Pin Cushions, Pitch Black

Natasha Richardson, in my estimation, never really seemed to fit in her films, except for The Handmaid's Tale, and in that laughably histrionic Margaret Atwood vehicle, none of the big names fit, because it was a turbo charged warning which was so grandiose that it metamorphoses its own mockery. Often the industry does this intentionally. Sometimes my own heaviness achieves this by accident. Alpha and Beta is a case in point. I showed it to one of the agency aides, in my nine year revolving door with the system, before I let Mary Johnson have it for her now defunct site, and I expected that Esmin the easy Jamaican soul would have been offended. "You're funny!" she said, laughing, on her scan of the final page. I wasn't trying to be. My world had shattered, and I was desperately trying to glue the egg back together, and in a rather convoluted sense, this entire account is a sort of vomit on my ruptured idealism. I screamed in Linda's voicemail, in my nervous breakdown, during that fresh turn of the century, (think I'm recovered?) "I believed in you!" And that is the truth. I thought she represented a triumph of integration.

Today, I am in fact much closer to Karl Shapiro's defense of the notorious Tropic of Cancer, which I am still reading. Miller is, for me, a stop and start nihilist, and though he is terrific with oral cadence, and a necessary voice, he isn't a great writer, hardly as canonical as his defenders would like. Henry James achieved more with his attenuation in the relic of the Victorian age than any of the leftists who mushroomed in the thirties. Miller is so raw he makes the throbbing radioactive vein in my chest seem cowardly, when I discuss which minority [substitute nigger bitches if you are in the she needs lithium like her mother category] exploited me in what fashion. They were not all uncouth brassy caste stricken Medicaid recipients, but a substantial minority of all those women in my revolving door have taken their toll. With my every transfer a feat of engineering physiological memory, I'm damned unless my remaining intellect can pick up my body after my next mistake, can guilt trip my way out of my corporate landlord before I lose myself, and I am doing that, at only fifty three, numb with apathy and avoidance, resilient only because of a corrosive-- well, I understand, in certain respects, the destructive attractions of the jihadists, though for me decapitation is lame. Everyone can breathe easy there.

So it perplexes me. Natasha Richardson cannot internalize, like Jodie Foster, who was a great actress because she internalized identity conflict. Ms Foster is not Ellen. DeGeneres radiates dyke like a wallowing hippo. Jodie Foster doesn't fit the categorical LBGT mold. Oh, I am not challenging her private intimacy so much as complimenting what will soon be lost, and that is the ambiguity of the outsider. It is what has made the child actor with whom so many of us came of age a powerhouse. Richardson, by contrast, is a two dimensional doll for thirteen year olds, hard to cast in the appropriate venue, but it is her role in Past Midnight which triggered my recent distress, conjoined with Benitiz's outreach. The soldier did not do anything wrong, exactly, and I never understood Hang Outs and now, duh, it is a chat scroll, but I am done whoring myself for nothing and should have ignored him. If I can find a divorcee like Cecil Morales who has the intellectual affinity for which I am starved, which is why I cannot forgive Josie Byzek, then yes, I'll take him, but I do not want anymore PC fantasy, as such. I was never shallow enough.

Natasha often paid a heavy price for similar psychological risks, despite the fact she'll never have a legacy beyond historical relevance, unlike Vanessa.