Vocal Cords of Alyssa Milano

"This reverend brother has been all his life engaged in fighting among the Saracens for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre; he is of the order of Knights Templars--" Sir Walter Scott, one of the first to utilize the innovation of life insurance.

I spent the evening desperately looking to make a digital pitch, failed in the effort, but resolved to hit Harper’s later this week with a traditional mailing despite living conditions to the tune of a dilapidated bunker. I misplaced my hardcopy file in this melee of public housing and destitution, but misplaced it on my own, despite my father’s ineffectual convergence with minority fatalism and Mainline Medical’s deplorable product fitting, I had the file, pulling out my accomplishments, still making an effort to get Negro medical management to see me as human, barking them down to fleeing from me in terror, but didn’t place said file back into place. It is a strange power to have, this spark of hatred in my eyes so ready and willing to die in the name of an insurgency I cannot even define, as every sort of organizing principle has governance behind it, whatever equitable distribution we believe in or not. Tanz Industries and Darius might have saved civilization on a thumbnail, (not the only one disgruntled with the CBS cancelation) but the Variety piece tells us nothing except ratings. No sourcing, just a straight news item, no names, no tug of war between the show’s producers and the executives at the Central Broadcasting System who made the cut. Salvation was a damn good series for what it was, utilizing real propulsion theory and applied engineering, so that even libertarians can hate corporate sometimes, and certainly do. We all hate rental agents within varying degrees, and make no mistake that section 202 owners are engaged in the business of gerontology, but it is not a market based contracture. It is a taxpayer subsidy for a broad range of spectrum disorders in the elderly 62 and above, and I rolled into it as a 31 year old career professional. Now look at me, luckily so caged, so free to leave. I can roll out on this fraternal Presbyterian dictatorship anytime I please, after years of subjugated terror. Threatening the governor of Pennsylvania means next to nothing to me in this context. I mean that literally, despite the fact that Wolf and Ridge and the ailing Rendell are status quo establishment politicians we all used to favor. Put Wolf, the executive, and Toomey, the stalwart Irishman, in the same room, and what do you have? Both are pro-business, one doesn’t like the Social Security dispensary on the backs of American workers, the other is never going to say that Medicaid is merely a transposition for the descendants of slaves. Both would condescend to me, “now now spastic, homicide is not a legitimate political outcome.” But that’s only a veneer, and all a care giver has to do is have a bad day, leave me lying on the single foam mattress, move the power chair away. It would be interesting to discover if I still had the collegiate strength to get up off the floor, to conquer bad wheelchair technology.

The Grimace of Machiavelli

Machiavelli's most famous work, Il Principe, brought him a reputation of an immoral cynic [sic]

The Italians. If my life in Philadelphia amounts to an abject deconstruction of perennial, thwarted aspiration, I am under little illusion about what it would amount to on the peninsula if I managed to land and assemble for transport in Tuscany. Cramped store outlets barely large enough for a 5 foot 7 inch male of perhaps 175 lbs to stand behind a small counter, equally compact flats in which to wedge persecuted Arabic foreigners, juxtaposed around the scenic beauty of Lake Como, a plethora of earthquake collapses in Naples. One thing native Italians share with my enthusiastic to fade away contingent of Turks is an overweening penchant for flowery allusions embedded in death threats which are basically meaningless, an emaciated breath of history from the tombs of the Medici. Is Beppe Grillo a little Mussolini with saccharine smiles for Rai’s studio lightning? I yowled at a copywriter who dropped me because I enjoy Matteo Salvini’s pugnacity, and it is into this subterfuge of less precise detail that lurking in on Tassoni’s prep school immaturity triggers an irascible desire to hoist myself on my own petard, but lurk I do, nonetheless. Then I emailed him once again, approximately the third time since I tracked his career accolades. I mentioned Brandon’s name, the Negro assailant who nearly took my life. “It would have been better had he killed me,” I wrote, nearly petulant with despair, still accusing.

Why weren’t you there to protect me? This was the embedded outcry to my interpersonal Rocky who rejected me when I was 19. Now who’s being prep school, the dowager asks wryly, so easy to believe you still love the one who got away? John Tassoni was, indeed, my Rocky Balboa, and my mild bout of digital hysteria elicited his solicitude, the little monkey on his back, the nascent savant who can’t get over a punk from Chester who was kind to her, bear hugged her, made her realize that masculinity needn’t be toxic. Imprinted for life, no matter whose husband I slept with, but sitting here, with the mock up board of our lives on social media, you take stock in the realization of unhappiness with a player. Had I been successful in seducing him, chaffing or not, the interpersonal would have wound up where I left the serial novel of Alicia and Peter Florrick, keeping up appearances as a matter of showboat necessity on the hollow knell of the attraction which brought them together.

This episode, the one where the flawed values of a moderate political couple defeat the NSA, would have been courageous on the part of everyone, including Ridley Scott, to leave it conclude right there after the departure of Charles. Alicia was far too ruthless with Peter. You may adjudicate that assessment for yourself.

I’m dropping The Passage, as edgy as it purports to be, and scrolled through Tucci in Fortitude as a British DCI, to my delighted surprise. Somehow, even with the edginess of an Arctic locale, British thrillers are grounded in domestic tensions which are anti-climatic. On the American scene, they are instances of grand theater. Another citizen from my homeland with its tertiary angles has joined my ranks, and like John, a doctorate. I’m mollified. For the time being.

Chlorine Blade Lines in Backed Up Septic Tanks

"I will not hide from you that I am sending you into the midst of the wolves."-- Stendhal,  rouge et noir, loc 4183

Memories of New Jersey drive throughs begin to fade, not as vivid as those Nick Gillespie possess, such that he would declare the Garden State “the greatest state on earth,” in a moment of superlative appreciation. It seems the charming ignominy of dilapidated beachfront properties is closer to the truth, with the seediness of Burt Lancaster’s Atlantic City reverberating through the dull grey sand beneath Wildwood’s Boardwalk, with its titillation of cheap carny thrills, Keystone Cop rides a senile grandmother might retrieve in a lucid flash, Gerald Ford on black and white badly received VHF, vainly attempting to save the GOP from the wavering barometer of agrarian sensibilities which would translate into President Carter's self-flagellation, with his residual sympathizers congregating around his last public Bible lectures by virtue of rather expensive glioma-shrinking drugs. Farmland in Georgia isn’t as temperate as Jersey’s perhaps, not that the dowager has geographic expertise in regional topsoil, remembering northern Jersey as more sedate, darker, not so many beach bodies jiggling swimsuit love handles. When things go rancid in this state, within Trenton's environs, or beyond its borders, as in the Thomas Tramaglini arrest, they spoil in rather dramatic fashion.
If this had been the late summer of 1981, the most flagellant controversy surrounding a superintendent would have been the schedule for driving school over the summer. This was the dowager's first journalism article, in a high school publication better designed, according to Tassoni, than the inter-departmental magazine we produced on a perennial basis. At the time Tramaglini's arrest, a forgettable reference to the flashback of Potter's protagonist in The Singing Detective was made. A childhood actor stands in for Gambion to defecate in a school aquarium, but a more tolerant allusion to the accommodation of such a bizarre eccentricity which is more shameful than menacing is The Vanishing of Pato. On the whole, this two part mystery is Rai's copy of the English formula for putting the pieces together in the traditional whodunit, directed with the fabled provincialism of Italy in mind before helping to cement the United States as the new age global power. In Pato, Nino Frassica has an exchange with a commoner about a villager who eats feces in palm leaves with warm milk. The humor lay in the actors dragging out the details of such a repast. 
While public defecation is not a precise parallel with the criminal intersection of penalizing or victimizing chronic afflictions (such as incontinence), runner's trots may not be the sole reason for Tramaglini's furtive expression in his photographic image. Bad table manners convey social hostility towards the infantile freedom of relief. 

From Here to The Eternal Plague

Alessandro Manzoni’s seminal work is on my mind because of Renzo’s forced migratory path in Milan. My history with The Betrothed is somewhat quixotic: I started reading the text at a free access site, perhaps Harvard classics, or John Hopkins. I then paid ten dollars and change for a kindle academic edition, started the novel once again, and left Manzoni’s besieged youth at the inn, slightly imbibed. I also purchased an academic study of Manzoni which I had also just started, it was expensive, and I engaged briefly with the Italian literature instructor about it, and it is hopefully undamaged in one of my boxes, but maybe this gives my audience another perspective on my vehemence about public housing. It refuses to cease disrupting my ambition, and it I really do go down in a criminal flare of rage, don’t be surprised. I have barely been able to live a semblance of my former life since October, one that was already too constricted, and the VNA keeps saying they will “bring me back.” They have made this assertion since November while I am struggling in Mike’s power chair with no desk arms on a two inch cushion which leaves me dangling. I am no stranger to temporary loan chairs, but this thing, for me, is a health hazard. I keep trying to divorce VNA, and the Jewish crones want to continue on with this love fest of ineptitude. They will not continue on for long, because I have to bring myself back, and I am starting to rebel. As soon as the Muslim is exchanged for another brow beaten fatalist of the underclass, I’ll push back more, though I considered dousing my scalp tonight, and shelved it, despite my knowledge that I’d feel better if I did, Saran’s ever constant accented protests ringing in my ear.

I have little idea why she was allowed to emigrate to the US, under the Clinton Administration. She is 53, certainly not moving on up, in the lingo of Norman Lear’s aspiration when The Jeffersons had cultural relevance. She misses Africa, her religious absolutions interfere with things I need to do, and though I have been through worse, her prayer activity is unprofessional. No one confronts her, not the health care Jewish league I’m arm wrestling, not the intake coordinators, nor I. If I get too confrontational before my switch, she could drop me, and yes, she stays where others would have quit, until I solve the toiletry issue, or I don’t, well aware I could die from this. I may not be comfortable with her, but I feel horrible about what she does for me. It is too much, for me, her, anyone, but like Renzo, miraculously untouched by buboes as he walks the length of Italy under Austrian rule, a journey of displacement, nevertheless one I envy so much. I am not entirely untraveled, but remain impressed that Jason Dorwart has transversed the heartland, while I remain in stasis, weakening in the city of my birth. I had a small exchange with Jason about his material needs, and do not know how to accommodate him at this time.

In my archives, I have written before I am diffident about performance and empowerment in disability culture, but I also do not have much access to it, so this is problematic, especially as not all of us have Dinkage’s cross over appeal, so recently off the lone hip Superbowl commercial. Doing an analysis from a YouTube viewing, even if it was pertinent to his theatrical periodical, might not be entirely fair to the troupe, but yes, I am glad he found me, peer to peer. One can’t always get away from identity politics, or autocratic injustice. Manzoni ranks highly with me, however, nearly Stendhal’s equal at psychological penetration. Will I live long enough to read him in dialect? I’d like to.

Verdi's delicate precision instruments

Libiamo, ne' lietti calici
che la bellezza infiora,
e la fuggevol ora
s''inebrii a volutta.-- the libretto

Collaborative state model systems like niume earn the ire of the damned because they aren't very well thought out. Thousands of users, all vying for attention, none particularly discriminating when it comes to pixel image resolution, and the dowager is, herein, also at fault in this, unable to upgrade at an affluent pace, hence, the British based platform's advertising rate hikes hurt many people, pensioners, homeless individuals, not simply those limited by conditions, and the staff should have anticipated this beforehand, considered previous ailing models, like Yabberz, Examiner, and looked at what Medium is doing, especially since Niume utilizes the proprietary software of Medium's model. Considering the physical labor of blogging, 89 percent of it not revenue generating, how have these efficiency models optimized anything for those without the capacity to grasp computing technology? It demonstrates capitalist vulnerability, like a carnivore. Powerful, lethal at first glance, transformed into an atrocity by simple technical constructs, like spears, and then socialists like the disability attorney Tom Earle commiserate while they make sure mortuary services are in their investment portfolios. I give Virily something of a pass on this because they are Marxist heirs, not quite classical communists as such, but emulators, kissing cousins to western European compassion, even while that compassion crashes on its face.

Earlier this summer, though I demurred rather than continue, I almost got into a serious battle on social media with mother's sister, her family, about a certain level of inattentiveness to my plight, and of all people, (soft snort of deflected affection), Sheldon Novick jumped in, attempting to offer reassurance "we love you." And then he went silent. Had this been one of Mrs. Ramsey's dinner parties, I might have looked at him edgewise-- not so much for the interjection, as I've been equally inappropriate with the good legal scholar-- but I was raising my voice about the blinders of family self-interest. As an academic sympatico, he's blameless. During this episode, I committed a serious cognitive error, not recognizing another woman with cerebral palsy who I knew slightly from the intake center. When she friended me, I did not enlarge her photo image. I thought she was one of my aunts contacts, a case manager, possibly setting me up to fall on my sword, and the whole time, she was just Maria, a woman who knows I'm aggrieved, but not much else. This level of paranoia illustrates the disease of Philadelphia's static social model, making most of us sicker, not keeping us healthy. Tom posted to Maria on Friday in the last days of August, like an amicable simpleton, and it took me some doing, stifling the trigger for a condescending legally blind taco soft Mexican, tolerant of everything except for legal accountability, admitting fault, actually making amends. It seems nearly impossible for them, and the shock I put on his face sixteen years ago was like a land mine he had inadvertently triggered, then he clamped his jaw. Even the poorest lawyers have innate discipline for instinctively going non-responsive. This may be worthy to applaud, but he is one of two attorneys who specialize in rehabilitation law, and he's an enemy. It makes me wonder, how little social order would hold if Wall Street and similar finance centers, truly fell, no whipping boys to prop up so many dependent hordes. We'll never know, not in my lifetime, unless I assume too much.

Every cognizant wheelchair user knows what Tammy Duckworth has achieved, and on Thursday, I pushed back, politely, against her egalitarian altruism by illustrating how its opposite only confirmed my basic conservative convictions. I argued with her tweets as one disabled woman to another, not nameless writer to new branded political liberal. I believe she understood this, and neither of us had the upper hand on the better part of valor. It is a curious thing, little eddies amid the Trumpian wars.

Walken's Dark Liturgy

Sensibilita was at the heart of Futurism's main objectives--Futurism and the Technological Imagination, p.63

I made a genealogical error here and not a soul corrected me, neither the irritable Transcendentalists at Niume, nor in my nastier Twitter comfort zone. John Carradine was David's father. I mixed the lineage up, inadvertently. The dowager thought Cassidy was David's sire, but I was thinking of David Cassidy when he was my fake rock idol fuckable back in the day, and I mean that in all affection. Fuckable is softer: The Partridge Family may have been a crock-a-too, but my palpitations went soft for groove boy junior with his shag. That was our hairstyle. I decided to barrel some quick revisions into "John Carradine in Milan" and submit it to a pay-mart. Shouldn't take me more than 72 hours, but I bristle defensively at every editor to the right of the owner's booth at the Stanley Cup finals: I am not deleting this post my my account. I will take it off Niume, but not here. I am going to die soon, and Google must not extinguish this legacy, regardless of its antithetical umbrage with the ferocity of what I hate. Liberals made me promises and destroyed me, and I may get myself in trouble with Sanders' operatives if they do not vanish from my junk mail address. I regret supporting Obama, even in the face of his opponent's evident Sundown Syndrome, but I have to own the aging 08 anomaly at the primaries searching for difference. It was a failure. I regret Trump too, but his protective detail didn't haul me out of Riverside for telling the brash New York personality to get his fucking act together, and I respect that. If I had tilted at Barack one could only imagine my inconvenience, but Obama isn't a true African American, as has been noted. He is half Kenyan and half Caucasian Communist, and we used to black ball individuals like his fast and loose deceased mamma. Perhaps the CIA gave her cancer, as she was a really loose-cannon radical, from what ?I've gleaned: I have to own I hoped in this poor boy whose identity is in the vapor of a cirrus cloud, but Sanders's operatives are either going to get the fuck out of my virtual space or report me to the FBI field office again(?) I am not positive that Liberty's firm in Jersey actually had me flagged on an FBI alert: I told the CIL if someone like Omar Mateen came after them, I'd be ecstatic, and they prohibited me further contact. I threw my trauma they inflicted on me in Nancy's voice mail (she and I know each other by sight, not well). The prohibition vanished, as I did not say I'd be their Omar, only that IL will one day face what he represents if they do not start learning to be accountable for their institutional cruelty and racism. Whether my viewers are American, and are familiar with our rampage culture, or not: this will be the next shock, the next grief, the next battle with the NRA's money and stiff necked reliance-- a CIL will one day buy it because of what they do to the formerly indoctrinated such as I. NCIL has to put a stop to this if they want to save lives, and if I live long enough Congress is going to change the law. I am not the only one traumatized by IL assurances which flip on a dime, when statements like "you can always come back" actually mean "you will get an interview and then be ostracized the rest of your life." This behavior can kill people, especially those with sensory deprivation and limb impairments. Sanders organization culled me from OFA. I intend to make them regret it, like Walkens' Gabriel makes Simon regret impalement. The first in The Prophecy franchise did have an aspirational, liturgical hope, and even if I am a female, the Holy Father may find, to his astonishment, that I'm the Tuscan Joan d'Arc, a ferocious inquisitor who thinks the rack is rather beneficial.

Marlon's Silent Harmonica

For a dozen years or so he had been feeling as if the vital fluid, the faculty of existing, [...] were ebbing.--Lampedusa, The Leopard, p228

Me being me, my early life ebbing birthday present to myself was to stream Last Tango in Paris, and already knowing so much about it in advance, was more or less diminished by Bertolucci's Truffaut affect, the meta dramatic technique of film within a film. There was an obvious homage to the older French director in Leaud's staginess as an intrepid enthusiast of capture, but shock, awe? Hardly. By today's standards, Schneidner's nascent coyness, coupled with that baby doll face, and Brando's shrewd magnetism, suggested more interesting motifs than Marie's body served in a candy dish. Method acting had engraved itself onto Brando by this point, encasing his defenses, locking away anything raw, except for the impetuosity of his violence, and curious compassion for Girotti's Marcel. Other than that, his performance was a tease, as in so much of his later work. Perhaps he let himself go after the butter scene, because this took what was left, so he exchanged keeping himself in shape for the effortless sating through eating well and over nourishing. Never really my type, I can still see, however, why women like Jeanne would succumb to his domineering ferocity in lieu of true loving congruence. Youth desires penetration of invulnerable pretenses, even if pivotal monologues do not quite penetrate inflammatory deafness, the constant companion to ringing ears. 

I still have time to run sections of the film again, review his weaving leg and what he was smirking to this poor girl, before he toyed with the small wind instrument, before this woman who decided to blame a simulated violation for the rest of her *ruined* life. Actors. What we put up with for aesthetics, inclusive of sudden democratic government totalitarianism for a hard look at power shifts between the sexes. As a woman myself, one whose contorted skeleton would be naked exploitation of a different texture, if substituted in the bathroom scene with Schneider's odd bush, with gradations like an inverted pyramid, I can attest that adventurism can lead to histrionic regret, but like so many doomed artists, even David Foster Wallace, my episodes of being chained to a spurious colon begins to give way to defeat: If I once believed myself matriculated, once made love to ambulatory men, now my grandfather's gastrointestinal turbulence is a psychological erosion of self worth. Rainy days are a bitch, elongated lung creping like a failed exercise in origami folding. Not a particularly good day person, I have been dragging since I woke. Maybe I'll rent it again later, or eat my usage last minute to recapture. Saturated as I am, near 60, with the best of the best, masterpieces, classics, believing I could have done better, myself, had I made better choices, I am glad of Bertolucci's tyranny in pursuit of this vision. Is Last Tango a great movie? I'd say intriguing, particularly with its interior strategies. We'd be a better species if we were this brave for the sake of creativity most of the time. Maybe I'll find a way to stop getting weaker and sicker, and get out, somehow, return to limited functionality; maybe I'll rationalize that atheists are wrong, that spirits retain identity, and that I can join Wallace in doomed ego limbo, or lose and die in Philadelphia's excuse for a wheelchair community. None of you know what to say. It is not one or two bad experiences which lead me to defy Medicaid Waiver services. Nine years have taught me that attendant care here at the bottom is legalized pimping; it does not change the fact my legs are going, my rectum is ready made greenhouse topsoil. After all the trauma I lived, my fail year has dawned, and I am, in all probability, telling Gail Sims, the newest assistant manager, that I'm not recertifying. I am also probably not going to find a pro bono champion between then and the initiation of eviction proceedings.

The Strength of Apostasy, a good marina sauce

"A science that strives to understand apostasy as a thoroughly social phenomenon has much to gain by recognizing the members of this curious class [...] for what they are."-- David A Bromley, The Politics of Religious Apostasy, p 116

Ray Liotta's poc-marked projection of shell shocked disembodiment is perfectly diachronic between slumming it with Scorsese in Goofellas, to the complexities of the present day. Nothing is so clearly delineated anymore between our villains, our heroes, our collusions, and though one might grow weary of seeing him parody Machiavellian duplicity until his inevitable murder rectifies the situation, he's done it for so long that he manages to make it a high art in this new high octane series, though we might not take away anything fresh, and J-Lo is as Halle Berry still convincing herself she's the diva cop of yore, retreading Angel Eyes and Enough, as if we haven't seen enough of the tight T-shirt braggadocio to know its keynotes.

Italians have always known this however, even in the classic era. The Republicans assassinate Augustus to "save" the Republic-- in essence to keep power divested, only to initiate the monarchical divine reign of the aristocracy -- which only begins its real death throes in 1945, as opposed to 475 AD.

Perelli's La Piovra, with its grisly lurking cowardice, may no longer be "what it was," according to Wapo, but it is now organic, part of the entire textile which make up Euro-Asian societies as a whole, and it takes a special kind of apostate, one as zealous as Wozniak, to blow the whistle and cleanse procedure once boundaries get too muddied. Did the shock value of the homosexual liaison subvert expectations? Perhaps, but it seemed more like an exploitation fuck which thankfully wasn't overtly faked, the kind which victimizes wheelchair users repeatedly. If we were against Henry Hill in Scorsese's little blood bling, we look at Wozniak, and with secret glee hopes he walks out of a bloodbath with Liotta's trademark "ehnanana" Quite a turn within a quarter century.

The Occupation of Paris

They hoped Petain was playing the Germans at a double game and was secretly planning the liberation of France. --Terry Crowdy

You have to reach for it in odd places, in schematics like The Song of Bernadette, a film not so friendly to institutional Catholicism as it might initially appear, though it is otherwise reverent to Mary, who was elevated by the Church as a strategism against pagan goddesses like Diana, but Vincent Price, in the right role, wasn't all high camp, and rather presages how he'd die in this youthful vehicle. The film, dated as it is, has its own medical model ruthlessness towards cancers we're still fighting, to little avail, and beneath the surface, buttered up with palatable salvation, it is a bit stark about disease.

Of all celebrity absences, I feel Price as a loss, a cutout with his outline that comes through in translation. I haven't quite digested Lauren Bacall's death either, though I have little reason to mourn her, as I study a film like Birth with care, as a precursor to The Others, which also acts as a sealant to Kidman's split with Cruise, maniac man with a grin. I do mourn Peter Falk, but his homeliness is a dated palliative to a liberalism stripping us of every possible anchorage.

In my relief at finding the late Bruno Cremer's new time slot, he too felled by the crab, I wondered if I'd have been happy married to a cool cucumber like Georges Simenon, and rapidly surmised a negation due to a sense of an urgent ruthlessness about his work. If I ever get back on my feet, however unlikely, I need to read more Simenon. My hatred of what I've done to myself is killing me as fast as any future date with advancing COPD, congestive heart failure, or colon polyps. I keep missing medical appointments for script even as I master the shimmy to deal with the Jazzy Quantum, and leave you now to try try again, setting the scaffold, my wheels, at least, still turning; my version of immortality, living on as one of Maigret's enigmatic females. I do not know how to save Europe, but I am related to the Marinelli's in Italy who work the Don Matteo production crew.

Istanbul

7.99 is not a bad price to be inundated with the state socialist model which controls most of the world. In my cable deprived free broadcast zone, WYBE runs Mhz feed, when not broadcasting the Russians in English, on 35.5, and I've no idea how this new streaming package will affect my droll allegiance to Mikael Persbrandt as the sole conservative in Sweden, or a parody of one, barring Johan Norberg, who has earned liberal critiquing rights, along with Niall Ferguson, with the seal of approval from the American left. But European procedurals bore me too now, and I really only watch to see how those corrupt souls who didn't emigrate manage themselves in the world, weighing in my mind Roman tolerances over my current non-compliance in Philadelphia's African shadow state. I do not know that it would necessarily be worse. Italians know my type, and deal with the abrasions of the social outcast with a thousand years of theatrical absurdity behind them. 

This model is damaging my health, and that because of a Medicare bean counter. I give my notice in July, assuming I live that long, and take Septa to my proverbial stepmother's home and camp outside a block in Springfield. Enough to provoke an eighty year old padre over the edge?

What I fail to understand is why Presbyterian Homes doesn't evict me. I've all but labeled myself a reactionary racist, brimming with ferocity. I hate nearly all the tenants, and cannot think of many exceptions. I've satirized Trudy Richardson as a google-eyed fool, and Debra Horne is a Neanderthal dredged from the Mississippi River. Their parent employer all but treats me like a rabid zoological specimen, utilizing the carrot and stick approach. The interior of this studio is a deplorable statement on a nearly lifelong battle with indigence, and nothing moves, as I've stated in the past, until something does. By the time the motherfuckers who run this company decide to litigate my competency, I'll be out on the street, shifting the parameters. I made contact with one wheelchair company, one, and I simply don't have the time to play the single payer option system for a tilt chair design disaster. I let Magee do this to me, and I have no strings to pull.

If I thought it would do any good, I'd have myself arrested for assaulting Democrats. 

Mastering Medium

I may be too old, or too garrulous, for Ev Williams to consider hiring me to work at Medium. My feed may as yet be shooting myself in the foot, but I like the concept and would like to try to be able to meet his requirements, so I am telling myself to be patient with the formatting prompts. I'll get it. This is part of our future. "Breathe," I say, "don't overwhelm your synapses."

I'll get it, and I may be a bitch in a bull moose, but I'm a hard worker and I take responsibility, even for being incivil to Examiner. Ev gets the format right. Clarity Media doesn't. I have a CV in the small presses three pages long, and it doesn't matter in the slightest.

We Italians are devolving.

Benefits of France 24

The shortwave WYBE feed Crime Scene Cleaner has an uppity nuanced humor, perhaps playing against Dick Wolf, and if not, certainly toying with class consciousness that still exists on the continent against the German working class in a contemporary urban mode, and yet, there is something fragile in Germany's shallow laughter at itself, not that Pegida is truly anything to worry about. Pegida is a kind of icing over a stalemate of egalitarian deceit.

If I had actually grown up Roman, as opposed to American, I would have been taught by grandmother Lillian to sit on a balcony, watching pedestrians on scooters, with quiet acceptance, but then again, I would not have survived my birth in the Italy of Fellini's Dolce Vita, and my inner voice is telling me my life is finished, I waited too long, and regardless of what I do, Pennsylvania's ineptitude has essentially made me grist for the mill. My poet friend, over 17 years now he has absorbed my accordion rhythms with Cisco panache, hard to believe-- and he might even point out I did not have to remind him how long we've applauded each other, he was nice enough to send me an email, and in my response, for once, I kept a lid on it, but I need to move on now before it becomes impossible, and it very nearly already is. I cannot go back into a home; I can't, but I cannot be like Frank, or Sherry and have my life dictated by low skill labor which borders criminality. And in those microcosms of self-interest, our relevance is increasingly precarious, unless we're engineers with a complex grasp, or microbiologists airily tweaking  millions of years of evolution.

Mass extinction is one thing, a monkey aware that the caboose is hurling toward disastrous consequences is another. I am hoping that by February if I pull hard on the creative community I can find temporary housing of some sort.

La Cattiva Strada

Somebody moved behind the brown door: first on the left, then on the right; first footsteps, then a muted rumpling of fabric and the clanking of pots; the concierge's grey eyes seemed to penetrate the wood in pursuit of the invisible noise.-- Georges Simenon, The Engagement

It isn't that one doesn't perceive the strategism within the provincial puzzles of Andrea Camilleri; Simenon was one of his influences, and it shows in the flowering absurdity and pathos of his local color. His narratives are as much about the terrible transmutation of the Old World into contemporary materialism, the one vomiting into the other with the repugnance of centuries old collapse, as they are about the fraud and corruption which truly besiege the carabinieri and all of Europe. Less murder, more graft. In the States, regardless of ethnicity, to an extent, most murders are an emotional argument: kill the wife and stage a suicide, get rid of the bitch on my ass, or go serial predator to assuage the corrosion of pathological pain. Americans go postal, enjoy blockbuster slaughter. Europe, excepting the transplantation of the mafisio, whose golden age was killed off by the ruthlessness of the FBI, is a bit different. The players are dirty, do business off the books, and authors obfuscate their real critique by leaving a dead body around; that real critique takes aim at provincialism, dirty money, and the plight of migrants, like Pakistanis who leave the volatility of the Iron Triangle, only to be victimized beneath placid milk white  surfaces. For the more swarthy Sicilians, who aren't as European as the Germans, the stigma may envelop Tunisians, but for Camilleri, it is the same formula as other mystery writers from the Continent, his progressive cues play out a bit differently than they do in American class conflicts. Spastic cripples like Bejou are simply what they are, dirty, unwashed, going off under stress, part of the comic poke of Italian effacement after centuries of diminishing hegemony.

The problem: Luca Zingaretti's screwball antics, especially when played off Peppino Mazzotta, feel forced by Rai television, and the mesh of the horrific lengths to which the criminal will go against the scatological gossip filling in the blanks doesn't quite work, not that Rai does err on the side of grandiosity, but Zingaretti is an insult to true Roman heritage, may he dormire con i pesci, grinding my teeth. You cannot win them all. 

Days of Papal Infallibility

"Because I have pressure sores"--  Christopher Walken

Al Pacino is a transformation performer. Within the apex of his talent, he changed American cinema, worrying about the maturity of applied technique much later in his career. Andy Garcia has moments of only fleeting authenticity, aping the great man with whom he appeared in Coppola's trilogy summation, which should not have been made, just as much of Garcia's work should not have been made, except when he gets interesting with self-referential irony about the art of melodrama itself. as in the 09 City Island, which makes a middling attempt at creating a language around the business of cinematic creation within a movie itself, pushed even further, and sharper, on cable, as when De Niro played a producer and Bruce Willis plays himself, having a bit of a Homeric temper tantrum in a clip on yet another Charlie Rose promotional segment. Is this language of sophistication  synchronic over time?

The Roman Catholic Church is already a dead entity, despite militant fossils like myself who do not believe in pastoral tolerance for homosexual indulgence, throwing my moral weight with the synod over Francis, then caught myself. Church authority began to die from the dawn of mass literacy, let alone the dawn of Protestant reformation and the Vatican 2.0 under John, and the fact that the Argentine is playing politics as opposed to being a spiritual leader means doctrinal infallibility is a de facto anachronism. If a speck of spastic dirt on the wall under increasing intestinal stress feels disheartened by apostasy as a democratic forum, then all is finished.

Declare defeat, go home, and perhaps preserve my form as a calcified figure on which the grandchildren of millennials can gawk, a pseudo-historical trope. What is the big deal? Fisting in secret, fisting  in the open, I myself have posted about Frank and his fingers within my rectrum as a mock-up of vigor, virility. Believers might say I'm lying to myself, that I really do believe in Christ as equal parts human divine, laughing at the rigorous objections of Dawkins to words like transubstanation, and yes, well, I was raised in Catholicism, and in middle adolescence, threw my emotions into testament-- but even before university, I challenged priests and Jewish counselors alike, questing, on fire, offensive, even as a young woman, had anyone cared, I would have been excommunicated, which invites laughter, which in Eco, spells the death of metaphysical need for answers.

Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead strives to be larger than itself, and yes, Walken exposes, successfully, the narcissism with which we surround broken bodies, but as a comedy about brutality, boast, and repressive tolerances, lines not to be crossed, it bounces a bit much, like an IKEA catalog glorifying plastique fabrication even as its laminated pages curl and burn in the stink of a propane fire, the fatigue before the actual dying commences, not living long enough to polish every post, which justifies some literary critical assertion that post-modern subversion has fallen to the wayside of the NASDAQ index.

All I ever desired was a decent husband, like the fictional Maigret who actually seems to have more corporeal embodiment than Bruno Cremer, the actor who best fleshed out the detective among so many famous creations which have no real life counterpart; a decent husband, one who would have supported my ambition, a pleasant hamlet, my own space, decent literary friends. Instead, I am ugly, a trauma who draws out lesbianistic tendencies in even more marginal ugly inner city minorities who make pest control seem heroic. And yes, after the traumatic episodes that challenged my life itself, I asked, queried my internal self, did I want those games with another female, and such fleeting hormonal sensations which come with masturbatory aggression, that level of pornography itself whose exploitation is still policed, regardless of the progressive scorched earth policy for tolerance.

My answer: a resounding no, is like a flake of dandruff in a libertine world, healthy pink flesh too often pasty, soft, anemic, or brown and exaggerated. Thick buttocks, breasts so large they veer toward eccentricity. I think fecal face was a clever slang term, pointing toward epistemological values even in second rate ensembles.

Curtsey

Despite my usage bill and my need to file my legal griefs, as if this is going to protect me from finishing my life as a hate crime, I am honored to have the European views that I do, and will not ask the Europeans why, or expect affirmation or its opposite. My ISP has been kinder to me than any humans of late, despite its settlement with consumer advocates over things it never did to me, at least as far as I know. If I cannot die with my lips kissing sampietrini, becoming a collusionist in Rouen might be my second choice.

I bow, grasp your shoulders, fluent kiss on each cheek. I'd also raise Mussolini back from the dead faster than RAI could recycle Inspector Luca. Unlike Jennifer Rubin, and this is one area where she and I differ as conservative women, I cannot consider myself a patriot when I have been at the mercy of extermination, life long. 

Inundation

Under a great deal of stress, of course, as it relates to Relocation Manual. Google and Amazon will ride in to my rescue, certainly, with my battered psyche, internal giggle of bemusement, throwing my spears at the managerial weary minority Trudy because my white chick pick Karina didn't work out. I know you do not care, but it hurts that this unwitting Jesus two shoes bitch destroyed part of my independent press record, in essence triggering my final war against Presby that I will not truly win, even if I litigate it out. Philadelphia has essentially three tiers:

1. The nigger hustle, inclusive of white trash, that eats itself expendable;
2. The white moderately liberal professional class who work the center district and then return to rural New Jersey or Chestnut Hill;
3. The Jewish Italian remnant that tacitly smiles at the ghetto majority in order not to be targeted by it. Unlike me. My downward spiral is so evidentiary that "hello" on the Parkway from a hoodie in sunglasses is a fishing expedition for a welfare bitch, but it will never happen. I'll never be an addict ho, which isn't to say they will not assault again. They may. I'm weakening, probably never truly to resurrect a vindicated matriculation. Future hate crime on an axel, but be thankful we're not as sterile as the Finnish street scene. Talk about a static culture-- of all the European procedurals that have glazed me over since I rediscovered where Mindview has been hiding on WYBE, Jussi Vares seems the most authentically true to itself in its own social mores, not necessarily imitating or competing with American models.

The French get it right when they care to; the Swedes, not in any way detracting from Mankell, are so impotent they send me running back to Dick Wolf, and Italiano? The only argument Rome has left is to acknowledge that corrosion and incompetence have an incestuous compatibility, and yet, this is the genetic make up calling me home to 10,000 years of dust I'd never survive. How could I? With those ancient, narrow causeways? But I intend to die in Tuscany. WYBE has so successfully indoctrinated me I may end up trying my hand-- two unfinished novels why not a third where a devoted daughter suspects the worst of amato padre, si?

Fugue

Perhaps I presume, but we'll presume then. Melinda looks like a gentle soul who perhaps took a knock or two during the recession, and despite the fact that my virtual life hasn't done much for me, or, the little it has done is a little late, her picture with the boy recalled home and some better moments in Ridley Park. It was not all sexual abuse by proxy of my mother's men. She picked them up like stray dogs. Joe the Flop, Walt the Indian, a Jamaican I never met, Don, Beaky. Men drawn to over-sexed fat volatility, even my ailing father on his knees begging her not to divorce him. Mom had a way. I guess men smelled she was a whore, ignored the weight. 

I am so depressed I am like blackberry juice on the fingertips, and want to give my notice, without a damn plan in all the world. I want out, more than anything, I just want out of this building, though it is the same in every public housing building, and all tenants spar with building owners. Karina is causing me grief, and I cannot trust myself during inspections tomorrow not to go at it with the staff and want not to be here but bottle blond has her own problems and I can dismiss her from service twice too and laugh starkly. I might as well be bisexual with the shit I am putting up with for a 35 year old white girl who reminds me of home, home that no longer exists for me.

I am not in the best of shape. My father's sister is dying. Stomach cancer. No surprise, but Marie has been my only support since my mother died, and padre is exhausted trying to keep wicked stepmother Louise alive, and if I follow my heart, and scuttle downtown to the Italian consulate, let's assume I tantrum my crippled poverty across the Atlantic. My regret will consume me five minutes after docking, because the still virile Stanley Tucci was right. Italy has nothing but history, and yet I want to go, and upon getting there, storm into RAI and punch Luigi Perelli to ensure his prostate remembers my fist, the crafty old socialist. He is a liar, and so is The Washington Post.

I would not know what to say to Melinda, at least not in digital idiolect, except to say thank you for a picture of her smiling peace with life. I'll never experience it. Would she like a roommate?

Decadent Pairs

In Siena the Tomasi revealed that powerful and single-minded religious vocation which later made them famous in Sicily. One went to England as papal legate and tried to settle the dispute between Henry 2.0 [my emendation] and Thomas a Becket. David Gilmour, The Last Leopard, p11

I believe I shall focus my attentions on Giuseppe Tomasi for now, then perhaps work my way back to Henry James. The Prince of Lampedusa presents the demise of the petty nobility as a foregone conclusion. Gilmour presents their obliteration as an almost radical reaction, and to the extent that I understand Dr. Cristina Coletta's abstract in her critical study, Plotting The Past, she is examining the diachronic discourse between historic episode, narrative, and how this frames contemporary perception. Dr. Coletta was very kind to me, and told me she would send me a copy of her book but she only had her reader's copy; not a total ingrate, by dint of my own obstinacy I have nearly all my tools at hand, except a visit to the point of origin. I see where I am going with Il Gattopardo much more clearly than with the work of James, and Tomasi may actually give me my framework to back into James [the New Mobility bloggers who follow my twitter account glaze over at this point saying she goes very far]. Mmm, like Mr. Ramsay's throbbing mind in his theoretical struggle, I am defying much more than domestication in my outreach. Cannot the same be said of Fellini's mastery as an auteur? La Strada is more than the sum of its parts; it borders on the magical realism that Shakespeare invented in The Tempest, which means if you are Julie Taymor you are going to be fanatical in your canonical felicity because you cast the magisterial Helen Mirren in the lead.

It borders on post war fabulism, La Strada, but it is not simply a love song to Mussolini, who in turn was a deluded optimist to the point of insanity. All of us miss the Roman Empire, whether we know it or not. We keep recreating the Colossus, not restoring the past, only reinventing the application of power. I cannot bring full brunt of analysis to on La Strada today, but did want to point out to you how commercialism exhausts genre, much as Haggard exhausts great Victorian contributions. His work is almost an Edwardian squeal about the terror of progressive erosions yet to come. The same can be said with European directors against Hollywood. Fellini is nearly Jamesian when engaging in cinematic ambiguity. Identity is a clever knife thrust into liberal pretensions, but never truly veers off the expected prescription.

Virtuous Self-Interest Over Alleviation

Maybe you'll be our leader one day.-- a former consumer over 70 years old I've characterized as The Gladhandler

I should not have written this post, let alone drawn attention to it, the avalanche tumbling on my head, and it shall at some point be revised or deleted, while I have plenty of time to agonize over access to vulnerable actors who may also be classified as cancer survivors, since I have to by necessity reconstruct the piece for which I need it. This falls under nothing anyone can do, even with the best sympathy available, though I will never know that if this is also the case when I contacted Phillips' office about the issue of Oxford Magazine she and I appear in together, never having so much as received the courtesy of a response. Apparently it is far too burdensome for pristine liberalism such as hers to reach down beyond those matriculated students on whom her income depends. A marginalized quadriplegic with disillusioned admiration and aspiration isn't a passing grade for her progressive finesse. I did not want her issue (if she had it). I just wanted a copy of my "Custer" poem, complex and fine as it is. Did she have to respond? No, but what would the harm had been if a TA had searched and made me a copy, simply to help? I'm a product of that academic system as much as she, and can't see that my posts were an issue, ambivalent or not, my voice hearkens her currency. Conservatives may not be beating down the gate to relocate me the fuck out of here on humanitarian grounds, but imagine they would have made me a copy of my misplaced work, had the situation been commensurate. There are nearly as many causes as there are people, to echo Krauthammer: no one has time for them all, inclusive of my subtextual bent to embed policy issues threaded in a bruised narcissism, though immigration is a league outside of this ballpark, all those starving and malnourished Houthi taking a lesson from the Nigerians who've preyed on Roman pity for years, never mind the Italy barely has the ability to salvage its ruins from earthquakes, at least since season  8 of Don Matteo, where whores of village back alleys get the justice of our spaghetti western priest. Catholic mercy never fails, having found a docking grappler for the besieged under the shadow of Boko Harem at a port in Spain, thus a libertarian moment of hosanna. On the abstract level, the dowager has to support the libertarian outcry for freedom of mobility. This embodies what personal liberty is all about, but it is also equally true, as in James Woods vocal retrenchment, supporting the Trumpian border wall, that the European Union's charitable acceptance will one day break the camel's back, already eroding what once made the United States seem indomitable. Doubtlessly Spain won't do a doubletake and ask Putin to find these poor victims of their own government some space in Kaliningrad. The communists do love indigenous tokenism so, after all. After Mussolini was hung like a dog in the streets, Italians rightly slowed paying the piper on the moral debits of history.

Italian Anglais

"Will you be civil!" --Nicholas Marinelli, Sr.

Fathers and daughters invariably disappoint each other. As an undergraduate, I had to do some forging on ahead with vocational services when padre could no longer afford the tuition. I doubt yanking vocational services along as I did in the mid-eighties would be possible today as it was then. My education was expensive, as my old age will be even more so. I told myself not to get my hopes up when I heard "looking for a new place," before my aging parent's cell phone went dead, but leaden despondency vanished.

My father hates me. You may say I exaggerate, but he attempted abandonment of all his children, even his dead son, when my mother divorced him; he hates the fact that I am a cripple, hates the fact that I am slovenly via biological inclination; I hate my father, but always loved his elegance, sense of style, his drive for material acumen.

I have been trying to make him proud of me for 50 years, and my grief for my sociopathic ghost of a brother is mainly through his eyes. He loved little Nicky, loved Italy. Gandolfini's sudden death was a story in my head I am writing in irony before it became an obituary, much like Pacino's ...And Justice For All was an episodic soap opera in the foment of his Godfather arc. The former film is not a Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece, but getting past the fact that Justice is a situational argument about jurisprudence, it is actually a very dark rendition about the dirt that goes on in the criminal courts, and how the law grinds people with a civic sense of decency into a pulp, and favors sadists, which John Forsythe's one dimensional demeanor adapts to conveniently, in this instance.

It was some years ago now. Padre may have been 69 or 71, still handsome. I was lowered on the hydraulic Paratransit lift, growling about the driver's incompetence, before my sister and I ruptured into civil war, appearing for my usual compulsory holiday visit, and I was admonished. All whites are racists, but they hide it behind whatever vinaigrette you'd like me to list: veneer, condescension, affluence, ripping off (immersion in) black culture, belief that Barack Obama is a demi-god, or one of my favorites, paternalism toward the Sudanese in relation to the eradication of the guinea worm.