Searing Parables of the Digitally Condensed

A noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food, and almost instantly the food was snatched away.-- CS Lewis

Why I lagged behind on the reading of some of my early 2010 e-text purchases? One reason was, surely, the mere logistics of the kindle reader I was using: I have written prior to this entry that I am fond of electronic devices as they age, if I am comfortable with them, though this is not the case with the eighth generation kindle I forlornly upgraded at a now defunct off-campus shoppe called Joe’s Coffee  -- too much money spent on a heavy glazed fritter regardless of the coffee swilled needlessly, not the least of which because while Amazon was remotely salvaging this slightly thicker eighth generation model, my behemoth common law husband Frank was dying of kidney failure (he and I were having serious issues and he didn’t want me to attend hospice with him) but I exhaled his last with him, that last weighted draw of bated breath in his olive-pitted, diseased skin, sucking on my own encroaching fiftieth year vinegar: I couldn’t persuade Frank to undergo dialysis to have more be with his family. I have always felt I should have been able to persuade him, for the sake of his grandchildren, who loved him, for the sake of his younger brother, and especially for the sake of his son. This is why satirists like Marc Haig and his off balanced Radleys got the short straw to a degree; Alison Strobel I had simply forgotten I had, and The Weight of Shadows is just good enough, my perineum convulsing mildly with her narrative, to keep me interested in her younger generation. Herman Koch is another matter with his turn of the decade novel. There are a number of movies about The Dinner, and they deterred me from reaching completion, there are also trace echoes of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Koch’s charming didactic lesson, but, ultimately, Paul Lohman’s pre-crisis triggers come off like the contrivance of a marionettist, and the final chapter disappointed me, perhaps even because of his brusque geocidal rattling of his students. The talent of Herman Koch is immense, and should be read, but he isn’t quite ready to dock the yacht. A grain of salt should be secured at the table.

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

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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.

Neuralgia

 "He actually asked me what Chief Davis had on me.  He did."-- Lance Reddick, The Wire

Reddick's  demise on Friday caught me off guard, which can be read as obvious in The Washington Post's rather rushed eulogy to remind us that walking tall with a stiff upper lip can be humorous. I know very little of the appearances Thomas Floyd cites, but I am aware of the ballpark: by the time I had cycled out of Dick Wolf's now somewhat careworn script formulas, I knew to keep my eyes open for the occipital center which allowed Reddick to reign in Titus Welliver and Dominic West prior to the heavy tread of Bosch for seven seasons. Why exactly did we need Bosch? To have Reddick exclaim "Bosch!" in exasperated frustration, or "Bosch." Deadpan, cryptic, knowing; if there is a hint of complaint, why didn't I drop the damn series, dragging my heels with The Wire as is. Same time, same place, we've lost the suave chieftain of the bulbous eyes, who was murdered once in the film Faults, which may not succeed in its turn on the deprogrammer. Perhaps I will return for that which I am attempting to grasp without being hypocritical, because I always respect the humanism of the solid authoritarian, from a distance, even though I've brought liberalism to its knees in distain of my voice. I'm not offering remorse amid the unexpected, only a shared mortality closing in. The man was five months younger than I. He had money, better doctors, and the standard rates still apply for minority health outcomes, sharp stabbing, and stabbing, while I pass massive stools in a commode bucket on the labor of a floor worker's eccentric jolts of poorly formed astrological tropes. James Leo Herlihy , the author of Midnight Cowboy, liked characters on the fringes. I don't, and such differentials in stature matter, however intangible.

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.