and Walmart every so often. Defy convenience. I did and went kitsch, having never owned my own beret. Clap with small happiness. Perhaps I should ship Jerry one as an apologia for subversively highlighting his online profile. Not sure if he'd look foolish in a beret these days. I give myself permission to love his memory. I only know Susan through him. Susan and I went here. For Susan. Those kind of references. When I was an idiot and we were all young, I espied a glimpse of her. Susan Saint Jame-ish, like this.

Kowtow as a gesture of respect. A woman who can wield a leash that well deserves it, not that I offer much in the way of forbidden fruit. Even now, discussing it in the most abstract sense, I cannot picture me and Jerry sleeping together. Sin? Guilt? Terror over defiling an authority figure? An unwillingness to accept that more functional individuals are vulnerable, just as I? Mmm. The naked ape, producer of laughs, absurdio reductio, complicit in so many escape valves. 

I am on the look out for a roommate or two. 

Now, if you are lesbian, and can handle that I reject your orientation, I am still willing to split expenses. Lay a hand on me and it's your culpability which places you at risk, not mine, however --not that I assume the butch league is falling over itself to help me make a fresh change, but one never knows.

Largesse in Bed

...like The Mount, it has numerous rooms and a bewildering array of windows.    --Sandra M Gilbert, The Whirling Princess

I can understand why Sheldon Novick tossed out Alice James and her morbidity as a project for my morbidity, and I was always morbid, a horrible child, if that satisfies the mood swing advocates that I am in self-denial. I throw tantrums-- but let not my narcissism stray too far afield. As fond as I am of Dr. Novick's generous spirit, I would become impatient with Alice as a subject, a charge that bedevils Susan Sontag's output. I would prefer not to dismiss a project solely for the hope of money, though if I knew the invalid left a diary I had forgotten it, and remain curious, even in my apparent indulgence for forgiving bad metaphysical quests. Liam's After.Life (09) falls into the same category and is interesting despite itself. Natasha had not yet had her fatal accident at the time of filming, as far as dates go, but for all the intents and purposes of Deacon as character, Liam might have already been cocooned in morbid grief. I want to resist the story line's literalism that our morticians may indeed be serial killers, and for an actor of Neeson's caliber, the plot  might have offered up a more textured ambiguity on Western origin myths, but the premise is indeed interesting, as I mull.

There are lesbians and there are women who grow immeasurably weary of men, and I suspect Sontag had little internal anchor, as opposed to a preference for women's breasts. Her son is still out there, and would probably disabuse my ruminations if I had any name recognition, but I am having trouble remembering why Sontag had a public mantle in the first place. I'd like to read her work on AIDS as metaphor.

I will not hold my breath for audience support on acquiring a copy. 

Syndicate Winding

Laughing like children, living like lovers,
Rolling like thunder, under the covers. -- Elton John's pap paean to the blues, toward his late career trajectory as a has been.

Predicting the consequences of impaction can be difficult. In the film Brazil, how the system reacts to it is not only absurd, but a detriment to the health of the body politic. Buttle is killed by an over active police response to a clerical error, and the actual subversive, De Niro's Tuttle, is defeated not as the anti-hero who covets efficiency, through a violent constraint. The luckless engineer vanishes in a paper ordinance glut, just as this same complicity to a perceived threat defeats the protagonist Lowry's decency, and annuls his skill at navigating the information systems hardware. Gilliam was right not to personify a central figure such as Richard Burton in 1984, because no one of us understands the modern autocracy we've created, and any anguish it generates.

If we take Simenon's Rico and place it at the post-war end of the spectrum, and we bookend Arlington Road as a fin de siecle warning to the digital age, a warning that is heeded by no one, evidently: In theory, North Korea cedes its foreign autonomy to China, but that stubborn xenophobic sense of Juche may spark a new conflict on the demilitarized zone. Beware the end of history, because it points to the deeper mendacity of the Bush Administration's offense in Iraq. Saddam was a kitten next to the Jong family. Brazil spans the mid-point between the syndicate, and our complicity with it at the dawn of the material age, and the deceptive new world order that Pellington insinuates through Jeff Bridges well played paranoia in Arlington. Everyone is sacrificed. Mob bosses who lose face, the neighborhood boys who gained through the possible necessity of criminality as a living. Even Conte's Eddie, triumphant in the closing sequence, comes off as defanged, possibly still out on a limb should vengeance rear its head. In Brazil, Gilliam turns the tables on those who survive through deliberate ignorance. All those plastic surgery patches hardly amount to bliss, and in Arlington, we discover Robbins and Cusack have strings too, that they are also being played, private contractors in an internal dirty war.

If I leave the Philadelphia public housing system as things stand, in terms of factual reality, I am setting myself up to face incarceration on much harsher terms, and yes, I realize this, but if I do not shake things up, I face the prospect of being parceled out like pork rinds anyway to the self-interest of those coming up behind my fading geriatric twilight. I deserved better within the environs of the most powerful country on earth, even if you find that sentiment prideful in audacity. 

This may not conclude everything I have to offer about collusion, complicity, and the diseases of the intellect it generates, but I am winding down what has been a lengthy rebuttal from my Jamesian scolding. I have been online a very long time, and I have been with this Henry James community the longest. For what it's worth, they have kept me afloat with a mostly delightful arcane sensibility, and I have the fondest affections for them, even when I have hairballs plaguing my colon!

Bon voyage! (I brace.)