Old Hollywood

 A scheme unexecuted is with them a positive loss. -- Thucydides

In light of Robert Carradine’s self-inflicted expiration date last Monday, I thought I would write a caution about memoirs and biographical stricture, however otherwise unwound: be wary. I did not pay much money for Endless Highway, considering the tomes I own outright in hardcopy editions, and what I pay for in terms of kindle “services” for digital  etexts, four dollars plus tax isn’t that concerning, not against the estimated two thousand USD I’ve spent on kindle technology since the turn of the century, but I find David’s voice hard-scrabbled, even while haunted by his enigmatic passing in the spring of 2009, which happens to be the same year I paid too much money for my more primitive second generation device. Still mourning – which means still fond of, the early tablet-sized casement over disk, still in my possession, but mysteriously hidden, hopefully, in a slot between weathered books in the foyer, the lithium battery quite dead, worthless except to be dismantled when I get a chance to return it, tagged—always nagging in the back of my mind.

The most celebrated son of the Carradine clan deserves credit for writing Endless Highway on his own, but a ghostwriter, like Cybill Shepherd’s Aimee Lee Ball, might have given his voice a polish he isn’t able to manage pitching his own stones. What this disabled writer knows about ghosting is a never attempted writing advice article on how to do it on consignment, but those who could benefit from it comprise a diverse group: crime bosses, athletes, clergy, and politicians included. Perhaps David didn’t have the hindsight, or, since Kwai Chang Caine became his alter ego, that ego may have gotten in the way. Assailing fans with the notion that God doesn’t like me very much is the immature spurting of the boy within the man, carrying his wounds. This is self-evident from his second sentence in the next paragraph: “When I was five, I tried to hang myself in the garage by jumping off the bumper of the Duesenberg.” Fans of David, of which I am one, will perhaps find this admission eerily prefigures how his life would end. One hopes he wasn’t this calculating in late his fifties, despite his revitalization as the malice-riddled manipulator in the heady Kill Bill saga. From as far as I’ve gotten in the book, David’s father seems both itinerant and errant, and these traits haven’t worked out so well for the weather beaten working-class mien of the sons. The Kennedys, also in decline, always carried their royalty with them, not the Carradines. As actors, they were anything but the Irish who had beaten the sticks. Perhaps this was part of problem, whatever the proclivities. Do those of European descent still have the ability to create history, let alone feint the immersion which made John and David so notable? (Keith handles his characters differently.) Generational shifts have also challenged the norms of what used to be the standards of Caucasian excellence. This may not trouble the younger talents behind boomers on their last legs, like JD Vance, who found what he needed in the cooption of a diversity marriage, but for every Vance, how many deluded men like Crooks, a nearly successful assassin, has the US nurtured over the last 25 years? Mental illness is a classification, after all, but Robert’s suicide runs in close tandem with the aspirational sniper, and it points to a larger crisis within Western culture, one wherein we do not have a Peloponnesian War to eke out a victory.

In the Aftermath of Minneapolis

 "Please do tell us all the secret solution."-- Kyle Smith, chucking it

I interact with theater critic Kyle Smith more often than is necessary, a credit to his acumen and tolerance, and his willingness to post back to subscribers, but I would like to gnaw on one kernel he offered to politically active Democrats when he asserted, factually, that his party couldn’t ban firearms. No, but they could push to ratify a constitutional amendment by the traditional two thirds state majority to alter or eliminate the Second Amendment. I am not indicating this is what I would do, and such a proposed ratification would take a long time, would have to outlive MAGA’s commitment to any perceivable Trump heir. It isn’t simply the United States which faces the choice to revitalize or decline (I am in the decline camp because my life is static and puerile beyond the words I have to spare for virtually living with a bandy ass minority I never chose, as a daily constant of my sixty plus years), but our party system as well. Leon Panetta discusses bipartisan abdication for The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. One way to reverse this is to revitalize commitment to principles, and domestic massacres are powerful arguments against American citizens carrying Glocks, semi-automatics, killing Las Vegas revelers, or the children of Sandy Hook, or Florida students, and now, church going Catholics; it isn’t going to stop until the electorate and the representatives we elect have the will to make it stop, to stop treating gun shows like flea markets, to restrict sales. For every Kyle Rittenhouse engaging in the right of self-defense, there are 20 tragedies any literate reader could rattle off. Remember George Zimmerman making a martyr out of Trayvon Martin, in 2012, at the tail end of Obama’s dimming comet of glory? Until Trump’s election last November, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 2 to 1 on the basis of voter registration. It can be that way again, because conservatives tend to be streamlined, have a unipolar focus, like faith in God, country, and austerity.  So stand for something, change the Constitution. I have written on this Blogger failure in the past that I believe in political violence in very limited circumstances. Will Smith slapping Chris Rock didn’t perturb my conscience. I don’t appreciate either man a great deal, but Smith stood ground in an acceptable manner. Senseless carnage destroys everyone and everything which used to be decent, including me.

It's All Fixed?

 "The last game needed to win is always the hardest."-- Nazem Kadri, rink Sultan

--------

I first heeded the call to return to what used to enthrall me about NHL professional hockey in 2022, when the AVS defeated Tampa Bay to host the Stanley Cup that off season. It wasn't a hard and fast rekindling of  a twelve year old's medical model pain which found appeasement in the dark listening to Flyer's radio as the Broad Street Bullies brought it home and actually let me touch that magical trophy when I was still in my normal W sitting  posture, in pigtails, hard for me to remember now, my normal body in that horrible vaginal-painted ward in 1975, before the surgeons, with my father's permission, destroyed me, although I am obviously still here, suffering writer's block superficially due to Substack, another collective bargain with digital devils which obviously isn't working. I don't want to do this on that model, indulge myself. I can't afford it.

Kadri was more quixotic than exotic to me, wondering in the back of my mind if the Canadians htad gone too far turning a Muslim into an athletic nerd. Perhaps I followed up on the racism Naz had to field, but it wasn't the focus of my attention. All the line journalists wanted to speak to him, he was good at relating to fans while closing in on that victory, trying to find a fixation that will keep me strong enough not to self-destruct with end of life nigger welfare care at my disposal, such intimacies as are necessary with the majority black warders making me worse, not better, than when  Google wanted to terminate me for incendiary, caustic tones. Perhaps I wanted an insurrection, much like the Red Brigade did when they assassinated Moreno, but I am too old now. Genocide, carnage, casualties, it doesn't heal pain solve my arduous cursor issues, or earn me Paul Bissnnette's acknowledgement. What would that do for me anyway, giving up on James Woods the actor with muted rancor, and why that? Trump Elevation Syndrome? The tragedy of his Palisades survival? X makes me feel too familiar with Woods, and like some thinkers, I cannot process that virtual reality, ditto my dying aunt. I have written about her on Blogger, disparagingly, and she is dying almost exactly as Pope Francis did. It is all fixed, she used to tell me about sports, and after the Canes victory Monday evening, her sensibility makes me balk. She's right. Granted Florida was tired, but some of you remember the early James Woods film, Against All Odds. Big money wants game 5. Too cynical?

Novena in an Advanced Directive

 

                                            image of feral parrots by James Woods

Before waking at five thirty this morning to feed Saint Gregory and his sister Georgina, (never actually calling to Greggie by his papal nomenclature) I had a waking terror, at the break dawn. This is fairly common since I started my grating downward spiral with JEVS Care-at-Home in 2018; nightmares with the sun, in disposable tissue-stitched elastic I had never been previously forced to wear. These terr0rs usually scatter, and I dissipate, returning to my static misery aging, burrowing my umbrage towards Philadelphia’s color-coded majorities, and it isn’t because of recent criminal events like the Ramadan shooting last Thursday. The disruption that incident represented was an integral part of Philadelphia’s minority identity, the undercurrent that the “brotherly love” actually blankets over, beneath that adoption of that now careworn Nation of Islam rhetoric as well. Somehow this city, molded by Quakers who the British couldn’t subdue or export fast enough to suit the tenuous grasp of its Anglican largesse on the east coast, is just a seedy tale of dereliction, and had those symptoms been made more manifest when I was in intellectual foment in Chester, in its then one idyllic campus hotspot, perhaps I would not have engaged such a destructive journey. My engagements at Rusk Institute during adolescence, in Manhattan, over a twenty-four month period, consecutive intervals during which I returned home for Ridley Junior High down by the lake, prefigured later hard choices which would ultimately unravel my life into this despicable travesty, but in 77? I had some mewing hope that another stint in rehab would undo the brutality of Shriner’s Hospital.

Being an in-patient once again would wind up an extraneous exercise, but it did place Greg Hepburn in my path, and to a teenager, he was solidly defined for a spastic gimp, like a compact Arnold Schwarzenegger, not so tall as the former body builder, but well defined for a rough shod recreation therapist, stringy blonde hair which brushed the shoulder of his form-fitting knit shirts, usually sky blue in color; for casual wear his jeans and tee accented what masculine virility he had.

It might have been a virility I could have tested, had I not scuttled the fact that I was a minor and a temporary in-patient who at least made a pretense out of following the rules, and he was an empowerment hire, it didn’t matter. I was slightly too passive to stroll on my wheelchair rims around my spartan, laminated junior high school bragging “I have a long distance boyfriend in Manhattan,” (even as the reflections of an increasingly confined woman wonders if she had worn this medallion man as an active lie, would it have led to a healthier engagement with my milieu?) but he was a figurine, however much flesh and blood, however prickly our city boy to girl discussions, who became an internalized fantasy of a lonely girl burgeoning into womanhood who couldn’t find her way amid conventional teenage norms.

It might be said, if the jolt from the subconscious wasn’t gone in a flicker, that the dream sequence bore a certain similarity to Tony Soprano’s car ride while he was recovering from his demented uncle’s aggression in hospital, but it was too quickly vanished, my nearness to the Gregory Hepburn of yesteryear on the passenger side of a Chevy Impala, his eyes reflecting red rimmed in the rearview mirror, furtive, possibly absconding, like death on the lam.

The Muck & The Cringe

I used to believe that a warm and soft-centered drama like Thirtysmething was emblematic of the oyster on the shell liberalism I was supposed to exude in my post-collegiate life, and suppose I did, but not like these characters, attractive to watch in their Hope has a baby isles, groping along with whatever their zeitgeist amounted to, rooting for their genuflected sensibilities, but by the time This Is Us came along, I couldn't connect to Milo Ventimiglia's tenacity for his transracial family, but the double entendre of his death scene in the ambulance, which was the last episode I caught, just dawned on me as I refreshed the pilot of Heroes and the raw text of Peter Petrelli trying to be Superman while flailing in Dockers and working man's dungarees. Uncertain I want to wade through the conspiracy paranoia, so prevalent in 2011, once again.

"But taken altogether, I think, Sterne's fame increased every year until his death." --The introduction to the uniquely original Tristham Shandy.

Random Genetic Mutation

 "I didn't mean to kill him, Frenchie."-- John Hurt, The Discarded

The day after Christmas, the former Walmart shit-faced imbecile who discards my disposable underwear, (mainly from CVS ) came down with a chill, and the end result of that is, I have been stricken nearly two weeks with possible COVID-19 induced influenza, and all I have to show for it is the Elon Musk nigger modal owl hooting over my embittered carcass: I created an only partially successful GoFundMe campaign which stopped dead at the doorstep of my father's relatives, and that's that, a former writer, of some small reputation, driven to such hate, even as I am almost better, I find relief only in a type of ventilation genocide, because Twitter is nothing but a refuse pile, bot accounts of the poor choking each other to death, and I think of the late Brian Dennehy, charging, taking a stand, getting killed by a polycephaly gimp, because this is what super attenuated pressures achieve, beneath the overlay of Stephan Hawking's voice box, and the best we can do for ourselves is Elon, or his peer, Vivek? Not that the two are comparable, but India already has Narendra Modi. We don't need him in the West Wing.

The Mighty Back Hoe

 "I will catch a cold."-- the doctor in Washington Square

In some sense of the word, but for happenstance, we all end our lives as patients , whether its Antonin Scalia in his upscale lodge, or David Miranda emaciating away due to intestinal inflammation particular to the southern latitudes, as if homosexual indigenous pair bondings with American Caucasians simply cannot be original enough, always involving some fire of the body. Is happenstance any better? A distant cousin I only greeted at family gatherings, named Bryan, died in a manufacturing accident where he worked, one of those disasters of circumstance which catches everyone off guard, vanished. Whether Jake Sully does the same, in Avatar, is what I have been turning over to try to make a blockbuster two decades old relevant from another perspective. Is he a terminal patient who prolapses Pandora into the Walt Disney version of a patrician paradise? In recollecting the controversy surrounding the movie in its original release date, David Brooks analysis was off a notch. Sully wasn’t better at being native than the Na’vi; he was simply more attuned to taking risks, like a young Darth Vader, who, you might remember, was a good Jedi in the skirmish which took his hand in the Star Wars prequel. Although a conscientious viewer cannot help but be transfixed by Cameron’s futurist cowboys and indians battle, Sigourney Weaver’s overacting is a predictable keystroke; for the moment, this leaves me with nothing more to add.