Humbling Appropriation of Jewish Satire

"He had elements in him that allowed him to do what he did. -- Al Pacino

I would have endured vaginal castration to have had the thunderbolt with the Al Pacino who brought Puzo's Michael Corleone to life. What woman doesn't want that dark and daring menace willing to use massacre as a conversation? Dropped everything to listen to Rose draw him out in his March 2015 interview, which cost me time-- noting that Pacino can be distempered and say fuck you to an assistant, get away with it and get away with telling it, in context, but Christ forbid a disabled writer display the same passion, deflecting intense racial enmity into an admission of hate, substituting asshole for a more denigrating scorn. But there were certain absences. Most obviously no mention of G3, the stereotyping in Scarface, or a relevant discussion of what right Pacino had to inhabit Simon Axler in Roth's controversial and cold novel.

Pacino isn't right for the part. Pacino is just shy of decimated aging that tears my heart. Pacino is my movie idol exception and drives me fucking crazy in the this is why actors have body guards way. His fingernails aren't in the best shape, and why do I want to run and email celebrities of a certain period? What whim am I catering to? What could I possibly say to a legend who became diffuse? Why didn't Charlie press him on playing Wortzik? Dog Day was and remains weird, whether you are a pro-sodomy advocate or fake it so as to not be a target of gay rage (believing in hate crime). One can truly see the faggot in Al here, which is why between the lines, he was difficult on the set, booze or no booze, this little boy having the drama queen moment. The movie chilled me in the sense none of us beat the system, more than that, the seventies brought the docu-drama into its own, and Dog Day Afternoon has that effect of urban realism, grit, texture. Anyone who truly threatens power is taken out, despite Coppola's wet dream.

When I stop and remember my failed potential I feel badly about doing my own variation of Alexander Pope's satirical attacks on my past, almost too self-conscious, but then again, my online audience is small, my ferocity appalling. If the Old Cricket made a hypothetical entrance to scold me, I'd hide under the fucking bed and roll out to have a raging argument with him at the same time. Not about learning how hard it is to write for a living-- but about my matriculation as a normal once top tiered student-- before it was too late it would have been nice had someone put it in context that I couldn't have a normal career, but the man is human, so am I, and I put our memories into a Euripides' over the top mass death by Mount Olympus. The above linked piece is more reminiscent of what he taught me, though it doesn't matter. 

I needed to be good enough, tough enough as a writer, to rescue myself, and thus far, I'm not, despite an old man's limpid eyes, still able to mesmerize. Pacino was my fucking cunt slinky, and he's crafty too, given half a chance. Squandered a great deal, he's ridiculous in his present posture, verging on decrepit odiousness. He taught me a great deal about his craft in 50 minutes. Nostalgia's ability to wound is sharper than an arrow's pierce.

Why have the African Americans who run Presby made me racist? Because they do not strive to make themselves better, because you cannot see that Trudy Richardson does her damnest making me feel alienated and even more marginalized. I have no problem with my hostility toward a nigger bitch like that persecuting me relentlessly. My family is not on intimate terms with minorities in the manner forced upon me because I have no choice. It's killing me. And I'll never be a normal suburban girl again.

Local Break, Maduro on the Schuykill

Kenneth Moton's article does not reference it, but last evening's newscast paraphrased local authorities, suggesting this woman would not be charged for her drowning attempt due to an obviously severe depression. She might have injured the boating athletes on the river, and even drowned someone else, and if Al Pacino's psychiatrist in his five minute movie lecture was correct, insanity is a legal concept, and thus a difficult hurtle to overcome; since Edward Snowden is now purportedly beholden to the world's foremost megalomaniac bus driver, the computer thief should be able to relate to ephemeral degrees of mercy.

This incident is also the second local tragedy to wade in under my nose since I started blogging. The first was the death of Brian, a former tenant of Presby. He was flattened to a pancake when his wheelchair got stuck on the tracks which form the view from my window. These traumatic brains are starting to make me feel sheepish.

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. 

Hannibal's Antlers, Sauvignon Blanc

This last fact was the real issue, for the way grew straight from the moment one recognized that the poet essentially can't be concerned with the act of dying. Let him deal with the sickest of the sick, it is still by the act of living that they appeal to him -- Henry James

There is a preoccupation with 88 Minutes that is analogous to fascination with a ruined edifice, not that this is anything new in the subversions of how we entertain ourselves. Whatever Jon Avnet and Pacino intended, the end result of their two film partnerships, both of which I viewed as if invited to consume rancid mayonnaise, spells out a curious exhaustion, an interesting dialectic with superstardom, thriller formulas, going through the motions, slasher fears, and using Vancouver as a location, this last clause maintaining my consistency towards a dig at Canadian models. Look at William Forsythe's face as the film limps toward it's drooling close. The misdirected agent wants to be an obstacle to the (gangster) psychiatrist trying to get to the bottom of the puzzle. Forsythe is supposed to provide resistance. Pacino throws one of his hyper fits and the camera cuts to Forsythe's face as he simply says "okay". There is an unintended dichotomy here, as if Avnet falls out of the visual framework he never believed in the first place, and what we see is a worn out entity, the face of a tired character actor who might as well have been evocative of the Egyptian empire in disintegration after the death of Ramesses2.0.

Do we really believe in Pacino's vendetta riddled shrink? Julie Andrews gives a more plausible rendering as the analyst who gives in to being Burt Reynold's lover. She is able to exaggerate the clinician with more credibility than Pacino could command in this project. Whether he was on pain killers or not during filming, that he literally looks doped up sparks a conversation, perhaps not with the vibrant addict of Needle Park, but certainly with his dual interaction with Robert De Niro in Righteous Kill, which belies their struggle in Heat. Akin to what the end of Bronson's career signified via the Death Wish saga. Aesthetic malaise as a terminal disease.

My reference to Bryan Fuller's cinematic creativity with the countenance of Mads Mikkelsen has layered meanings I have left somewhat opaque, somewhat unexplained, but they apply here to both the Harris character and Pacino's aging flophouse strategy, its unintended disastrous result.

Fish, Chips, Tuberculous Hip

"Al Pacino was successful playing Richard the Third because he understood the nature of power." --Jerry McGuire, approximately

In the annals of local color, politics can still provide fonts of amusement, the representatives and constituents colliding like asteroids in the void. I am watching the auteur of the effeminate reconstructions implode Truman Capote, so I am typing slowly, still a student when I viewed his last television appearance--the actual person-- in 1984, obviously in the grip of alcoholic dementia, as is not quite the case with  Dick Cavett. We applaud Hoffman for his talent, and that seared underbelly he captures in relation to the wicked under bite of the homosexual male, one which provides theorists with their relentless apologias, yet if I assert how punishing LGBT interactions have been for me as a disabled woman trying to do the right thing on progressive rails, getting damaged, that is all of freak flag reactionism. In the end, it's all about the scaffold, how we build our towers. Weeping old woman, political aides. If I really do launch myself as a crusader in this twilight of my life, what will it amount to? Cripples will still sit discarded in lobbies, victims created on finer and finer threads of discrimination. Monogamy will still find its way into curiosity shops

Comfort food. Herring, hash browns, diced onion, oysters, olive oil. It took me two days to convince myself to prepare my favorite entree, to swallow my 1200 milligrams of salmon over it, and now I need my shower, to go buy tins of ground offal for my substitute feline children. The condition of my edition of To The Lighthouse is worse than the sweat of indifferent hygiene, however, a problem which seems to plague Jon Avnet's direction of 88 Minutes. The narrative is a world weary affect of an old man who pissed off his brand due to economic necessity. My heart still throbs when I look at Al Pacino on camera, but if you'd like me to strum it simply, I could kick him for being a mule. The opening rape scene is an exercise in graphic lack of tact, Pacino seems to wander around on location waiting for Hades to make up his mind about where the famous Italiano will spend eternity, and yet there is a sleazy subtext that someone like me recognizes, all the triggers that go off in superlative fucking of the mentor, or maintaining chastity in the sexual tension. I grew up with Mario Puzo. But his dramatic conceits which ossified the Sicilian stereotype was a love letter. Al seems determined to make us regret those dried petals in the scrap book, with that ridiculous bouffant. McDonough's first instincts to give up on acting were the correct ones.

I am beginning to learn that no one really knows what they're doing, and thus the exposure of the reporter will always be valid. I intend to keep going; if Google wants to shut me down when I hit hard, that is up to them. It is their service. I may obfuscate my agenda from time to time, but I do believe in my conviction that if I fight back, the next spastic may be spared the wicked corruption and trauma to which I have been subjected. Raising my voice has risks.

I am taking them.