Ragtime Cadenza

"If you show people their future, then they have no future."--Ben Affleck, giving JJ Abrams the scene to replicate Colm Feore's death in his more contemporary series.

More than likely, I will only ever see Hannibal through the actors who've embodied him rather than as Harris created him. I dislike thrillers in print. There are exceptions to this, but on the whole, authors rarely if ever deliver the goods. Hence I do Harris an injustice to give Bryan Fuller and Dacy and Mikkelsen all the credit, layering their vogue-ish series over top what has come before. Diabolical natures can amplify altruistic impulses. Moral rectitude can have its own obdurate obstinacy. Paleontologists seemingly dispense with the sanctity of life because epistemological  production is paramount, but Frances Glenn Cross will be, if the accusations against him hold, expurgated, and eliminated, for killing on the basis of murdering due to hatred of ethnicity. He violated the social contract that modern human societies vowed and failed to eliminate. Christopher Dorner, comparatively, engaged in revenge murder against a civilian police system which is probably still corrupt, despite reforms instituted in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating. Neither man had a rational justification for their actions, in the tension between the expendability of being and the precious nature of being. Being is preferred to not being, barring the exceptional instance, like seditious intent, or national interest. Yet we're still in a place where violence is coded to produce what we necessarily conclude to be a just outcome. We see it in formula thrillers like Affleck's mediocre futurist vehicle, where Eckhart wastes what he has proven to be a brilliant social intelligence, but we also see it daily beyond our fantastical destruction of villains, or those who do not tune it out when going to shing dings where it's bring you're own clams, sometimes we tune in, beyond cell text pings to the wrong number, to what foreign and domestic fanaticism wreaks upon optimistic and happy individuals. We do not assign hierarchical values to Afghan or Pakistani lives,and though we expect NATO forces to defeat the Taliban, American forces are expected to be disciplined if they urinate on enemy flesh. Killing is easy. Desecration is more onerous, more unspeakable, enveloped by darkness. I am that angry to dig into it this deeply, and I do not truly know what decency I am willing to transgress for the sake of appeasing my virtue-- no, my sense of injustice. I gave Erik the finger, shaking with Barbara's rage, back in winter. I am that angry with shim, his rhetoric and ethical sleaziness. Last week she/he said hello while I barged up to my ex. (I own Frank due to his marriage proposal, which I admit is my not entirely rational prerogative) One look from me, Erik drove back into the building. Just one look. If I could get away from shim, our history and our younger healthier intimacy, my hate wouldn't be so corrosive. I don't exactly hate the US, but our welfare state is a cruel, derisive business, one I was weak enough to be destroyed by. Barbara, if you're wondering, is another spastic, totally helpless, 70 year old slut who vented on me some years ago. "Asshole," she hissed, a tubular sea worm undulating in the coral.

Do I frighten you? There is nothing I can convey to Bernie Taupin, strangely, other than to express skepticism with how deeply embedded his best work threshed out my interior longings, I debated one of my bizarre and skittish communiques for five minutes. Fuck it, him, and the entire British invasion of rock and roll.