Rosemary's Thistle

#3:  Soon-Yi was Woody and Mia’s adopted daughter. False. Soon-Yi was the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow and André Previn. Her full name was Soon-Yi Farrow Previn. -- Robert B. Weide

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What authenticates The Burrowers isn't Petty's underlying condemnation of what forged the last, now doddering, superpower. Any polemic in narrative can do that; it is his real appreciation for hands on tactile sensation. The soil, and foolish human primates roaming about on it until they forget themselves and become carcasses. Ulee's Gold, more than a decade older with subtly different aims, nonetheless has a similar physicality. The curious thing about Peter Fonda's poignant swan song, I might add, is, despite my displeasure with Easy Rider as a self-conscious farce, it provides Ulee with a textually richer undercurrent that would have been lacking otherwise. Derivative pleasures like this become somewhat complicated, always improving on older origin concepts.

To indulge my underlying misogyny, my loathing for Jane Fonda, which is visceral, doesn't spill over to Peter. He is quieter, less of a chameleon flitting across the screen, to quote from Jane's daughter with the delightful cruelty of an accurate observation (and yes, I give Jane credit for giving Charlie Rose this gem), and I'm more in sympathy with his center of gravity. Ulee's Gold was my life with my mother and her raucous lovers. The film gives viewers a sense of resolution: Ulee relents, realizing his son and daughter-in-law aren't beyond reform. This is a gravely wounded family, but one that doesn't quite break once the avarice of the white punks is harnessed and contained. The industry has to be placated, but we all know that addiction doesn't work that way. My dead brother can't be walled off in my bereavement as a monster. Yet he was indifferent to any number of things: the shame he brought to my family, committing felony rape, infecting himself with AIDS, not because he had any experience with sodomizing men, but because he blithely used dirty needles. The end of his life in 1995 was agonizing. "We had a brother who was a bit of a shyster." This is how my sister summed up little Nicky for my ex, the Nicky who passed HIV onto his girlfriend without my mother deigning to interfere. She was afraid of possible litigation.

The engine of the freight train has been idling on track a quarter mile off from my window since Thursday morning, giving me palpitations. I'd do anything to get out of Riverside, anything, except there is little use in exploring other public housing options within the city. I already know I couldn't expect to find creative and safe solutions networking online, so I research Woody and Mia, condemning sexual liberalism. What no one is willing to say directly is the price Allen made Mia Farrow and her children pay for his trophy happiness with Soon-Yi. He sounds like John Updike's failed little boy with his thumb stuck up his ass. I do not know if Dylan's memory of molestation is true or false, but that she did not like Woody's thumb in her mouth, that felt real to me. My stepfather sneak fondled my breasts that way.

I started writing my own piece on the scandal. Because of Roman Polanski, what I relearn reviewing his mastery of repression, of what he intimates about sadism. More than that; yet as to Farrow herself, I never saw myself as a fan, not in terms of her performances. The poem never leaves me, the one in my head with wombs and spawn, the World Trade Center, the Empire State building, through her eyes. A few years ago, I caught the revision of the piece in hand, then lost it with the Vista driver crash. I have to redo all that research once again as well. Hypothetically, if I get it published, tweet her a link, how would I react if she thanked me for the tribute?

I'm unsure. If Woody had done to me what he did to her, he'd be dead; I'd be a cause celebre in prison, so in terms of being aggrieved, I have picked a side. That does not necessarily mean, as a disability journalist, I need access to her. I am not Orth, the Vanity Fair journalist who reignited old rivalries.

Would a mutual interaction be beneficial? Ambivalent about that, what she's like beneath the pixie damsel of Roman's coaxing, or Allen's irony.