Back to Black in a Holy Land Apotheosis

We only said goodbye with words I died a hundred times.-- the late Amy Winehouse

We have followed Glenn Close in her various guises of hedonistic, playful, malevolence over the years. The uproar over Fatal Attraction is now nothing more than a cyclic cultural footnote, especially juxtaposed against the reverberating waves of emasculating feminine outcry, castrating the acculturated like Ryan Lizza and the swine like Harvey Weinstein, and even the pedantic like Al Franken. [Erik Wemple is sometimes more filler than substance, but he nails the bafflement squarely on the head with Lizza’s career. Though Wemple is accurate about employer termination clauses, the case here against the noted eastern analyst seems in need of adjudication. I have no vested interest in salvaging a tenacious liberal like Lizza, and I had my supervisor removed simply for putting her husband’s orgasms and performance in the same sentence, so my alarm may seem hypocritical, but to impugn the man over what has a feel of sour grapes seems to be a loss of proportion…] Dangerous Liaisons might be an extended metaphor for weaponizing the AIDS virus, and it is my favorite Close film in a way that The Big Chill is almost instantaneously a non-entity. Like many performers, however, Close embodies the nefarious enforcer, and she can dial her medical professionals up or down, accordingly, always with a slightly malicious air. There are hideously interesting aspects to The Girl with All the Gifts. The opening scene was the only time I have ever seen wheelchairs used as protective devices for a threatened able-bodied minority, but I am going to go out on a limb and call the narrative evolutionary diabetes of popular culture. I have nothing against women like Carey earning a living off of established zombie conventions, but her motifs come on the cheap. Oh, there are creative instances, a distillation of the bond between teacher and student in merciless institutional settings. Sennia Nanua does an excellent job as monster child heroine with her idealism and principles contrasted with insensate drive, with her savagery toward cats a deliberate poke in the eye. Consumers don’t need a reference website to see McCarthy’s imitations of 28 Days Later, stark geography, stark existence in tandem. The dowager wearies of Walking Dead syndrome.

However much appreciative of British one-upmanship against their American colonial counterparts, the BBC and Channel 4, if not ye old Pinewood Studios, love of humbling redneck reactionaries with an elitist sensibility of how acclimated European minorities are simply isn’t a real world reflection of social mobility, inside a class system or not. And we dare not exclude the French from this contention, since David Baiot is the Remorseful, if corrupting, Homosexual of The Churchmen. Audiences cannot possibly dismiss his fully rounded character Emmanuel as not deserving of ordination and grace, unless it emanates from his conscience, not ours. This diversity outcry from Mcdonald may have accurate demographics, but to the English mindset, there is no such creature as a British African who can flip black counter culture on a half penny. Ask Sophie Okonedo. Any regular PBS viewer knows her as the indispensable token of Great Britain’s sobering success, never mind the empire’s ruthlessness when Jamaican field hands were executed for the sake of sugarcane in the 1840’s. Okonedo is the unflappable gauze bandage, exchanging a prosecuting barrister for an unassuming lesbian like a living hologram. It is in this sense “Melanie” is captivating on the cheap: look at the little black girl behaving like a duchess. This is what sells, African appropriation and elocution of Caucasian table manners. If her predatory ferocity is a survival tool in the new world order, exactly what that is in Carey’s disaster remains mystifying, since we have little idea if the fungal symbiosis of the third generation will essentially wind up being the jealous plants of the body snatchers. Contrary to what my audience reads here, I treat the Muslim Saran quite well, especially since my bitterness is beyond her comprehension. I let her have a few dollars here and there, and she has no idea I’d ship her right back to West Africa, that I examine her like a foreign invader who will invariably destroy my United States. If she understood this intolerance, she would weep, and perhaps marvel at the strength of its roots, ingrained by self-inflicted alienation, among other things. Some journalists take the bull by the horns and equate Trump’s behavior with mental disease, and these are in the majority. Will, Sullivan, Joe Scarborough. Wiser men like Ed Rogers see Trump’s behavior as unpleasant, remembering that none of us are expert at psychiatric classification. I am impatient with certain aspects of Trump’s crass, but as someone long wading the trenches of expendability, every time I distance myself from his bluster, the left swings me right back with what is indicative of hysteria. There is still entertainment to be had in making Jerusalem an apocalyptic focal point simply on the strength of conviction. Jewish Israeli’s have  a divine right because the Torah makes it so, or Trump likes to side with winners, in the simplicity of reasonable accommodation.

Perhaps, within a week, or two, I will stop being let down by Mike’s schedule, (the wheelchair mechanic) I can order a new charger and or trade in my kindles and return to reading, actually passing my stool into our civilized sewer systems, as I could in the fall, and be more forgiving of the turn of the screw. I do not think Trump will necessarily ignite a catastrophic third world war. I also don’t believe the GOP will shield him indefinitely. This doesn’t imply impeachment. His reign isn’t worth what that would entail, but I am no judge of what constitutes mental defect. Isn’t Al Sharpton also a bigoted bully?

Activity As Tolerated

State Department denies Tillerson called Trump a 'moron' --Meghan Keneally for ABC News

If I was into this stiff upper lip business, like my former follower Mark, then I would just wade in with a High Castle analysis, in equal parts pernicious and praiseworthy of Rufus Sewell as John Smith, whose series son did the right thing, turning himself in to the American Reich to be destroyed due to his muscular dystrophy,  
I almost followed suit, with a different diagnosis, almost, and ultimately may not have a choice. My shins are emaciated, like my outmoded hardware. My family is at war over the matter, and the assholes from Adult Protection Services are salivating at the bit to put me away, in the Belmont Avenue hellhole, but a few things are holding me off. Control, the right to say no, and a race to save my published work. I can blame this vendor, but only in part. The power chair isn't bad, whether or not he overcharged me. It drives well. I remain conflicted about keeping it. Adapting to it is something else. I was over ridden, by fearsome matrons in their 60's over replacing my furnishings with a hospital bed, can't use that either, my father, his sister, Debra Horne and Trudy Richardson, favorite niggers to hate, annihilated my personal effects, and I am virtually choking to death to lose the 52 year old West African immigrant keeping me alive. She is Muslim, hyper and ignorant as much as caring. We clash daily. She is rough and hurts: only when these ruthless Marxists do their final assessment can I lose Sarrin, if I choose. We all have to fail biologically-- but I just keep taking too many punches, and my ligaments are starting to buckle. Holding my weight, which just eight weeks ago I could manage, is now being contested. Arthritis. But I still have some fight, my hair matted beyond rescue, at the moment.

I lost approximately 18 social media accounts since October, in my semi-anguished outcry, perhaps rightly. Old invalids moaning, after all. Credit Austin for staying with me, along with some others, but I am a bit sore at Mark Antro. He has the right to drop what accounts he pleases, but I'm his ally and thought we were friends, and I mean friends. I am too battle scarred to have a cougar interest in him, but I support him. He seemed puzzled by what he claimed were my 'attacks'. What attacks? For me an attack is telling Paul Krugman he is a fucking fascist at heart. That's an attack.

I always respected Mark and defended him against his critics; having tuned down my woe meter, however, I gained 3 or 4, including, inexplicably, Ed Rogers. Unless I am in error, I remember Ed's more active political currency. I respect his voice, and in the revolving door of preference, followed him earlier, having dropped Jennifer Rubin. I only 'unfollowed' Ed as a traffic issue, tweeted a positive on his Trump tabloid piece. Voila. I've no idea why I've been so graced, and mentioned it to my novelist poet colleagues with astonishment, as only the Trinity knows if the universe has a contracted byline left for a vulgar Italian in her spastic frailty. Is a Principal calling Trump a moron insubordination? If it's merely academic, I tweeted to mogul man "to get his fucking act together". Nothing doing. 

Flushed Cries of Distress

 I am not Howard Stern." --Charlie Rose, in a post operative interview with Terry Gross, a preemptive strike indicating how much we all owe Howard Stern 

As my follower Jason Dorwart is aware, sexual pride is important in the progressive disabled community. I’ve written about it in somewhat explicit fashion in earlier years, nor am I the only formerly indoctrinated and embittered outcast to be censored in search and have page views suppressed because of it. Far more confident paraplegic females have had instructional videos removed from You Tube by Google over the issue, and in extending an olive branch to ableism, the dowager was sympathetic. Reading the narratives of shared experience takes us only so far, and whereas sexual activity may leave certain women ambivalent, others may be happy in pushing boundaries. Harassment and hostile environment is the flip side of this coin, and having been through these trials, my viewers may think I’d find the scoop by Irin Carmon and Amy Brittain commendable. Eight testimonials illustrate a pattern of conduct similar to those which besieged Cosby into an opaque court case, and Rose, like other lesser PBS titans, stayed at the top of his game far past Medicare eligibility. He was bound to be forced into retirement at some point, given that his facial features in a live interview setting occasionally cast a ghoulish aspect to his profile.

What is seemingly intractable, however, is the incongruity of his cultural and political excellence juxtaposed against behavior we more readily expect to emanate out of the Playboy mansion. From my point of view, it is less about power, in Rebecca Traister’s micro-post, and more about a legacy of excellence tarnished less by the heinous aspects and more by the hideousness foisted on all of us by entropy. Look at everything he has done to explore issues with his audience, his lengthy segments taking psychiatric medical model treats seriously, even with enthusiasm by his guests. Rose is a robust believer in cooperative treatment in a way the spastic dowager is not, dissecting the clinical aspects of his heart disease with more than one eminent cardiologist, in an envious lust to hang on to the quality of his life. He channeled the outrage felt by the public over the Iraq war to joust with Donald Rumsfeld over the destruction of a regime and a society which later devolved under Obama into a puppet state. Judy Woodruff commended him on his scoop with Assad when the Syrian theatre was hot. There are too many probative conversations to list which amount to a daunting legacy. If it seems I am coming perilously close to advocating a grin and bear it approach, which is what my humiliation has amounted to since 1999-- no, not quite. I'm merely suggesting, much as with Roman Polanski, that being the best at something shouldn't be entirely forgotten, and though there is a rush to being a journalist on deadline which extended my lifeline to September 2017, I'm increasingly unhappy with The Washington Post anointing itself as the moral arbiter of feminine esteem. Would I have broken this story, unleashing the #MeToo fury in the public square? What I can say is this: I would have waited to give Rose the benefit of the doubt. We should rehabilitate and honor that ego, whether or not he considers his cardiac issues debilitating, or merely chronic.

Carbon Dating

When I contend with Brian Greene and other physicists on Twitter, effeminate mind altering geeks as they are, I must come off as a blockhead. I cannot compete with them in the mathematical empiricism which illustrates the laws of nature as necessarily fixed, so why do it then? Before giving a direct answer, it may surprise viewers to learn I once did amazingly well in algebra and Euclidian geometry, and even got an A on my chemistry final dragging my sister bitch on a leash. My acumen sharpened or fogged primarily due to despair. In my home districts, I thrived. Outside of them my motivation struggled without the proper covalent bonds, but I never quite lost interest in how Einstein and those who made nuclear war possible revolutionized astronomy. I did not realize, or had serious memory lapses against what I was taught, that stars start out as frozen gas that clumps together, takes 10m to ignite or fail, accordingly, and that our solar system won the lottery with long odds, especially since brown dwarfs are popular failures which do not result in fusion, in theory. Space generates its own dynamism over extraordinarily lengthy periods through vibration, end of story. And yet, theoretical physics borders on tacky space opera in places. Matter may ultimately be a hologram. Time may be an illusion. Dark energy. Anti-matter. Four forces, weak and strong, magnetism. Are we absolutely certain we aren’t attempting to decode god? We cannot really say all that much about our self-awareness, let alone why the particles which configure life are so different from those which configure uranium, or why disease and age and so many other things generate agony, against which pleasure is fleeting. We know joy when we feel it too, but most of life processes itself irrespective of human naval gazing, which is why androids and android sex and zombies and singularities worry our collective social dynamics. I do not think the laws of nature recreates humanity in alternate universes as neatly as the equations of impaction lend themselves to in popular science. This is where my “yes but,” comes in, even if I risk being a Neanderthal, like Ron Perlman in Hand of God. Perlman is always reprising himself as a caveman, and his canceled series challenges materialism in exactly the same way I feel the need to challenge what epistemology gains through radio waves and optics. The pilot episode reveals a conspiracy through hallucinogenic delusion which, just possibly, might be divine revelation coming at a necessary price. Amazon canceled it, so we’ll never know, as its second season seems to meander in corporate evil. The actor who plays Keith (Dillahunt?) was certainly made up to look like a warrior from Judges, conquering Canaan. Going against the grain of established critics, there are things I’ve enjoyed viewing here, if only to observe, in context, why the West Coast is as fucked up as upstate New York.

My mother’s sister telephoned, since I have stopped using Facebook. We ignored my abominable attitude, and the prospect of moving into grandmother’s nursing home went in one ear, as the saying goes. Mary really thinks she is doing the right thing, oblivious to the fact that my sentience is still vital. Marie, the other aunt, accused me of whining, thus generating the enthusiasm of her former married relation, and then hung up. I have my moments, but Marie is wearying me with this constant punishment, as both she and my father contributed to this gradated wasting of my strength. A generic ten year old Quantum extended my strength, and when it blew on 10/02, I didn’t assume I’d be dead in 6 months. Unless I can move the absolute zero of Satan’s forbidding glacial majesty, exchange power chairs, relearn how to maneuver myself to restore some semblance of self-determination, it is possible, without exaggeration. The disposable underwear, the loss of my fish, coffee, toilet usage, the toll may now be too much. Trudy Richardson may not have defeated me with her illegal tactics, but as I’ve written, the stocky lupus African achieved quite a lot with her conniving, linear mindset. I have no love lost over these murders. First I thought one thing, and then said it’s a black problem, and decided not to ripple Twitter’s ions. I am not Milo, quite, but if the handwriting is on the wall, things might get more interesting still, in my quest, if not for grace, then? 

Absorbed Maximale

"I knew what it meant. He knew what it meant."-- a eulogy

Michael Almereyla does more than draw the viewer’s attention to what acting approximates in the 2017 Majorie Prime. One of his major themes is the price of the burdens we carry, encased in a rather skeptical presentation of what we leave behind in the residuals of virtual reality. Senility and suicide present themselves here beyond being an issue of sociological concern. Both as a condition, (dementia) and a destructive act overriding survival (corresponding suicides) Almereyla presents a family stifled and suffocating on itself. Geena Davis, never entirely impressive as the Vitamin D American girl caught in a vortex through association, in her A list days, (The Fly, Thelma and Louise), has mastered the projection of a crabby 60 year old who knows the runaway train is coming, and sends out her warning signals with a certain degree of fatalism. As it is present in the pilot of The Exorcist in her solicitation of the priest, it is present in Majorie Prime in subtler fashion, only in this world Geena’s character is a troubled mother with an equally problematic mother daughter relationship. Tim Robbins, as he does in Code 46, carries the onus of being surly and frustrated vanilla, filling in all these melancholy lacunae until it’s his turn to linger. Hamm has to project being a lifelike composite of a husband we never knew, and almost as Spielberg does in his mawkish afterword in A.I., Michael leaves us with an open ended question about empathetic software mimicking the ghost of the human spirit. We aren’t informed as to whether or not the primes are voluntary, but each character goes through the motions, rebellious resignation in tow. These moral obligations around virtual memory already resonate here and now: Google has rules about what happens if payments for the domain lag, everyone has an opinion about the erasure of Gawker as a distinctive, now archival, media voice, questions swirling about how Peter Thiel defines his libertarian beliefs against a worrisome, and mighty, plutocratic streak. Neither longevity nor voluntarily taking one’s own life appear palatable in Almereyla’s, and by extension, Robert Redford’s vision. To qualify a previous post, I realize the aging potentate of Barefoot in the Park is probably not micro-managing Sundance Studios, but I read cues in this project easily attributable to what we know about Redford’s public person. The column he wrote after Newman’s death stayed with me, in a particularly masculine no nonsense manner.

If we look at where we are headed, through Almereyla's lens and other dystopian minded thinkers, libertarian outcry, if not defeated outright, is always compromised. Kokesh, the boy soldier idealist, envisions a free market utopia, but still plays cowboys and indians with an apparently zealous authority. Harassing stoners, intimidating militant quadriplegics comes easy; mass murder not so much. Nick Gillespie doesn't know where the total lack of boundary and freedom collide; (little did I realize Nick and I have far too much in common) Austin Petersen is aiming for a synthesis so the establishment can satiate his political ambition. How do we all fit under the same tent? More importantly, personal liberty is elusive, as an empirical matter. I need not remind my viewers that I gave notice hours before my power chair's demise, and if it is in any way binding, I'm still here, constricted. For every Fee contributor celebrating market dynamism, there are 15 to 20 Americans like me and my parental generation shackled to a rather troubled medical entitlement system. I heard Adam chant, "the state will fall," like a Baptist hymn. Eventually, the way things are going, it must, as our ability to enact in a concerted effort to change our paradigms, this is limited. On the small scale, however, government processes are already overwhelmed, not to remind you of Flint Michigan, or San Diego's homeless. I have lived five minutes to midnight for a very long time. There is only so much our inner resources can spare.

Shadow Emissions From Brown Dwarfs

[In spite of his refined sensibility Hyacinth Robinson, the little Soho bookbinder, is condemned, as the Princess puts it, “to look at the good things of life only through the glass of the pastry-cook’s window.”]

I did not know that Oprah was also a sexual abuse victim who miscarried the fruits of the violence against her, and it certainly explains what lurks beneath her vivacious veneer, how she transmutes white suffering with the agrarian cracks in black culture; it nevertheless doesn’t remove the irritants of her telegenic superficiality, and the dowager believes this is what Karina doesn’t understand about umbrage against false friends. I think I had enough of that with my former heroine supervisor, Linda Dezenski, who “didn’t understand what I wanted,” when she let me crash land into a near self-inflicted violence. Discussing ideation is one thing, but the turmoil my former colleagues at Liberty left me in is another, and I could have never truly gotten past what happened to me without leaving River Presbyterian Apartments, and since I haven’t managed that, and keep getting punched in the face, I needed to cast off my former Craigslist hire. Karina saw the reality of my situation. Due to this, with a trace of guilt, I overcompensated her, but had a different set of expectations than consoling phone calls, particularly when I was in trouble in October. I had hoped the peripatetic passer would have stepped up to mitigate the stress of my equipment failure. The cues I read in her voice said no way, so I essentially tossed courtesy out the window, and unfriended her. I don’t necessarily dislike flighty blonds with wobbly centers, but this shallowness is the venial American sin. I would not have these same expectations from a women’s interest author like Gretchen Laskas, though she has been in my department with some of her early writings, because mutual physical support is not the foundation of our relationship. Karina, however, accepted how I defined her, rapidly suggested and then retracted a co-habitation, which, if she had more mettle behind her declarations, would have spared me the equestrian braying cruelty of an asshole like “Tom,” Presby’s contracted Holocaust squad leader. I fault conservatives here too, harder as I am on the left, especially Kaisch with his Downs Syndrome anti-abortion bill. Conservatives fight for our lives, but the majority of us wind up as slaves, constricted chattel, unless we have the peculiar genius of Hawking. It may appear that chronic conditions are harder on the precocious, but making that assumption is laurel resting. The mentally retarded know, particularly when entering into adulthood, that the world perceives the threat they pose. Robert Redford tries to cut through this superficiality within his maturity, almost with the force of preponderance in Majorie Prime. Whatever the flaws in its gravity, the revelation of emotional wounds, this futurist dramatic poem is a devastating condemnation of method acting. To that end it’s rather finely tuned, and probably an affectation in the wake of Paul Newman’s terminal cancer. The middlebrow would say Redford is wise, not engaging in a roman a clef, hiding his intent in subtext, but I have an agenda, going to be gone soon, and take my sacrifices. It could be that James Woods, trailing behind Redford some years, doesn’t have the capacity to read my responses, as his followers have steadily increased. In my case, I know I haven’t taken drops simply due to vulgarity, but I do wince, when my fondness leads me to positive attributes, like a solitaire guru, and I face the risk of more abandon if they become aware, but we all know the price of eggs, how difficult broken yolks are to clean away.

51/50, Aftermaths Up The Creek

It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.-- Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Even with repeated viewings, a film such as Jacob’s Ladder opens with too ponderous and heavy a thud. It is neither a fair representation of the Vietnam experience—most films aren’t—although a vehicle like Rolling Thunder (77) excavates a POW’s psychic duress with devastating impact—nor a fair representation of horror merged in synchronization with its back story. Yes, Danny Aiello provides us with an epigram from Meister Eckhart as a justification for the demonic sequences towards the angelic sensibility of reunification, but Lyne’s direction has too many incongruities to be a good afterlife experience, indicting the Department of Defense through a metaphysical backlash rather than thorough investigation. Why a dying medic dreams himself through a wife and mistress as a postal employee with a deceased Dr. Carson at a veteran’s clinic is anyone’s guess. There are better films out there to touch upon the transcendent, including Vanilla Sky.  At the very least, the writer we have to thank for this enduring template, Ambrose Bierce, manages a seamless tale with An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge, in contrast to Lyne’s camera transitions. Politically, the Civil War emasculated Bierce; stylistically, he is too translucent for my taste, akin to Edgar Allan Poe on methadone, but every writer builds up to the point where we, writers, have the breakout moment of our best pieces, and one sees this in Owl Creek, which resonated with me too upon the obligatory anthology reading. In other words, in an eagerness to relax and actually use the data I’m paying for, I unwittingly selected a film bad enough to have been syndicated numerous times. I may feel that Lyne is a pretentious Carpenter rip off, and feel some pity for the aspirations of Bill Rubin’s original script, but ironically, something clicked in yet this latest perusal of a Tim Robbins’ youthful performance.

His niche, to the extent he has one, is to play the man with whom we identify who is out of his depth. It is evident even in the neo-vigilante apologia narrative of Mystic River, in which Sean Penn fabulously murders the wrong culprit, and it is more than blatantly obvious in Code 23, one of my speculative favorites. Even in Majorie Prime, where the holograms and the human actors alike are dependent on his character, the only one not recreated as a synthetic personality, he is still out of his depth against computer science turning life experience into unwitting travesty. Perhaps, if we pause long enough, it won’t amount to the best we can offer the future.