Dangerous Idylls

It symbolizes a crucial lesson about craft: utility is not contingent on perfection of form.--David Sherwin

Anton Corbijn offers an inspired interpretation of landscape and enclosure, from the opening shot of rushes and thicket in a Swedish winter, to his claustrophobic overlay of Italian villages and underground freeway tunnels. AO Scott is right about Corbijn's practiced composition. AO Scott is absolutely correct that it is not enough and there are things not to like about The American, a film I wanted to view again before my rental time clocked out and did not, but the preeminent critic under the employ of the Sulzbergers is also wrong, because there are pleasures, insights gained over time, under the breezes of transfixing arcs. I was never big on George Clooney. Liked him well enough; he and the original ER cast made those early seasons, and there too, he portrayed sexual indolence with a shiek and brassy extra, asking her why they did not marry? It is there in Solaris as well, a fatal envelopment, a man done in by his own pampered intimacy, which points to why he cannot quite be the equal of Cary Grant. 

Grant was an onscreen dandy and womanizer who had the ability to contain himself. Clooney cannot; he dies for the nurturing maternal climax that smothers him. Occasionally he plays off its negation, as in Michael Clayton. I think this is why his sociopath Jack/Edward is nervous, unpleasantly taunt in certain key shots; he is attempting to demythologize the autonomic predator. With a better story line it might have worked.

It took me nearly three hours to make my coffee and omelet Saturday evening, in between copper urinal shots. We die young for fried eggs. One pitch, two submissions, in addition to all this time spent on Blogger where I earn not a fucking cent! Dedication, but I can do no more, and missed the spout because her royal highness now runs the studio. 

We shall save all felines! Had to get the incitement in-- and yes, I know your interest would peek markedly if I got past Clooney's publicist, but pricking the guilt of his privilege over his arrest record for the sake of Sudanese advocacy is a high bar.

Andre Dubus

The pineal gland was vitally connected with the center of life.  Alexander Blade

Gassy, coffee made, the letter opened, untouched, part multi-tasking, the Josephs aide de camp could not find it when Babette's office was closing, and I wept about the matter to Brian Sims guy when I telephoned their office. "Stupid woman," scolding myself mentally. The Sims guy no doubt believes my judgment is impaired, and to the extent that key personnel have any memory of me aside from the chief operating officer herself, Liberty would tell you an effort was made to make it up the injury. I had no desire to run an art therapy group, however, and parted with Barbara the art therapy performance artist, no slight intended to the Bride. I never really understood the obsession of Scott Norman to get the Bride to give developmental artists a place on stage. Wasn't that big a deal. The Bride is small, stuck in a protean time warp; never saw a performance there which caused any emotional response, unlike The Wilma.

Liberty is only important to the extent that it is not a competently run organization. That incompetence nearly got me killed during my landlord's renovations, and the injury has affixed itself. A mammary tumor? Ligament issue? Arthritis? Occlusion? What is your favorite game of solitaire? Go to the doctor and have the mammogram? Well, if I could find a practice that would respect the fact that I do not have the impetus for aggressive treatment, then perhaps. I do not find the source of precious life all that precious in my case, eroded to the degree that conflict with Presby is the way of life. My career was supposed to define that. Only because I am a wheelchair user poor as grit in your teeth does the need for change become a pathology. Conceding that "sell my soul" was trite, not worth the thirty pieces of the Pharisee. Poverty is abundant with powerlessness.

Beneath all the carnage, I miss her friendship, the COO, truly liked the woman, more than many of those functionally ambulatory, and wasn't prepared for her to catch me off guard with her obliging clitoris. I will try to go to Rome, the Rome of Anton Corbijn, where beautiful women, seemingly by necessity, well endowed, have to be mutilated. An age old issue. I saw things AO Scott and others did not mention in their review of The American. The lack of perfection in Irina Björklund's buttocks in the opening shot within the chateau. Her ass looked like a porcelain bowl.

For all the looks and all the charm, Clooney has the sexual vulnerability of men who are more beautiful than masculine, as if he is lonely even when he has what he wants. I am lonely without any of that whatsoever. I think even Dubus was lonely some of the time; his wife left him after he lost his leg in the car accident, the wife who had to clean the black fecal matter off the furniture of an established inheritor of Hemingway. I will go to Rome, make love to the sampietrini, give myself back to the fictive God I bargained with, adolescent, pleading.

And Nothingness

He plies his trade with meticulous care, weighing, measuring, disassembling and tweaking his special gun with artisanal devotion. And the virtues of the film itself are those of craft rather than art. 
-- AO Scott, ever meticulous.

To give you a sense of the span of time, in 1998 I logged onto the Poets & Writers website with the stunned intimidation of an acolyte joining the priesthood. I told myself not to open my mouth, which in more literal terms means lurk, not post. I imagine some of the women of Speakeasy would have appreciated the counter factual of never knowing I existed. Admittedly, I hurt some of these women unfairly, sitting here at Tom Reid's hand painted desk, the eastward wall of my studio bordering the janitor's supply closet. 19 years here at Riverside, relocated assault victim, screaming to leave to anyone who would listen. "It is nice here," people say. 

In terms of the entitlement nation that alarms George Will, this particular public housing building may be nice. Beneath the surface it bears all the hallmarks of a re-education camp.

Poets & Writers kicked me off their site due to my mental anguish in coping with this landlord, constant housekeeping issues. It is mid 2013 now, and I was wrong to believe that submitting my notice to Trudy or her future replacement was the one choice I could still make. Not really, as I cannot pack my belongings and cannot drive voluntarily on battery power much past seventh street. From the first day my father left me here overnight in a heap of furnishings in 1994 (my mother had to rescue me), I hated living here. I have to leave, and that is tantamount to a death sentence, one that Anton Corbijn stalks through tunnels and terraced pathways I necessarily could not navigate. Despair is literally making me ill, as much as George Clooney is a rack of doomed nerves in beautiful Roma, bella Roma.

I'd sell my soul to get off this dead end corner of Race Street, to get away from the autonomic remains of ancient Africans who think in monosyllables, to get away from the skeletal remains of Erik von Schmetterling, and the Gladhandler, equally cadaverous.