State Media

Relative to China, the Russian Federation, the United States, Mexico, the British Isles are a small land mass, and this will no doubt have to serve as the rationale for why Nina Sosanya is in every fucking series the BBC produces as The Anglicized Minority. She is a competent actress, and no doubt represents the epitome of progressive nirvana, playing the lesbian fuck buddy in the Tango Halifax upgrade, which reprises the same motif we've seen throughout a century of British film: the elderly have nine lives around which the productive contemporaries orbit with Their Own Importance. But wait! Here she is in Morse, playing the love child, or the bitchy barrister over reaching in a Silk power struggle. American television is not immune to familiarity contempt casting. (cf Richard Kind) But surely there must be a Pakistani or a fresh face from Bollywood who can handle the British accent and the cosmopolitan flair of engaging in coitus with Caucasians of European genotypes! Even the CBC understands that stale is not always a compensating reassurance! It is almost a synchronic answer the English viewpoint, about the nature of inclusion on the homefront, not so much strident as bloody dull. American producers, however moronic, are at least willing to actualize black culture as one thing, white another, with Latinos in a fluid, amorphous median.

Rescue me!

Keystone State, A Federal Subsidy

Dahlia thinks she is doing due diligence for victims advocacy, and having lived the life of my mother's domestic violence, Ms Briggs has a long road ahead of her, one that is beyond the ACLU's scope, but let me put my perpetrator Brandon front and center. He made me a victim of an inner city home invasion first because I took off of work to prepare to transition to full time, but second, and more importantly, because I was complying with HUD and Presby's extermination regulations. Back then, cabinet's had to be cleared and sprayed, and I was hurriedly clearing my kitchen. Knock on my door, which I believed was the pest contractor.

Trudy Richardson knew nothing about this, and she was most likely in middle school avoiding the bare foot and pregnant syndrome when Brandon decided I was rib eye steak, but the Presby executive who retired before Trudy Richardson deployed her dementia commando team knew, and Ellen Hovey would have never threatened me in the fashion under which Trudy was permitted to do, given the extreme stress I was already in; my lawsuit against the company is coming, rest assured, but Dahlia unwittingly assists in my argument. Section 811 202 housing is as corrupt as any Russian state profit model, and it has to end, and God as my witness, I am going to burn this torch beyond my death, if necessary.

Inversion Therapy

"I do not mean to suggest this was a conversion of convenience. I wanted to believe."-- Reza Aslan, Newshour damage control candidate

William Holden was before my time. Why he is a Hollywood celeb is beyond my comprehension, in much the same way that Miley Cyrus might be Tralfamadorian. It is solely due to Kathleen Parker that I gather Miley is a soft pornography performer, and I wail, too young to be in the generation gap, but here we are. It seems Holden's one and only elevation is against Bogart and beautiful Audrey. Audrey Hepburn transcends stardom. Looking at her face, I may not want to believe in God, but can understand why we have angels dance. Holden only confirms my tendency toward nihilism; hated Earthling when it recollected my youth. The man is not an actor, and this makes me rapacious, willing to drown Sri Lanka so that Kwai exists as a CinemaScope travesty. Guinness had a good death in Kwai, but Alec Guinness actually has theatrical force, much like Simon Schama.

I do not care to read Rough Crossings, but I am thinking of Schama's recognition of the dialectical tensions between Britain and the US on liberalism, because it can be seen in the majority of the twentieth films between the last imperial power and its fabulous offspring, and I half toy with the idea of contacting Schama and saying I need a fucking vocabulary mate, hey, help a cripple out dear boy. But why would he assist me? Pounding my fist, I see it, trying to encapsulate it, but it's difficult, a heterodoxy between the glamour of Hannibal and the documentary ruthlessness of 10 Rillington Place. Attenborough's Christie triggers memories of my assault, and frightens me more than Michael Rooker in Portrait, despite the realism of Henry's alienated outside status as a predator. 

Marie the aunt tells me to forget the Brandon Phillips who nearly killed me but I cannot; he lives in every sexual assault I experienced before or since, and this inner city brawn boy minority coward whose grandmother was a Presby tenant on the floor above me may one day make me famous, unpacking every middle brow Catholic girl's worst nightmare, I know the terror of Christie's victims, as well as the bemusement over Aslan's kerfuffle. Academics can also be pandering hacks, and this will be a scab I may pick for some time to come.

I would not have posed the question the way Lauren Green did, but the Newshour is also guilty of bias over the Zealot fiasco. Propping up Aslan was more important to the PBS team than being objective in terms of the quality of the text. Green was actually challenging Aslan's doubt, whether or not her interrogative stance was an unfair blow to his integrity. Remind me that I am pushing myself too hard for my age, and that I cannot live on maple walnut brownies, but I have fallen in love, not with William Holden.

Fedora's Lurk, Like Reza Aslan

The prolonged Cold War—that Manichean drama of projections and counterprojections; the Vietnam War—not generally acknowledeged as the longest war in American history (1954-73); the protests against the Vietnam War, which forcibly divided the generations-- Joyce Carol Oates, ferocity shrew

Dashiell Hammett could teach those rushed kindle authors a few things about making light surface fiction interesting. I have studied him more than once under Jewish and Gentile liberal. James Joyce may rouse my hostility as an unforgiving fuck who smirks his way into the apologia of the dimmer dial, but Hammett doesn't thin his gruel for the sake of the puzzle, and The Maltese Falcon is one of my favorite commercial novels. My money is on Sam Spade teaching alien archaeologists more about civilization than the joke on Leopold Bloom. James Spader seems to embody a bit of each character, the Manichean detective, the corrupt and corrosively mocked Jew. It manifests itself in his early and quixotic role in Stargate, a breathtaking speculative cinematic otherworld. follows him in Wolf, manifests a wickedly promising menace in Boston Legal, only to fizz in The Practice. It is a menace of more complex nuance than that offered by Christopher Walken. Walken carries a bit of jingoism in his ruthless irony, but Spader leaves one unsure, as if he is a fervent convert to Satanic possibilities, or a Crusader who just discovered the potency of salvation. We're never sure which in his manipulative antipodes.

It is not enough for The Blacklist, which is patently ridiculous. No one man can manipulate die hard gum shoes and the ruthless hardened criminals and stay three moves ahead of either, not even America's unifying KGB statesman. With that qualification, the show may be of use, in its idiotic television way (Ukrainian ordinance guerrillas apparently inhabit the capital and spring to life for the convenience of the screen writer's guild, but hey, who is starving in corrupt government housing methodologies, not screen writers!). Good and bad each have debilitating costs and secrets, in the measure of how far brutality has come, gut stabbings are routine in gratuitous teleplay, a delight! If producers wanted to do it right, they'd anglicize a Persian and twist his balls in a confused identity matrix. The real Islamists can't be killed fast enough, but multicultural humanism on an American campus is a pasturized entry pass.

Vecchio's Bended Knee

What child is this, who, laid to rest,
On Mary's lap lay sleeping?
Whom angels greet with anthems sweet,
While shepherds watch are keeping?-- the classic carol

Jack Dorsey is the boy man who lucked out and got the coolest bubble gum machine we fantasized about as children, but the standard terms of service bulletin does not abrogate moral responsibility, nor does it resolve the issue of what to do with fanaticism in the context of social networks. I know something about hate, real vitriolic hate of the type which led Poets & Writers to suspend me before bitterness and betrayed trust extended to hating my former homosexual associates, one of whom was a real friend, if not the best one for me, before my tolerance ruptured into corrosion, before I really got hurt, physically and mentally, and experienced black racism which liberals hastily deny exists, but I know enough to know we are not going to kill ourselves back to the age of Exodus, and I have restrained myself from my worst caustic excesses, for selfish reasons as well. I care about my legacy. Members of al-Shabab need to realize they are already corrupted, if they are using twitter to heighten the profile of this fantasy Caliphate they believe they can impose on Northern Africa.

I weep for our dead, but also for the fact that I am the oracle of a history very few are willing to respect. I lived the Kent State massacre, lived it, and like the rest of the country, was horrified that a state national guard could kill university students simply for protesting our military aggression bent on dousing Asian nationalism. I've read that Google hates being the arbiter of first amendment rights; I get it. Dorsey imitates the model, a convenient preclusion of conscience. Tears can now resume streaking my face.

Perihelion Sight

"Nobody understands what's going on." --George Clooney, not yet in the State Department

Syriana was one of the first films I saw on Netflix, and I cannot say my reaction was compatible to our deceased avuncular critic. Headphones do not compensate entirely for tinnitus and wax build up, and the best I could do was think "oil equals one serious game of expendable collateral damage," and then I otherwise felt stupid, and don't like feeling that way. Denzel's upgrade of The Manchurian Candidate, while more canonical towards the 62 version, had that same diaphanous quality, more trouble than it's worth, not taking "aim at the left and the right," as was written of the original, but equating globalization with opportunistic expediency?  Columnists wrote similar sentiments about the finale of Lost, and if this all adds up to a new subgenre, is this species assisting us in hitting the brakes in a responsible fashion?

I cannot get rid of the Democratic Party. Josie is writing state wide emails about being unable to adopt her nephews and urging an expansion of Medicaid for the Allyson Schwartz campaign. I told the campaign ADAPT's favorite lesbian was my enemy. I told the campaign they would not know the lesbian with foster care snorting out of her every orifice was my enemy, wished them luck, and unsubscribed. I told Organizing for America (Action), to "kiss my spastic ass," unsubscribed, and was then forced to opt in the spam filter, because OFA insists on my loyalty. I am not returning to the GOP, although the idea of approaching Senator Toomey's staff has entertained serious mental calculation. My problems run deeper than aligning with any one part of the political spectrum. Progressive expansion and conservative austerity share blame between them, and this for not studying Heidegger in the pragmatic sense, and not in terms of quantum physics. The tools we use solve fucking problems, while the systems we create make lives of intractable complexity.

Aphelion

The SHARE website doesn't convey the sensibility of rolling into a psychiatric facility that polices itself rather poorly. I was sexually harassed in a Darby Share, threatened with assault in a Northeast location, propositioned in a partial hospital, and have seen eruptions of the sort that make the mentally ill easy targets for Kathleen Parker and David Brooks. What goes on in a Share is innocuous until an incident, valid or obscure, disturbs the peace. People masturbate, fondle each other, stare at television listlessly once their entitlement for the month is spent. Sordid and boring, how much of the negative behavior is attributable to reluctance to comply with chemical saturation, finding the dosage combination and the therapeutic treatment that works, I am not the blogger to turn to for that data. Charles Krauthammer is the practitioner turned conservative paraplegic follow the schematic this is the concomitant series of conditions psychiatrist. Does he still treat patients? Unknown. What would he point out to me? That I use quadriplegia affected damage from cerebral palsy not to work at attitude readjustment? That anti-depressants work? That my perspective is impaired from post-traumatic stress?

Was I bipolar when I was an undergraduate? The answer to that question has to be tempered by the fact that my life was regulated from birth until seventeen years of age by institutionalization, and when I met Jerry I was nascent, naive, repressive about my mother, her significantly more severe suffering, her sometimes abusive lovers, and I regret the extent of my emotional investment in his intellectual ability, know it was not his fault, and perhaps not entirely mine either, and as he counseled me on several occasions, pedagogy is not entirely unaware of this aspect in the instructor student dynamic. All this as a given, I have never seen myself as sick, ever, until I had to fend off Debra Horne threatening me when my life imploded in the recession, and this contributes to the sense of stigma that Ed inadvertently linked me to when he connected me to Zach Tollen. The burden is almost one too many to carry, especially when the weight of matriculation is a much different bar for me than it is for a licensed driver who owns a car, or has use of one. 

Can I let an accident of incomplete information go? Yes, but my attempt at selecting a neighbor as an outlet essentially ended, either as a failure of my ability as a writer or a mutually skewered comprehension. The reason it is so much more difficult to shrug off disability center negligence is due to the fact that this negligence never corrects itself, never reforms, and my former supervisor got away with the commission of a serious crime. The impact of this on my life was proportionately detrimental, and I remain cemented in place. How would you maintain a healthy outlook in such circumstances?

I avoided the mention of the naval facility shooting, more or less out of saturation, but I do not see it as either a treatment or gun regulation failure. Navy reservists need to have access to weapons, but soldiers and police are as fallible as anyone. They snap. We cannot control every contingency.

Charm Fractals

"I tried that,"  Vera Farmiga on a woman's time honored prerogative on experimentation.

Up in the Air (2009) signals a number of conflicted messages I am not prepared to discuss in significant detail; it has to seep in, hopefully faster than my ligament contractions, but it rivals my admiration for Aaron Eckart's scathing bite, and my initial viewing makes me regret lack of effort to see it in its initial release. Definitively of its age, I see things in the comedy which point to why The American, a year later, didn't mesh. Clooney's ruthless charm is too decent for psychopathy in actualization. Depersonalization is one or few degrees removed from an assassin nerved by conscience, very similar to lack of accountability without litigation to force the issue. This Teflon mannequin aspect the actor projects at his best may explain his self-appointed status as Sudanese savior, and also why he and Clooney pere mesh uneasily between news media and entertainment. "Why did Europeans do everything?"

My loutish philosophy professor used to toss this trick question out to his class as a kind of false positive, but let me ask, what has the guilt tied to imperialism actually solved? Aren't some of Clooney's more substantial projects a rather bleak answer in kind? 

My follower shambled in from his daily routine the Tuesday evening I chased the Rosenbach's tail feathers. I was in congress with the developmental idiots, reviving McCarthyism. Ed did not say hello, and I simply observed him walk in, take the elevator, knowing his sanguine temperament did not mean to trick spark my social fear based on Project Share field duress. No regret, no pang of remorse. I had my doubts from the moment I sat with him over coffee on the tenth floor, but I also lost my sense of provocation as well.

There is a lot of bull shit artist in me, but spastic flesh moving past the half century mark is actually coming home to roost, and in the degree to which I am pressed for time, murder conspiracies may not matter, made into a kindle single, or seriously considered. Pointless wild justice on the principle of the thing. Does it come down to the amount of indignity we have to tolerate, the number of casualties needed before real movements mitigate the body politic?

Open House

"That was something else. "-- The Rosenbach director correcting my veer off topic.

If I was savvy enough with graphics, I would screen shot the Rosenbach events email and embed it for you, but suffice to say, their open house is September 28, from 12 to 6, and if you have not been yet, and enjoy eccentric historical preserves in cityscapes, then go take a peek. My first time I practically fell over myself to unload my small change in their donation vessels, and we will not dwell on my economic folly of maintaining my contributor membership; it is a folly I wish upon myself. The docents are friendly and know the history of the family. I did not spend a great deal of time in the Jewish history exhibit last evening, primarily out of consideration for Jewish tribalism and the museum's more important moneyed donors, but it is still an accessible and informative exchange, and the Civil War gallery is well designed, interesting to amateur and professional.

I shall not be in attendance, as I am a member now, and will conserve my energies in the direction of events, or future reading groups, so my absence will no doubt be an added inducement. Eh, let me hedge: If I am well enough maybe I will drive over and play mascot, but stay on Delancey. My sore spot over my reading fumble of Ulysses during Bloomsday this summer past is minor in the scale of things, but perhaps nerves led me to broach the issue. I know I am not upscale, and perhaps irrevocably falling out of the meritocracy. I may also secretly desire to try again one day, but that involves politics, like anything, and I am the Italian who hates Joyce!

There are lesser and greater inclusionary practices, however, and what quirky little Rosenbach represents is the greater, though I do not have the knowledge beforehand to know if the bookseller installed an elevator in the home as it was when it served its primary purpose as a bourgeoisie dwelling. Do mark your calendar.

Pop Up Recollection: Enemy Consortium

"I'm a puppet of a high functioning sociopath."-- Megan Boone

Patty Duke is given a diva scene in the tepid drama, The Baby Sitter, tapping into her varnished mania to have an episode made leaden by booze, and it is sadly camped, almost stenciled in to a talented actress'es notable itinerary. 

All aging actors seem to encompass these plot points: the breakthrough, the rise, the critical accolades in the train toward the apex, and then they attempt to cling to their glory through hackneyed scripts which then go to DVD. Shatner is no exception, and the only reason he had a resurgence on Boston Legal was because he played with audience nostalgia for his embodiment of James T Kirk, lampooning the action hero with considerable sophistication as the barging litigator. Boomer middle age anxiety was cruel, however, and heads rolled in the dust. 

Duke is a footnote, and Shatner plays the gallant, and we're indifferent. Respectful to the elder celebrity with a nod, but know in the back of our minds he is fish meal for obit gurus. Duke's exit is more consequential.

Her bipolar disorder initially cycled her creativity, and in The Patty Duke Show, between the lines of the starched script, runs an argument for accommodation of mood differentials, as opposed to their classification through the ever gargantuan medical model. Arguably, Duke herself may have put a dent in her ability to get roles through her embrace of the term as a medical definition. As a teen, she channeled that intensity to humanize Helen Keller, but failed to transition over in maturity, in contrast to Sally Field, who dramatized the condition for ER.

If we're going to deconstruct our humanity through microcelluar biology, the potential cyborgs which emerge from Google's Tonka Toy kit in AI might provide an answer as to why self aware intelligent life destroys itself before a hospitable planet cooks in a nova event horizon. By the same token, competing theories, in certain instances, do more harm than good. We're all assuming Lubitz died a mass murderer, perplexed by his actions. Unless he left a manifesto in a drawer, we'll never know, and shouldn't automatically consign his fate to the need for advanced neuroscience.

Cruel Seas, Clef

As seems to be the norm for this project, the British have their own peculiar variations, though Esther Costello feels like an American brand because of the standard tilt by Joan Crawford. Lousy performer, the camera loves her despite this, and yet in this muck raking narrative, she seems to struggle in a way that Nicholson's skill would not readily reveal to a viewer, to dim her alpha status for the sake of the story. Heather Sears is far less titanic than Patty Duke as the famous mute, yet there is also more realism, oddly, despite the fact that we're familiar with the prescriptive patterns the studio system followed in the fifties.

I am bewildered, Roger Ebert is dead, and I would have to make the time, or will have to if this really interests me, to discover why Monsarrat wrote this novel, and I do not mean it simply as a question of money, but as a question of Keller's fame conflicted with the issue of exploitation. I would not know where to begin, but it has thrown me a curve. Purchasing the novel is neither here nor there; I do not really wish to buy it. Looking at it can wait until I make space to browse in library, but I keep asking myself if the naval officer was fair to the iconic heroine, and I'm entirely in the dark; in addition, the wiki entry suggests the script substantially reversed the book. The movie, however, covers all the bases I've covered. Sexual development and abuse, chicanery, compliance over tyranny, rebellion, the angel demon dichotomy.

Beneath the film we have, there seems to be a counter narrative, one that was not followed through but would have been more intriguing, though we've seen this motif many times as well: abject poverty creating a banshee devoid of normal human intercourse. It opens the film after Esther's accident unique for its era. I'll see what I can do in terms of further inquiry, at least in a future tense.

Nebuchadnezzar's Amulet

I stayed for ten minutes. What am I doing here reverberating in my browbeaten intelligence, relieved to be familiar with the director, laughing sardonically at their mail, treating a dying and angry entitlement strapped spastic woman like a philanthropist, though to be honest I feel an affinity with their librarian, who was gasping in the galleries, busy day. I left not due to alienation so much as lack of readiness to use my weapons at self-promotion. I am going to make labels, play the game of unsaid to make one last bid to get myself as equidistant from micro Protestant Africa as possible, treated myself to dinner since I indeed looked like a glass of La Lastra Sagovese, 60 dollars for calamari and doggy bags, living death as history. Am I a rabid monster destined for the gallows?

I had no idea Helen Keller was the source of so much salacious gossip in the fifties. Before her deification in the notorious play The Miracle Worker, there was the roman de clef, the story of Esther Costello. Heather Sears before Patty Duke. I am reading picture books of a blind deaf socialist when I was six years old and she was still alive, Keller, an ACLU founder, and possibly a mistress to Sullivan's husband. It just suggests to me things so difficult to convey between where I've been, and how much I hate now, how much I would hate her socialism the way I hate the disabled community I've experienced.

Be glad there is no magic pill people; you would not want to deal with me cured, maniacal with rage. 

Tommy Lee Jones and persistent mediocrity of made for television

An elation had evidently penetrated to his vitals, and caused him to dilate as if he had been filled with gas. He snapped his fingers in the air, and whistled fragments of triumphal music.-- Stephen Crane, "The Monster"

Eyes of Laura Mars is too diaphanous in its denouement to amount to anything, but the link it makes between glamour, violence, our belief that there is something to ESP despite the charlatan horde, women scarred by it, men fractured by pain into remorseful killers trying to police themselves, makes it the signature syndication vehicle of adolescent imprint, laudably modish. The seventies lost itself into that kind of couture, that sartorial sensibility that Orhan Pamuk might wish upon Turkish police, the shag was real, so were bell bottoms, and Ms. Dunaway's boots, Carole King hair. It might have amounted to something if Jones, the rising Texan boy, had killed Faye, gotten away with it, and went on his merry way, though the script would have needed tightening. In the course of this project, I thought I had found the equally mopey British movie about a fraudulent EMS driver who steals a doctor's medical board exams and then destroys his one, two, friends who learn the truth. It too was a mediocre soppy deal, but Britons at least have the courage not to lie to themselves about brutal lack of ethics, and I believed I had tracked this chilling little number down and placed it in keywords, but if I did I can't find it, frighteningly plausible as it is. With Mars as a noted exception, Jones generally stays within his range, and developed his own sartorial sense in his sugar daddy years, opting out of his libertarian liberalism of The Park is Mine (why the fuck was this movie made at all?). Idiotic as this vet drama is, it was produced the same decade  Terry Gilliam decided to dazzle his clique with Brazil. "Park" is like a weak stream of mostly water-clear urine that nevertheless anticipates 9/11 with its clueless governing class, who try to deliberately mislead the public about an angry PTSD warrior with an agenda. Race issues are very lightly trod, with Yaphet Kotto as the pragmatic operations officer, who kills a guerrilla fighter his superiors had approved to take Jones out, while meanwhile, in the background, your typical hustler is hawking orange Tees to feed the movement Jones supposedly sparks with his one man insurrection. Only through the droll do we get to the expansive legitimacy caricature of Men in Black, or the stoic disillusion of No Country For Old Men, or the warrior who has reached his limit in The Hunted. The reality of Jones' textured bluntness in this is life as hard as it is is complex, much like Crane's feudalism in his little New York town. Beneath the surface, "The Monster" asks many complex questions about moral obligation and social codes, the cruelty of social norms in every demographic. Ingenious novella that it is, if Harper published it today, it would remain a telling fable on the limits of tolerance on all sides of the isle, and nothing has changed in the America of black and white. Crane's naturalism has a veracity Caucasians are now forbidden to depict, the controversy I've sown a case in point.

Human Automata

The modern concierge's daughter who fulfills her ambition by playing the Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas at the Theatre Francais is only one of many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue. --George Bernard Shaw

It disappoints that the classic facial beauty Faye Dunaway emanates on screen leads with few exceptions to mere dilatory satisfaction. It may be the limitation of her range and roles operating off of each other, or that she never again had a director like Polanski, since Polanski seemed able to illicit a vulnerable tigress, a predatory feline who leaps forth as her hauteur fractures under pressure. The raging porcelain never quite delivers the suggestion of her intensity and emotional investment, once you look beyond Chinatown, except for her supporting role as Yolande fourteen years ago. She was a tour de force of conviction as a queen mother under duress in the face of the dissimulation of Franco national identity, despite the fact that The Messenger disserviced both the legend and the veracity of Joan d'Arc, a film of minute ensemble moments which could not carry the whole affair. Dustin Hoffman comes late in the day to post-modern fragmentation.

This does not detract from Dunaway's glamour; it only points to the juxtaposition between the promise of a glamorous figure and the expectations of catharsis within a performance. Marilyn Monroe had the same problem but conveniently overdosed into hagiography. Dunaway outlasted herself into the contempt of the familiar figure always on the verge of ferocious histrionics, devoid of climax and exhausted pleasure. She barely fakes it with Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. There is the glimpse of her breast, a diminutive curve in a room festooned under studio lighting, yet the erotic tension, repressed to the imagination, is nearly unbearable. Her contemporary stills evoke the octogenarian Mae West of my childhood, the capped teeth now garish, skeletal, somehow still beautiful. "I have completed a work," I wonder if this is how she settles her accounts with the residual impact of her rise during the decade of America's militant radicalism, a decade neither all that anarchist nor as transformative as is supposed among popular sentiment.

Autotrophic Folly

"The term deep state originated in Turkey." -- a paraphrase from Sennott's reporting.

Granta Magazine is of singular distinction only due to the fact that I've supported it solely as a subscriber. In the nineties I was intimated by its quality, more like a quarterly collection than a periodical, and the sisters who founded Glimmer Train imitate the Granta brand, but imitate it like a Tiffany lamp knock off. The Glimmer Train sisters have rejected me, though be it rarely, and this is fine. Glimmer Train is not my favorite project. Granta used to be; I am less enamored of its voice, less intimidated, even irked by its contributor narcissism, I've become selective, more easily led to perceive flaws, than I was in the past. I do not kid myself. Certain bylines still matter, and Granta's would, but nothing I have is that piece. I am not going to write about my mother's death in that sonorous Granta fashion. Pushing the envelope in a manuscript about wiping out Philadelphia's disability activists? Maybe, but this is speculative, dependent upon my control, brimming with the ironic undercurrent particular to Granta's voice, and selecting the right word that leads to the singular and pleasing sense of pretense. I cannot lose it to raw aggression, in other words.

Let's indulge in speculation and say I get in by next year. I had to move past the half century mark to realize even a Granta byline changes nil, paid or otherwise, at this point. If I was still in my thirties it might have landed me a position under which I could manage my debt, but not now. The only time this public housing shanty guarantees me relative undisturbed peace to work is between two and six am. The internet is of course somewhat to blame for my fall in productivity, but before I opened a blog account, that drop in productivity is mainly due to nearly continuous conflict with Presby. Sure, it is amusing, but not when you have no other options, and managers, whether white and shrill, or black and liars through their teeth, have the power to limit the circumference of your daily routine to a 24 hour care facility. I can no longer rely on family to take me in. I transferred to Riverside against my will in 1994, and faced continuous harassment by the other tenants until I threatened the current manager, Trudy Richardson, with legal action. It is Trudy, and her "former OVR employee" Debra Horne, who took what traumatized me in the inner city, and made me nearly irreversibly biased against urban African American culture, and I know if I cannot get away from section 202 housing, then I really will sicken, lose to aggression, vitriol mitigated by chemical saturation and its side effects. I can get on another transfer list, sure, back to bad neighborhoods, weakened further still by waiting who knows how many years, and I can't take this anymore, except I have to take it, unless by a miracle I can hire myself away full time and sustain it.

4:30 this morning saw me take two plus hours to make a submission to the same old literary journal circuit, just to keep myself active, and this is a sink back to the excruciating poverty of my twenties. If I sink back into this fox hole, the quick sand of indigence before my social services career, then it is essentially over. It doesn't bear repeating who and what I have to thank for that, but at my age, the emerging exposure contributor's copy catch all might as well be the joke of a real world Truman Show character defeated by post production realism.

Two Jakes

I went to Beirut in June of 2010 because my father was dying.-- Claire Messud

There is a scene toward the climax in Chinatown, brilliantly staged by Polanski. Mrs. Mulwray drives Jake to the sanitarium which Noah Cross utilizes for his cover up, and in the foreground we see a resident of the sanitarium sexually harass a nurse who looks like a horse's scrotum, and the nurse, care worn and world weary, bids the octogenarian to have a seat and finish his meal. It is nearly a Shakespearean moment. The Nicholson Dunaway Huston trifecta bisected by the lewd romper room antics, antics which offer cues about Roman fucking nubile adolescents in puberty, and yet, Polanski's entitlement with his alleged victim is a footnote, an inconvenience, even as he might have been my psychotic stepfather, in my poem "Broken China" I am crying out daddy daddy help me, wishing my father had killed my mother's second husband, fearful of the reverse but unsure. Stuart was brutal, but my father had a more calculated Roman menace. Should this woman be a footnote due to Polanski's genius? That woman in India, I have to close my mind to her trauma. Many of us would; many of us do. What that must have felt like, gang raped and then internal hemorrhaging, an iron rod to violate her. Violate is too nuanced for her agony. Her uterus was likely perforated. A footnote.

My father will never know how much hatred I feel that I failed him, that the IRS my mother and his son destroyed the life he deserved. He never talks to me but now that his third wife is dying, now he speaks. He made me almost wealthy in an invalid's barren and bleak institutional environment and this is my evil, created my evil, that human life is so expendable. The veterinarian whom Moyers filmed openly discussed euthanizing  himself with horse tranquilizer during the brief time he could operate a power chair. In the last segment, he pleaded with his wife to let him go, recumbent, shrunken, clothed in a polo shirt. We do not realize the profound impact of the photographic medium, the saturation of prognosis, treatment, the mechanized technology with which we contain disease. The majority of my life was spent in a hospital, and then I force myself to watch it in a teleplay funded by Congress to educate the American public on the brutality of modern medicine.

Fruitful Multiplication

"Do you understand, or is it too tough for you?" -- Faye Dunaway

A veterinarian with Parkinson's disease tracked from diagnosis to demise in a Bill Moyers documentary on degenerative illness was the first video of its kind, a viewing that would lead to almost incidental accretion, dozens of cancer treatments won and lost. Physicians who never talk about dying for the cause and effect of their insurance premiums, say instead "We could talk about hospice." A painter tracked through the unraveling of his sinews due to muscular dystrophy, a pathos Good Housekeeping domestication enforcers sop up with bistro dinner rolls, activists rebel against and the telethon moderates itself attempting to placate empowerment inside of wretched pity. Maupassant can be faulted for this overweening saturation in his later stories as his own disease blew the sprockets in his neural net, but American public television producers never say die when it comes to exposing the free market exploitation of death. Suicide tourists and militants, what we have lost isn't just acceptance, but willingness to see death as routine. The right to control dying, the right of self determination within physical vulnerability are not incompatible. Both are about control, but there is only so much control any one of us can exert without some form of scaffolding. Was Noah Cross as sinister and dangerous as Polanski makes him out to be? We'd have to enlarge the question to examine the American mogul.

I am a right to die advocate, slightly complicated by my belief  that death should be used as a form of political protest, but it is a form of extremism, like the practice of Sati under the Indian caste system. Chinatown is a kind of extremism that makes it one of the greatest movies ever made, and Polanski managed to make it without the hatchet jobs which Orson Welles swallowed into morbid obesity. Some films as pandering trash should have never been made. Orca is what? The burgeoning birth of Eco feminism reviving Melville? There are times when death by stoning for Richard Harris is too kind to ham as an interesting meat.

Linus, Helium Wrapped

The flaw in Million Dollar Baby is the ubiquity of Morgan Freeman's character. Mr. Eastwood could have picked another narrator from which we absorb the bonding between the central characters. Freeman was powerfully cast in Gone Baby Gone, but "Scrap" waters down an otherwise powerful dramatic arc in Clint's seminal work, and Baby is the kind of film which challenges preconceptions, the kind of film that speaks for itself about human will and dignity that serves admirably without the silly political gamesmanship that diminishes the actor's stature, the last of its kind from the old studio system Clint knew how to milk, merging almost perfectly the anti-federal mandate agenda with the tragedy of defeated aspiration. GBG is a weaker, more diluted film, but I bookend it with Baby because both have the ingredients of what could be great films about the tanglewood between our physical frailty, aggregate lack of value coupled with our extraordinary accident of evolution.

This is as far as I can go this morning. For those of you who read "On the P & Q," the woman is hired but will not last very long. She made the exact grimace of economic necessity envisioned by my overwhelmed stress. Frontline will not receive Vatican sanction, but I bless them. "The Suicide Plan" is exactly the kind of exposure of the American  underbelly that matters to me, (and this underbelly is what Affleck wades into with a scorch playing the minute detective) I have criticized PBS for its documentary voyeurism on dying, but in this segment, the video journalists stuck to the story; no doubt did some of us a service.

I have found my inner terrorist. I'd recommend it.

From The Mouth of Ashley Judd's Assassin

"You think I pushed Cheryl too hard?", Stephanie March, SVU incarnation

Hilary Swank and Jennifer Garner have the nearly exact corresponding genotype in the eye of a casting director. They are both reasonably attractive tom boy brunettes with well defined cheekbones, with complexions comparable to a glass of milk; not great beauties, but wholesome American girls with thick African defined lips in a darker contrast to their Caucasian skin tone, at least with lavender colored lipstick, with equally equivalent range and talent, the only real difference between the two of them is Swank attained elevation against Eastwood and then went poof, both women having trouble maintaining their first billing leads on screen, with Garner more tangible to television. Wait another ten years lady. At 44 you think your body will hold the assembly line, mature but sturdy. By 55 those martial arts moves you've perfected as Supergirl in a technocratic age will require performance enhancing drugs.

It is easy to believe as brunettes, we are all Hilary and Jennifer, this is why the studio selects them. Girls just like us who marry the reasonably hip boy next store Affleck, but none of are truly like this, on closer examination, the athletic naivety which muddles its way through rural trash family exploitation and betrayals of trust, landing on our feet with a chance at second love, or the true father figure riding to the rescue on a mercy mission which concedes that our determination and strength as overwhelmed, shielded, as always, by the Hollywood marriage, an inexplicable anachronism in the modern age, much like Foucault's fascination with the royal body of the sovereign as a living embodiment of the body politic. Michel's queer intellectual rigor wasn't in error, as the still relatively undefined AIDS virus destroyed his body due to his inability to stave off unsafe anal penetration and direct his energies elsewhere, (though in fairness, in 84 ,  Fauci's carefully proscribed phrases about "unsafe sexual practices" weren't current in liberal lexicography). The health of the sovereign does reflect the health of a national power. The real problem, as we hurl four years ahead, where the dowager logged on to research temporary political jobs, isn't the pneumonia, but the clots, the concussions, bad temperaments tailgating fading relevance, on both ends of the political spectrum. More on this in more demanding thought processes later; this post was borne out of an annoyance, desiring some quiet evening reading. The dowager failed, volume and video the only things to penetrate a sterile evening, loneliness, fear, sore epidermis, stressed digestion.

A Pulled Brisket's Soft Malignancy

"Que paso aqui?"-- Once Upon A Time in Mexico, the main villain

Rodrigo Garcia suggests things about the possibilities and limits of reconciliation in his first film that necessarily hearken back to the themes of his internationally recognized father, absent the lineage issues which occur in the familial intervals which drive One Hundred Years of Solitude. Childhood is merely a suggested anxiety in Things, as opposed to a reward: Kathy Baker's Rose hovers as an overly protective mother of an adolescent right on the edge, still a boy merely toying with manhood, which in turn draws her to the infantile allure of the dwarf Albert, a character of exotic element and due process; in "Love Waits for Kathy" he is simply a file archivist. In the Rose segment he is an intrigue, one who offers the possibility of fulfillment as might be found in Alice In Wonderland, however awkward the comic aspects come across from the cutting floor. The near miss collision, once Baker offers the attractive man toy a ride, is a slap in the face to the viewing audience, an obvious contrivance which comes off as one, an allusion to the risk of hard sex conjoined to the frailty of impairment? Perhaps this is a stretch, but Albert accepts the teacher and nascent author's voyeurism, just as the detective accepts the camaraderie of dating a medical examiner in the field.

Physicians, particularly surgeons, do not care for ailing loved ones as Close does in the Keener narrative, and its weakness isn't quite her fault. The veteran actress projects the longing of the professional woman who lacks on cue, but the emptiness within the doctor's domestic interior, prior to Calista Flockhart's entrance, is too soft, a dripping poached egg, much as the flashback to lesbian petting lacks the courage of conviction in "Goodnight Lilly, Goodnight Christine". If the morality police want to draw inferences about the indulgence of sexual pleasure and impending loss, the blame can be laid at Rodrigo's doorstep. If there is nothing wrong with homosexual orientation, even conscientious directors like Garcia have a hard time selling sexual equality to an (as yet) heterosexually predominant movie goer.  Two pretend dykes with no voluptuousness saying goodbye, how sweet, while the suicide victim who opens and concludes the film walks by, an incidental character, perhaps a prospect for Flockhart in the absence of Lilly, but for the fact that women are experts at insulation, a theme which saturates this entire project, from Holly Hunter's discordant violence to her womb, to Diaz'es penetrating monologue, closing the film with a bittersweet irony encapsulating the failure of the post boomer world to at least find some sort of contentment within the middle brow striving to have what we want: an abortion, two blind women girls engaged in thrust and parry, a police officer simply doing a routine investigation. Where is the pleasure of bringing and rearing life in the world? Marquez had it in his novel, which, despite energy, skill, and its Nobel Prize, rolled off the back of this blogger as mostly about style, affect, more an apologia for the insistence of metaphysical mystery than a saga with memorable substance.

The best that can be said of the son: the rise of women has no more solved the problems of liberalism than the male patriarchy which handed over the reigns; it might be argued, however, that Garcia sets the stage for matriarchal novelists like Lionel Shriver, who fragments domestication, also with the suggestive absence of childhood, through her female protagonists.

Taps

High features, naturally strong and powerfully expressive, had been burnt almost into Negro blackness by constant exposure to the tropical sun," Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

The more we learn.  It was an accidental circumstance that a Jewish public housing tenant, who is in a comparatively soiled outhouse more lowly than the gorilla below me, reconnected me to mental illness empowerment intake; my anger was triggered because I asked the aforementioned tenant for more information, and should know by now that ethnic Communists undergo lobotomies in terms of gate-keeping skills. My spirit, my very essence, needs a change, and the reason America is in jeremiad is because the social safety net is destroying our ability to take the initiative, and my starvation for fresh space is turning into a pathology, and it need not.

This is not about mood swings. I have client confidentiality I need to maintain-- Christ-- but I knew well enough how pedestrian Edward is-- never again. Never. You may hold me accountable. No more overtures to public housing residents. That the president has lost all credibility with me is not nearly as disconcerting, but represents a national disheartening. I would prefer to leave the country, seriously. I can more readily doom myself under European case management than rot in the city of my birth, watching my digital clocks tick. Given the time I should be resting, but I am trying to contract typhoid like John Malkovich, who also does blindness in his first major supporting role. Actors never get it right, even the top billed like Malkovich whose face is now in protean death mask stage, sightlessness. Not Cameron Diaz in Garcia's vignettes.

Things You Can Tell is very good, merges into itself and its inclusionary frictions, yet I balk at saying it is a great film meshing disability, urban loons drawn familiar, to our recognition. I have dealt with Garcia as auteur before-- but the film doesn't fit on the mantelpiece properly in terms of really challenging viewers. This is how I am dealing with it now. With Garcia, it is about the magical realism of the father. The style is a shield, because we know we're looking for nuances of interpretation. These days we're all magical realists, our wars fought to be cached on YouTube. Living the science fiction we read as affixed adolescents, our government at the bidding of a Charlie Rose scoop. Yet despots fascinate us. Admit it. We create narratives around them, held by megalomania, giddy when it is fractured by hubris. Mussolini hung like a dead and bloated mule carcass. Czar Nicholas out of tune and executed in countless variations of Doctor Zhivago; all of Russian literature is Doctor Zhivago, the American induced mortal illness of Hugo Chavez, or Elizabeth's beheading of Mary Queen of Scotts via Glenda Jackson.

The blind rarely have a fixed eyeball. Their countenance usually has the appearance of a pronounced brow ridge.

Some affection for Isabelle Allende. The aide who received the stories of Eva Luna recognized me this morning. She was a single mother child herself years ago. Blows to the solar plexus aren't helpful. Deep breaths. I thought Edward Berkowitz cared enough about my concerns to be discriminating, and taking a few minutes to categorize the situation behind these private lectures he disseminated with Zen-like laissez-faire would have shielded me from a past with very negative consequences. Perhaps some of you understand how leaving a job is like a divorce. He worries my use of detail compromises online safety, but my emotional vulnerability never crossed his mind; he and I know each other and have the ability to ascertain each other's reality, unlike forum moderators. Existential hopelessness.

On the P & Q

"It's not my credibility on the line." --Barack Obama, defense lawyer

I may have hired a dead resident's old caretaker, and we've set the meeting for Tuesday morning; I am already picturing the contraction of her facial muscles as she tries not to react to my habitat, not sure if I should push myself hard to clean before our meeting, or if she has the experience not to be judgmental. Black? Yes, but if we can reach an understanding and I can keep her at arm's length, I can dial down my stress.

Obama has so utterly disappointed me I have lost faith in my country, and I'll never get it back. In 08, at his campaign headquarters, before he lost PA to Hillary by nine percentage points, while his youthful acolytes swarmed upstairs and downstairs, and I met uptight white middle aged political operatives in double breasted pinstripes, a hustler from the neighborhood held his hand out, trying to take my contribution to the campaign for himself, and that is Philadelphia. Contextualized against Fruitvale Station, you dismiss this, my over developed social fear and contempt, correct?

The boomer generation, those closer to my mother's age, did not know what the slogan meant, this "change we can believe in". Neither did I, but I was amazed at the energy Obama had behind him, and was astounded. I cannot tell you what I hoped for, maybe that his success would allow me to spring back, to change my environment. TARP and the ACA have not improved my circumstances. While the administration was young, the insurance coverage I had dropped me, and Trudy Richardson, regardless of her recent contraction, escalated pressure on me to the breaking point. I remain scathed, weary of always feeling the need to have my back up, that I can never let go, relax, and work, because someone needs entry, to check fire alarms the residents set off once a week, or to replace my pipe, sign a petition, inspect the unit, ride a power outage, review my fiances to make sure I am not hiding a fucking fortune. If I had my own writing studio, Siberia might seem like a blessed luxury in contrast to this nigger beehive. No one will take me in. The only thing I can do is apply for jobs and grants I do not have the accreditation nor the stamina to maintain.

Striated Wrists

Depending on which executive branch of government is the prosecuting and pursuant body, I am both not disabled and nursing home eligible. To the DOE my cerebral palsy is essentially meaningless, because I went to university, then maintained gainful employment with my condition, and the department, along with Treasury, has the power to garnish and freeze my bank accounts. One day soon I will reach that particular part of Siberia despite my already stringent poverty level. To the state of Pennsylvania, however, in order to receive services, I have to be classified as a nursing home candidate not cogent enough for self determination, and my Jewish bankruptcy lawyer, who left my bankruptcy status only partially complete, given that I would have been better off now had she negotiated with my DOE creditors, explained that as a matter of adjudication, both claims are valid. I am an institutional candidate who needs primary care and functionally able at the same time, unless I legally change my status. Ed Berkowitz parsed this another way, through sucking me back into the world of mental health services and mental illness self-determination, and this is my reward for opening up to my neighbor. I telephoned him about two hours ago. Mr. Berkowitz and myself are friends no more, though he is free to continue reading if he wishes.

Liberalism. I am 51 years old and only as functional as my power chair and grab bars, a bare minimum of medical technology available, while SEPTA does everything it can to reduce my accessible transport options. The Soloist only glances off this red tape, as it is about the tragedy of potential genius broken, but the Project Share model is even worse than the congregation of follies at disability centers.

Advocate for myself? Oh certainly. Challenge my own competency and surrender so the minorities can earn twelve dollars an hour giving me sponge baths. Perhaps you ought to reread some of my more virulent reactions in this context. Ed, I know you were not thinking about anything in particular in promoting Zach Tollen's *tributes,* but I feel hurt, emotionally wounded without cause, and I may have case managed this man. Lose my email Edward, lose it. We are back to hello and goodbye. The next time Suzanne is flat on her back with a seizure I am not driving to get security's assistance.

Seasons In The Sun

We had joy we had fun-- Terry Jacks

Misconstrued email is the source of so much folly. This is the one thing I have not really examined with you, and it significantly shortened my life span. My neighbor hits a send all button to help a marginalized figure, who has his own footprint. I very briefly skimmed his post about taking himself off Social Security, and while I am no fan of entitlement strangulation, the consequences of indigence in a city like Philly is not the adventure of a graphic novel, but Mr. Tollen is presumably an ambulatory fellow.

I am not mad at Ed. *He just did not pause to think that a disenfranchised wheelchair user and a disenfranchised mental health consumer would not be able to accommodate each other when he (Ed) told me to contact Zach directly. That direct contact disappointed me and made me feel excluded. Zach gives small private talks about Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, important but superseded figures. A small episode come and gone. I dealt with people like Zach every day under my salaried grant project, and Ed may follow my blog and skim my posts; he probably does the same for Zachary Tollen, but this does not mean we're getting through to each other, and I find that discouraging. 

The same confusion created a cyber EEOC case between Linda C Dezenski and myself, and the corrosive poison of my anger resides in the cost. Linda was embarrassed, faced demotion, and I was traumatized to the brink of institutional incarceration, and a crippling guaranteed federal debt which is driving me into myocardial infarction or an early stroke. Even if my political representatives investigate, no one is going to restrict Linda's economic viability for prior bad acts, and that due to tokenism. She is a prescriptive and compliant public figure who humiliated me and countless others, but the people that run this state know a radioactive problem when they see it.

Move on? It would be nice, but my health is failing, and I can't leave a landlord also guilty of recurring criminal negligence. Consider yourself lucky.

*As I indicated yesterday, however, the implication of bringing Zach and myself into each other's sphere of influence is for me only an additional source of shame and annoyance. I am trying to climb back up, not give into Mr. Tollen's functional limitations. A thanks but no thank you situation.

Viatica Franchise

"It won't be Amazon." -- Leon Wieseltier

No, it won't be Amazon, nor will it be Google Books, but like Leon in his past, I am always broke and skirting the edge of destitution, and gave my ambulatory younger sister and brother four thousand dollars while Trudy Richardson was threatening me on the telephone in an imitation Oprah Winfrey voice that "I would not be living at Riverside." Four years later I wrote her a letter and said back "as an African American woman who can live where you choose, either evict me or leave me alone," and like magic the black police state flips a pancake: "oh of course you're normal, you're not doing anything wrong..." Landlords really hate litigation, don't they, in the munificence of forced egalitarianism of the pluralistic American landscape? Is digital monopolization of publishing good for the dialogic of ideas, the very cause of authorship? Sure, I can teach myself how to take my work straight from hard drive to a kindle file, and turn (a) blog account into a spam market for my own vanity, but would it pay? I am not part of the establishment in which Leon and Marty Peretz wag their inner Jewish mother at the Beltway because we have 2000 years of Hebraic law on which to draw, nor could I maintain the visibility pressure through which David Brooks secures his affluence by being the voice of Everyman. I hate David Brooks, because I have intellectual parity with him and live on rats corn seed and he gets money for saying on air what McCain believes: That American prestige necessitates involvement in a sectarian schism American citizens know we need no part of. McCain may deserve his own affluence, but Brooks? Brooks is where he is because Buckley chanced to offer him a job. Marianna Torgovnick examines the merger of Italiano Americana with the conceit of Jewish men making good husbands. Had I walked I might have been a variation of her, the feminine Italian intellect lost in the humanities shuffleboard with that *good husband* who, even with that veneer of feminine taming, betrays me in some manner that is displeasing. Ed Berkowitz did not mean to set me up with fringe nut cases; it happened because he could not think to tell me that Zach Tollen was a mental health consumer. If Ed had been able to offer this sacrosanct assessment I would have avoided interacting with a nut case with a not unusual Jungian fixation that more or less is an indication of limitation. I will get past all this, but it tells me I was wrong to single out Mr. Berkowitz, to attempt to bridge a gap, or even to worry about my loyalties to whom, since Ed's partner has epilepsy. If you see me as just another fringe player out of the world of James Leo Herlihy, then that defeats the purpose.  

Walking It Back, Mako Miasma

"I couldn't make the slightest movement. I stood, or rather hung, suspended, in a bed of air, all of one piece with my metal shell."-- Solaris, Bill Johnston translation, location 21

What about McQueen? What about it? Minimalist, strong silent type, Maggie Q isn't a jack off rave either in her attempt to leave us hand wringing. Good little bad girl. Bad bigger good Jake with the finger of divine discipline on him, with the future Murphy Brown reeking the vestigial horror of rape as a war crime. Everyone knows the faces of Mako and James Hong as the standard character actors of ethnic diabolical impurity and compliant good intentions, illustrated by Attenborough's Frenchie; it is not simply love of Maily which drives the second mate. He wants to achieve bourgeoisie status at a bargain basement rate. He pays with malaria or dysentery and leaves his Eurasian sweet meat to die like a dog getting its skull fractured for a stew. The Sand Pebbles has an affinity with the equally commercial Sho gun of moral turpitude, homo sociability of unintended consequences as a result of the peasant caste system which Jake challenges through individualism and the love of being a journeyman in and of itself. Linda Lee Cadwell's exotic romance may not have been tinctured with this studio saga of the forbidden, but its real life tragedy had the same vitiating result.

Am I against multicultural fusion? Not at all. Pragmatic reality is another matter. My argument is that Crenna unexpectedly steals the film in his last twenty minutes of shooting, despite McQueen's abscess and his sickened sacrifice. A possible trigger for his mesothelioma? Feverish, pneumatic runs, hungry and not eating. Dry toast?

American Buffalo, Chit

"Turn on your television set." -- My mother.

9/11 was both a real and surreal horror. Engaged in an unsuccessful fling with a married therapist with spina bifida at the time, he was free therapy who did not heal me, and he had a farm not many miles from the flight 93 crash. Our dialogue ceased because we were not going to have sex, but not in the immediate aftermath of the great event. I had also lived in NYC and been to the Twin Towers. Disconnected and in shockwaves of outrage at the same time, I wanted a response. Overkill. If it had been me in charge I would have wiped out the Saudi royal family, turned Afghanistan into the Fukushima wasteland. The Bush family had more vested interests, and granted, between the Bush wars and the establishment of the Obama administration, American prowess killed many Islamic radicals, but the people in power did a lousy job.

We've had the response, and thirteen years later, we are going to play war games in Damascus to curb Hezbollah's temptation to acquire chemical agents? Why not let Turkey's Erdogan echo the imperial Ottoman Empire and be our proxy? He would put boots on the ground in Syria; I am not a policy analyst, but I read them choc through my ear inflammation, and I really do not see that a missile strike against Bashar is going to do any good; he is a despot as much by default as anything. What is a missile strike going to achieve in a sectarian schism that is creating gimps and paralytics by the minute? The BBC had some surreal footage of the capital, and I saw a man limping, supporting himself on cuff crutches. Google has everything now, even our dead, the ghosts of our memories.

My mother and I did not have a healthy relationship; we set each other off, especially toward the end. My sister killed her by relying on her to support the grandchildren. I killed her because she made me miserable and I broke my engagement to the imbecile one floor below me who is a bedridden industry for the Pennsylvania threadbare social safety net. Never get involved with public housing tenants if you wind up going into public housing, never. Do not have sex, simulated sex, and don't get too friendly. Keep an appropriate distance, and work with me to eliminate the Department of Housing and Urban Development. We'll remain a superpower that much longer.

Hassan is Dead

What time was it when I woke Monday? After-noon-ish, focusing my entire energies on one small load of laundry, perfuming my sister's much abused and only worn in the building maternity jumper, made it to the laundry room at 7:30 and had to wait. The elderly black man was using the front load washing machine. Made it back up here by 9:50 to see the movie adaptation of the novel I avoided deliberately when it was the darling impulse purchase of its time. Not all of the movie. Had to piss and was starving, but I got the basic points. Sodomy is the Islamic secret beneath the web of lies we all play, Housseini's tale just another version of The Killing Fields, and my spiritual waste land is as stark as Pol Pot or the Taliban. This is what my autobiographical narrative has done to my soul, and there is no redemption, just an Aaron Eckhart dark comedy without the merit of his bite. A woman with cerebral palsy who let public housing for urban road kill destroy her life.

I never expected to succeed as an author, or a writer, or a poet-- not even when I was Jerry's fuck me adhesive on my grandiose metaphysical quest -- but I expected to succeed, and it never occurred to me to attribute failure to mood disorders. Perhaps it should have occurred to me. Not that I am shocked my stepmother is dying. She has been seriously ill since she and mio padre married. My ambition to be established in a career is slipping through my fingers and I am going to lose my father soon (if Jerry himself is not threatened with the same prospect after our communique in 07) and I can feel my own mortality falling apart, like the corpse of the friend in American Werewolf in London. We all have to die, but I know the mental torture of being bedridden like my fucking moron ex Frank is something I simply cannot endure; my life has been a runaway abject terror of living like that, like this, living like I am, an intelligence buried under squalor contained by nursing aides who are neither medical caretakers nor janitors. Perhaps I cannot rematriculate. Perhaps it is already too late, the pain of genocidal epochs absorbed like a sponge. I've never been happy. Obsessive, yes, desperate, yes, strong, yes. Moments of pleasure, my byline in Philadelphia Inquirer garbled ecstatically to my sister in anti-climatic fashion, whereas Jerry would have understood. It would have called for a drink. None the less, what progressives have done in succeeding to keep me de-institutionalized is more inhumane than my parents abandoning me in Home of the Merciful Savior. I should have died in the knife fight that threatened the occupational therapist who played John Denver records in the playroom, after we were fed dinner. This was also the me decade I knew.

Sarin Neurotoxins

"You never really learn something until you teach it." My latter day drama instructor.

Look at that face. You would never imagine such a female maintains a benevolent dictatorship. Mother watch me hunt. Mother the foot massage means we need to eat as a family, but only after I beckon you to the food bowl three times and only after I see you engaging in mastication will I shoo you so a jaguar may gnaw daintily. Mother make the bed, and your little black panther is a pain in the ass, but when he lets me curl up with him then that's the ticket! No I won't come back in the house! Yes I will when they scare me! And on and on. I have been raising cats since I was a kid and little little kimmy is a young 2, and will outlive my independence, which is reason enough to purchase my blog on your kindle. The unfortunate orphan needs an endowment, and you will save the cats if you want me to outgrow my caustic flint spark cynicism. She lost her babies and deserves the good life. I considered joining PETA due to my feline zeal, but Wallace turned it on the dime, and PETA is almost too fanatical, because evolution cannot be managed like a suburban duplex. I am on the fence because feline poachers deserve the death penalty, and in indecision cannot cash in my chips.

This post was an entirely different subject, but let me get my cold calculus which has driven some of you off out of the way: My stepmother is dying, and Marie no doubt reasoned it was her brother's place to inform me, since he is my father. My feelings about Louise are not pleasant. She was my mother's colleague in nursing school and dated my father behind my mother's back. My lover never understood my umbrage about that, but even married husbands who cheat are befuddled by the bitch codex. The bitch codex says you do not marry your nursing friend's divorced husband and Louise did anyway and never imagined what she was in for, and that includes my indignation with her mouth. My father's impotence is not something I as his eldest daughter am going to treat as a clinical seminar suggesting solutions, and this became an international incident, along with other choice cuts from her invalid tongue.

She has been crippled for years by RA. Takes one to know one, and now she has leukemia or Roy Schneider's multiple myeloma and I am only worried about the impact of her death on my father. That is the way it is. I love my daddy and daddy needs his wife, relieved that her estate issues will presumably enter tort before padre himself expires and my sister and I will then litigate each other, but I am not emotionally invested in stepmother hate. I don't like her or her children, but Louise has paid for landing padre as a caretaker, in more ways than I am willing to reveal, or that you'd want me to.

If she dies, however, this changes things, and maybe I shall be able to part company with PresbyHomes before my future end stage hospice care, within a year or two. I cannot grieve her. My father. My poor father.

Crossing Red Lines

"Do you know what swishing is?"-- Oprah Winfrey, shadow empress

The Sand Pebbles arguably belongs to Richard Crenna as an American military officer willing to sacrifice himself for the absurd might is right principle unless the State Department swallows cowardice in the face of being overrun by a half billion righteously enraged Asians; it is both an usually interesting film for its time and place, and chock full of the usual stereotypes we already know and field with familiarity. The Caucasian heat for the exotic, Caucasian guilt for denigration, which in this case is justified, because the Western powers had no business carving up imperial China in the first place, just as in contemporary terms, the Mandarin cyber dragnet has no business making Arthur O. Sulzberger an enemy of state, and yet, it is also a rare piece of entertainment that deals with real historical policy that was morally problematic.

Real time dysentery, though not really, slowing me to the silence is golden cliche, with the additional adduce of moisture saturated air, you would tend to think that a woman of 42 would not hire a girl with a newborn strangled by the umbilical cord at birth emblazoned as a decal on a T-shirt, but dealing with Ingrid Bunton was just as much, if not more, an abusive experience as the woman who threw herself at me. Ingrid turned me into a laughing stock, got sexually involved with a security guard who banged on my door after she had obviously impregnated herself again. I am a seducer. Ingrid is the type of sexually dysfunctional female who usually winds up battered if not murdered, and even the young woman I hired back after I fired Miss Bunton in the baby bump phase said, "There is something wrong with that girl."

The only apartment manager who treated me with dignity had to get involved, invoking the obvious fact that Riverside was not The Love Boat. It would be amusing and it is, in its own way, funny, the lack of control that urban loose legs exhibit, except that it isn't. Opening the door to Ingrid's psyche offers a horrible travesty of silent minorities, the discarded, who are exploited in fairly bestial fashion on a daily basis and have to live with it, and this is the vomit that federally mandated disability centers catapult on the wall like a food fight with mashed potatoes. They do not care about it either in the lowest common denominator. What's a few thousand coolies here or there, after all? As fantastic as high camp, or wearing the dead on our sleeves.