Autonomous Straight

"You're going to have to accept the fact that sometimes we can't save everyone." Shemar Moore, toffee muscle

We never see Bobby Goren romantically involved with a woman, only the implication of prospective involvement. Forget Nicole Wallace (sheesh); forget the occasional utilization of Eames as the faux lover despite its dual implausibility-- dual because they often play act couple for the sake of solving the case, but by the end of season six certain insinuations goad Bobby into aggression-- his dying mother, his brother whom he loses to murder, the denouement with the brass busted shrink (again, sheesh), no, the more subtle interstice is with the blond foil with the attachment disorder, or his flirtation with the brunette who had a summer girl crush on the Russian mob girl killed by the cross dresser who killed his mama out of natal jealousy.

I know exactly zero about D'onofrio's ballet with metal affect, but he did not get Goren's stressor imbalances out of method acting, and the beginning of the end of Vincent's deconstruction of his best known character is quite interesting when juxtaposed against the dying Scheider. Even with a multiple myeloma, Roy is the consummate ladies man pitted up against a suffering buffoon whose analytical abilities aren't enough to keep him together anymore. The deconstruction of the super human predator/prey motif is as superlative as it has always been with the use of psychopathy as entertainment, but this is very much an insider's industry script, a homage to Schneider the super cool against Spielberg's super monster. And should Steven feel guilty for the frightening decline of our monster fish? I think about how much fear orcas and sharks inspire real terror within. There is a bucket to do, eh? Go to Seaworld, drive to the edge of the sea tiger's liquid prison. Voila, spastic is an abstract seal to stun into edible submission.

But the intangible fascination lies in the fact that Schneider has aged, his eyes muddied, his neckline in rivulets, and he is still the Schneider who could sexually satisfy, could be for me the alpha coitus of the century, while D'onofrio has to give mea culpas to tattles that his weight gain in season seven was due to medication. 

Different cultures have different values when it comes to physical vanity-- and I wonder, actually, if this is the real problem with the nature of being human. We conceive perfection, dignity, metaphysical harmony, unable to reconcile this entirely with a strictly biological, material narrative, chemically manipulating pain and suffering, altering and sometimes torturing the female shape. Demi Moore's fortune spent on plastic surgery isn't quite enough to fool the close observer that she is now preserved as opposed to attractive. But Liz Taylor was forever Cleopatra. She just had that goddess aura straight through to cessation. 

I have my own vanity, but it never laid in the attempt to compete with an ambulatory woman's considerable advantages. Perhaps a more ruthless humility would have served my old age.

Twilight Swans, Mountain's Midnight Slope

"Do you know what they do to people who can't walk?"
                                                   --Dustin Hoffman
While I still have the ability to tell you about absence, one arm naturalized into a broken wing position, held in against the chest, spine tilting my larger breast to the right when I do not consciously fight my posture, my pelvic ligaments sliced by this American Baghdad butcher, who did for invasive orthopedic surgery what Henry Ford did for automobile assembly, so that my legs which I once long ago could command to motion, control through my own methods, on my knees, grabbing arms, standing, then pivoting carefully, hoisting myself, now dangle in useless, delicate constrictions of pain, echoes of foot fusions I should have fought, made my father annihilate me, as he no doubt wished, as sinister in the height of his strength as Kevin Spacey, when Kevin still had the intangible qualities of a box office draw, a zenith created by what? Talent? A slow dance with Helen Hunt, perhaps, in the usual mawkish morality tale?

In American Beauty, Spacey might have been an impersonation of my father, a slightly better constructed version, and thus worthy of my arms around his neck, inside the bubble of our own slow dance, lost into the unity and vulnerability of the other, the silent dialogic I wanted with this man, circumstances not sparing me from the observation of the fact that he had it with Gail, and you did too, as well, at your senior prom? Or at a wedding buffet? His arms encircled around your waist, in rhythmic accord. When I tried to believe, I bargained with your despicable icon to allow me to know this fullness of womanhood, as is proper, and if he does exist, I'd kill him, for he denied me this, but once, when John snuck up behind me in his winter jacket so I could feel how cold his hands were, but all I knew was the blood pounding in my temples, the knowledge in my soul that such a love with his arms around me, his children in utero, was the fulfillment, completion, and the loss that now defines the end of my life, tears still welling in my eyes, never to be held by the right one, the man who could see and read me, wrap his arms around me, insist we have a proper lunch as husband, as wife, dancing to the marvelous climax of the falsetto in the transition of Taupin's expression of passion from "we all fall in love, sometimes" to the somber melancholy of Curtains, I cannot even construct a false memory, never knowing your binary freedom, the right lover's hand cupping my face. There is no pill for this empty space, never shall be.

Addendum Death Dance

All That Jazz is, of course, an able-bodied film with its own subtext, and Dave Kehr does offer me what a poet once named Wendy would phrase as, "the shock of recognition," in Gideon's Mephistophelean aspects, but what it offers to a disability thesis is a certain Kantian aspect, that, whatever makes you a hot property, be it Scheider's restrained sex appeal on camera, or a potential political power on the rise, or skills that lend themselves to choreography, none of us have it for very long, and need to make the most of it, even as our biological design breaks down, kills us through our own behavior, though Gideon is a type of an anachronism, the basic fun loving self-destructive addict, one that I'd wager no longer exists, even in Fosse's world.

Schneider too declined and died of blood cancer, maybe not a bad way to go.

For a technical quadriplegic, I was once fairly affluent, however I have to square my father in my psyche as he heads toward dementia, and I decline, but I assert this as a basic truth: I face the prospect of dying in squalor in the last superpower standing because I was a confused 23 year old who wanted love with a passion, took risks toward total independence, and failed, and this is unjust. I no longer know, at 50, how much work I can take on in a traditional employee context, and I can bust my ass fifty ways from Sunday on article pitches, and it might not matter. I cannot force publishers to contract me, and can still fail, as I did with my editor last year.

I cannot even leave section 202 housing like a fucking normal human being. If you want me to readjust my attitude, it is simple, give me hope, and leave your community integration rhetoric in the outhouse, where it belongs.

Myeloma Glitter Maw

"You have to be careful with something like that in national policy. It corrodes the forces; it corrodes the torturer."--Gen Stanley McChrystal



General McChrystal, sir: Obama may be relieved, or not, and most likely no one will care that I face the danger of Ezra Pound in his decline, and I am aware that I face such a danger as I recoil from the sordidness of the flesh, the sordidness of urban America, but I do not dislike Barack, and sometimes even agree with him. However, if Mitt Romney had not been nominated, I would have voted against the president. Radical equality progressives are as extreme as national socialists once were, and they are destroying the United States. I think you were treated unfairly by the current administration over the Rolling Stone expose. It is not as if you endangered national security by fucking female officers, and I have your book in my queue. Here is the deal: If you have national political aspirations, the spastic_dowager will support you, as long as you give me a tasty victual. I want the federal mandate that secures independent living centers eliminated. Kabeesh? If it was up to me I'd say let's go for a coup d'etat, but since it is not, and I am debating showing up for my local inauguration event to troll for kindle users to give me a subscription, I'd settle for seeing you at the head of, or in, a 2016 transition team. I want the people in Philadelphia who hurt me punished, and I know you've seen much worse in Iraq, but sir, the third world does exist in the US, and I deserve the compassion to stop living in it, because I am a gifted woman, and should not have to be watching my soul perish, like Roy Schneider producing his own death journey in Fosse's flawed but smart aleck musical hybrid.

I miss Roy Schneider the actor for more shallow and more sexual reasons, as compared to the moral certitude of Anne Bancroft, but miss him I do, the hyper cool tight ass, the perfect foil for the damn great white shark who probably would have been a better president than the majority of the men who held the office, and for those very reasons, All That Jazz had a powerful effect on me as a young woman. Even with multiple myeloma, Schneider kept his edge, commanding the desire of women like me to unify in the elegance of his eros (the scene where he kisses the dying woman with white hair). Fosse's devil may care moxie reaches me, despite the mild sexism inside the world of dance subculture. They just don't make movie stars like him anymore.