Local Break, Maduro on the Schuykill

Kenneth Moton's article does not reference it, but last evening's newscast paraphrased local authorities, suggesting this woman would not be charged for her drowning attempt due to an obviously severe depression. She might have injured the boating athletes on the river, and even drowned someone else, and if Al Pacino's psychiatrist in his five minute movie lecture was correct, insanity is a legal concept, and thus a difficult hurtle to overcome; since Edward Snowden is now purportedly beholden to the world's foremost megalomaniac bus driver, the computer thief should be able to relate to ephemeral degrees of mercy.

This incident is also the second local tragedy to wade in under my nose since I started blogging. The first was the death of Brian, a former tenant of Presby. He was flattened to a pancake when his wheelchair got stuck on the tracks which form the view from my window. These traumatic brains are starting to make me feel sheepish.

Hannibal's Antlers, Sauvignon Blanc

This last fact was the real issue, for the way grew straight from the moment one recognized that the poet essentially can't be concerned with the act of dying. Let him deal with the sickest of the sick, it is still by the act of living that they appeal to him -- Henry James

There is a preoccupation with 88 Minutes that is analogous to fascination with a ruined edifice, not that this is anything new in the subversions of how we entertain ourselves. Whatever Jon Avnet and Pacino intended, the end result of their two film partnerships, both of which I viewed as if invited to consume rancid mayonnaise, spells out a curious exhaustion, an interesting dialectic with superstardom, thriller formulas, going through the motions, slasher fears, and using Vancouver as a location, this last clause maintaining my consistency towards a dig at Canadian models. Look at William Forsythe's face as the film limps toward it's drooling close. The misdirected agent wants to be an obstacle to the (gangster) psychiatrist trying to get to the bottom of the puzzle. Forsythe is supposed to provide resistance. Pacino throws one of his hyper fits and the camera cuts to Forsythe's face as he simply says "okay". There is an unintended dichotomy here, as if Avnet falls out of the visual framework he never believed in the first place, and what we see is a worn out entity, the face of a tired character actor who might as well have been evocative of the Egyptian empire in disintegration after the death of Ramesses2.0.

Do we really believe in Pacino's vendetta riddled shrink? Julie Andrews gives a more plausible rendering as the analyst who gives in to being Burt Reynold's lover. She is able to exaggerate the clinician with more credibility than Pacino could command in this project. Whether he was on pain killers or not during filming, that he literally looks doped up sparks a conversation, perhaps not with the vibrant addict of Needle Park, but certainly with his dual interaction with Robert De Niro in Righteous Kill, which belies their struggle in Heat. Akin to what the end of Bronson's career signified via the Death Wish saga. Aesthetic malaise as a terminal disease.

My reference to Bryan Fuller's cinematic creativity with the countenance of Mads Mikkelsen has layered meanings I have left somewhat opaque, somewhat unexplained, but they apply here to both the Harris character and Pacino's aging flophouse strategy, its unintended disastrous result.

Fish, Chips, Tuberculous Hip

"Al Pacino was successful playing Richard the Third because he understood the nature of power." --Jerry McGuire, approximately

In the annals of local color, politics can still provide fonts of amusement, the representatives and constituents colliding like asteroids in the void. I am watching the auteur of the effeminate reconstructions implode Truman Capote, so I am typing slowly, still a student when I viewed his last television appearance--the actual person-- in 1984, obviously in the grip of alcoholic dementia, as is not quite the case with  Dick Cavett. We applaud Hoffman for his talent, and that seared underbelly he captures in relation to the wicked under bite of the homosexual male, one which provides theorists with their relentless apologias, yet if I assert how punishing LGBT interactions have been for me as a disabled woman trying to do the right thing on progressive rails, getting damaged, that is all of freak flag reactionism. In the end, it's all about the scaffold, how we build our towers. Weeping old woman, political aides. If I really do launch myself as a crusader in this twilight of my life, what will it amount to? Cripples will still sit discarded in lobbies, victims created on finer and finer threads of discrimination. Monogamy will still find its way into curiosity shops

Comfort food. Herring, hash browns, diced onion, oysters, olive oil. It took me two days to convince myself to prepare my favorite entree, to swallow my 1200 milligrams of salmon over it, and now I need my shower, to go buy tins of ground offal for my substitute feline children. The condition of my edition of To The Lighthouse is worse than the sweat of indifferent hygiene, however, a problem which seems to plague Jon Avnet's direction of 88 Minutes. The narrative is a world weary affect of an old man who pissed off his brand due to economic necessity. My heart still throbs when I look at Al Pacino on camera, but if you'd like me to strum it simply, I could kick him for being a mule. The opening rape scene is an exercise in graphic lack of tact, Pacino seems to wander around on location waiting for Hades to make up his mind about where the famous Italiano will spend eternity, and yet there is a sleazy subtext that someone like me recognizes, all the triggers that go off in superlative fucking of the mentor, or maintaining chastity in the sexual tension. I grew up with Mario Puzo. But his dramatic conceits which ossified the Sicilian stereotype was a love letter. Al seems determined to make us regret those dried petals in the scrap book, with that ridiculous bouffant. McDonough's first instincts to give up on acting were the correct ones.

I am beginning to learn that no one really knows what they're doing, and thus the exposure of the reporter will always be valid. I intend to keep going; if Google wants to shut me down when I hit hard, that is up to them. It is their service. I may obfuscate my agenda from time to time, but I do believe in my conviction that if I fight back, the next spastic may be spared the wicked corruption and trauma to which I have been subjected. Raising my voice has risks.

I am taking them.