Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Runs Batted In

Since I am here, finally sweltering before Mayday, a word: Neil Patrick Harris' portrayal of Jeffrey Dahmer in CI's "Want" was not one of the franchise's stronger episodes. Harris' public indifference to being outed, which he responded to with a shrug in so many monosyllables, perhaps interfered with the suspension of disbelief, a common conceit about performance which I don't think quite captures why we watch, either to admire or disdain. John Tagman was just a little too pat, his torture just this shy of too nascent, to explain why Dahmer's cannibalism suffices as an answer to gay panic, if that is what it was, his psyche being one of our species most distorted, almost immune to the subversive dark humor of Hannibal, but what stays with me about that episode is Erbe's rebuff to D'Onofrio, serving as the last line of the teleplay: What a man to go bat for, since Goren saw reason's for leniency in Tagman's need to thwart abandonment.
When earlier this evening I pushed back against Rudy Giuliani's traditional appellation of "madman"



it was not to defend Earnest, merely to remind everyone that we need to stop engaging in lazy recoils. Earnest may have exhibited sociopathic tendencies for a significant length of time before New Zealand served as his trigger, just as Michael may have been engaging in behavior indicative of a cry for help before his alleged exploits. Labeling it, as Caitlin Flanagan does, as something beyond conception, is a mistake. Omnivorous primates all have an emotional range and degree, well adjusted or not so able to cope, even if we concede the former mayor, who's been blunt before, is attempting to shield Trump from blame. The president is responsible, certainly, for his bully tenor, but placing liability on his doorstep for heinous spree kills goes a bridge too far. Nothing in his candidacy or his excise of duty as commander in chief suggests he thinks slaughter in places of worship is beneficial.

Monday, April 29, 2019

The Eight Ball Visor

Wer wird ein Kind so zeigen, wie es ist? Wer wird es in seiner Konstellation platzieren, mit einem gewissen Abstand in der Hand?-- Google's synthesis of Rilke, from English and back again

In all fairness to Mr. Dorsey, who looks appalling to anyone's sartorial sense of public presentation, be it New Yorker correspondents or TED enthusiasts, almost as if he's channeling Tommy Lee Jones as Gary Gilmore fresh out of Woodstock:
  
No one arbitrarily anointed him, Ev Williams and his now streamlined Medium, or the others faithful to coding, including Donald Hicks (who certainly looks the part of a queer Iranian's dance partner), to be defenders of the First Amendment, which no longer exists, other than as concept devoid of access. If I was as much of a fiend as I purport to be, I would have weaponized myself against Yashar Ali, gaining significant insight, of a sudden, as to why his family are dissidents from the Islamic Republic in Tehran. Instead I took a break, revisiting the stark comfort of Styron's voice in Sophie's Choice. But for accidents of geography, I might have conceivably matched Styron in aesthetic temperament, despite my sympathies for the feudal caste system Robert E Lee struggled valiantly to save. Styron is to the left of that, undoubtedly, having the grace to host another canonical voice which yet eludes me, James Baldwin, but heaven forbid teaching any of this to the indignant nigger with his high functioning mood disorder who has tended to your besieged buttocks for the past year. If it makes progressives any easier with the ever burgeoning unease of my extreme prejudice, it mortifies me more that I almost fucked a black man who might have been my client at Matrix. This is the graver ethical lapse, one I'm almost ready to cut the cord with, even with the knowledge that I am trapped, Waiver services the maelstrom sucking me under.
Styron did not appear to be happy with liberalism towards the end of his life, radiating that comforting bleakness softly from him on his last appearance on Charlie Rose, betraying that he did not want to die horribly crippled, a slip in manner both he and Rose quickly corrected. What would he have made of the fact that I hold Llhan Omar to be an enemy of state? Reconstituting Nazism for his own lack of species optimism is one thing, a naturalized Somali bigot in the halls of Congress? This may have eluded the grasp of his privilege.
LLhan may say what she likes about Israel. I have certainly explored secular liberalism with my own diffidence, but she has not earned the right to be a federal official in any capacity, has barely earned the privilege of being a citizen. Whether or not she manages to get assassinated, I certainly have the temerity to see how enervating her political success is to the health of our body politic, stripped as I am of Trump's moral cowardice. If my pet monkey from Jewish Employment  Vocational Services Home Care Wing wasn't browbeating me to death for forty hours a week, I'd fly to Minneapolis and launch a ruthless investigation into Omar's electoral success, willing to place myself in mortal jeopardy to do so. I cannot change anything about my Medicaid service in this Commonwealth, even with my delightful Twitter stalker on my heels, a speculative stalker, offering to place himself at my service. It was never what I required, and any additional support will come far too late in my disaffection.

Friday, April 26, 2019

Water Pollution

How many of you remember this as one of the most notorious news segments of its time? There are two seminal events of the later 20th century which prefigure the blasted husk of human empathy and its erosions of trust in its own institutions in the 21st. Although I find it exceedingly difficult to practice the craft of journalism at this moment in time, I still consider myself one, even though admirable quacko Iranians who still have the energy to live in it have stolen the thunder of throbbing cerebral intellects gone south in anarchist glee. I am following Yashar, temporarily, to utilize his ledes when I can. The jury is still out on whether or not I despise him. Perhaps, but he is also honest, ruthless, brash, and unlike the embattled Kim Foxx, of whom my initial post was to be much longer, this not so much to excoriate the lack of impartiality in the bayous of black liberation and its cohesiveness (also hidden fissures, as Foxx seems to disdain Smollett's insecure swagger behind his body guard as much as a significant portion of conservatives do), but to illustrate how faulty Robby Soave's hastily written pieces are. Soave leads us to believe that Foxx was to recuse herself from Jussie's case due to conflict of interest. Gaynor, of Fox News, walks the recusal back, allowing the state's attorney to explain she had *contact* with Smollett's family. Where are the violins for the bedevilment of deadlines? David French considers Yashar Ali's integrity remarkable. Perhaps, but Yashar isn't truly impartial. We tried that with Jonestown, prior to the massacre. People couldn't see what Jim Jones was, but he presages more than Paddock, the Vegas shooter, just as the OJ Simpson trial is more than "the monkey is still a monkey" and got away with it, in the paraphrase of a cold attorney named Lydia Nayo. These two signature events anticipate the sense of crisis in our current populist era, a crisis that transcends Trump's narcissism, which, as a spastic woman with brain lesions of her own, I believe I intuit better than most. That a polemicist like Tom Nichols still uses the participle phrase "drink the Kool Aid" in reference to his lackluster senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, illustrates how much of an impact the events of Jonestown had on the American psyche, our inability to process that humanity creates its own self-destructive carnage.


So nefarious, at least until we start thinking about physics, gravitational pulls, the remarkable coincidence of Earth, and how Salvation subverts the expectations of the asteroid catastrophe genre. If I could just return to a pitch a week. A pitch a week, that would be remarkable, in my shriveling beneath the weight of modern African tribalism.

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Victor Hugo's Pantheon Ashes

he would fight until they killed him-- Scott J Holliday, Normal

How avidly this barely typing dowager used to read, even now, in her mildly frigid tremors and soils to be coped with, probably forever in these frail encroaching years, which have finally felled Stanley Plumly, one of the few poets I felt compelled to explore since my ouster from the MFA farming system, I am a woman of action. If Notre Dame Cathedral burns, then we must do something, punish someone, even in the realization that ancient relics are frail themselves, I cannot accept that this fire was the result of construction crew carelessness, and in my sin of extracting vengeance, I cling to the refrain from every Catholic service inviting tranquility.
Peace be with you.
And also with you.

But I am not a woman of peace shrunken to convulsions of her colon making her little better than Ezra Pound singing his madness behind bars. No. I do not need any more of my rhetorical flourishes being forwarded to the FBI by disability centers, so I stop short of simplistic threats toward Llhan Omar, but make no mistake about how exacting I would be if I had the executive authority: I'd not only strip her of her elected office, nullifying her supporters in Minneapolis, I'd also strip her of her citizenship, forcibly return her and her family to Somalia. These are the sins of your ferocious Catholic atheist, who like Lucifer, rebels against divine will for the right reasons.
Notre Dame
Notre Dame, I grieve to glory most high. Macron had better have a salient explanation for the Catholic public at large. He needs a very credible spin. I am reading Holliday's novel. Its rapid pace belies its historical context. It's protagonist, a complicated freak, one who would have been right at home in the gallows of Jean Valjean's prison quarry.