Richard Basciano

"A smile opens up the whole body!" Danny Aiello

Local newscasts serve up unethical contractors with the same relish that we dig into a pot roast dinner, and undoubtedly, local journalists will investigate construction bosses with renewed vigilance in light of Basciano's malfeasance. The reasons for the consistent malpractice are probably as long  and drawn out as the history of architecture, the ways in which edifice, monuments, churches and palaces are used, instilling grandeur, making statements about imperial might, material efficiency. Boots on the ground may get reconstructed in historical documentaries, but only the designers are treated with iconic status, whether this is through Charlie Rose, and his desire to educate his audience on design as art, or Peter Greenaway engaged in his curious examinations via cinematography. In the art of negativity, however, it also serves up the disintegration of Italian culture that can never be put back together again, even if there was a good deal of luck involved in the rise, the glory, of the Roman city state.

In one of my unfortunate events when I still utilized Paratransit services regularly, my sexual excitement over a male candy sent my driver into Basciano's local smut forum, closed now, some months prior to the Market Street collapse. I gave a fat no nothing black guy with gristled facial hair a hard on, and to this day, carry that episodic guilt, tuning myself to Kafka's abstract disparities. I might have been raped, or led him to get heavy on another client. Greaseball to jig indictment, hand in hand with long standing Mediterranean ambivalence toward North Africa. In these micro narrative terms, Basciano may be a facsimile, an anti-matter image layered on an already corrosive and provincial retraction (the mafia) of what it is to be a member of the meritocracy, the established figurehead in charge, running things, for appearances sake, while skating the lowest common denominator, because serfs are still expendable. Peasants no longer exist in the modern world. Of course not.

I am still in an exasperated stasis over what I did wrong saving my revisions which apparently vanished on my external drive, retyping because I still lack the steady nerve to open my HP and try to rescue my content. In my new found freedom of repose, sinkhole mattress challenging posture and sleep, dismay over my most influential professor's collection leads me to re-examine why I punished myself so badly over my lack of striving to eclipse him.

I never had certain things that make the arc of life worth living, like the joy of falling into a lover. Franz had many of the same problems as his health would gradually necessitate a disability stipend. I was never partial to his genius, of course, though in moments my prism aligns.