The injury which Ken Wahl sustained on the set of Wiseguy during the Tucci Pizzolo segment was mere happenstance, luck of the draw, much as his neck injury was bipedal carelessness, something which fame may aggrandize, and yet, if Umberto Eco wrote a pendulous attack on hermeneutics with his convoluted novel Foucault's Pendulum (read more than twice), it is not so easy for humans to dismiss pattern recognition. We're configured for it, and the familiar things of more vigorous adulthood are sometimes recognized with shock, recollected schematics much easier to grasp in scope: As an actor, Ken Wahl wore his emotions and his retro-eighties shag doo hairstyle on his sleeve, for me, back then, just more disco culture transplanted onto an organized crime drama which was already part of a bygone era, an era which Mario Puzo captured and magnified for studio players to glorify. Michael Corleone's power, in other words, went the way of the Kennedy brothers as martyrs. We either bury the JFK, RFK assassinations, and move on, knowing the Warren Commission never answered the public unease, or drive ourselves crazy.
Cannell's show was window dressing the moral ambiguities of the 20th century coning to a close, which Kevin Spacey capitalized on to become one of the greatest actors of his time, great acting for which we nearly lack a syntax. Where Wahl is an open book, easily read, even if personally unknown, Spacey is a manipulative master of a humane but ruthless center, even in lesser films, he has the uncanny ability to keep his audience suspended on the wire, until delivery of the dénouement where he triumphs, whether or not Wahl's face was in the mix. Enter contemporary surrealism of 2016, since we're all on twitter with its massive micro data aggregation. I'm there, Wahl's there, and my cancerous aunt, the few thousand like her who find social media alienating aren't, but they, with the dowager and Ken Wahl only two decades behind them, are dying, in their last years, tick tock. A disabled woman makes an attempt to be heartfelt in her usual birdshot method, to a heartthrob of yesteryear who inadvertently took the punishments to his physique that his character sustained for dramatic continuance, followed him and retweeted his adoptive cause and he returned the favor, and to discover that at 2am, just transferring, sent a shot of adrenaline right through her heart, as if she could roll straight back to her hormone raging thirties.
I felt vulnerable, and emailed my sister like a squealing teen, as if tomorrow my knight will finally appear to ride me out of this corrupt African majority city because an actor was conciliatory, if cautiously so, as I also wasn't raunchy in my outreach, also careful, because his past brought me back to a collegiate womanhood before the worst wounds became an inhumane pin cushion, because he made me feel like an Italian American who would have her man, as was once hoped, instead of portents in busted legs getting injured by cameramen, signifying lack of heed for omens, for civilization under strain, the weight of lethargy a valve into which old age invariably gets bottled. I am not conciliatory. I did not vote for Trump because I think conservatives will give me vindication before I buckle under my own weight. I'm not one of the mogul's supporters. I simply understand his insensitivity, and since I wanted to make a choice, afraid of dying, I picked the lack of empathy I myself have learned and roared and got reported for numerous times already, knowing the Clinton mendacity would be worse than a dickhead from New York. As the national voice of Jewish motherhood, Marcus is already in histrionics, but fair is fair. My notes, too, however, are ossifying on a familiar scale, because all I have are the search for signs, the hope for magical evasions of burgeoning helplessness. You might ask what's wrong that a fleeting connection made me feel flush? Nothing, but it is the vain strength of days bygone, since every defecation, every move I make, is a balance on a tightrope whose safety net is effervescent.
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