Elusive Hotspot Mastery

There isn't going to be a next time!-- Ryan O'Neal, against his romantic inclinations in an unhappy monastic focus.

There is something off kilter about Los Angles which, succinctly, is integral to its geography, integral to California’s veneer about its own progressive sensibilities. The dowager may no longer offer regressive members of ADAPT the tolerance she once doled on the teaspoon, but Jimmi Shrode was not in error when he warned me about the state’s cosmetic fraudulence, after a fashion. James Ellroy seems to pick it apart in his novels, gets at its essence through rather brutal citrus peels, terrible phantasms, grotesque, obsessive drives, like Harry Bosch going flintly in the face of a threat. Welliver’s character is an unabashed liberal, playing off a hip sidekick of a partner and a lesbian lieutenant who has parity with the title character when it comes to testosterone and an honorable pair of testicles, but he is also a frightening vigilante, and this behavior stems not from liberalism, but from cowboy culture, easily superimposed on Walter Hill’s exposition of the sprawling metropolis as a location. Just as Ellroy’s literary LA has a very dark undercurrent, one that is not comparable to Austin but might run parallel to tortured white male psyches. Walter Hill’s LA is a function of the underground. Though The Driver has scenes shot in sunlight and even pastel-light backgrounds, it is a movie about what happens after dark, beneath the surface, by those who have no desire for Bruce Dern’s zealous attention. Ostensible reality cop shows too though, illustrate LA’s bizarre bicameral indigestion with cultural appropriation. Only in LA does a patrol officer allow bygones to be bygones, counseling a crippled white gimp about a twenty dollar fuck with a toothless black ho whose gaunt frame was claimed by narcotics long ago, sad, but just as much Hollywood kitsch as real, and rather fragile, glamor. Entertainment’s intersection with the street is only a part of the whole, a synecdoche distinct from other cities with stark impersonal landscapes, like Tokyo, part sprawl, part superhighway, part architecture which looks like pastry boxes. Somehow, we don’t all get along, in this desert of 4 million, iuterlaced with a nearly predominant Mexican culture and so much sometimes tragic, sometimes braced, tension, by disaster or design.

He died of a heart attack in a swimming pool; so much for igniting headlines like an earthquake, coast to coast.

What a tale my thoughts could tell

"It was one of those grimy brick houses which existed in large quantities before the era of reconstruction. [sic]" Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, location 4-11

Even in incidental moments, slicing the dwindling supply of potatoes to get you through a traumatic riddled weekend, not really paying attention to The Blacklist, the Gordon Lightfoot soundtrack craters you in, as Spader methodically wastes another traitor ally with humane ruthlessness right on the edge, his acting, between the emotional wounds and internalized flippancy, though the opening first season episodes offered a wry subversive bemusement, interest waned with all these mysterious processes swirling around the rouge agent character of Elizabeth, her brutalized psycho husband who apparently survives major cavity wounds. No one is that important, and the brutality offered by the directors doing the captures and the cuts is somewhat complicit, served up as fantastic, with Reddington something of a vengeful deity, except that some clever staff member remembered Lightfoot. This was all it took, for those of us who grew up on the emotive breadsticks of Croce's legacy, one which never envisioned Nigerian swaggering with thickened buttocks on the streets of Rome.

Dowager learned of this social ill through Don Matteo, and has no empathy. Let the Italian government ship their charming red light migrants to Jamaica. If these women want to leave Lagos, then they should stop complaining as to the consequences of marginalized, alien status. I tutored Nigerian students, and liked it better when they were restrained Franophiles absorbing western education for improvement. The difference between Matteo and the progressive video journalists soliciting the pity of privilege, is the mystery drama blames Roman lewdness, its sexual excitement over difference. Reporters on the ground liken them to untouchables, confined to their own foreign ethnicity, who cannot pay them well-- which will take us down memory lane to the fickle years of Usenet.

If I've mentioned JoettaB before, it was perhaps with scant detail. In 2016, coming to its close, I cannot flush out my interaction with her to a very great degree. She tried to help me over the CIL rupture, seemed to have a special interest in unstable males prone to violence, and posted one of my essays about smoking on her website, which I wasn't ready to abandon, then she vanished, and I assume this was due to harassment, or being threatened. "It was not I," the dowager proclaims, hands raised in an exposure of innocence. I bring this up because the general rule of thumb is, if it is posted, then it's published, and first printing rights have vanished, even if it doesn't quite feel that way. Nonetheless, I am including a variation of the piece in my collection, because it is a piece of my early post Matrix history, and the woman's disappearance troubles me, and since I take a hideously long time to gestate, "The Zippo Lighter" may lead me to a commission on addiction. Joetta met Kiefer Sutherland online, and she prided herself on that connection. It seemed a credible boast: He sent her tickets. Whatever her troubles were, I regret the space she left. Given what I face in real life, online nastiness hasn't really penetrated in that way; though it is a stretch, I think she was impaired through MS.