The Concept of Nothing

In section 202 housing, giving notice is apparently irrelevant for someone in my condition, so I got up to look for a hotel, found one, not that I know if this establishment has a vacancy. I'll find out this morning, I'll pack a few things, and then I am not coming back to this building, if ever, until I have an attorney, in succinct summation, reminiscent of seeing Brazil in university theater, still part communal experience, in the late 80's. No streaming, imagine. That was reserved for Zero Theorem, the last film in Gilliam's ostensible trilogy. Gilliam's style of ostentation, now out of fashion, never sat particularly well with me, even though the absurdist disruptions in all three films can be interpreted as distractions to prevent  the characters, the audience, from actualizing the Orwellian state in which they (we) inhabit: the only reason I was ever able to feel the tide on my legs, as a young girl, was because my grandfather dragged my wheelchair from the planked walkway which led out to the beach at Wildwood all the way to the damn Atlantic ocean, and I've carried the guilt of his labor ever since, a good twenty minutes, like a pack horse, and my chair, not being titanium, but the older mid-20th century stainless steel models, rusted through at the axle, embedded in one of my most ironclad memories, my only experience of the ocean meeting the shore, never imagining forcing sunset in a virtual horizon, manipulating it like a beach ball, even if the real Orwellian modular affect of human society is grimmer than Gilliam's ornate constructs allows for, despite certain poignant cessations, which doesn't quite occur in this last take on his exaggerated antics. Still, as aware as we are of what we're doing to ourselves, we hurdle along, due to mostly mindless group dynamics. I am going to dress, go grab a cold wrap, eat, and where I land by week's end may come down to commiseration, or general lack of forgiveness for failure, unless I go back to rest my fatigue another few hours, too old for all of this, fight and flight.

Trail Mix

I wanted to discuss the Gilliam box set in depth, but the very nature of his direction makes this an arduous proposition, and The Fisher King, despite its humor towards social stratification and disruption, is too much Hollywood shellac on The Big Apple. This leads me to recycle Robin Williams and my wrestling match with his talent and sentimentality, his concealed diagnosis, and his interesting ambiguity in maturity, probably not a good idea to continue on in this vein, a bit puss weary from the radiator vapor, and good for me, I caught my drop in the toilet, but if not an accident, neither was it a clean run. IBS and Crohn’s disease doesn’t quite fit my issues with impaction; ulcerative colitis might be closer, and hence, I may not be able to struggle with Septa to go back to daddy until later tomorrow, or very early Thursday. Have I fucked myself royally? Should I take kimmy? I can’t really carry the carrier, meeting up with the wry Johnathan Pryce in the nuisance of Brazil’s blue dyed dystopia. Pryce was the best cast, and Brazil had the best doomed aspirational appeal of all four films, with its conclusion suggestive of clinical torture escaped through mythos with Kim Greist as nihilistic as it gets, gift wrapped in the fantastical, unless it’s Twelve Monkeys, with its muzzle flash panache. Willis and Pitt do a good job in this narrative puzzle, with its sinister subplot, but in terms of aesthetic criteria, this member of the box set pleases me least. Perhaps I will return for kimmy, but this opens more worms with futurist bag ladies and cats. If Brazil is midnight blue in its tenor, Monkeys is a garish yellow, a tilt toward Ra and the Earth’s inevitable roast in a nova, a proclivity toward human error doomed to repeat cycles of destruction. Both Monkeys and The Zero Theorem link mental affect to social disease, with mixed results, as any delusional state is a reflection of its place and time, like the rise of autism as an evolutionary subroutine. In terms of Gilliam’s legacy and his signature, a unique imprimatur in the marketplace of intellectual angst and our defeat by our own processes, this isn’t enough for my digestion, but I am disengaging my anchor at an age no one should, wondering how Robin’s hesitation marks apply. Brazil has a particular significance, of course, a shadow over my own aspiration, as fun as it was on the cinematic screen. It was not the last movie I’d experience in the traditional method of projector technology, but it was one of the best of the last, rivaled only by AI, with AI’s bummer of an end. 

Syndicate Winding

Laughing like children, living like lovers,
Rolling like thunder, under the covers. -- Elton John's pap paean to the blues, toward his late career trajectory as a has been.

Predicting the consequences of impaction can be difficult. In the film Brazil, how the system reacts to it is not only absurd, but a detriment to the health of the body politic. Buttle is killed by an over active police response to a clerical error, and the actual subversive, De Niro's Tuttle, is defeated not as the anti-hero who covets efficiency, through a violent constraint. The luckless engineer vanishes in a paper ordinance glut, just as this same complicity to a perceived threat defeats the protagonist Lowry's decency, and annuls his skill at navigating the information systems hardware. Gilliam was right not to personify a central figure such as Richard Burton in 1984, because no one of us understands the modern autocracy we've created, and any anguish it generates.

If we take Simenon's Rico and place it at the post-war end of the spectrum, and we bookend Arlington Road as a fin de siecle warning to the digital age, a warning that is heeded by no one, evidently: In theory, North Korea cedes its foreign autonomy to China, but that stubborn xenophobic sense of Juche may spark a new conflict on the demilitarized zone. Beware the end of history, because it points to the deeper mendacity of the Bush Administration's offense in Iraq. Saddam was a kitten next to the Jong family. Brazil spans the mid-point between the syndicate, and our complicity with it at the dawn of the material age, and the deceptive new world order that Pellington insinuates through Jeff Bridges well played paranoia in Arlington. Everyone is sacrificed. Mob bosses who lose face, the neighborhood boys who gained through the possible necessity of criminality as a living. Even Conte's Eddie, triumphant in the closing sequence, comes off as defanged, possibly still out on a limb should vengeance rear its head. In Brazil, Gilliam turns the tables on those who survive through deliberate ignorance. All those plastic surgery patches hardly amount to bliss, and in Arlington, we discover Robbins and Cusack have strings too, that they are also being played, private contractors in an internal dirty war.

If I leave the Philadelphia public housing system as things stand, in terms of factual reality, I am setting myself up to face incarceration on much harsher terms, and yes, I realize this, but if I do not shake things up, I face the prospect of being parceled out like pork rinds anyway to the self-interest of those coming up behind my fading geriatric twilight. I deserved better within the environs of the most powerful country on earth, even if you find that sentiment prideful in audacity. 

This may not conclude everything I have to offer about collusion, complicity, and the diseases of the intellect it generates, but I am winding down what has been a lengthy rebuttal from my Jamesian scolding. I have been online a very long time, and I have been with this Henry James community the longest. For what it's worth, they have kept me afloat with a mostly delightful arcane sensibility, and I have the fondest affections for them, even when I have hairballs plaguing my colon!

Bon voyage! (I brace.)

Urethra Knives

The Brothers Rico opens with Richard Conte in a glinty house robe receiving a telephone call, and then in a scene I found fascinating for its time and place, he and Dianne Foster have a fairly frank episode of sexual intimacy while Eddie undresses and gets in the shower. I know some of the pre-33 era black and whites were more risqué, but if you really look at this film, it sells star powered sex as hard as New Wave in the next decade. Eddie is obviously virile in his every gesture at the sink, of which we are offered a nice shot of bare chested beef. Alice is obviously happy with her tiger, and the shoulder bite is permissively promiscuous. The suggestion of infertility in this atmosphere of laden sexual satisfaction is left open for speculation, and this is very Eisenhower era, but it is also very much a part of Simenon's methodology, to leave the issue of a barren, and otherwise happy couple, simply hanging in the air. I have another theory. Italians will never be Wasps, no matter how perfect the imitation. Whether or not this was lifted from Henry James, (cf Daisy Miller ) as much as it might be a standard plot device might be debatable, and you can even tell me I am full of shit, but I have two points in my favor:

1. Daisy Miller positively resonated with the American public; it was a huge hit for James, put the fellow on the map like nothing else.

2. Simenon is European, and 2a. The Saxons, Franks, Austrians and Prussians thought it was acceptable to cast Italians as greaseballs. James does it all the time. Even Prince Amerigo is a somewhat sordid character, royal though he may be, and Wilkie Collins cashes in those chips without hesitation in his major virginal hit.

This still had a hold on the generational Protestants of Eisenhower's day, so, voila, Eddie is cursed because of his provincial roots, no matter how assimilated he is into American material power and status. Italian Catholics, like the Jews, like the Irish, can approximate, but it would take the civil rights era, and perceived  color threat, to implode intramural Caucasian prejudices which flag a film such as this.

Time for a pause, but this analysis will carry me through a number of posts, hampered by my imperfect memory of Brazil's timeline, despite the fact I have seen the film three times. Bridge to cross.

I have taken ill, and because of this, have to resign myself to not reentering a late life academic competition, and in fact, should my posts become inactive, depending how long accessing treatment takes me, you may assume that the interns, or medical students who usually evaluate me, fucked up. This is a health issue I cannot allow to linger, however, unless, unbeknownst to me, I get to decompose in much the same manner as mio bambino, a consoling irony?

Complicity Bounding

"I meant it in the sense that we were conspirators."-- Linda C Dezenski, defending her descriptions of her climaxes with her husband. quizzically riding on the heels of their divorce.

For all the efforts taken to circumvent Netflix, and the inconvenience of a DVD collection, sometimes streaming video denies us instant gratification. It was on the ABC affliate, the aforementioned chronicle, but weak signal and laborous transfer provided only glimpses of a vehicle that is possibly intriguing. Just blanked out in blinding white panic on telephone number; synapses assured by last summer's paper bill. If Alzheimer's is in my future more than likely I will be beaten to death by a caretaker, in the sense that verbal ferocity invites provocation. You've glimpsed my Iago already, the interior provocateur of a facile sophist. With that being the opening lead of a future preponderance, the kindle paperwhite yet another catalyst in knock offs to a weakened, weakening stride, let's return to the avenues opened by Paula Broadwell and Arlington Road, though I cannot pull a rabbit out of the hat into the immediacy of revelation, there is something larger here, an overarching issue worthy of grasping, like the proverbial tiger who will maul out my innards unless I unravel the maze. It is a difficult one, but the real life event, the sexual license which seems to go hand in hand with state secrets, keeping and uncovering them, ties into what the studio reflects back. Pellington's fin de siecle is dangerous because it suggests what cannot be said in the mainstream, that everything we think we know is a front for facts not in evidence, that McVeigh may not have been an implicitly independent actor, that federal agents misdirect themselves and miss real threats that might have been caught otherwise. Clinton's sexual misbehavior, for instance, may have exhausted our energy, not leaving us alert to pay attention to Osama, though the right bears blame here too, given that Kenneth Starr suddenly elected himself the American prelate (much as I am doing by airing out the dirty laundry within the homosexual community, by the way-- I have not dug into this, yet, but can assure Blogger that spastic's probing may hit a nerve, and won't we have fun! Do we ban this disabled woman, or what, damn it, we're about efficiency, not defamatory speech! Why us?) -- and while Wiki does a good job describing Kruger's taunt script,  Pellington's texture complicates things, like his jump cut to a Hope Davis replica after her supposed elimination by Robbins' charmingly superlative, and thereby incredulous, glee club, suggesting that Bridges' Faraday was so out of his depth that the only way he could have won was to join the conspiracy, vanish into it. This is partly where Gilliam leads his protagonist in Brazil, who is doomed simply because he tries to be decent, and longs for a kind of purity, that, due to its impossibility, leads to expiration. As phantasmagoric as Brazil is, it leaves Gilliam's fans uneasy, and exhausted Terry's output. 12 Monkeys and The Fisher King, though competent, lack the same force. The third film that binds all this together, surprisingly, is, The Brothers Rico, and this is not simply due to economic pressure. Then again, fans of Simenon understand that we are all complicit in the damage of corrupting and collusionary impetus. I'll take a break, pick it up next post.

Porchetta Links

Things were going fairly well in the waning afternoon sunlight of mid-November's autumn, nature having reminded the latest east coast starling who is actually in charge, things settled down, and although spastic has no hope of earning a fucking cent on her poetry, playing the guilt game with the even more ephemeral literary journal was an active back step, a deceleration (do not kid yourself about my rage-- I may be leery of pushing the envelope with Google, but if I believed that I had the physical ability to carry out a tactical assault for justice, barring that I still have layers of politicians and the civil service to engage, and pity wooing, after this is exhausted, my temperament is such I'd choose this over post modern polemics, if my intelligence could counterbalance my physical helplessness, though the compassionate house nigger lifting me off the foam mattress which was just a little too low for me to do my lateral transfer suggests otherwise). I would spare Tim, in the age old tradition of objective indifference. The man may hold me back, now and again, because of his limitations, none the less, my target is the power that denies the regulatory system nearly any degree of flexibility. Rising up from the black lagoon into this tranquil interlude comes Aunt's obsession with niece and a new mattress for her daybed. My ex found the daybed and I owe him there because its sturdy wooden frame works, gives me hand grips.

For those remaining fans of Terry Gilliam's cult status, this is my aunt with the mattress obsession. Yes, the old woman with her frightening face lift, her ostomy issues, is on my side, and I know that. I lived with her before imprisoning myself in public housing. I know she wants to help, and that she sees how my sister's exploitation has hurt me, on top of my trauma (for newbies not following, I gave my sister a substantial loan during the Great Recession, wanted her to help me during the building renovations, and sister, who won't lift a finger for anyone else, wants to put me in a nursing home. She has husband, education, four children, a house worth 500k, and needs everyone else to support her; you figure it out).

Niece tries to tell aunt that niece needs to track down editor boss for cv for the editorial position, and that the optimal time was then, while I had the space, landlord leaving me the fuck alone, I have to plow through my documents, but no. Aunt and niece shatter each other's nerves, despite me telling her to throw mattress out, nope. Favorite cousin hauls ass with senile uncle. Good to see cousin, teach him kindle, tell him blog is up on Azmo for download. Coz is going to help me advertise... I really want to try for this job, one last great push, and I am screwed now, because the foam needs an inch, or an inch and a half base, and while I have to sort that out and reroute my newfound lack of room, because Tim just leaves things, I am running out of time to put a competitive submission in place. He was a terrific authority figure, my AC editor, and taught me how to be a better journalist. On deadline, I was in Paula's heat for the fellow,  and I have no idea what he looks like. The odds of me finding him before this Thursday? The issue of the economically disadvantaged at a standstill in time management is not new. If I do not apply, if I miss taking a last heroic leap, I might as well be Tuttle vanishing in a layer of ordinance.

Comparative Interstice

The performances of The Invisible cast are stronger than the lazy adaptation of the Mark Davis screenplay, and I hope if I do ever chance on the Wahl novel, that the author deploys more credible imagination toward metaphysical need. Limbo may possibly have some foundation within verifiable science, because mind and body do not always die in synchronization, and the modern upgrades on medieval allegories in regard to "the inbetween," interest me, whether it is The Lovely Bones, or Terry Gilliam's use of escapism when those who wish to cease engaging in complicity are tortured to death via the demands of extraction.

This post is being scheduled in the back archive because Wahl drew an introspective mention on my earlier account. The hyperlink interlock ongoing, hopefully to return with more detail later on.