Winter Moonlight's Vapor Shroud

The Code Black episode which ran last evening seemed to intentionally reference the Spanish Catholic motif that the unpleasantness of life is a dream from which we invariably wake, with varying degrees of courage or fortitude to follow suit, whether it's Dona Luz coping with a deceitful lover and becoming content to be a virtuous single mother thereafter, or the futuristic sensibility of Vanilla Sky rather unevenly adapted for Americana. It was an irritating cheap trick, whether or not there is a certain degree of commiseration for William Young as the compassionate patriarch who knows when to give in to the disruptions of the urban disenfranchised. Spastic has no particular affinity for current medical serials, however more sophisticated scripts, but Raza was at least a curiosity, whereas Rob Lowe is the manufactured, if seasoned veteran, who delivers line readings with new found square jawed machismo. To go from that to the silicon metrosexual tweaks of Pure Genius is insufferable. The public airways may be frambrosia next to what retarded and fed baby boomer narcissism, but it makes taking a backward glance at Cary Grant beat one's chest for glamour, and bourgeoisie style held in place by gleaming hair gel and aerosol. 
Grant was already a mausoleum plague in the Columbo era, but what appealed to our mothers, that vaudeville charm, holds the same magnetism now as then, whether tightly wound in Hitchcock, or more subversively timed in his comedies, which can be decoded along the same lines as Rock Hudson, if with more heartbreaking effect. To scroll a tawdry digital gallery and read that Grant was gay simply because he lived with another male friend was indeed shocking. We may not be able to read orientation on a whim, but Grant? It drew tears, when a more cautious intellect might have challenged the veracity of such claims. As a journalist, rebelling in despair at an encroaching twilight, blows having already broken her back, delving into this particular undercurrent would be akin to chasing Loch Ness: His grandchildren would disavow it, and there is no proof which can be confirmed. The reasons these rumors dog the star stem from the very things that made him one of the greatest celebrities. He toys with sexual secrets to keep his female admirers on the bait, even if we don't give much of a thought to poor Ingrid Bergman, the *gay bachelor's* patsy, as she was against Anthony Perkins in :Goodbye Again (though I would have fucked Perkins in that movie, and again in On The Beach). Bergman is not particularly sexual. She is a gracious elegance of poised need. And the idiot who cast her against Matheau in later years should have lost his job. It did not work. If you see her as the wife of Sartre, sacrificing all for such a great ego, that works. That is how women of her era derived standing, but there is culpability in that social form that shields the deviations of dandies which Proust exposes like a montage in the tide. Spastic cannot read it in Grant, however, the inclination toward sodomy. He might have been an empty vessel mimicking the upper echelon whose ranks he joined by virtue of his talent, but risking that for more roughshod homoerotic experimentation seems beyond where his attention to personal detail would take him. 

Unleashed (If you give me money I'll buy a Vuse)

"She is an active and friendly girl to whom destiny has not been bright."--Timo, whose commiseration is adept

We have discussed in some detail the angel and demon dichotomy of the invalid's general nature, and we have discussed, in less detail, the nature of shields. If my readers are mildly perplexed as to why I would utilize Andrea Camilleri's fictionalized Sicilian fringe types to preoccupy myself with Falk, with Nimoy, and their archetypes, those who care may thread the needle as we go along, trying in my own way, akin to Wittgenstein, to resist grand unified theories, and yet drawn to the need for something dazzling, at the same time.

The idea of shields is not germane to my own line of thinking. It comes from the superior Jewish intellect which predominates in queer theory, and since queer theory and disability very nearly coalesce, we can examine shields, across literature and teleplays, as we find them. Despite my red flags and red herrings over Psycho, my flags and herring is more about the deployment of aesthetics toward corrupting ends. Do I believe that Psycho represents Hitchcock at his best? No, but as I wrote in my earlier post, relying too, on my memory of Polman's piece in Obituary, the film represented a paradigm shift, one for which the price of civilization has no answer, and, although I envision the problems my old mentor raised when discussing ethics in fiction, as raised by John Gardner, for those asking "How did we get here?"  The answer is in the pathways of moral relativism; I can see them even if I am not yet publishing a traditional dissertation on the issue, and I can see them in the simple stock formula twist of Blood Bargin-- never denying Hitchcock's brand of genius, tracing it through Gena Rowland's virtually vibrant naivety  in "Playback," up through something as complex as Camilleri's "Equal Time". Do we know if the actor playing Biagio is a real spastic gimp? Perhaps not, but his evil lies in his helplessness and inability to change the course of events without a determined truth hunter like Salvo being blessed with the gift of fools.

And now, to sound like everyone else (ad nauseam) on social media, I am taking some time off from this account. I did not break any bones or tear a ligament, but I am having transfer trouble, and it is a bad time to be a poor wasted piece of shit in pain with no nicotine, whether or not this is partly psychosomatic. I am too young not to be able to dump a stool when I need to, and this is going to be a major headache-- yes, I know what ADAPT members would say, I know.