Bound Over Tradition

"They were considered to have right wing elements. And perhaps many of them were."-- Luigi Perelli, carving out his justifications for righteous polizi

One cannot quarrel with creator John Ridley over how well made American Crime is, craft and care is evident, especially when absorbing the alienation Pollari is able to project. He is an interesting young actor, but the message within the series, thus far, leaves one with a certain ambivalence. There is an atmosphere of forced intensity to it, freezing jello cubes with little wiggle room, leaving a European take on the grey area between justice and criminality, like The Bankrobber's Wife, seem light, comparatively. But what Ridley reflects is stark, sometimes leaving the viewer to squirm, which is why Shades of Blue earns a preference. It takes chances, but stays within parameters I can handle, and I am heartened that the writers allowed Wozniak to keep his humanity.

I also have to give praise to Liotta where it's due.

I never cared about the man and his acting before, Scorsese or not-- and there is a puzzle-- Scorsese is of my ethnicity with many of my concerns and I am somewhat hostile to his work, not able to quite put my finger on it, what repels me away from it, but Liotta's character work on Shades woke me up and bit, hard, but it's not quite erotic. I was wrong about that. Closer to the shock of recognition in tasting old wine with new flavors. Lopez is Lopez, and we can take issue with her credibility in projecting a cop outfencing everyone, but Liotta is charged, and perhaps age does this to us all, jacking us up to folly in that bracket of time left before things really head south. I mean fuck, he's giving a signature performance, and it rivets. I missed the finale, and maybe I'll run it this weekend, but it is a good show, mixing up the usual expectations in a crime drama. I'll offer more later. I've been online most of the afternoon and I'm looking at overages, barring chasing down a hotspot.

Sobering Pressures

Whatever one feels about John Ridley and his second season, I do not remember high school being as serious for teenagers as we all once were. In my era, drugs were a disruptive issue, but we never had lock downs and aggravated sexual assaults on the grapevine, and this was at the beginning of the Carter Administration, 78-79. In my district, somewhat affluent, like Leyland, bearing in mind this is Pennsylvania we're talking about, as opposed to Indianapolis, diversity was moot. Spastic was the diversity, not African Americans. I did not slam into class conflict and the cultural wars over black and white until the uproar at Widener over Huckleberry Finn and how to teach it. I pitied my academic advisor, Michael Clark, whose memory is one of the few instances of hallowed ground for me, I pitied Mark Twain, his legacy, and his towering achievement being obliterated over a pejorative which in the 19th century was part and parcel of linguistic currency, good and bad. It's a word, and when I use it I don't use it to "take away its power," as some angry black comics do, ones we no longer hear from-- I'll look it up later-- regardless of my context. When John and I had a heated debate at the tables of Cafe Walnut last summer and I said it in anger that was an accident, but I was hurting because a Market Street rent a cop denigrated me for going into my ATM, and I'm lucky I did not end up drawing the police on a holiday; perhaps it is a symptom of degeneration (I looked it up because that was one diagnosis that slipped by in the field) and the actor journalist was right. Taylor's mother had a serious illness, and we would have never seen anything like Pollari's assault on network in my youth. It was brave of ABC, maybe too brave, how easy it is to die like that. I took it, because that was what life was like for my deceased brother and his clique, but I'm amazed ABC allowed us all this brave linguistic honesty, the truth of our volatile dysfunction.

Now I need digestion time.

Funny Thing on a Timothy Hutton Tether

"Who would want to live in a world without pharmaceuticals?"-- Peter Strauss

The dowager saw just enough (1.7 hours) of American Crime in its first season to now be confused by its second, until reading enough entertainment news allowed Ridley Scott's reprisal role strategy to dawn on a wearied mind; in essence meaning I shall have to stream season one, realizing how much I missed out in my enthusiasm for Felicity Huffman, whose work on Sports Night remains sorely under-appreciated, even to the point that her Desperate Housewives director allowed her to echo her savvy sports channel executive.

While too cautious to offer Scott's bravado a raving endorsement, and perhaps too old, as well, spastic is slowly supplanting NBC's Code Black with Scott's consciously jacked torque ratios. Paid critics call the series brave, spastic calls it catching up with cable television as the models for content slowly collapse and merge, but instead of staying by Tom Reid's battle worn contrivance of a desk to watch the episode, I sat up in bed, writhing in pain most of the evening, and yes, this is the fault of my obstinacy, trying to stay abreast of the online privileges to which I've become used to, and could not get my legs back up on the Jazzy cushion for a significant length of time when I tried to lie back down. I got where I was going, but part of the problem was the metal plate seating of the Jazzy cutting the surgically fused arch of my foot; this would not happen with the Quickie P-200.

Hutton is at once ubiquitous and exceptional as the Everyman American inheritor of Protestant moral sensibility. Those of us who grew up with him cling to the raw repressive exposures of Ordinary People, because it manages to cut across the value systems between the sprouting denominational folly of the Reformation and the Catholic imposition of rational hierarchy. Some of you no doubt laugh at these vulgar descriptions I deploy, as opposed to with me. Is it okay? Perhaps sometimes, and perhaps sometimes it's okay to be undercut. Writing a furious scold to minority ethical lapses in my head juxtaposed against a furious struggle to control my posture with aging furniture and bad equipment. A personal care attendant wouldn't have been around that time of night just because I wanted to use my daybed like a lounge chair, and yet, even a nearly perfect talent like Felicity gets lost in our streaming rush to be in all places at once. In the dowager's estimation, she's a great actress, and nobody's beating the drum.

Arrest Worthiness Metrics

"Do you think I'm over-reacting?"-- Patrick Stewart as Loomis

The beginning of the end of sedate misery, not yet transmitted, barreled through to simmer, a day, two, no more:

To the ninth district:

I am writing to file a discrimination complaint against Presbyterian Homes, their present supervisory agent Ken Cantrell, current manager Trudy Richardson, and long time former vocational employee Debra Horne.

In 1993, under the duress at my former location, the Diamond Park Apartment complex on 1500 West Page Street, I was a victim of an aggravated assault by the grandson of a tenant.  Presby's owners had some liability for that home invasion. The grandson, whose name was Brandon Phillips, had free access to the building. The grandmother either could not or did not escort her relative out after his visits, and I bore the brunt of this by being staked out by a minority, without even so much as a hint of security at these dual complexes, on a day when I had taken off from work. There was no eye level peep hole for me to look out of when the Phillips boy knocked, and perhaps, had I not been worried about clearing my cabinets for the exterminator, had not rushed to open the door, Brandon might have gotten lucky and actually killed me later on, and I wouldn't be sitting here 15 minutes away from the area, virtually penniless, and still traumatized.

The detective who investigated the case closed it rapidly and the perpetrator served his time. My issue is Preby's culpability. I wanted to pursue litigation against this huge rental corporation, so much more powerful than I, and allowed their manager, Terri Way, to talk me out of it. I know there is nothing any officer can do about that. It was many years ago, and reluctantly, I followed Ms. Way to Riverside, with great resistance. The supervisory agent then, Ellen Hovey, knew she dodged a bullet, knew how traumatic becoming a crime victim was for me, and under her manager, Michael Howard, I was treated  with deference until he left.

Since he was replaced by Debra Schwab in 2005, I have been under repeated duress. I was banned from the dining service during that time, harassed by the tenants knocking on my door and pelting me was bars of soap. An attorney named Steven Gold assisted me with that, and undoubtedly as officers you might suggest it is over and done with. Of course, but then I was molested and robbed by two personal care attendants from Unlimited Staffing in 2006, at which time I ceased getting aides on the Medicaid Waiver, out of fear. At least one in three of these woman attempted to exploit me, and I've let it go and let it go, and can't anymore.

Up until last year, I used my personal monies for housekeeping help, and that is now gone. I am unemployed with the exception of sparse freelance commissions. Trudy Richardson, her boss, and Debra Horne have repeatedly threatened me and excoriated me at every opportunity, and if I had stood up to Ms. Way in 1993, I could have litigated the Diamond Park owner's negligence and returned back to Delaware County near my immediate family. I want an admission of liability from Diamond Park's owner, and given what I've been through, if Presby is a so called Christian company, let them pay for unit cleanings. I am strangled in debt, trying to go back to work, and if Ms. Horne is so concerned about my mental affect, she and I had a meeting about the fact that my former supervisor at the local disability center had created a toxic environment for me, but in 2007, with an assessment team corralling me in the doorway, they insisted that I return to the disability center for services while my supervisor was Vice President and chief officer.

Every white professional I've spoken to about what happened to me due to my interaction with Linda at the center understands I cannot return there with their coordinators, but not Debra Horne. Her role here at Presby is to attack every vulnerability, and treat wheelchair users like zoological specimens who need to be caged. I refuse to go down this way after years of fighting for viable matriculation. If this company wants to evict me, that is an option freely available to them. If your officers think I am now falling into the troublemaker category and want to remove me from the building environs for not being able to measure up to ambulatory standards, then do that. I do not do drugs. I don't drink, but I'm going to put your motto to protect and serve to the test. This company violates my rights, and I consider the fact that I've lived in a senior living facility since I was 23 tantamount to a hate crime. I want out, and I want this company's conduct toward the disabled investigated. Copies of this complaint will be going to the ACLU, state attorney's offices, and the Human Relations Commission.

I realize you have much more traumatic domestic issues to deal with, but I am not going to die like Danieal Kelly begging for water while this city's governing competency continues to generate national embarrassment. I apologize for the two or three minutes of your time this took to read. 

Derelict in Transition

"I don't want any surprises."-- a Philadelphia police officer who ignored my request to be placed under arrest as he took my arm and I pivoted.

Or, when you're fucked, you're fucked, like Timothy Hutton as the troubled father on American Crime, a show experienced rather late, without the time for much back episode viewing, but Hutton, like so much in the perpetual motion of the generation gap, is a familiar figure, probably weary of the query I asked on his twitter account about Ordinary People; it is a frightening film, because the taut layer of repression is lethal, to his character and Mary Tyler Moore's, and perhaps for those of us with dead brothers.

Much like the previously referenced novelist, referenced with a mysterious undercurrent of umbrage?, Hutton was never able to quite close the deal with the following he had, and I was one among them, the silent follower who had a hidden reservoir of affection for the cuter, personable, everyman, who, like the stalwart Gene Hackman, could inhabit anything, soldier, con artist, a lost soul threatened by overwhelming guilt. And when the man is on, those undercurrents reach out.

My entire life has fallen apart, simply in shambles, with throbbing maniacal emotional scars off nicotine and doses of salmon oil, with fantasies of physical conflict my diabolical cunning cannot in fact engage over and above my biology, and I keep eating humiliation on top of humiliation and cannot move the needle in a suicide attempt because I am so crippled and so poor failure would simply make it worse, and yet, I'm still not doing the certification HUD requires, deliberately making it very very hard, tweeting to celebrities who comfort me like it's nothing, a casual exchange, and if I was younger perhaps I could cling to a hope of resurgence but I really can't.

Yes, I have the second chair, and I am in it, but the Quantum is not friendly to my independence, and the P-200 may not be worth saving and I can no longer buy a used machine. Too many plates on a stick, and that is assuredly old school variety gawking. I asked poppa to come over. He mistook my meaning. Nicky is always between us, as is his hatred for my mother, miscarrying a first born son, god punishing a bad Korean conflict era hook up with a disaster of a palsied daughter, then a dead imbecile, and his one little boy was a psychotic. Hail to our fathers.