Carmel in the Niger Sky

This consisted of gentle prods, ridicule so faint and unfocused that it always could be given a flattering turn if necessary. [sic] Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, loc 894

One of the most heuristic of my viewing pleasures was experiencing Peter Falk in Wings of Desire, even if his cameo does indeed feel like a post production interjection in a beautifully romantic and aspirant enterprise. One of his shortest appearances, also his sharpest, radiant with benevolence. It takes such darkness torturing a muzzled poet's spirit to see such light, light we no longer have with the death of presence.

Johnny Cash was doing what any celebrity does in his appearance on the Columbo episode "Swan Song," cashing it the chips. In many ways, this script is one of the more annoying ones, a bit cockamamie, the evidence against the gospel singer pretty much snatching a kid's hand out of the cookie jar, because there was no other way to do it other than through turning the screws on Cash's dark side, whatever items at the site of the plane crash didn't add up. Had the celebrity as nemesis kept his composure, and his broken leg, on a cushion, the forerunners of progressive guilt conscious television would have had a more difficult resolution. This is a reluctant way of admitting Jerry's aesthetic insights into pop culture trump my own, because The Rockford Files remains fresher, more telling on contemporary American angst, than Levinson's morality play, ferreting out the egotism, or giving Johnny Cash his redemption for bilking Ida Lupino's astringent.

To deescalate a little further, as stupid as Kojak is in its hyperbolic urban anxiety, it most aptly captures what the 70's were, if you ignore the plots, and simply breathe its urban exposition. Combine all three shows into an overlaying collage gives an accurate portrait of what haunts my generation: the loss of giants in whom we had moral guides. Of course Cash (and even Falk) had a certain systemic shallowness, the capped teeth, the megalomania, to a degree, but they were touchstones: Falk, Cash, Savalas, with very long genomes behind them. Gardner a little less, because maverick was about as far as his range could go. To transplant myself from this to the black brotherhood was fatal, whether or not my skimming, silent viewers comprehend.

Even if I'm lenient to looks. One of the guards, Anthony, talked to me the week of 5/10/16, perhaps because he felt bad witnessing another brother trash me, and asked me if I was still writing. For once in my life, I was unmoved, as starved for human interaction as I remain. I'll get over Vinnie's death, horrible as it was for me to be forced to use animal control, but something has broken, not to be captured through any blatant expose of a hobbled gimp, trying to outrun his own demons of indulgence.