But can Verdi do Chicago Slam?

Let a free woman fall in love, Camille declares, and she will gladly submit to her chains. More than one hundred fifty years later, the question is whether this has entirely ceased to be true. -- Toril Moi, Introduction, location 209

I cannot provide the exact date I flipped myself in my old manual wheelchair after frothing at the mouth with Jennifer Barnhart. June, I think, and I had an agreement with the ex to come after me, and had a technician visit due. Flipped between bedpost and katty corner in such a manner I could not undo the seat belt, and therein lie the danger, as opposed to the fall itself, Jennifer's voice in my head intonating defensive disengagement, I hated the disability center all the more, her voice in my head, breast painfully wedged on the cat carrier. Knew I did not want to die and that independent living centers were nothing more than exterminating enterprises, simultaneously. Jennifer and I didn't know each other. She came in to Liberty under Tom Earle, but my rage intimidated her, as it intimidates most of Liberty. Even Linda emailed me back, "Why are you so angry?"

I suppose this isn't a good way to head toward entropy and putrefaction, this constant inferno of distemper which isn't sure, with the certitude of Islamic State adherents, that she would not enjoy the delivery of a few significant contusions. Why I hate certain figures, like Debra Horne, with bituminous discharge of scorn can be summarized with the knowledge that Presbyterian Homes hired her to intimidate people. She is not a compassionate person, with that new orange dye hair and thick lard ass, sense of inadequacy around black men who possibly find her sensuality to hover around zero, I stood up to her, hard, very hard, and yet I am hardly victorious in making a nigger matron who wields her invisible truncheon eat rust. Do I hate her enough to see her hurt? Only insofar as I remain trapped here. Oh, the activists whom cannot be trusted, they have her number: Ugly women without prospects have only so many options.

Madeleine Stowe mediates being an fairly attractive brunette with traces of elegance in an interesting way with the 1994 Blink. The plot is somewhat contrived, and the contacts the actress wears in the opening, as always, have a Friday the 13th effect. (Putting real disabled individuals in film, blind or otherwise, brings us into the problematic terrain of exploitation.) But the subtext between Madeleine and Quinn is intriguing. Stowe isn't competing with Patty Duke's spectacular and dramatic habitation of the Keller child, who quite ably controls her family until Bancroft, with compassionate cruelty, wants to give the girl a chance. No, Stowe is negotiating the wounded chick meme. 

Haven't we all been fucked over in one way or another? The surgery her Emma undergoes gives her back her sight which all but the blind take for granted. It takes her out of the security of damage and darkness she knew from having an abusive mother, and makes her newly vulnerable with restored senses she cannot trust, with Aidan alternating between an insecure jackass who wants his cake but not the threat of commitment, and the tough love cop, no genius, no glory, but this is Chicago with its smokey interiors and oily alleyways, conscience smote by anger of Madeleine's fist and the anger of the child of one of the killer's victims, Stowe discovers, once faced with the truth of a deranged fixation, that she is resilient. Given her later habitation of Dumas' Mercedes in the ABC series Revenge, the contextuality of Stowe's femininity mediates between deceptive vulnerability, and a woman's pain over lost causes.

Cuckoo's Forfeiture

My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness---and the healthiest way of being ill---is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. -- Susan Sontag

Meryl Streep presents herself as a translucent mirage in Dark Matter (2007), a progressive caught between multicultural faith and the reality of academic politics. Forget extrapolations. Chen’s direction and Shebar’s script are irresponsible in their rendition of events that transformed Gang Lu into a spree killer, with his goal perhaps being the elimination of an entire department. Liu Xing is too sympathetic as an alter, and the triggers that lead him to kill Aidan Quinn’s Reiser foreshadowed on the cheap, with tai ching intersplices dispersed between scenes; its binary closures of the women racing, both the attache and the mother, in a fatuous attempt to contain the damage. The Virginia Tech massacre was a real and traumatic event, one that perhaps forever pierced the notion of intellectual ambition as a form of insulation against the vulgarity of urban violence.

In many respects, I am a radical advocate of free speech, doomed and dwarfed thereby due to the worrisome rise of the digital global conglomerate, and rarely engage in the moral chastisement of cheap theatrical manipulations, but Bridget Fonda’s Single White Female falls into the same category as Chen‘s lame interpolation. The unedited scene of deceptively forced fellatio between Jennifer Jason Leigh and Steven Weber was a masturbation stimulant that I did not need to incorporate in the psyche of my delayed sexual maturity, but the scene made an indelible impact, this out of nothing but a B grade slasher formula dressed up by psychological excuses for purposes of justification, just another patriarchal brick thrown at the shrieking and hysterical female, not a few leagues past the range of veracity.

I’ve needed a bit of rest, trying to finish some much needed chores, remind myself that I actually was a writer before portals and search engines. At my age it's increasingly difficult, and in the rare instance that I view television to escape, I did not need that unexpected tantrum of blood and guts with a shiny Colt revolver and a bling starburst.