Perhaps Will Self Can Air Ship His Hemoglobin

 The 2019 Blood Thins does not have the extraordinary resonance of We Need to Talk About Kevin, but both directors, with the ghost of Lionel Shriver's too media current tempo behind them, ask the same question in a different thematic intent: How in the name of everything sacred did we get from 18th century irrational hysteria on the verge of industrial modernity, did we get from the Puritans to here? Please don't think I have any answers, any more than the FBI did about Vegas, as to why mass murder  and video game extremes seem to merge before the cinematographer's filtered lens. I am as exhausted as anyone else, with special circumstances, dealing with deplatforming, both involuntary and otherwise. I will leave you with one other question, particularly as it relates to Lynne Ramsay's remarkable discipline with suggestibility, does it work?

Voracious Verite

The whole side has collapsed? -- Peter Jennings, a mortal inquiry

Two of the last films I would see at the Boyd Theater at 1908 Chestnut Street, this being the grime settled retail zoned business district emanating outward from City Hall, with the rotund and pilloried sienna brick lay CVS two blocks below, also of historical interest as a grim, bleak, industrial age factory conveyor belt gray seediness before my time, reflective of how urban planners built for lives of toil, was the 1998 Matthew Broderick Godzilla, detailed slightly in my archives in another context, no particular lucidity attached, and the 1999 Blair Witch Project, the latter leaving me singularly unimpressed in the emotional turbulence of dismay, though I will concede to the always omnipresent gap within our generations, that Sanchez and Mynick anticipate an eradication, a dimensional abstract of openness and claustrophobic undercurrent, which now assails us in pixels, but also offers a shield to species outcasts. These two lackluster fin de siècle dramas offer the near perfect set up to be wary of a “free” movie like Cloverfield being offered to viewers with cultural resentments against Abrams, in the troubled Halloween of 2020, a cheesy, material rendition of transmutation, under threat as a collective, over the top victory and bemusement. Within the past sixty years, which is basically the span of one human life, an average span, even as the median agony of a crone’s visage increasingly makes a centennial and emaciated body more common, sans Joe Biden, sans Pelosi, (does she reign as the most powerful woman for yet another 24 months?), Halloween, at least in both Americas, is about having fun with inhibitions released to the mischievous.

The question isn’t whether Cloverfield is a great homage to Ishiro Honda and his forever inflicted terror lizard. I mean, even if we take one step back in our biologically engineered ability to endure long walks, most of us alive today rarely see the 1954 original with which Honda shocked the collective consciousness. I did make it a point to refresh myself on that matter and will only yield on certain points of innovation: there are elements of greatness in the original film which veer south due to the very nature of post war authoritarian stricture, and by the time we get to Jet Jaguar of Megalon, even coming of age audiences for which it was made might blasphemy into heterodoxy. The industry essentially demolished Godzilla with overkill, and Abrams, as well, is guilty of over reach and series which crumple over on themselves in the post Lost aftershock. The Fringe failed as a transhumanist playboard. Revolution failed in its attempt to take Lost in another direction, as most of these dystopian loss of power movies do. Power plants may be vulnerable to military destruction, but when it comes to credibility, the universal loss of the electronic age for sustained periods due to diabolical menace is highly improbable. Even the Clover creature doesn’t quite achieve this end. The film does open and swivel into horror very well. Abrams likes brackets, and much like Joseph Conrad, uses them as close-ended narrative frameworks, proving the paranoia seeded in the digital age was placed there as high concept before the Trump phenomenon. I was not too perturbed at the thinness of the characters, particularly as these characters are literally dealing with annihilation without the benefit of blame being assigned to nuclear detonation. The question, which I certainly can’t answer, even with two viewings of the film fresh and better sequenced the second time, is whether Abrams is using September 11^th at our expense, or if Clover is successful as a coping mechanism. The movie divides critics on this point, with the enemy who wins. The win, however, is inexplicable, and nihilistic, if not also parasitic, as what happened to yours truly, the content generator, who only has hate as the price of survival, malice against an ethnicity into which she flung herself. In the medias res, Marlena manages to fend off the alien host just long enough for the viewers to grasp the aim taken at Romero with lightning speed, who like Honda, created the animated cadaver, forever and a day. When presented with a life of combat deformity who simply breaks down and cries, a momentary immovable object on tires, in her sagging sex, ambulatory pedestrians might ward her off, or those same pedestrians might have called for paramedics, but in those moments of night, of impoverished frustration, the outburst of tears went unheeded. She drove back to the ten story building with its difficult location on the dead end of Penn’s uncomplicated grid of interconnected squares.

The Complicity of Noor Salman

 Omar Mateen was gay

How long have the lockdowns been bouncing on the heads of our supposedly free societies now? Six months? For more than three years, I have not been able to brew my Krups Automated Drip of my own volition, quite an older model, without significant duress. I cannot cook or prepare my own food spontaneously, this now being the provenance of jamboree man, as I now call him, my little niggardly music man, father driving me back to the city directing my gaze from the passenger side, “Look at that,” he says with subdued emphasis, my eyes following toward a broken gimp of a black man pushing a battered wheelchair with an equally feral white woman in it. With the grace of God, this is the suffering and persecution imposed on me now, stomach distended with acid reflux, but never mind that. How often can I post about the forced imposition of helplessness making me convulse excrement in pain due to medical model indifference? If I want a particular book out of my personal library, I cannot readily access a significant portion of my titles, or my own hard copy manuscripts, my revisions to my nearly ready to publish collections locked away, one failed hard drive after another, doubtful there is any meaningful way to right myself with any positive assertion of who Joanne Marinelli was, at her best, as I hurdle maybe, past sixty years into a leaden despair as numb as that ostracized street couple. True despair is no empathy, no feeling, no remorse, a lack of guilt, except for being still young enough to be struck by ironic moments only relevant to me: a dissection on the series Deadly Motives of Omar Mateen, the worst mass murderer in American history, second only to Stephen Paddock. For those of you who do not view True Crime Network as a learning tool, (and actually I do, getting past the macabre, the crime scene photos, I learn a good deal, about local color, and the Orwellian sometimes ineffectual nature of policing and investigation) Deadly Motives tries very hard to ration out redemption as if it was part and parcel of an Oxycontin epidemic. The daughter of The Happy Face Killer hosts the series, driving to and fro, to the families of victims, to the relatives of the killers, and Sitora Yusufiy is no exception, except there is something off in her expiations relative to this Afghan man she wed so briefly, caught between worlds. I am not sure she has enough social sophistication to truly understand homosexual masking in Western society.

In my anger at Liberty Resources, I concede that I took the Pulse slaughter out of context, but what I told this city’s center, nonetheless, was an accurate warning. Exiles of independent living culture often invest in this culture as the only family we have, and if its manifest corruption continues on as part of the status quo, eventually Hamlet will keep repeating itself, whether or not civilians in the modern hook up culture were felled by triggers we’re reluctant to look at too closely, and I have a rather blunt suggestion, one which belies my former intellectual aspirations, now besieged and harassed by Waiver compliance demands, stop attempting to assimilate such deeply entrenched Islamic nationals to secular methodologies. Institutionalism fared quite poorly in the aftermath of this shooting. The Department of Justice overplayed its need to convict Noor as an accessory, the media didn’t unravel the triggers or the character, and the gay community in Orlando was left stricken, paralyzed, despite progressive tsunami waves against populism.

Northward from Barbary Coast

Perhaps they had already been corrupted.-- a contributor to New York Magazine on the Taliban, 18 years ago, give or take.

What I haven't dwelt on very successfully, in relation to how I utilized Omar Mateen's autonomic act of terror , unlike Linda Sarsour in Aurora, interestingly enough, is my own level of complicity, and I am not sure I can resolve that, no matter how direct and on point I am. For my internalized dynamics, there is relatively little harm in that; for the country at large, this may be another matter, and with or without Donald Trump, the American left will one day have an uneasy reckoning, its ideology a series of contradictions, such that conservatives may weaken, but will always have grounds on which to reemerge.

Literature and movies, featured video of poverty stricken concrete sublets, never really assisted me in the comprehension of modern Afghan and Pakistani tribalism, and I have always been of two mindsets: civilization is better off without the Pashtun, and the Pashtun have survival skills which are useful in the event of a mass extinction, and if I want boundaries, these tribes have them in spades. They also bred into Sicilian and Roman bloodlines, as Rome evolved into the Byzantine, hence many Italians have Arabic trace elements in their provincialism, which is obviously digressing. It is easier to turn on the World Series, resign oneself to the dominance of the Dodgers, than dwell on these moral dilemmas and latent hostility toward those that challenge gender, defy the reality of biology itself, and at the same time tremble at savages who more rightly belong in Ashoka's era . There is no question that Mateen's shooting gallery was and is beyond comprehension. To make a primitive analogy, if I rolled into a room of 1500 case managers and took out 75 of them as targets, it wouldn't send any kind of message about radical obstetrics and quality of life. It is an indiscriminate behavior which actually makes it more difficult to close ranks against hedonism. Andrew Sullivan's solution to that was an appropriation, gay marriage. It won't settle the question anymore than the incautious utterances of Pope Francis, a weak leader who one day 18 months ago made me squeal in private exuberance when he liked my response, and then me weep in rare excess, a grave sin committed in my disrespect, as the atheist in me scuttles under the bed. Any Catholic reading this would scold me not to disavow my faith simply to be a smartass. He would be a better leader if he harvested such teachings gleaned from centuries, as opposed to diluting doctrine to appease the left, and if we're tone deaf, perhaps we have to be, and not out of selfishness.

Some of you may believe I am walking myself back from sometimes explosive vitriol because my father, and particularly Mainline Medical, run by my uncle, destroyed my independence at the request of the Negro Public Housing Alliance, and if I read this anonymous portion of my audience correctly, you're right, but I haven't altered in a certain sense of hardened conviction, only that Mateen was nonsensical, counterproductive, and he may have killed people who might have rejected the excesses of the sexual revolution. I have known many in the gay community, and just because my contempt with two of them led me to a temper, it doesn't mean I regale bloodbaths. But this doesn't mean national conscience is settled with the affair.

Slopes for the Doctrine of Chances

 What if after all these years you discover that behind your determined, disciplined mind, impervious to discouragement, behind the fortress admired and envied by others, you have a tender, timid, wounded, sentimental heart?  --Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat, p4

Slopes for the Doctrine of Chances

Normally, suspended as I am between the pit and the pendulum, I would not pay attention to flimsy content generation from entertainment media, but the algorithm knows just how often I will yield to clickbait for a Star Trek headline, and on October 14^th, I thought Rick Gonzales’ hastily reassembled deadline profile for giant freaking robot, contending that Lien fell to Garrett Wang over a sex appeal vote, was worth a read. I did not know that some odd fifteen years later, bearing in mind behavioral deterioration doesn’t have neatly bracketed timelines attached, that this ensemble cast member of a “children’s show,” one that would turn Patrick Stewart into an internationally renowned superstar, would fall victim to alcoholism, domestic violence, and indecent exposure. My link here represents CNN’s initial reporting, itself probably compiled from a local Tennessee paper, or a stringer assigned to the township precinct, from which Gonzales aggregated his concluding paragraph, representative of how little automation has done for five & dime outlets. As I have previously indicated on Blogger, I myself went from earning 3k, starting in 99, deflating through 04, to virtual slave labor, two failed aggregate ventures, and then barreling into disaster with generic generation z mindsets in Medium's dubious cacophony of a collective palette. In other words, I understand the architecture of the padding in which Gonzales was engaged. I allowed it to resonate, allowed myself to feel something about Jennifer Ann Lien’s piteous fragility and the way Gonzales framed the arbitrariness of here today, gone tomorrow, because of the way in which producers and casting directors play shuffleboard. I worked in mental health; I am mindful of Foucault’s castigation of its practices, not that Lien’s neighbor wasn’t within her rights to protect her children, but the behavior of this celebrity with her latter day life of incremental shambles wasn’t really the full blown onslaught of mental illness as it is defined in the medical welfare paradigm, like shadows on the wall. She simply engaged in loss of inhibition, perhaps bored, unable to match Gwyneth Paltrow in an anti-gluten campaign, if this was the model she hoped to copy, within an industry afterlife. She made better connections than I did to pursue her telegenic appeal, fell further. All that seems to be left is a canonical asterisk.