Friday, October 9, 2015

Peachy Keen

It is difficult to hold within our grasp that not all historical undercurrents have closure. Tuberculosis was a fungal epidemic effectively beaten back in the 1950's with derivatives of the breakthrough antibiotic of the 20th century, and hygiene campaigns which followed in its wake, but AIDS saw the condition make a comeback. As a terminal illness, it manufactured at least one serial killer in Doc Holliday. Stacy Keach portrays the gambler as an embittered existentialist against Faye Dunaway, in yet another revisionist Western. As a bio pic, in this part, Keach manages to transcend his composite swash buckler who pretends. It might have something to do with necessarily being as large as an embittered legend, liberated in having nothing to lose. Why Dunaway challenges her glamorous hauteur by enveloping herself in a wardrobe of slutty trash remains an unconvincing perplexity, but her Katie Elder is suitable playing off of Keach's manic undercurrent, bumbling their way about the set like paper cut outs, doomed by corruption and conspiracy. The Doc Keach adorns is naive in small ways, able to be taken in by the Mexican inn keeper for a pricey sum, or sold a house incautiously, and yet remains a man of leonine ruthlessness, calling a bluff, or aiming to kill.

To wit, though I am patently indifferent to national politics as having any bearing on Philadelphia as a cesspool of incompetent depreciation, I may rally around Ben Carson. Not to make too much of the contradiction in terms. Certain kinds of experience cuts across identity, and I comprehend, as a life long recipient of institutional stricture, why a black neurosurgeon would become a reactionary defining zones of exclusion. Can he win the nomination? Can he beat Hillary? What the fuck do I know?

But the possibility of igniting a third world war is exciting, so I'll wait in the wings with the fiery torches glaring from my pupils. Maybe I'll send his campaign a few dollars, Joan d'Arc in search of a sword and zeal, the thirst for cleansing purity. I had a difficult Wednesday on 10/14.

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