The Complexity of Alain Delon's Syntax

We need to rise up and defend Paris from the barbarians so that I can finish my thesis before I stroke out. I have absolutely no inclination to connect to Alain Delon in any fashion whatsoever, but his work as the suave European mediating between colonial outgrowth and native autonomy, or as a French resistance fighter during the studio controlled footage in the postwar years, and Riva's correspondences to Gene Hackman in the aftermath of the Nixon administration is almost enough to drive me crazy, but yes, it is relevant, my brain throbbing like Leonardo's, so, in carpe diem fashion I'll forgive the dead pan line readings of the cast, with the exception of Perrin, who understands Xavier's psychology, for the sake of the trope. On one level the series simply toys with Faulkner's oft  quoted adage, "The past is never the past." But there is more to it, consciously or otherwise. Regardless of national identity and regardless of ethnicity and impairment, time does chase us all. We can cheat it, like Armin Mueller-Stahl, who can be an alluring character actor, appealing to a woman's fulfillment quotient in his well preserved age, but the very rigor he displays as an old man is a reminder of rigor mortis. Delon's Riva is conscious of this as well. The characters that people this world are shades in a new mechanized paramilitary age, which is just as complicit as the Mafia (the Loggia's) might have been with Fascist Europe of yore. Maxime, as the heir to criminal spoils, is correct when he dresses down Riva about the new conglomerate world order. The rackets have shifted gears, with legalese, high interest rates, term insurance, floating mortgages bundled for Korean investors, but the guy in Florida getting foreclosed on can still utilize weapons technology. Unfortunately, the video of Slager doesn't outrage me, but I've stipulated why often enough, and will choose to minimize any abuse host reportings for the interval, and in fact may never bring it up again, but even if the left defangs ineffective policing, it will never entirely unravel the contradictions between individual self-worth and the analytics that go into aggregate life expectancy and the legal worth of any one human body, which varies according to tort, nationality, region, country, profession, caste; I'll concede cowardice, but bad actors abound, including this one.

I received, and accepted, an invitation to The Cafe, and if I make it, in modestly presentable fashion, I will be, literally, an outsider. Perhaps a compassionate male will offer to lift whichever power chair I take over the stoop, assuming I can navigate the interior. I doubt it, but just as with the Rosenbach in 2013, I am engaging in misplaced faith of association as a possible solution in winter's discontent. We'll see what happens.

What Does Larry Summers want?

Ah, Business Insider clarified the ever fawning economic advisor. Summers gets plenty of op ed space from Wapo, as all formerly prominent policy makers do, and I am rather skeptical still, not of China's rise on the global stage, but as to whether it matters. Sure, the People's Republic obfuscates in a manner that the Western Hemisphere doesn't, but what of it? To a degree we're all in a microcosmic police state, and if the heirs to Maoist apparatchick take over, the denial of propaganda isn't going to save us any more than freedom of expression, as liberty is eclipsed by statutory guidelines. Social Security is not administered according to civil liberties of the people, neither is our byzantine tax code, certainly not housing authorities, and this cuts across the board, from Home Owner's Associations to public housing police states, let alone medical model stricture.

I tried to lie down for my appt this afternoon, and had to force myself up, as my Achilles's heel always rides the forefront: dorm rooms, rehabs, hospital beds, apartment dwellings exactly the same, barring size: Dixon Hall, Diamond Park, this studio, off white and cheap as Chinese drywall. I never had, never will, a stake in ownership, as my father and family did once. I have to forgive my father, because of our home in Folsom. It was a home, a rancher with an individualized presence, like our house in Ridley.

All I have now are laminated floors, imposing cinder block  hospital halls, or transfers to sterile environments much the same as this. Did Alain Delon whine as Frank Riva when Xavier dusted him off and gave him a little flat with adorable cat sequences as only the French can do? I'm going back to bed. Fuck Trudy Richardson and Ken Cantrell. I will find a way to sue Presby for negligence, compliance be damned, however quizzical it seems that Blogger referring urls link back to the Henry James list serv.

As a virtual academic community, it deserves praise as a continuing tributary, but as my matriculation continues to take a pounding, the space to organize the shavings of biographical detail is no longer a kind of monastic security, and the inadequacy of intellectual discipline keeps me away. I doubt I'll ever return-- which is not to convey if my life stabilizes I will not resume researching a proposal.

Viewers Exhaust

I did say Alain Delon was clever, if not a transcendent minimalist, did I not? Let me walk back an earlier assertion I wrote about not wanting disabled friends. This was not meant to convey I am enjoying social isolation mummified in plastic wrap, and buffs could offer me data I evidently lack from time to time. I need to view Le Samourai now, as I am formulating an article about the American adaption.

Perhaps some of my readers hesitate to offer suggestions, but I am not out to troll everyone and strip them naked on a constant basis people, sheesh not that my vitriol falls into this category. I barely understand why the trolling occurred.

If the Britons, however, have one form of dialectic with the country they founded, the French have another dialectic, somewhat based on intrigue, more elusive, quite flavored syntax, increasingly commercialized with its contemporary knock off models, like Spiral, and The Detectives.

Shields of Sang Froid

"you know you could have been some honey." popular lyric of an era bursting at the seams

The question which Delon leaves open in his early decade Frank Riva saga is what type of dialectical conversation he is having with with Gene Hackman as the hero against Nixon era interconnected systems apparatus in the name of security. Delon is suggesting a slightly more sophisticated argument than the mere assertion that, "the past is never really the past," to channel Faulkner before Faulkner drank himself to the temporary numbness of inebriation. Security naturally engenders paranoia, as the Gonzalez incident conveys. The White House, at least before Booth assassinated Lincoln-- the greatest American racist who ever served his country, was open to the American public, more or less a sad commentary on the fact that weapons manufacturers, no more than any other business interest, cannot stop themselves-- yet there is a reverberating aftermath that is essentially the life blood of Nixon's active political years. 

Delon suggests that no nation state ever truly decouples itself from it, implying, at least through France 2 television, that American innocence bleeds its own tyranny, not because it is analogous to a toddler having a tantrum (not entirely null and void, mind) but that European maturity avoids the worst of these psychic scars. Do we have international discussions about Napoleon's battlefield atrocities?

The mere mention of Watergate, however, sends progressives flocking to their favorite adaptation of Macbeth, and this is Alain's curious ingenuity with Riva, in an otherwise droll take on American thrillers. Delon says however The French Connection singed old world fingertips, the American psyche never gets over itself, is either unwilling, or unable, to be the adult in the room, and this has created the ever widening geopolitcal vacuum that some model will eventually have to fill, if you want to consider this as a continuing salvo in my overstated rebuttal to Greg Zacharias on the nature of conspiracy, this is inclusive of how self interest plays into it. Not just me, or you, or Greg, for that matter.

He and I had a few exchanges after I beat my breast about the "silly thing to say" comments which upset me back when. I told him I was toxic, if the academics wanted me to leave. He claimed someone else reprimanded me on the thread and that it was not he. That was that. Honors professor goes back to his citadel, and I back to my disenfranchisement, and pet causes roll on, none of us really willing to pay attention, or even get burned, as I have multiple times by now.

For those of you able to understand the correspondence I making with the description I tagged to Lincoln-- the comparison I am making is to challenge progressive labeling, not my political genius to that of Abraham. If I had Lincoln's political skills, Donald would have offered me a suite at Trump plaza

Flames of Osteoporosis

"There are enough detonators here to blow up half of Algiers!"-- an ethnic bit player.

Frank Riva is at best an insipid police drama, such that some captions and sequences were left to my tinnitus encroached deafness to do what it could with five years of French lab, but Delon is a clever bastard, gnawing away at Watergate era paranoia despite a fairly tepid story of shared generational guilt that lives on past the Nixon years.

Alain may not have worked with Gene, but as I suspected, he came up the same time as Hackman did, and in Lost Command, he inhabits the same aloof persona as in Riva, the man in the middle, neither a proponent for European hegemony, nor the freedom fighter, becomes imperiled but escapes, much like Edmund Dantes. Hence, Riva needs to be examined against two of Hackman's signature performances, Popeye Doyle in The French Connection and Harry Caul in The Conversation.

Riva is a kind of double take against the worst perceived threat to liberalism in American history. Every twist in Riva is about the underside of justice-- that justice itself draws the blood of the righteous, that no process isn't rife with corruption, and is doomed to repeat itself. The Loggias are fossils, much like GF 1 and 2 are museum films, but those fossils leave their imprint, not only on Maxime, but on Riva's unrealized daughter and the child she carries, a baby passed around like so many croissants to dip in the coffee bowl-- we'll pick this up after I do some sweating. I need to drop off the rent and go food shopping, and manage my fear. I told Trudy Richardson I was done with Presby, with compliance that deliberately attacks my dignity, and I meant it, but I am scared I am going to get myself killed. Forcing my own eviction leaves me prey to human predators who aren't going to care if they rape me or what.