Danny DeVito, Birdseye

Not only do people point to very different features when they describe aesthetic experience or justify aesthetic judgments, but the language of aesthetic discourse also varies tremendously from one place and time to another.--Marcia Eaton

10 Rillington Place encapsulates a verity that transcends its age as a film. I remember viewing parts of it at a young age, but believe the lugubrious waif this spastic moll once was took it as a thriller; the revisitation and nostalgia of it is more chilling, and sexually arousing. Being drugged into passivity pussy access is a stimulus. Asphyxiation after the fact is not. Necrophilia is putrid. No one looks at a man like Christie and wants to suspect that he can strangle an innocent child, achieve erection with cadavers, and yet the lexicon has overtaken us, giving Hannibal in his incarnations another kind of veracity, a language of irony with pop culture and the liberation of murder, a liberation that takes on its own linguistic structure, embedded in Saussure's classification of human vocalization. The parent empire has staid formulations, even the same frictions with the African diaspora. Bryan Fuller mitigates it by being hip. Americans like a classy subversion.

I mull Devito's arc. Drowning Mona has yet another kind of truism, marred or not by familiar casting. Mothers have to live with the psychological score cards imprinted, and as a consequence, we laugh at the adult maiming and emasculation, wincing. Marcus projects a good old schlub in the end while we whack each other with all our emotional baggage, naked vulnerability.  Jamie Lee Curtis hits one out of the park. She made me laugh in a 25 year old satirical drama that ran fresh for me, cuing recognitions in its exaggeration. But our real vulnerabilities inflict real trauma.

"I've always recognized the personal bond between us."

Linda Dezenski wrote that to me fourteen years ago and what the fuck is she doing? is what I asked myself. She never telephoned Matrix to see how I was. Never extended her friendship after I had resigned from her department. I felt gratified, however, and thought her authority would remain a safe harbor for me. Infantile? Perhaps. In 01, in a tactical mistake, I met with her between mutual human shields. You stay away from me. An indictment uttered I've been putting on trial ever since. I liked her before I made the attempt to trust her. It is difficult, not having healthy and happy social bindings, and that was one thing I wanted, friendships. The esteem of work, my own self reliance, all up in smoke. Let's see.

Louise tried. Daniel Schneider tried, but these are online contacts. Schneider was a misconstrued apprehension. Louise was too close to home and too young. Ed tried, and miscued and I bristled, again, on trust, I engaged his associate. Zach and I bumped like fools, but it was not Zach. My history with Project Share is best left as ancient history. Everything instant digital access is necessarily beneficial?

Inversion Therapy

"I do not mean to suggest this was a conversion of convenience. I wanted to believe."-- Reza Aslan, Newshour damage control candidate

William Holden was before my time. Why he is a Hollywood celeb is beyond my comprehension, in much the same way that Miley Cyrus might be Tralfamadorian. It is solely due to Kathleen Parker that I gather Miley is a soft pornography performer, and I wail, too young to be in the generation gap, but here we are. It seems Holden's one and only elevation is against Bogart and beautiful Audrey. Audrey Hepburn transcends stardom. Looking at her face, I may not want to believe in God, but can understand why we have angels dance. Holden only confirms my tendency toward nihilism; hated Earthling when it recollected my youth. The man is not an actor, and this makes me rapacious, willing to drown Sri Lanka so that Kwai exists as a CinemaScope travesty. Guinness had a good death in Kwai, but Alec Guinness actually has theatrical force, much like Simon Schama.

I do not care to read Rough Crossings, but I am thinking of Schama's recognition of the dialectical tensions between Britain and the US on liberalism, because it can be seen in the majority of the twentieth films between the last imperial power and its fabulous offspring, and I half toy with the idea of contacting Schama and saying I need a fucking vocabulary mate, hey, help a cripple out dear boy. But why would he assist me? Pounding my fist, I see it, trying to encapsulate it, but it's difficult, a heterodoxy between the glamour of Hannibal and the documentary ruthlessness of 10 Rillington Place. Attenborough's Christie triggers memories of my assault, and frightens me more than Michael Rooker in Portrait, despite the realism of Henry's alienated outside status as a predator. 

Marie the aunt tells me to forget the Brandon Phillips who nearly killed me but I cannot; he lives in every sexual assault I experienced before or since, and this inner city brawn boy minority coward whose grandmother was a Presby tenant on the floor above me may one day make me famous, unpacking every middle brow Catholic girl's worst nightmare, I know the terror of Christie's victims, as well as the bemusement over Aslan's kerfuffle. Academics can also be pandering hacks, and this will be a scab I may pick for some time to come.

I would not have posed the question the way Lauren Green did, but the Newshour is also guilty of bias over the Zealot fiasco. Propping up Aslan was more important to the PBS team than being objective in terms of the quality of the text. Green was actually challenging Aslan's doubt, whether or not her interrogative stance was an unfair blow to his integrity. Remind me that I am pushing myself too hard for my age, and that I cannot live on maple walnut brownies, but I have fallen in love, not with William Holden.

All in the Family

"We could just keep quiet about it."--the Attenborough version

I do not know if Google would remove my account if I was exceedingly blunt, or honestly cut to the chase, as quadriplegia does not excuse illegal incitement, but I am worn out with swallowing what I have allowed myself to swallow, taking it year after year, from one form of institutional horror to another, to Medicare dictating the terms of my quality of life when I was younger and stronger, my acumen and intelligence deserving better. It is a rare investigative journalist indeed who examines Medicare and Medicaid in terms of allocation and delivery of service; our old world cultural bastion deserves credit for its in depth look at dialysis, but I can't remember the last time Paul Krugman turned his radical liberalism to the heart breaking reality of the limitations imposed by socialized medicine, not within the scope of his intellectual pretensions; he may be the smartest New York Times economist on campus, but that would change considerably if a stroke paralyzed him and he was traumatized by minority paraprofessionals, perhaps even humiliated by his peers, academics in whom he trusted.

I am not the first person to wish ill on a former superior, and I won't be the last, but my anger primarily stems from the knowledge that disability centers are segregated obscenities, and Linda Dezenski, involved in one law suit after another, remains there as a titular second in command. In a real corporate climate she would have been forced out of power, and there lies my anger. She created a hostile environment for me which compromised the supports I needed. Statue of limitations long gone. Sorry. Mixed race aide wants to make love to me, another swindles me and their supervisors say don't press charges, we'll repair it, and I just wind up being another profit margin, while the minorities who manage my building for the company want to put me away, shift the burden. There has to be a smart attorney out there who can see my adult life has been a living land mine and can adjudicate justice for it. Linda would tell you her side, that she did not mean it, that I displayed considerable anxiety; I was emotional. She acted without thinking and attempted to reflect my concerns, but she broke the law, needs to be removed, and my suffering needs to be acknowledged, served as an illustration that compliance paradigms can do more harm than good. When people lose faith in the system, crime statistics rise. She may have removed her digital footprint, but I'll refrain from speculation.

I am virtually helpless, but if I have to die with all this swept aside because I am inconsequential, then our civilization doesn't really amount to anything.

Linda Ronstadt's Parkinson's was the luck of the draw, ended the normative comeback cycles for recording artists on the downward curve of the apex. I treated her as an afterthought, not realizing she is still out there, stoic and less of a point man than Michael, not as flamboyant; I am considering purchasing her memoir out of commiseration, because she is of my time and I understand the period in which she gained recognition, but I do not actually care about her duet with Smokey Robinson.

The nihilist sniggers, wondering if I should teach you how to steal without getting yourself sued for plagiarism  I am considering it myself, taking an idea from an author never read, and writing a horrific tale of graphic precision, daring to get it published, as I am doing with my inner city attacker. Producing from the heart of a searing and authentic vision is difficult, the difference that divides canonical authors from the mediocre and the offering of platitudes.