I've got you under my skin.-- a crooner
She reminds me of mine too-- Alan :Gordon
I am
up this morning, restless, hay fever sick, with the nurse practitioner who
isn’t licensed to treat me come and gone, nothing said about the allergy ooze
burbling up into my crotch, if the significance of what cunt denotes is now
front and center in our social forums, James Woods ever tongue in cheek in that
regard, my resilience put to the test over Memorial Day weekend due to the fact
that the provider sent me a homosexual drug addict whose shriven swishing ass
was continually revealed in all its dark brown nakedness. True to my
survivalist libertarian sentiment (waving congenially at Austin), I told the
kid to do what he needed to do without getting caught, not bothering to explain
to him the statue passed by Congress making eviction mandatory for any public
housing tenant whose attendant is found in possession of drug
paraphrenia. The dowager knew these demographics for residential urban
minorities long before this volley took its aim, and she’d have to be able to
cope with it for Galahad’s sake, in all its divisive currency, if there is a
future between us. What do I know? He’s here now, oblivious both to what I’m
writing now and what I blurted out in text to him Friday when his car broke
down. I went into a virtual panic so fraught with paranoia it might have well
as been one of Woody’s early classics.
“I’m in love with you,” I typed, not a minute and 30 seconds before
screaming to my cousin that I had to get out if I couldn’t handle it, as I was
deluding myself. I’m handling it now, not referencing a word in relation to
Deep State. Oh, I waited, as women will at this stage, and got Sinatra. Now
that thread sits behind a closed door. We are talking the usual minutia of such
plans between two people, but whether or not it’s an implied us, and as of this evening it once again
isn’t, is moot, even if I cannot mute my damn tongue. With such an affinity for
Roseanne Barr’s pensive bite, my viewer’s might believe I am appreciable of her
rise in the comic genre. Not quite, as she was too close in representation to
our mothers, Alan and I, when prat boy was my best friend, and I had an
antithetical response to her stage routines. I remember enough to posit her
sympathies for the Trumpian brand to her hatred of institutionalization. That,
as well, is a shared value. What I haven’t read, in all the controversy
surrounding her aesthetic choices to reduce and insult Jarrett, though I am
usually a little more obtuse after my “want them dead” post of many years ago,
is the fact that Roseanne’s entertainment abilities come from deep seated
emotional pain. Age many soften what we were, Roseanne, or myself, but doesn’t
eliminate the errors, and the impaired
judgment, in the lingo of psychiatry, hence, she might have been expected
to do something like this. I have no love for Jarrett, but going below the belt
isn’t really a legitimate critique of her near blind idolatry for her president.
I’ve been there before. I have figures like Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood, and
yes, James Woods too, on my mind, because so many of the big stars are gone. Allen and
Eastwood are of an age, and so superlatively iconic, that they’ve become
ruthless, in their respective genres, just as Woods has turned harbinger. My
dear little big man of an aide, a man who wishes I’d shut my mouth when appropriate,
gave me a little holiday with a free viewing of Grand Torino, and nothing in
the narrative was surprising. Goodbye Dirty Harry, I am mourning a superstar,
anticipating the dead, the pre-written obituary—and this is what Match Point
does for me with Woody, particularly with Meyers’ last climatic scenes. We’ll
pick it up then. I am in a swamped and saturated pressure vat. Bad time to be
in love with lost causes, fatal error my heart, my own reiterating pattern.
"Talo tayo dito."-- Rodrigo Duterte
How men like Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson are behind the scenes, with the tap off, is difficult to ascertain. There are moments, glimpses, and despite his ineffectual political jabs, Clint Eastwood is an admirable force. Nicholson, comparatively, is a lecherous pig, but the two of them are some of the very last supernovas of "the industry ". Their leonine coda is comprehensible and informed on my world, and I declare the right to mourn. I may grasp Dita's angle, but millennial celebrity, crowd funded as it appears to be, leaves me chasing after its linguistic relevance; Ben Landis is another example. I respect his metrics-- and that comes with qualifier, namely, that a million plus followers may not be as relevant as media shorthand makes it out to be, but as I tweeted to Ben, he is a more glamorous version of my brother. To me he is just people. Observant, yes, good debater, but still people. I cannot puff chest feathers over the fact that he was gracious to me, though I appreciate it. Put Clint in his place and spastic would turn to stone. She would go "ga" and the stardom of an actor near the twilight of his life would instantly achieve what a corrupt Protestant housing agent has thus far failed to do: create a passive savant. In As Good As it Gets, that would be the dog, "Boo".
I wanted to see this movie, and agree with Ebert's cadaver on nearly every point of his review. Does this mean a short post? Yes, no, perhaps. I'd augment the bolo critic who became a freak only to this extent: Brooks and Andrus were hoping situational irony would override the lack of credulous sexual tension between Jack and Helen Hunt. Hunt works with Spacey, but her shared wounds with Nicholson did indeed deserve more subtly, and perhaps darker torsion. And for a guy trying out homosexual regression, Greg Kinnear might have been vying for an executive position at Cosmopolitan. Skeet Ulrich was a much more energetic truism, his strip scene wonderful in its sheer predatory aspects, but as I once said in a poetry workshop, this movie was a cop out. The pooch, however, almost made me reconsider dislike of terriers. Boo had marvelous comic timing. Language cannot create that kind of dramatic disbelief that Brooks asks of us to get what we want out of our most famous bastards, but literature has a parallel mechanism that films, in their turn, cannot quite achieve. In the same way the receptionist at the desk was felled by Nicholson's genre technique, Orhan humanized the Turkish dilemma for me, made me care, with Chekhovian pathos, against a turbulent genealogy unlike any inverted verbals I grew up with out of Luce's signature periodicals. I am struggling a great deal with multicultural conscience these days, and don't have any easy answers. Snow prepared me for Mevlut Mert, and the swift judicial ban issued on the case. Whether it's Erdogan or a military coup, however, if Turkey falls, then my advancing age may see the advent of a third world war. Writers always know ahead of time, but how often do we stop the inevitable?
"The light in Sicily is corpuscular," -- the perceptive cinematographer for RAI's Montalbano.
Luca Zingaretti is actually annoying for a Roman greaseball, however acculturated his Old World inadequacy against the modern age, his clean shaven pate and passive acceptance of the voluptuous female in chase of his ineptitude baffling, unlike Terence Hill, Luca cannot fit into the spaghetti western codex.
Eastwood makes it easy in Sudden Impact, despite the moral equivocation of some of Sondra Locke's targets. Females, victimized, need to acquire the accouterments of masculine power and strike back. Not that it heals her torn psyche, necessarily. After the cartoonish punks are wiped out, Callahan has to make a judgment call about Jennifer; makes it. Everyone's debt was paid. The cost is what it is, including the price Eastwood himself pays for having created Million Dollar Baby using the same Social Darwinism model dressed up with characters in whom we invest. Eastwood is the only conservative who offers the disabled an answer within his ideology: death with dignity is better than being defeated by an environment with scarcity of resource, though Hilary is, of course, only an actress performing a white trash home girl out of her depth, and as an able-bodied women felled by the realities of the boxing industry, her decision for active euthanasia was easy for audience empathy. Developmental conditions are another matter, and for that we have to dive back in the archive for the orangutan and related mimics to loosening.
Gang rape is a rare phenomenon, involving the dynamics of group psychology with which Sabrina Erdely should have been armed before she proceeded apace, perhaps inserted in the script to mitigate Locke's vengeance, presupposing we still live in a world where we can resolve injustices perpetrated on our own initiative.
Ulysses may be a very large Joycean experiment, but Virginia Woolf succeeds without resorting to so many belabored correspondences, though we would never allow To The Lighthouse to supersede the former. Both novels hew to their scenic locales. Woolf's alluding subtly is richer than Joyce's, not so prone to cerebral hemorrhaging. Certain Romans aren't keen on the brogue.
The flaw in Million Dollar Baby is the ubiquity of Morgan Freeman's character. Mr. Eastwood could have picked another narrator from which we absorb the bonding between the central characters. Freeman was powerfully cast in Gone Baby Gone, but "Scrap" waters down an otherwise powerful dramatic arc in Clint's seminal work, and Baby is the kind of film which challenges preconceptions, the kind of film that speaks for itself about human will and dignity that serves admirably without the silly political gamesmanship that diminishes the actor's stature, the last of its kind from the old studio system Clint knew how to milk, merging almost perfectly the anti-federal mandate agenda with the tragedy of defeated aspiration. GBG is a weaker, more diluted film, but I bookend it with Baby because both have the ingredients of what could be great films about the tanglewood between our physical frailty, aggregate lack of value coupled with our extraordinary accident of evolution.
This is as far as I can go this morning. For those of you who read "On the P & Q," the woman is hired but will not last very long. She made the exact grimace of economic necessity envisioned by my overwhelmed stress. Frontline will not receive Vatican sanction, but I bless them. "The Suicide Plan" is exactly the kind of exposure of the American underbelly that matters to me, (and this underbelly is what Affleck wades into with a scorch playing the minute detective) I have criticized PBS for its documentary voyeurism on dying, but in this segment, the video journalists stuck to the story; no doubt did some of us a service.
I have found my inner terrorist. I'd recommend it.
Yom Kippur has been called the "white fast." That's because it is not a fast of mourning, but rather a fast that is supposed to help the faster contemplate his or her sins and relationship with God. A different fast, one that mourns for the destruction of the Holy Temple, is a "black fast."--Craig Oren, Rutgers School of Law
Was Clint Eastwood thinking about this almost laughable leading man flick when he produced Million Dollar Baby? The dated new wave kill the sex symbol movie and the contemporary morality play, for all their differences, carry the same message: breaking free of the entrapment of sterile environment can be costly, in mind in body and spirit. Asinine activists protesting a narrative that had something to say. Linear minds are so limiting, so unwilling to think, to be challenged.
I have mentioned Marshall Zacharias (bottom still) more than a few times in the course of my writings on Blogger, and I forgive the man. As long as there is a Henry James Society scholars will be throwing spitballs around on bad hair days. I took my arguments about peers and collusion public, however, because Greg would not reply to my private email about the matter, and, as I have told my page views in the past, I hate social cuts, virtual or the three dimensional variety. I would have preferred even an angry response from him to no response at all, and I have to forgive that too. Perhaps his honors program had a crisis, or maybe he did not like how I ditched Louise, but why do I have to be in charge of wounded starlings? I am not getting paid to do that anymore and I didn't ask her to either follow me around online, or follow my example.
Does he look happy to you, or, like half the universe, is he a Zolcroft user?
Yahoo did not ban me for writing this. Surprise. I truly believed a flock of angry posters would have come at me, not two thumbs up. The dawn of a new civil war? Ah, clever spastic, that's all, no doubt, simply clever.
Philip K. Dick long ago predicted the cosmetic nature of democratic choice in a story about robots created to simulate human politicians, where an older prototype is operated by a short black man who pauses out of exhaustion and asks for a beer, and in many senses, Obama is still this figure, uneasy in his own identity, neither black enough in the civil rights sense, and not quite accepted by white America on its own cultural terms. What Romney shares with Barack is that same invisibility, and though Gwen Ifill was not entirely off when she remarked that Eastwood's speech evokes Ellison's famous opening, she gives the country too much credit for being able to pick up the allusion, and I am doing my best to tune out national politics on either end. My sentiments about actors and the two party system seem only to be confirmed. The best the Democrats can do is offer me compliance with a regulatory system that is brutal in its own right, and the Republicans have nothing to say to me as a disabled woman who believes in success through hard work, and wants her own autonomy, inclusive of more fluid mobility options.
The disabled community views Eastwood as an enemy, and indeed, John Hockenberry shredded the former mayor for his objections to the ADA with a better effectiveness than anything I have at my disposal, but my view is more nuanced. Million Dollar Baby was about escaping bleak entrapments, not killing the crippled. Neither the right, nor the left, seem to realize that the American conception of individual liberty is virtually paralyzed.
The 1955 Tarantula deals with malformation, and transformation, in the senses I mean, through Leo G. Carroll's rather curious struggle with acromegaly as a symbolic stand in for irresponsible use of nuclear technology. I will do some digging into Clive Barker's string of American films to see what I can distill about deforming processes that unnerve sensibility.
