Olfactory Frsson

 It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by  another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not, -- Daniel Defoe

I did not know much about Mark Ruffalo prior to his whimsical stand-in for Bill Bixby in 2012, much like many viewers. I was able to recognize him as an important foil to DiCaprio in Shutter Island  almost solely, in far too narrow a fashion, because his lead work with an agit prop made film , entitled The Normal Heart , made me furious. As a “made for television” project, it was designed to provoke as a raunchy modern Dionysian outcry for homosexual freedom at the start of the AIDS epidemic in the eighties, letting the good times roll under the  “voo doo economics” (notoriously characterized by George Herbert Walker Bush)  administration of the actor politician who in those very 80’s, was very good at projecting his solidarity with lines in the sand; and just why did Ruffalo and Julia Roberts (perhaps aging out of synchronicity?) and Alfred Molina, not unknown in his younger years for representing gay pathology, lend themselves to this cable documentary drama? Ignorance is not always the requisite criterion for bliss: I might have suspected, but didn’t, that the director, Ryan Murphy was a lapsed Catholic who went ape shit after coming out, with a chunky, heuristic fervor, both his camera and his screen writer insistent upon the fact that histrionic orgies are cause for celebratory affirmation, as opposed to the pall of repulsion, with death from a new epidemic causing such outrage amid the urban left that a viewer might be persuaded a new era of genocide had enveloped the big cities. When Roberts doctor Emma Bookner emphatically tells her patient queue to “stop fucking,”  Ruffalo ardently asserts that you can’t tell gay men this. “Sex is all they have,” be belts out with nasal hypermania. This doesn’t really offer retrospective justice for anyone, and this angry teleplay ignited a backdraft on this besieged spastic writer in the opposite direction Murphy and his cohort celebrities expect. Forget about reactionary incitement with the potential for intimidation:  if a physician suggests abstinence from coitus as a temporary measure to save my life, then logic dictates I follow medical advice,

I was actually present when AIDS broke onto the scene in the United States as a foreign enemy, and took my brother’s life due to drug addiction, so Ruffalo’s doubletake provoked an illegal degree of rage, the type of which not only shackles the marginalized, but also places them on the radar of law and order. The much dissected Anthony Fauci has been fabulously quoted, as Covid waned, saying “we’ve entered the age of the pandemic,” but he began his rise as a public figure trying to break the stranglehold of HIV, and at best managed a ceasefire with a drug regime that is evidently the gay black male’s cocktail, if the Truvada commercials are accepted as an anecdotal representation. Ruffalo may have mollified me since, slightly, with his short serial I Know This Much is True , but HBO, at best, regardless of craft, is a network of domestic terrorism, and needs to be perceived accordingly. Radical Traditionalist Catholics were once the holy warriors who repelled the Saracens from Europe, when our blood was worth its faith.

Malaise Stampede

 Villeneuve screened the film for the families. They approved,-- an app footnote

I was mildly drawn to the sparingly edited, starkly shot Polytechique, about six moths before I subscribed to Topic and its dog-earred cultural appropriation, and I let it get away from me at the time, without realizing that Villeneuve would both abuse and offer Frank Herbert fealty with a vengeance in 2021. Whether or not Herbert would have approved of multi-ethnic Freemen is a matter open for debate, but Vileneuve, as director, takes a liberty when dealing with the 1989 massacre which is suspect. Santo Blais, characterized as Jean Francois in the film, whose hesitancy in confronting Lepine is implied, hung himself due survivor’s guilt, and his parents followed suit. He didn’t gas himself with carbon monoxide in a sealed car.  Had he been mortally wounded attempting to stop Lepine, that is the heroism worthy of artistic license: Yes, Santo displayed bravery, but Canada’s pasteurized equanimity takes it too far afield, at times, especially when rigor in the face of danger is warranted

Many Happy Returns

 "I want the whole man!"--Ian McKellan

I would tell you that I have been stalled for many days on a Substack piece about the McCormack Oz race which I would like to finish, with hopefully some relevant insight, before the November election results are tallied, with a Shapiro victory most likely assured as Wolf’s heir apparent, but this is only a partial truth, while I reflect on Patrick McGoohan’s Number 6 caught in a rubber room, an analog rubber room, for making a disruptive choice which the MI6 of nearly 60 years ago didn’t like. McGoohan didn’t create The Prisoner as a critique of the British welfare state, but the boomerang nature of The Village is a great deal like being a rat in a maze of the Commonwealth’s static, and blisteringly deadly Waiver services. Like Enka Kohat's Shubert of 21 years ago, the mind attempts to rally around the cauterized despair burbling about like raspberry jam, knowing it’s doomed, resisting electro shocks, brainwashing, various ruses designed to make the agent believe he can outwit the closed circuit cameras, and those malignant capture balloons, no realism here in this 17 episode carnivalesque farce, but The Prisoner is violent, paranoid, anticipating Guantanamo Bay despite its cartoonish exaggeration. The series withstands age even with the knowledge that the Soviet Union is dead, in definitive terms. While I am surprised at the quick success of Zelenskyy’s counteroffensive, any student of modern Russia knew Putin was in trouble when Shoigu couldn’t bring about Kyiv’s collapse. However long it may be until Putin is deposed, or not, this sinking writer doesn’t think Ukraine is entirely free from the threat of the Russian Bear, but the nail in Stalin’s coffin has been sealed, We can breathe a small sigh of relief.

The Jenga Echo Chamber

The great principle of English law is to make business for itself.-- Charles Dickens, Bleak House

 I may have had money once, briefly, forged on the dried grinds of feral welfare culture, once I left behind Daddy’s rat pack wheeling and dealing, but Bed Bath & Beyond , founded in 1971, encapsulated upper caste suburbia I would have never been able to capture on my own without the right marriage, but that was never forthcoming in the bracketed time young women have to recognize and forge the character of the hypothetical man in question, so the death of Gustavo this past Friday, who wasn’t the retailer’s CFO for any great length of time, is not only reminiscent of the 1929 suicides which ushered in The Great Depression, which arguably didn’t end until the GI Bill picked up pace after 1944, it is also a harbinger of the American upper class warped by a pandemic decompression. Not only will the last boomer deaths signify the loss of what life was like before the digital age, but there never will be a reverting back to normal  after COVID-19, ever, not when otherwise reasonably ambulatory men like Amal emote beyond rationality in such a spectacular fashion. Businesses fail, even in state model economies, and one man’s ruin is not necessarily only one step out of the gutter, beaten to a pulp, horizon eclipsed and narrowed by the weaknesses of age. This same sort of visceral reaction pierced the gut when Robin Williams took his life in 2014. The comedian, however, in the passage of time, had a debilitating diagnosis. Amal had pressure. Some of us should be so lucky to still have a head in the game.

The First Chappelle

Her eyes were green.-- Harrison Ford, still killing replicants

 

Since I am not working on anything I want to be working on, and can forget about timeliness with my scaly brush burned ass, which markedly hasn’t made me comatose yet, awaiting my 60^th birthday this winter in livid fear, hating my cowardice, let me make just a brief clippity -clop down an alley where my trot is at best tentative.

The first time I ever read about Dave Chappelle, he was allegedly having mental health issues, going to and fro on a plane. Then I saw a bit of his improvised skits on WPHL, and you will get “eh,” with a shrug. He doesn’t need me to defend his edgy agitation when it comes to our inability to strike on our ironic discord for bemusement, but 1^st Avenue’s sanctimony about canceling his live appearance over his jokes about  transsexuality is absurd. I have also been irritable with Rand Paul’s unique Kentucky bourbon flavor of late, but will walk that irritation back when it comes to challenging the Levine orthodoxy when it comes to gender reassignment. Paul was willing as a physician, to step on a progressive IED, and that takes courage. Richard Leland Levine is not a woman. Dysmorphia is a disorder, regardless of the fantastical games writers like to play with it. This Assistant Secretary takes hormones to enhance breast tissue, suppresses his testosterone, and he is in charge of public health? The German intern I knew, and lived below for many years, went insane before she died as Erik, As for Chappelle, some promoter believed in the man and helped him get to where he is, so shouldn’t his audience decide his value on the merit, rather than the venue? Now I've earned some reest for spasmodic contractions. These cannot be transitioned.

Littoral Membranes

 People believe they're self-important!--  Jason Statham smashing his skull through a car window. Revolver

Instead of paying tribute to Ray Liotta by revisiting the seminal Good Fellas, which takes a significant amount of energy, I selected Revolver, where Jason Statham undergoes some queer double indemnity; Ray Liotta’s role as D, however, is essentially the same allegorical switch hitter as in Identity, which is a year earlier, a much better construct, and perhaps Guy Ritchie should spend some time in an actual jail cell before he mashes up such a soporific effort again with such talented players.

I do not feel the same absence of presence in Liotta’s death that I may have felt about others, like Peter Falk. I never enjoyed what Liotta projected, most of the time, that skeevy New Jersey mendacity, not his corrupt cops, not his tough guys with soft paunch centers of gravity. Not everything about Italian ethnicity deserves celebration, and his voice peels off like a scab not willing to heal, although I softened for his support role as the dying father in Powder Blue, where maudlin is Forest Whitaker’s middle name. It is this fake death, in LA made snow, with Liotta’s baby blue eyes, against Jessica Biel, which leaves the man most poignant. It is excessive to suggest a movie like Powder Blue is a type of precursor to this rotten second decade in which I die, but sometimes, the fabric of the universe has a malignant tap when we troublesome creatures push past the envelope, and Powder Blue contains elements of malevolence embedded therein. Bui exacts a heavy toll on his viewers.

Not Too Many of These

 "A must see oddity--" Rotten Tomatoes

I subscribed to Topic in May solely to see The Returned, and as to the series, I cannot add anything that spry and paid reviewers haven't written about it. I saw a similar variation on the theme on HBO called The Departed, which was a majestic reconciliation in the way the US handles evangelical oscillations, but The Returned is unabashedly a Catholic French liberal horror story which has no apologies to make. Writing about it escaped me  in the immediacy of viewing due to daily nigger care, and my foray into Substack, which has been slow, but all I am here to do this morning, even if I am back logging into my archive, is to endorse Topic itself. 40% of the series are innovative concept, worth the six dollars a month.. I may not be able to afford it daily for too much longer, but if I don't simply give up and die of Pennsylvania's nursing home death march, I will certainly return to this channel in an economy marginally easier. Since I am on this do as I say kick, don't ever move to this state. I know Texas has its own sagebrush poverty and Texas Ranger powder residues, and Miami has areas of Liberty City that make Philadelphia seem like Kenya, but don't come here, to this state of my birth. It functions like static electricity.

Tertium Quid

"Do you know the difference between capitalism and socialism?"> "No"> "In capitalism, man exploits man. With socialism it's the other way around."-- dialogue from The Alienist

 When I was on the verge of leaving prepubescence, not much older, or younger, than Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier were in 2014, I never saw cable channels such as Home Box Office through a particularly polemical perspective; if anything, the august movement of its logo across my neighbor’s television screen was intimidating, for in the beginning of the cable era I watched it while my mother’s peer was minding me in her duplex. The network was simply the package you subscribed to in order to have daily content available, movies all of the time, even at five in the morning, the new constant distraction, a gratification stimulant which would lead to an ever growing demand for content, not that the naiveite of childhood could foresee all of this, not like Sidney Lumet did with Network. If you ask, or even if I search those diaphanous memory triggers, what content I saw on these fledging subscription providers, my introspection thickens with milky white blanks, the foamy textures of oblivion, but it certainly wasn’t Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, or Coppola’s The Conversation, which, although inimical in it’s encroaching build up toward a frothy climax, was tame enough for commercial projection. Weier’s father sounding off to Brodsky about iPad content isn’t new, in her careful probing of these distraught families. What is new, and almost beyond organic cognition, is the interface between hydraulic generated power, micro circuitry, mass media, mobility, the pressures of collectivization on it, and any subsequent reaction to that pressure.

To a certain extent, all documentary films are forensic excavations, and Brodsky and her crew excavate aplenty over this autonomic perniciousness which assails boomers in this new age manufacture of killer children, and this writer would argue that this feral niche culture resists the comforting grasp of categorization, in terms of oh yes mental illness and schizophrenia are the trial balloon floating at this altitude while a debased society floats at the other, and well, fuck, parents can’t export kids out to the colonies to apprentice a trade anymore, and why is it still so hard? Beneath all this is a woman’s pain in not catching the monstrosity in their otherwise angelic baby, but Angie Geyser, if she had been aware of her husband Michael's schizophrenia prior to Morgan's birth, might have had her daughter periodically evaluated by behavioral specialists. It may not have prevented the attempted murder, which, when scaled down to size, might have involved 'best friend spite', which roiled over in viciousness, but it may have made the judge hesitate before trying two girls barely out of childhood, as adults. This was absurd, regardless of the level of premeditation. The heart rends itself for Morgan, still a young woman, because regardless of how successful her pharmaceutical cocktail might be, her life ended the day she adjudicated her apology to Payton Leutner, and there is something even still more invidious in that.

Mise en Scene Buona Serata

 

Observing James Gandolfini bring Tony Soprano to life is analogous to becoming the prophet Jeremiah, sacrificing the droll life of whatever a Bedouin does, say, shaving his pubic hair with carving knife, in order to chastise Israel into whatever the rewards an aesthete lifestyle was supposed to bring to the first nation to recognize the divine as other dimensional and without limit. My Roman blood sang the song of going home, the very DNA I fled for Nigger City USA, an impulse of heart for which I’ve never forgiven myself: David Chase kept me sane just a little while longer, while perhaps some of you can imagine how much I regret not being able to stay concurrent with it due to an antiseptic barrenness of my own. That Jimmy faded to black in Italy in parallel circumstances to his title character creates the same dissonance in me that Eugene Robinson felt about Cosby. Can I offer perspectives about the series which established critics cannot? Perhaps in micro fragments, but not this evening, bone weary as granite, as cool and unforgiving as marble to our rubbery fingertips, but I do have to write about it, rerun it for the rest of the miserable ferocity of my life.

Earring in the Naval

 

Antonio Brown: The Inception of Black Dysfunction onto The Mainframe

 Perhaps this should be the last time. --Al Michaels

How far have we forwarded from the days when George Will could praise the late Hank Aaron's athleticism on the diamond with appreciative poise? Fairly far, if Antonio Brown’s antics on the field against the Jets this evening was any indication, and no, I am not present at the curtain call to compete with swaggering dicks on field stats. Wouldn’t dream of it, but as per my link to Jason Owen's synopsis article for Yahoo Sports, I am indeed here to stir the pot with my own ladle toward a real time future pitch, attempting to get back in the saddle in my fifty-ninth year of humiliating and now sometimes painful jeopardy. One thing you will never read my complaining about is an editor dropping me because incontinence prevented me from meeting a deadline, and I have lost opportunities with periodicals to which I am reluctant to return because my topics fell apart, without regard to what form of colitis plagues my colon, even if it isn’t colitis as opposed to other forms of inflammation. Arains was within his rights to release Brown immediately, nothing illegal about it. Brown had a fiduciary obligation to the contract he signed, just like every other league player of privilege who pay their dues, and that’s the point. Being in the league because one is a great wide receiver or quarter back is a privilege, not a right, especially when men like Gleason of the Saints has sacrificed, and any inequities that existed in the 1950’s have been corrected, even over-corrected. Brady, and those who worship said demi-god want to draw out the violins and look for a suitable bipolar inhibitor? There is more to Brown’s melodrama than that, and it has a fairly lengthy tradition in Black American culture, an exaggerated servility designed to distract observers. Nothing is perfect, and for every Junior Seau and other instances of dark domestic violence some managers have to contain, there are the Donovan McNabbs and Dak Prescotts who become household names, and Dak is all grace under fire with his own emotional skeletons. Whatever else our pandemic cultural shifts contains, there is an element of insouciant superfluidity about it, like Lil Nas X Old Town Road video embedded in sarcasm and the female street dancer’s nearly automated gestures of defiance in a song which is nothing more than studio broadcast sugar for those who’ve lost moral centers to bling. This is one disabled woman aging out, on the precarious slope of vanishing, who’s had enough. I loathe the NFL, but Antonio’s rip cord isn’t a corrective measure in which to create a better league. He deserves social ostracization, considering how many millions of people simply cannot take his place on the field.