"Pakistan is no ordinary country."-- Benazir Bhutto's last preface.
One thing neither John Irvin nor his screen writer Ken Solarz answer for is the underlying cowardice of Stephen Dorff's character Skip Kovich in their latter day City of Industry. Dorff’s motivation for icing the heist crew put together by Timothy Hutton, who is seemingly in the preliminary stage of getting his lead role on Leverage, this woebegone every American kid of Taps and the brittle, frightening scenes in Ordinary People, invisibly axed in a jump shot by a snow cone Dorff, this flinty indifferent spree killer with scant principle to speak of, we’re to presume he fears Elliot Gould’s muscle, given the carnage that burns through the reel beyond the brief back story putting the figurines in place? He certainly fears being outnumbered.
Irvin’s transition from ensemble to allowing for the aging Keitel to absorb the weight of the lead and the pursuit remains intriguing, as is the relationship he develops between Keitel and Janssen in her role as the vulnerable brass tacks widow. The film itself is also transitional, between then and now. Not wholly a procedural of the past, with a signature detective rectifying matters, nor quite a gut wound graphic, such as we might see with The Following, or in Bryan Fuller and David Slade’s dark aesthetic. Little is left to the imagination, but the gore isn’t quite so pronounced as it would be for Tarantino.
The punishment that the elder Egan absorbs is a puzzling ambiguity, even somewhat fantastical, with Roy hovering between life and death as he fractures Skip’s skull. The agony Keitel projects is the only Dionysian passion he allows Roy Egan to have, as one wonders if he does die and is in fact reborn, miraculously defying his chest wound in these muted enclosures, Hutton’s fatal optimism dappled in Florida sunlight, with Roy’s pursuit of Skip moving in gradations from shadows to the expansive danger of a post midnight world. Does Irvin’s denouement suggest an escapism similar to Morrison’s hymn for her ravenous ghost?
Fantastical flights of fantasy can reinforce narrative meaning, as they do in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or they can make the moral gratuitous, as happens in Beloved. City of Industry wobbles on a balance beam between unifying impact and lack of responsibility for its glamorization, but it‘s worth examination.
Pakistan exists as a weak and marginally governable state because the British administers in Asia did not heed their literary masochist, EM Forster. Thanks to his novels the western hemisphere is a homosexual police state. If you know how Pakistani and Indian differ ethnically feel free to cue me in.
Showing posts with label beloved. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beloved. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Saturday, May 17, 2014
Hollow Log
Billowing tirade, I splintered on my ex today, unfairly, hissing at the glamorization of Michael Sam's sex life, then roaring I would nuke the entire eastern seaboard if I could, then disconnected the 5c in tears. Nuking the entire eastern seaboard implies that anguish has that degree of magnitude: I cannot break what binds my future asceticism, and my pissant student loan debt which is going to crush me, with or without putting myself back on Medicaid.
If I find Frank and his bulk on his hospital bed and his Hoya lift repugnant, with a running price tag he has cost Pennsylvania well over 100, 000 dollars, I should have the decency to leave him alone, regardless of my nerves. My rage was about the sand pit sucking me under. My landlord repeatedly broke the law, letting seniors harass me freely for years, and yet because I then roar at Trudy, who is just trying to be a good matriarchal black nanny, I have to let all that go. Vulnerable cripple with target right smack on her back. My disability center breaks state and federal law so often that they are a running joke, and I have to let all that go, poets and writers in a unified front regrettably parked my digital ass out the door because I had an insurrectionist rage in relation to all this, and they are about selling craft to refine talent. If I want to be Henry Miller with jugs, then hey. P&W has to vacuum in writing students. Go staple your brain, spastic.
George has MS. He doesn't rave. He writes well crafted short stories with a mildly sinister aspect. I met him and his wife at an Abington bookstore in my little manual chair, bored out of my mind. "I talk just like I post on Speakeasy don't I?"
"Yes," he nodded.
"I think it is enough," this is what he posted on the boards as Dana, the moderator, and Gretchen, the melodramatic southern novelist, closed ranks and banned my account. Whatever the inflammatory nature of my rhetoric, I had residents of Riverside throwing bars of soap at me, while this man, writing with the hope of saving troubled teens, ostracized me after having met me and I purchased First Tiger, his early YA novel. I wonder if my neighbor and follower Ed knows that about my history with this building, that I was physically pelted. Doubtlessly not. He suffers too and doesn't let it throb where dialysis evidently disfigured him. The horror of such group stigmatization doesn't go away with a snap of the fingers.
Weigh this. Weigh this against a history of medical disfigurement, life long sexual victimization, then come back at me with Atwood's salutary apologia for Toni Morrison's embodiment of dignity in endurance. Language signifies the reality of the flesh, but it isn't tangible. There is no reason to run into similar troubles at Linked In. It is simply a career resource site, and I do not have the time, but this is why I fear mass aggregation.
I forgot to add, with economic contests such as this, the voices of the dead recounting Sunset Blvd seems charmed, indeed.
If I find Frank and his bulk on his hospital bed and his Hoya lift repugnant, with a running price tag he has cost Pennsylvania well over 100, 000 dollars, I should have the decency to leave him alone, regardless of my nerves. My rage was about the sand pit sucking me under. My landlord repeatedly broke the law, letting seniors harass me freely for years, and yet because I then roar at Trudy, who is just trying to be a good matriarchal black nanny, I have to let all that go. Vulnerable cripple with target right smack on her back. My disability center breaks state and federal law so often that they are a running joke, and I have to let all that go, poets and writers in a unified front regrettably parked my digital ass out the door because I had an insurrectionist rage in relation to all this, and they are about selling craft to refine talent. If I want to be Henry Miller with jugs, then hey. P&W has to vacuum in writing students. Go staple your brain, spastic.
George has MS. He doesn't rave. He writes well crafted short stories with a mildly sinister aspect. I met him and his wife at an Abington bookstore in my little manual chair, bored out of my mind. "I talk just like I post on Speakeasy don't I?"
"Yes," he nodded.
"I think it is enough," this is what he posted on the boards as Dana, the moderator, and Gretchen, the melodramatic southern novelist, closed ranks and banned my account. Whatever the inflammatory nature of my rhetoric, I had residents of Riverside throwing bars of soap at me, while this man, writing with the hope of saving troubled teens, ostracized me after having met me and I purchased First Tiger, his early YA novel. I wonder if my neighbor and follower Ed knows that about my history with this building, that I was physically pelted. Doubtlessly not. He suffers too and doesn't let it throb where dialysis evidently disfigured him. The horror of such group stigmatization doesn't go away with a snap of the fingers.
Weigh this. Weigh this against a history of medical disfigurement, life long sexual victimization, then come back at me with Atwood's salutary apologia for Toni Morrison's embodiment of dignity in endurance. Language signifies the reality of the flesh, but it isn't tangible. There is no reason to run into similar troubles at Linked In. It is simply a career resource site, and I do not have the time, but this is why I fear mass aggregation.
I forgot to add, with economic contests such as this, the voices of the dead recounting Sunset Blvd seems charmed, indeed.
Friday, May 16, 2014
Michael's Prism
"I don't know," Michael C. Clark, always wry, never fearful of bewilderment.
"Speakeasy is not meeting your needs," oh god forbid, not the staff who evaluate MFA curriculums, but their volunteer board moderators.
It is his memory which embodies the emotional investment of my exile from P&W, on a digital scale. Their customer service agents, in the little contact I've had with them since 2002, are perplexed by my personal indignation. Of course they would be, as creative writing is an oversold academic industry which should not be a separate and distinct subset in the study of literature, and yet it is. MFA groups polish technique, leave us with Toni Morrison roasting smores over slavery's aftermath, or Franzen, always living in a block bluster mindset.
As a published writer unable to make the transition to franchise author, I want something else? Yes, to remove the pain of loss from my memory, when Michael wasn't my husband, but was representative of the humanist soul mate I desired, believing in its happiness. I may excoriate Jerry McGuire, but Michael I rarely write about. Embarrassment, guilt for being such an imposition on his personal space. He tolerated it, that imposition, except when he told me about his diagnosis, and I did not know what to do. I ran away, me, when he was always there for me, even with my 28 year old dating troubles with a Jerry look a like who had ferrets.
I listened to Michael's son Andy play the violin, was there when his daughter Emily's birth was announced in the CAS cafeteria, and realized far too late in my life that here was the graduate student hook up I should have played for, and realized it with the anguish distinct to Jamesian novelistic antipodes: Michael was whom I should have married, this Michael divorced, with his wife's motives bewildering to me. Michael Clark was a perfect husband, father and teacher to the extent that fallibility allows--and I am not much for fallibility, my own included, always struggling for a better thesis, the vision that will give me that breakthrough, that victory particular to itself.
I did love Michael C Clark. We were not physically intimate, so the authenticity of feeling may be on the cheap: I did not have to deal with his weight that made his pudginess charming, or evaluate his capacity for sexual blandishments, but I loved him.
I weep, what else is there? He never told me he was designated my academic adviser because he took on that role for Widener's disabled student body, a demurral of recognition in the fact that I always was and will remain, a segregated element. I know what some of you would say about that. My quadriplegia isn't an excuse to hurt others. I've been told this on innumerable occasions, and yes, I have been wrong, sometimes over the top in vitriolic build up, but when the paradigms surrounding me impede equal opportunity as a fact of life, progressives like Jonathan Capehart are waxing in effusive cosmetic jewelry.
The power of those who control the connective software, this has a cumulative affect.
"Speakeasy is not meeting your needs," oh god forbid, not the staff who evaluate MFA curriculums, but their volunteer board moderators.
It is his memory which embodies the emotional investment of my exile from P&W, on a digital scale. Their customer service agents, in the little contact I've had with them since 2002, are perplexed by my personal indignation. Of course they would be, as creative writing is an oversold academic industry which should not be a separate and distinct subset in the study of literature, and yet it is. MFA groups polish technique, leave us with Toni Morrison roasting smores over slavery's aftermath, or Franzen, always living in a block bluster mindset.
As a published writer unable to make the transition to franchise author, I want something else? Yes, to remove the pain of loss from my memory, when Michael wasn't my husband, but was representative of the humanist soul mate I desired, believing in its happiness. I may excoriate Jerry McGuire, but Michael I rarely write about. Embarrassment, guilt for being such an imposition on his personal space. He tolerated it, that imposition, except when he told me about his diagnosis, and I did not know what to do. I ran away, me, when he was always there for me, even with my 28 year old dating troubles with a Jerry look a like who had ferrets.
I listened to Michael's son Andy play the violin, was there when his daughter Emily's birth was announced in the CAS cafeteria, and realized far too late in my life that here was the graduate student hook up I should have played for, and realized it with the anguish distinct to Jamesian novelistic antipodes: Michael was whom I should have married, this Michael divorced, with his wife's motives bewildering to me. Michael Clark was a perfect husband, father and teacher to the extent that fallibility allows--and I am not much for fallibility, my own included, always struggling for a better thesis, the vision that will give me that breakthrough, that victory particular to itself.
I did love Michael C Clark. We were not physically intimate, so the authenticity of feeling may be on the cheap: I did not have to deal with his weight that made his pudginess charming, or evaluate his capacity for sexual blandishments, but I loved him.
I weep, what else is there? He never told me he was designated my academic adviser because he took on that role for Widener's disabled student body, a demurral of recognition in the fact that I always was and will remain, a segregated element. I know what some of you would say about that. My quadriplegia isn't an excuse to hurt others. I've been told this on innumerable occasions, and yes, I have been wrong, sometimes over the top in vitriolic build up, but when the paradigms surrounding me impede equal opportunity as a fact of life, progressives like Jonathan Capehart are waxing in effusive cosmetic jewelry.
The power of those who control the connective software, this has a cumulative affect.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Crabs
I am not on this morning, and since I am not on, debating the worth of tweeting a youthful aging cripple's shrinkage, my drying up scurrilous sentiments. Not that I'm the first to worry brain plasticity once it is over the age of 50. What I am going through now is what Jerry was going through when I was his student who wanted to fuse herself to his corduroy blazer in my own quite tortured psychic guilt for wanting to sleep with him. I was nineteen when I first met him while Susan sat in the car. Nineteen, and I still can't shut the fuck up about my aging Shakespearean post modernist whose intellectual force wasn't enough to maintain the decency of my conscience.
Jerry: "Joanne, what the fuck do you want from me? I was kind. I encouraged you as best I could to imitate me. I am sorry your path was more obstructionist than that. I am old, and as I've written you, had a heart attack. You're over 50, presumably frigid over a duress you've struggled with for years which had nothing to do with me. I kept my mouth shut. Your former supervisor did not. That is the price you've paid for using words to get you from A to B in deploying subversive behavior."
Joanne: (sniveling): I wanted to be happy being loved by someone like you. I subjected myself to date rapes trying to find you in men who approximated your appearance. I sublimated our necessary detachment to my career and that died, fast and furiously.
Call in Smokey's commercialization of French baroque, hey? The tracks of pork like collagen. Toni Morrison's work angers me, and I meant my damning praise against the herd to be angrier than it turned out in barreling my dissatisfied sentiment, delayed over my domestic assistance anxiety. I found a woman, white, whom I like. We'll see.
Jerry: "Joanne, what the fuck do you want from me? I was kind. I encouraged you as best I could to imitate me. I am sorry your path was more obstructionist than that. I am old, and as I've written you, had a heart attack. You're over 50, presumably frigid over a duress you've struggled with for years which had nothing to do with me. I kept my mouth shut. Your former supervisor did not. That is the price you've paid for using words to get you from A to B in deploying subversive behavior."
Joanne: (sniveling): I wanted to be happy being loved by someone like you. I subjected myself to date rapes trying to find you in men who approximated your appearance. I sublimated our necessary detachment to my career and that died, fast and furiously.
Call in Smokey's commercialization of French baroque, hey? The tracks of pork like collagen. Toni Morrison's work angers me, and I meant my damning praise against the herd to be angrier than it turned out in barreling my dissatisfied sentiment, delayed over my domestic assistance anxiety. I found a woman, white, whom I like. We'll see.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Eschatological Targets
"I wouldn't know where to find such people." Tom Wilkinson.
When Howard Stern had syndication currency, simulcast from his New York station to WYSP, he claimed, in less than scintillating fashion, that black authors wrote to capitalize on the white guilt market, and I probably believe that about Morrison's work, though I am not entirely certain about Beloved in particular, like a snake in the grass, choking on marshmallow. Did she write it for the chimera of canonization? For herself? For a paucity of comparison to the estimated 4 million lives taken in the division of the Korean peninsula?
We read fictional narratives for many reasons, the most prevalent being an enjoyment of satire, or the need to escape ourselves. What Morrison has provoked in me is guilt, guilt not for her characters, some so abused, so wretched, that they snap into a madness, pleasure and horror intermingled, but guilt in my own identification with her bleak exposition. There is nothing wrong with softening the toughness in her courageousness in being explicit, as she does in Beloved. It has the standard ironical undercurrents, humorous interludes, comparisons to Salman Rushdie's ending of The Satanic Verses, descending into the escape hatch of schizophrenia, but the hymnal wail of Morrison's communal voice of expiation was too overly lavish. It led to a regurgitation of my sympathies. This doesn't mean I resent Toni the way I resent Oprah's rise as America's shadow empress, but a cop out is still a cop out, though it would be too much to feel the grand dame implicitly modulated her tone for a Danny Glover/Winfrey deal.
I do not know the truth about myself anymore. Jimmi Shrode cut me socially first because I was having an emotional breakdown over what Linda did to me. He had been my friend (supposedly), but refused to understand what he and Erik von Schmetterling did was wrong, and placed honest applicants at a disadvantage. Since Philadelphia ADAPT, as a whole, cannot rectify its moral turpitude, I cannot reengage the group. I have absolutely no intimacy in my life, not a soul to speak to who cares about me. Think about that, how hard it has been for me while Linda still buses into work, has her social extensions and a paycheck, and I can't leave the building where so many of her consumers still traffic in and out of her domain. Both the staff who knew me and the staff who didn't say "I transferred your case file." Why don't we close your case file?
Are you that relegated?
When Howard Stern had syndication currency, simulcast from his New York station to WYSP, he claimed, in less than scintillating fashion, that black authors wrote to capitalize on the white guilt market, and I probably believe that about Morrison's work, though I am not entirely certain about Beloved in particular, like a snake in the grass, choking on marshmallow. Did she write it for the chimera of canonization? For herself? For a paucity of comparison to the estimated 4 million lives taken in the division of the Korean peninsula?
We read fictional narratives for many reasons, the most prevalent being an enjoyment of satire, or the need to escape ourselves. What Morrison has provoked in me is guilt, guilt not for her characters, some so abused, so wretched, that they snap into a madness, pleasure and horror intermingled, but guilt in my own identification with her bleak exposition. There is nothing wrong with softening the toughness in her courageousness in being explicit, as she does in Beloved. It has the standard ironical undercurrents, humorous interludes, comparisons to Salman Rushdie's ending of The Satanic Verses, descending into the escape hatch of schizophrenia, but the hymnal wail of Morrison's communal voice of expiation was too overly lavish. It led to a regurgitation of my sympathies. This doesn't mean I resent Toni the way I resent Oprah's rise as America's shadow empress, but a cop out is still a cop out, though it would be too much to feel the grand dame implicitly modulated her tone for a Danny Glover/Winfrey deal.
I do not know the truth about myself anymore. Jimmi Shrode cut me socially first because I was having an emotional breakdown over what Linda did to me. He had been my friend (supposedly), but refused to understand what he and Erik von Schmetterling did was wrong, and placed honest applicants at a disadvantage. Since Philadelphia ADAPT, as a whole, cannot rectify its moral turpitude, I cannot reengage the group. I have absolutely no intimacy in my life, not a soul to speak to who cares about me. Think about that, how hard it has been for me while Linda still buses into work, has her social extensions and a paycheck, and I can't leave the building where so many of her consumers still traffic in and out of her domain. Both the staff who knew me and the staff who didn't say "I transferred your case file." Why don't we close your case file?
Are you that relegated?
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