Constantly Maligned, the Fang's in Travis Kauffman's Foreaem

"They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgement.-- Zora Neale Hurston

The word I would use is elegiac, as opposed to Poniewozik's elegant, in a description of Matthew Weiner’s The Romanoffs, whose title itself suggests something which is a knock off of an original. I would also suggest that it is fine for viewers to be mystified by how these short movies link together to make an anthology.  The strongest of them is the episode “The Royal We,” which the NYT features in its still photo of Kerry Bishe on a cruise for modern day survivors of the original Romanov family, of whom her husband happens to be one. Kerry, as Shelly, is simply an all-American girl, bohemian enough to get stoned over pizza in her off hours, trying to sort out her husband Michael. Corey Stoll has to suffuse himself as the missing link, tying the knot between Nicholas as the disconnected Victorian Czar about to be sacrificed for the new world order of egalitarianism which we’ve all learned since is a utopian fiction, and the sobering existential angst of the Slavic dark side to brutality. To break away from Shelly’s festering befuddlement, Michael leans into jury duty, and this has its own grotesque allure. You might reflect on how “The Violet Hour” leads to a pregnancy. Aaron Eckhart, despite ostensible star power, behaves like a sheep dog in it, his pleasures as furtive as Stoll’s remorse following on its heels. I never engaged in due diligence on Eckhart following his incisive energies which makes In The Company of Men such a powerful nihilist statement, but Weiner allows the actor some autobiographical footnotes which I certainly found more convincing than his character’s overflow of sexual conquest in the guise of an American dilettante. Ines Melab does better constructing her road map with Keller than as the distressed Tunisian Hajar about to hurl into social alienation but for Eckhart’s bumbling nonchalance finding a cornerstone of appearance and propriety for the sake of what appearance and propriety entail. In its way it’s a more sophisticated upgrade on the Florrick’s marriage of convenience revealing that relationships are more complex than mere residual unhappiness of a mistake.

The dowager wearies of The Good Wife as a foretelling of a Hillary presidency ghosted into a backlash upon which Trump capitalized, and may leave off where it is, with Peter in his effervescent governorship, Alicia with her self-assertion, and Will Gardner on his rampage towards Josh Charles’ exit from the series, effectively killing it. Isn’t Will a senescent liberalism in decline as well, or Diane Lockhart? What concerns me more than Mueller’s quest for integrity, and possible failure to bring down Trump’s crust of an old boys network, is what this undercurrent of appeasement toward Putin is supposed to yield. Its five day old war with Georgia reestablished the Russian Federation as "as a military power" in the words of Sarah Pruitt. Even before Putin emerged after Yeltsin, how was this ever not the case, even with but a limited tutorial available on the Crimean War with the British Empire, before revolutionary dissents within Russian amassed under Lenin? American media figures with access claim that Michael Flynn allowed himself to be orchestrated by Russia’s imitative propaganda machine, which can mimic the western press so cleverly as to not have a valid issue to raise now and again, but even if we accept, as per Obama Administration issues with temperament, that Flynn is a cracked vessel, he spent his career in military intelligence. If were going to think along nice big and easy puzzle pieces, then the argument can be made that contemporary civilization is yoked to the US Russia and China. If their interests were aligned than the rest of Europe might be a mere pacified inconvenience. Matthew Weiner’s fourth episode, “Expectation” entangles itself in a web of mendacity ending in an emergency surgery for gallstones. Telling, in Weiner’s polite request that we apply ourselves.

Ragtime Cadenza

"If you show people their future, then they have no future."--Ben Affleck, giving JJ Abrams the scene to replicate Colm Feore's death in his more contemporary series.

More than likely, I will only ever see Hannibal through the actors who've embodied him rather than as Harris created him. I dislike thrillers in print. There are exceptions to this, but on the whole, authors rarely if ever deliver the goods. Hence I do Harris an injustice to give Bryan Fuller and Dacy and Mikkelsen all the credit, layering their vogue-ish series over top what has come before. Diabolical natures can amplify altruistic impulses. Moral rectitude can have its own obdurate obstinacy. Paleontologists seemingly dispense with the sanctity of life because epistemological  production is paramount, but Frances Glenn Cross will be, if the accusations against him hold, expurgated, and eliminated, for killing on the basis of murdering due to hatred of ethnicity. He violated the social contract that modern human societies vowed and failed to eliminate. Christopher Dorner, comparatively, engaged in revenge murder against a civilian police system which is probably still corrupt, despite reforms instituted in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating. Neither man had a rational justification for their actions, in the tension between the expendability of being and the precious nature of being. Being is preferred to not being, barring the exceptional instance, like seditious intent, or national interest. Yet we're still in a place where violence is coded to produce what we necessarily conclude to be a just outcome. We see it in formula thrillers like Affleck's mediocre futurist vehicle, where Eckhart wastes what he has proven to be a brilliant social intelligence, but we also see it daily beyond our fantastical destruction of villains, or those who do not tune it out when going to shing dings where it's bring you're own clams, sometimes we tune in, beyond cell text pings to the wrong number, to what foreign and domestic fanaticism wreaks upon optimistic and happy individuals. We do not assign hierarchical values to Afghan or Pakistani lives,and though we expect NATO forces to defeat the Taliban, American forces are expected to be disciplined if they urinate on enemy flesh. Killing is easy. Desecration is more onerous, more unspeakable, enveloped by darkness. I am that angry to dig into it this deeply, and I do not truly know what decency I am willing to transgress for the sake of appeasing my virtue-- no, my sense of injustice. I gave Erik the finger, shaking with Barbara's rage, back in winter. I am that angry with shim, his rhetoric and ethical sleaziness. Last week she/he said hello while I barged up to my ex. (I own Frank due to his marriage proposal, which I admit is my not entirely rational prerogative) One look from me, Erik drove back into the building. Just one look. If I could get away from shim, our history and our younger healthier intimacy, my hate wouldn't be so corrosive. I don't exactly hate the US, but our welfare state is a cruel, derisive business, one I was weak enough to be destroyed by. Barbara, if you're wondering, is another spastic, totally helpless, 70 year old slut who vented on me some years ago. "Asshole," she hissed, a tubular sea worm undulating in the coral.

Do I frighten you? There is nothing I can convey to Bernie Taupin, strangely, other than to express skepticism with how deeply embedded his best work threshed out my interior longings, I debated one of my bizarre and skittish communiques for five minutes. Fuck it, him, and the entire British invasion of rock and roll.

Fidgets

"It's hard to find much of a pulse."-- Drew Taylor

For a high functioning quadriplegic, reliable power chairs are the difference between life and death. Even with two models though, snow storms strain already vulnerable survival skills. Getting to Trader Joe's tomorrow or not with which chair is an issue, and I've been gently starving on tuna and eggs a bit of fish, for over a week. During the blizzard of 96 I cracked a castor on dry ice and went through hell with a black woman who sat at my table and played solitaire and walked me in my manual to my closest Dunkin Donuts franchise so I would stop discussing my failed engagement. I detached myself from any further working relationship with her for no real valid reason, and she moved on to an ancient crone of her own ethnicity. "Do you clean up dog shit?" her soul sister asked her. This was before the renovations, and my studio reeked of fecal tobacco and urine, and in 2014 the pungency may not be the same, but years of Tim the Mule and the failed cleaning service hasn't changed much about lived poverty in a studio with six year old carpet, dander, fur, flaking ceiling, stained drop ceiling over toilet because David, the toffee gang banger casualty, cannot cease and desist from dislodging his toilet from the flush system. Is it this level of powerlessness that breeds spree killers like maggots? We need to stop this, despite Aaron Eckhart's persuasive argument about technologies and trade offs, even if I cannot speak to Taylor's lampooning glee over Mary Shelley's original zombie. Even my rage is now passe, transmuted, it seems, into an argument about modern capitalism and confusion over rights and entitlements.

Guns basically have one design function, and in the best of all possible utopias, the technology which have given us this kill candy isn't going away, but I have to break with conservatives on treating the Second Amendment like any other form of retail. It has to stop, despite the sociological undercurrent of the American reality. Like Islamists, our disenfranchised utilize violence to settle disputes, and even as a form of conversation, a dialogue that uniquely ends in cessation and anti-climatic death tolls. The kill rate isn't really a good evolutionary check on the population, as it is not an efficient predatory cull. Wielding weaponry, through most of human history has been a privilege, not a form of radical equality, one on which the NRA seems to insist.

Charm Fractals

"I tried that,"  Vera Farmiga on a woman's time honored prerogative on experimentation.

Up in the Air (2009) signals a number of conflicted messages I am not prepared to discuss in significant detail; it has to seep in, hopefully faster than my ligament contractions, but it rivals my admiration for Aaron Eckart's scathing bite, and my initial viewing makes me regret lack of effort to see it in its initial release. Definitively of its age, I see things in the comedy which point to why The American, a year later, didn't mesh. Clooney's ruthless charm is too decent for psychopathy in actualization. Depersonalization is one or few degrees removed from an assassin nerved by conscience, very similar to lack of accountability without litigation to force the issue. This Teflon mannequin aspect the actor projects at his best may explain his self-appointed status as Sudanese savior, and also why he and Clooney pere mesh uneasily between news media and entertainment. "Why did Europeans do everything?"

My loutish philosophy professor used to toss this trick question out to his class as a kind of false positive, but let me ask, what has the guilt tied to imperialism actually solved? Aren't some of Clooney's more substantial projects a rather bleak answer in kind? 

My follower shambled in from his daily routine the Tuesday evening I chased the Rosenbach's tail feathers. I was in congress with the developmental idiots, reviving McCarthyism. Ed did not say hello, and I simply observed him walk in, take the elevator, knowing his sanguine temperament did not mean to trick spark my social fear based on Project Share field duress. No regret, no pang of remorse. I had my doubts from the moment I sat with him over coffee on the tenth floor, but I also lost my sense of provocation as well.

There is a lot of bull shit artist in me, but spastic flesh moving past the half century mark is actually coming home to roost, and in the degree to which I am pressed for time, murder conspiracies may not matter, made into a kindle single, or seriously considered. Pointless wild justice on the principle of the thing. Does it come down to the amount of indignity we have to tolerate, the number of casualties needed before real movements mitigate the body politic?

Hassan is Dead

What time was it when I woke Monday? After-noon-ish, focusing my entire energies on one small load of laundry, perfuming my sister's much abused and only worn in the building maternity jumper, made it to the laundry room at 7:30 and had to wait. The elderly black man was using the front load washing machine. Made it back up here by 9:50 to see the movie adaptation of the novel I avoided deliberately when it was the darling impulse purchase of its time. Not all of the movie. Had to piss and was starving, but I got the basic points. Sodomy is the Islamic secret beneath the web of lies we all play, Housseini's tale just another version of The Killing Fields, and my spiritual waste land is as stark as Pol Pot or the Taliban. This is what my autobiographical narrative has done to my soul, and there is no redemption, just an Aaron Eckhart dark comedy without the merit of his bite. A woman with cerebral palsy who let public housing for urban road kill destroy her life.

I never expected to succeed as an author, or a writer, or a poet-- not even when I was Jerry's fuck me adhesive on my grandiose metaphysical quest -- but I expected to succeed, and it never occurred to me to attribute failure to mood disorders. Perhaps it should have occurred to me. Not that I am shocked my stepmother is dying. She has been seriously ill since she and mio padre married. My ambition to be established in a career is slipping through my fingers and I am going to lose my father soon (if Jerry himself is not threatened with the same prospect after our communique in 07) and I can feel my own mortality falling apart, like the corpse of the friend in American Werewolf in London. We all have to die, but I know the mental torture of being bedridden like my fucking moron ex Frank is something I simply cannot endure; my life has been a runaway abject terror of living like that, like this, living like I am, an intelligence buried under squalor contained by nursing aides who are neither medical caretakers nor janitors. Perhaps I cannot rematriculate. Perhaps it is already too late, the pain of genocidal epochs absorbed like a sponge. I've never been happy. Obsessive, yes, desperate, yes, strong, yes. Moments of pleasure, my byline in Philadelphia Inquirer garbled ecstatically to my sister in anti-climatic fashion, whereas Jerry would have understood. It would have called for a drink. None the less, what progressives have done in succeeding to keep me de-institutionalized is more inhumane than my parents abandoning me in Home of the Merciful Savior. I should have died in the knife fight that threatened the occupational therapist who played John Denver records in the playroom, after we were fed dinner. This was also the me decade I knew.

Pruitt's Carrot, Body's Stick

the artist's young spouse, wore a great billowing pastel housedress and flattened espadrilles and was, for better or worse, the sexiest morbidly obese woman Atwater had ever seen. -- David Foster Wallace, "The Suffering Channel", loc. 3973

Everyone remembers Pruitt Vince. The involuntary eye movement, his weight, pasty face. The unique signature of his character makes him easy to recall. The obscenely heavy foil in House, the one submissive john in Monster spared by Aileen Wuornous. Pruitt's part was small but crucial because the tables had turned. The trick was vulnerable and the hard luck bitch minimized herself for the few moments it took to bring on ejaculation. Harsh scene. With the right casting director Pruitt does the good guy, the bad guy, and the acerbic Manichean in the middle. In Identity Mangold makes an interesting choice to pit Molina against Vince, suggesting over-classification of mental defect and the loss of our own agency to it are two sides of the same coin. Molina's countenance also leaves viewers uneasy-- not quite one type or another, almost Byzantine. The ying and the yang meta-fictional reality book end the formulaic red shirt elimination plot so popularized by Agatha Christie. Cleverly done, where even the sanest parts of Malcolm Rivers are corrupted.

Dissociative identity disorder, however, may not be a real mental illness, and it is not so sweet or succinct as famously brought on by the author of Sybil. This has not prevented the industry from mythologizing it, conflating it as a fascinating morality play, and it will no doubt stay that way until a pupil of Aaron Eckhart deconstructs it just as Eckhart deconstructs the dark side of secular liberalism with ruthless, painfully funny, veracity. Pruitt Vince will always have work due to his mild yet egregious condition. Would there ever be a day where he'd get lead billing?

Alpha Female

let not
us that are squires of the night's body be called
thieves of the day's beauty: let us be Diana's
foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the
moon; and let men say we be men of good government,
being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and
chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal. Falstaff, H4P1

I just sent a query to an editor who doesn't like them, to be positively droll after my wee morning sausage toast. I know better, of course, than to violate guidelines, but assumed the standard query with clips applied without scrolling down all the way, which is why I'll never be Ruth Gordon, can't be Gwen Ifill, and don't want to be either of them, but this idea is not a piece I am willing to commit to without approval. You can laugh, at and with me.

I have failed more than succeeded in the news business, but it is not that. My hatred of Liberty and its sister 50 state wide models gives these centers more primacy than deserved, analogous to Dacy's Graham seeing the light due to Hannibal's excessive scheming. I am ashamed of the fact that I allowed Linda to push me over the edge, that I facilitated her ability to abuse my trust 50 ways through a dead end maze. I want to see her suffer, to hear her bones snap, not because she terminates the employment of vulnerable subordinates, but because she deliberately humiliates and openly condones criminal conduct, and has gotten away with doing it since she became Vice President. She has a Masters degree in Social Policy and Law, was touted as the center's mouthpiece, but god forbid that Liberty holds her accountable for nearly driving me to commit suicide. I am never going to get past this. They hire the diseased and impaired, and even the pre-die off from dialysis, then dump them like a milling herd of lambs doomed to slaughter, but Linda Dezenski will no doubt  expire as chief operating officer, and Liberty will embalm her, a waxed Lenin in the lobby, after she accused me of wanting to sleep with her, as if I was the one who brought up her orgasm quotient. She forgot that my hamstrings were cut, forgot all about her "recognition of the personal bond between us," forgot she wished she had been kinder.

People have been fired, even hurt, for less than what she did to me, and I have already written about what my life has been like in the last fourteen years, in comparison to her ruthlessly maintained security and appearances, the empowered ice princess. It simply isn't fair, what I have had to suffer in this city's environs, in a pattern of sustained cruelty, ineptitude, and she gets off every day, fifteen minutes away from me, with her pension secure, decent health benefits. Aaron Eckhart certainly offered his fans a lesson in the truth about these prevaricating figurines, but that was a film. There the victim of a ruthless manipulation rearranged the entrapments that held her in place without any visible consequences to her character.

Where I am at, in this point and time, I probably can't survive leaving the influence of the center's circumference without further duress which might prove to be otherwise irreparable. How high is the price for the murderer in you?

Curse of Sinn Fein

Perhaps my coconut milk curdled, but suffice to say I cannot attend to group this afternoon. Used to a troubled bowel as I am, the virulence of this attack frightened me to the point that if I want to return to Italy to die, I'd better start focusing on getting that done. I'd dive into racism in the 21st century, but should wait to see if I have gone viral in the tradition of an influenza.

It is official: I am sick beyond the normal parameters of COPD, and over-utilizing blu and its glycerin atomizers may have contributed. Again, I cannot work, again.

But since I cannot find the post I am looking for, and what else is new, let me make some slight observation about attuning our addictive propensities to alternate and digital technologies: these and these each have strengths and weaknesses. Aero is simple and portable and can be taken anywhere, but does not last long and generates pressure on the need to recycle. The electronic version is stronger and closer to the stabilization of tobacco, but binds the user to the grid with greater necessity, and I am not entirely sure this is much better than the rise of the tobacco industry, though its torturous fall is a utilitarian virtue for public health. As Aaron Eckart in his didactic mode illustrates, however, many of our modern conveniences have pitfalls.

And I am unsure what the left thinks it will achieve in the attempt to regulate vice and negative behaviors out of existence.

Comparative Predation

I surprised myself by finding something derivative out of Sebold's metaphysical triumph over trauma in The Lovely Bones. If you like dark parlor games, consider Stanley Tucci as George Harvey against Michael Rooker as Henry, against Hopkins as Hannibal. That is your job spastic, might saith twitter, might saith the hapless surfer, or those who chance posted with me prior to community banishment. My rebuttal is distillation takes time, and my facial ligaments are in pain.

For me to watch a film twice in rapid succession means the transcendent caught my interior suction cups, and decided me to track Sebold even though I cannot do it her way, find my way through the thorns to loss of my own ego. My escape as a writer is to burrow into the agony, with or without substance aid, like Thomas More in his hair shirt, willing to accept the assassin. But my challenge to the Sebold victory is this: Would a mouse be owed the same consideration? It is the snicker bar on the evolutionary scale, killed swiftly, killed slowly, high pitched squeal as its spine is snapped on a glue trap, or pummeled and then eaten by Joey, speared by his brother. What does the fabric of space give the insect, krill, or plankton, for that matter? Why did I pay for my pet's ashes if I am a non-believer? There is also Aaron Eckhart's work, scathing and stark, which I thought of during the morning hours before Sandy's landfall, but evaded me in the initial post draft. In the company of men is a different genre, a masterpiece of social manner, critically acclaimed, then buried by the public, but it is a vehicle willing to be honest in its illustration that blind justice, fortune, are projections about how the primate moral code works, possibly no more than a facade; yet Sebold strikes something a mass audience needs, just as I needed Joey's remains, my deceased, now part of all minimalist dead pet theatre.

Even if we keep it on the human scale, is the serial predator simply an evolutionary outcome our self-domestication refuses to accept, or is it disease, as we attribute it in clinical terms? A footnote on which I'll have to catch up. Tucci's performance here nearly matches his more physically magnetic role in Big Night.

Requiem(s)

I just finished my fourth Gerstel, a non-alcoholic beer, in lieu of coffee, and no one will note or any discernible difference. I will have to edit my posts about my sister at some point, but she and I are estranged over money; (and this remains the case in the onset of winter 2012, my sister obliterating that her lack of support accentuated my distress) with my half-brother it is different; he and I are now estranged over his basement in North Carolina, (though the gulf has widened) which was never my best option to begin with, but was not Presby, the parent company I live under, and I pushed the envelope, not on Facebook, but still, in a virtual matrix, and I am feeling sorry about it, just like a real human being would. This happens with families with nursing home eligibles like myself, and I was hoping it wouldn't, laughing at my interior picture of twitter or LiveJournal falling over themselves to rush to my rescue, buying me the study of Andre Dubus, perhaps, in some Cinderella ending, despite my lack of requisite and docile loveliness required for such closure.

I was trying to stay awake to review In The Company of Men again, once more for free on Antenna TV, with that amusing retroactive golden age voice over, but even if I pushed, unwisely, to do so, my somnolent state of being probably couldn't keep up with Aaron Eckhart, who I find to be a wickedly sexual satirist. I have resisted discussing Stacy Edwards' supporting character, whose deafness makes Eckhart's satirical skill a delicious pain, within the usual paradigm, but this black comedy defies such paradigms. Sometimes I have to allow films to saturate, much like photosynthesis.

Despite the fact that I'm on deadline, I'll see you tonight, assurances in the technology being what they are, though I do not know which hat I'll be wearing.  Self-contradictions being what it is, I am both more vulnerable and far worse than I let on, though I cannot know how many reading these entries divines this fact.