Setting Your Watch By The Bowels of Philip Seymour Hoffman

Are you okay?-- the indulgent lack of specificity in modern ecumenicalism

Search prevents the least among us from being the dunce in our virtual public spaces, and as such, after Meloni left SVU, whatever his brash liberalism amounts to in social media, the overly long running spin off seemed to become a hollow allegory of itself. Followed so intermittently, Noah’s appearance was a disconcerting element, even if it was designed to give Mariska Hargitay a counterbalance; it is not that outlandish that a daughter of an alcoholic rape victim adopts the son of a pimp, but the series no longer works. It has a hollow knell to it with so much of its core ensemble now absent from the set, and the writers seem to acknowledge this with the season opener. Olivia Benson is slipping once again, but unless there were hints from last season that the equally over stressed dowager missed, the child abuse allegation is just this short of ludicrous, straining credulity, like Gary Webb's suicide after his CIA story collapsed under scrutiny. She became distracted, the child ran into the street, and the inexorable grind of the state against the individual begins again, as with OJ, or the Angleton murder and gambling scene in Houston’s upper crust.

While under no circumstances is the brutal killing of Mrs. Angleton anything worth condoning, her surviving spouse kept beating the system, and no government allows that, none, whether by purportedly unbiased legal processes or not. We’re all at the mercy of mass tolerance, whether Zuckerberg’s or Jack’s, not that either of these uber liberals are involved in day to day postings. I’m rapidly wearying, even if I understand why my long term writing associates utilize Facebook as they do, just as I keep blogging with dismal skepticism, in varying shade overs to cynicism. I have overkilled with tweets, so I am not one to judge the frequency with which my few Facebook connections describe too much too often, but if Gretchen had posted about her medical travail with fibromyalgia ten years ago, or five, I might have taken heart, and persevered. I replied to her weariness with her pain in more detail than some of her relatives, and my muted positives on her behalf were genuine. She married well, to all appearances has produced happy children with a loving husband, but I am about ready to roll out the door of Riverside Presbyterian, despite the tally of what justice, in its pithy abstraction, owes me, despite the condition of my power chair, despite the chasm that will open before me, I am probably going to run, abandoning very nearly everything, even my contributor copies reorganized in the nexus of Karina’s well meaning disruption to my order. Then I’ll be off the radar, soiling myself in the next county. Presbyterian Homes is doing everything in its power to force my compliance with Philadelphia’s welfare system, or set me up for a forced intake to a wheelchair community like Inglis House, and I am not going to allow it. It is that simple.

Unlike Webb, my professional reputation wasn’t destroyed through the pressure of overreach, just bad luck, and my willingness to be scathing, ruining the rudiments of my small crescent of bylines. I can’t take the bullshit that goes on in public housing anymore, and if I cannot take the ignorant vindictiveness of urban poverty with its relentless cruelty destroying my spirit, how much less the relentless human offal of a home for cripples, merciless, huge, the stench of disease permeating its halls. Regardless of my sympathies for a fiery, hard Roman Catholic faith, there is absolutely no dignity in this existence of such vulnerability, and I’ll need a week or so, but I either leave, or fight my way into a convulsive conflict with African Americans and hypocritical white Protestants whom I literally despise with their horrified proprieties. They are the ones abusing me, constantly breaking me down, and it’s just more of the same. If Olivia Benson was an actuality, there is very little probability that she could have aged so well adjusted into her leadership role. Eighteen years is it? Her life of being assaulted and abducted, while more dramatic than my mostly sordid degradation at the hands of violence, would have never left her so well adjusted to take over from her captain, however well intimated these slight hints are at her newly acquired destructive armor, after a fashion. Yeah, it is serial fiction, akin to a comic book, and audience loyalty needs lines of resilient moral constancy, but if I am to recover anything of the woman I once was, described as full of life, I have got to get the fuck out of here, with virtually nothing, even my published work locked away. Nothing more than the blood curdling my veins says I either leave or die, regardless of how Wolf has an actress so solidly typecast put in her papers.

Force of Absence

"I mean, you've got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice looking guy."-- Joe Biden's sterling liberal? honesty, circa 2007

With her tinnitus in full force, the weary dowager should be rolling back to her sunken coil mattress which may be viewed as a reminiscent freedom in a few weeks, but has strolled back in to contemplate cessation of following SVU regularly with so much of the original ensemble gutted. Peter Gallagher's scar tissue as Deputy Chief Dodd doesn't fill the spaces left by Florek, who seemingly convinced us of world weary NYC skepticism, and as much as can be said for Hargitay's longevity, doing the expected positive spin being quoted "It's like a new show," in reality the remnants of Wolf's formula are more like a funeral dirge; Benson cannot carry the series to it's twilight with the implied intimacy between her and the IAB barker  who was her long time nemesis with Meloni always  burly. Ice -T seems to have nothing to do with himself except to back run Ghost Whisperer, which is referenced for a reason: namely, I am not positive I have a favorite SVU episode. I do savor some of the more acerbic Law and Orders, and when in the mood agree with standard critical sentiment that CI is the best of them, but SVU does have tendencies to make sexual victimization overwhelming, only rarely hitting the right keynotes in relation to the reverberating impact of sexual exploitation. The Hewitt rape stalker episode is one of them, mystified as anyone as to what drug they put Jennifer on to get that raw desperate helplessness seeking any outlet elicited from her sparse range, since she failed in Criminal Minds, a formula serial as nearly despised as the actress. Criminal Minds seeps  a bit of a Chicago mindset to it which I never enjoyed and shall elucidate, if I'm able to keep my online account afloat, at a later date. L&O is more forgiven because it is more New York, or was, with Beltzer and Florek. You do not have to fill the dowager in on what particular womb Noah was ejected from. She doesn't fucking care, but it looms ahead that a freaking curtain call is in order. The show lost its force with Pino's entry after Cold Case. Actors have contracts and it's a business, but milking an urban concept crime drama to the last wrecking ball never made much sense. SVU has little capital on which to retire and return as a special we might eagerly relish from hospice.    

Celebrity Modules

"I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought-- 1 Corinthians 1:10

I wish I could be content sometimes, but even in a social context as casual as an LOTR eat and greet, or the Rosenbach, to which I shall not return in the near term, I rarely am out of myself and off my guard; when I try to relax I feel every inch the spastic savant. It may have been the same on campus as a student, but in my early twenties I had episodes of comfort, episodes now rare, as I'm always wound up like a cork being popped.

Though both kindle devices are old, and I would, in fact, send the 2G in for a trade if nerves were not wrought and I wasn't preoccupied with a bounce: If my viewers want to know what I want, out of curiosity, all that amounts to is temporary lodgings into which I can roll the Quantum. I'm not looking for an Ariel Castro, despite my luck. If I did run into one my wits would be bested simply via physical and emotional exhaustion. but just a place I might get into, use facilities, in this low life world wide web we inhabit, and then sterilize, through terms of service guidelines so confusing Socrates would have few sophist points to turn.

Mariska, in her first life as a successful series actor, told Ms. Gross, on air, that she created a web montage for special victims who contacted her. People can see it as a powerful rivulet around psychiatric classifications, therapeutic treatments. A little girl inside me would eat that up, to have Mariska Hargitay give me a hug and let me have a good cry-- which is precisely why I cannot become one of her followers, or offer libations to an aging woman in her last cycle as the weaker sergeant in charge. The bald Florek, who first gained prominence as the LA Law junk bond king, had more definition than Olivia as the authority figure who held the line and bent it, as necessary.

I penetrate the digital New American Bible slowly, thus far only bookmarking the table of contents in the order most Catholic know, whether or not those are nominal Catholics, or still practicing. My faith shall never return. It is not possible, after what I've been through, for more of the same. My poor old aunt, who watched her husband, and then her mother, her elder brother, slowly shrivel and die, hangs on. She believes if I give my notice I'll be put away. I have roughly 30 days to discover otherwise, as management will get my notice tomorrow, Friday, there about. I let an incorporated section 202 facility, designed primarily for the senior working class, destroy my life. Once in a blue moon they snatch a white collar. It has been so long since I cited a biblical verse I had to look up the instructions.

Comfort in the Alignment of the Fifth Column

"I lost interest around the age of 84."--Vladimir Sokoloff, seamless cultural appropriation at the height of international tensions.

The Magnificent Seven utilizes a fairly structuralist approach to deconstruct libertarian individualism against the unsung glories of collective necessity. Sturges was a product of his times, and movie stars on a set could safely educate a young aspirant, embodied in the hot-blooded youth of Chico, that the number of bodies on your gun (read celebrity) carries a price which layers compassion in tanned leather. Why four of the gunmen die while the initial heroes who braved irrational prejudices simply to give a man a decent burial isn't all that difficult for the viewer to grasp.  Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen do not buckle, conveniently dying of cancer before they could be pillaged by over-hyped social media tools. Colburn, Bronson, Dexter, and Vaughn had to convey intrinsic character flaws, and their death scenes complete their arc. Vaughn's stagy projection of battle fatigue is not performed without exaggeration, though perhaps a critic cannot be too harsh against the demands of the indigenous for succor if the privileged product of neo-imperialism ramps up his dramatic stresses. Vaughn does a better job with existential absurdity in The Bridge at Remagen, which the dowager reviewed at Niume, which appears to be cached under Medium's paywall umbrella. When Medium made it's initial launch, one of its contributors suggested that publishing companies were "afraid" of it, but Ev's brainchild has had to fall back on a centuries old idea: subscription. I certainly cannot afford it, though I still have an active account. 

In Remagen, Vaughn is trying to rescue Germany from the left's extremes, and the disabled citizens under his command are all but ghosts as the Allies advance. How much better then, to have one last swan song under the tried and true verities of Dick Wolf's formula. Vaughn would be dead within a year of filming his part in December Solstice, from acute leukemia, much like Roy Scheider's better contrived end game in Criminal Intent. The legality surrounding December Solstice is silly. Vaughn last appearance in an online video would have stopped any real life ADA from proceeding to trial against an aging literary "figure" and his trophy wife, echoing Morrie Schwartz in near perfect imitation in regard to nurses wiping our ass. Peter Scanavino, as Carisi, is handed the coda, the tributary laurel of an admirer, paying homage to an era that closed with Sturges's seminal classic. Scripture says rather fabulously that the meek shall inherit the earth. This means, in actuality, overwhelming it against its strivers that made civilization possible for a burgeoning population.

Caricature's Lonely Soul with Subtlety

"The material creation is thus an act of necessity, a means for the light-substance to recover what it has lost of itself."--Manichaeism and Its Legacy, Introduction

Celebrity is not a perfect insulator, now that time has softened the blow of Williams' demise. We cannot know if he thought of the very public struggle of Michael J Fox before he hung himself, perhaps not wanting to become another spokesman for Parkinson's as his improvisational genius lost its vigor if not its acuity. Still, Robin Williams wasn't poor, certainly not spiraling into public welfare territory, whatever his problems. In most of his over 40 film work, his nascent childlike innocence wears a bit thin, but had he lived, the embittered widow he plays in Authority is intriguing, a sinister in between figure, with Dick Wolf offering a tacit homage to Terry Gilliam's Orwellian parodies, and Robin reenacting his Manichean figure from One Hour Photo, which amounts to the best acting from a comedian I've ever seen. There are elements of Jackie Gleason's Lonely Soul in these performances, not that dowager knows what was studied.

Being a bird on a wire caught in a dualistic war between opposing forces is not necessarily a way past binary choices, but Robin Williams had that rare ability to express differance in the same way Derrida went in search of it through pushing the boundary of linguistic decorum. Common sense ruralists dismiss Derrida as "word games," and his reputation now suffers in some quarters, or treated as comic relief by archaeologists in inner-disciplinary conferences, and yet he has his defenders, precisely because his textual appropriations offer a tertiary struggle.  In Authority, particularly, Williams moves Meloni's acting up a few notches from sheer A list intimidation, much like my Roman temper despising African obfuscation causes it to tremble autocratic methodology [in translation, white apartment managers would not have attacked me as relentlessly as drafty and vacant niggers like Trudy  and Debra. End clarification, though I am mindful that I want the 2016 Trenton lawyer's assistance, if the firm can take aim at the right cow] , and the conclusion of the 2008 episode of SVU does indeed evade the pat conceits of detective stories. Williams isn't simply entertaining in these examples. He is disturbing, and I wish he had held on, for a little while, but such mania as made his talent has implosive elements.

Kevin McHale, Mime Karaoke

During a nascent episode of glee, Kevin McHale's Artie is swept up by Dianna Agron's cheerleader (most likely) in an aggressive seduction scene in which the nerdy pretend paraplegic is bewildered, entirely ignorant of the convoluted cross ethnic love plot suggestive of a sizzlingly kitsch hip bisexuality that regresses rednecks to awed pornography Neanderthals. Hot girls and hard nipples, that is an art in progress, as opposed to your grandmother's estrogen loss and the suggestive comfort crones can take in fallen paps, with the fearful androgyny of the Furies ever evocative of our founding myths, and our instinctual unease with gender definition and its tensions in relation to origin.

Artie's bewildered naivete is something of a truism in the wheelchair user innocence lexicon, but only in terms of Caucasian parents sheltering their invalids from any sexual identity: If you are paralyzed and need injections to get a hard on, what's the use? His silence in the scene is meant to have a comic, nerdy impact, but what it also illuminates, inadvertently, and I hear fans of the show's early incisive biting wit on Americana dysfunction crying out, "unfair, you are deploying a cheap stratagem!" is the wall of silence that surrounds the sexual abuse and exploitation of those with chronic conditions, a wall that is even thicker in the inner cities, where black women with MCTD are forcibly raped and assaulted into providing oral sex. No SVU doggedly pursued this girl's rapist and abuser when I knew her, too inexperienced as a journalist in those days to get her a cover story and some exposure to alleviate the duress she lived under, though the violence of her partner affected us all. He vandalized the mailbox unit and killed her cat. This is the systemic stress I was exposed to by Presby in the inner city, to then be nearly ceaselessly harassed here in this unit, let alone what this poor woman had to be subjected to in order to survive (and I do not know that she did).

It also adds layers to our current preoccupation with complicity, to pun on my own correspondence (work at it, you'll get it). That Artie is clueless does not spare him, any more than more worldly experience, and mine was above average for disability norms, spares us from future injury, which time and again, cordons off the unfortuate low status primate. glee is not my thing, particularly, musical theater that unites, mocks, and at the same time articulates the conflict of difference, synthesizing everything into our knowledge of Kantian universals, but I have seen enough of it not to spare you from exercising your mind a little away from the willful necessity of self-interest.

Feeling a little overwhelmed, I was nonetheless pleased to figure out what I had been doing wrong with the kindle paperwhite, the curse of vapid technical literacy.