Blue Patches With Rubber Tips, Bearing the Crutch

"It doesn't have to be a death sentence," --Megan Crowley

It is difficult to adjudicate A Patch of Blue against contemporary standards without viewing it as a public service announcement to maintain silence in the face of differences between ethnic groups not altogether superficial. I must have seen the film a half dozen times, find the echo of my own reactionary fear in Shelley Winters and her recriminating castigation, calling Poitier your black buck, play acting the white trash of which I am a little embodied, or Poitier’s containment of the blind girl’s unintentional disruption, when she nearly topples the fruit pyramid in the supermarket, and yet the movie filters through me like a light urine stream right before a major stool struggle, the arc of the narrative dissipates, leaving behind the poignancy of a connection between a disabled woman and a black man essentially teaching her how to adapt, never actualized, because Poitier’s character realizes the girl’s feelings are based in part on a sheltered dependency. In North Philadelphia, there was, in fact, a blind woman beaten daily and traumatically by a black husband. The dowager was the unfortunate observer of her caramelized face browbeat by crisis counselors and patrol officers, and she disappeared before I relocated to Race Street, a most likely death sentence to an inevitable probable cause, lest you continue to marvel about the scars of the lioness breathing more shallowly beneath my ribs, and so we come full circle, back to my initial rebellion, planting myself in the inner city solely on the basis of a lust to live. To my sensibilities of enduring interior conflict, Shane, (ahem) the paraprofessional tending my shriveled wings, is sexually attractive, and makes me realize what happiness I might have had with such strength as his, and it is rather unfair to discover this, tottering on the brink of  a final weakness towards helplessness I cannot defeat, that the right degree of masculinity ignites my passion, the very will to live, after years of absorbing everything of the emotional pain I’ve written about to my audience. Part of me says to hell with the stigma, and wants to win him despite what I am, despite what he sees every day, and consume him. But I am playing tic tac toe with an aging woman’s embers. He is not the true target, simply a man I like using his strong shoulders as a bulwark for a spastic quadriplegic who was never loved as she wished, with her reactionary anarchist already looking down her nose at having fun with such tensions. It would never work between us, and I know it already because it isn’t a last act of love, merely defiance, fooling yourself the hormones still work in secret. We could not succeed as a couple, as equals in the dynamic of society’s fabric, in any sense. I cannot embrace his world, having sustained such damage in it, any more than he could embrace mine—the world from which I fled, deluding myself in relation to liberal sanctity. Yet I do like him, his energetic man child smile, clinging to him more than a little, like Amy Adams defying narrative frameworks with mystical orthography that eddies linear time. Like the actress, I too ply her thematic imperative, of calling out, “Come back to me,” the life I see as so fulfilling, married to a kindred heart. What sort of love letter is this? One that knows Miss Crowley is in need of a market correction.

Strategic Retreat

As the lunacy of my non-compliance continues toward the overwhelming crisis of self-enforced eviction-- what, exactly, do I expect to happen without access to electricity and toiletries? Nothing beneficial-- I'll pull a shuttlecock and actually post about a partial or legally blind content creator from the ewe mentality of Niume-land and its troubles. I've written before I have very little to say about the intersection between art therapy and aspiring disabled individuals in the fine arts, and I have, at best, a nominal command of art criticism, but those of you without chronic pain want this, positive attitude effusive, sympathetic ecology appreciation, and would prefer I turn the rudder, assert that Oscar Perez has an eye for the harmony of contemplating the environment. Done.

Certain things don't translate on web sites that well, and traditional portraiture, whether paint or still frame, is one. Digital pictures cheat the aesthetic appreciation for which our eyes, symmetric and concentrated, like all primates, were designed. Oscar followed me and I followed back, and barely hear a peep out of him, picked up a slightly more centered perception of him on Virily, where I've remained relatively quiet. I hold happiness and contentment suspect, and believe those inclined to genius normally do, and, in affinity with my mentor, Jerry, I do not like crowds, though my twitter presence escalates, at least on the benevolence of the gatekeepers.

Do you want me to tell you what will happen if I do not evacuate myself from Presby? I did not think so, but I shall, just the same, release my inner militant. She will ensure a tragedy occurs if she doesn't get out. The lack of physical ability to fight is irrelevant in this regard.

I came up with the idea of a subset essay at least, whether or not for my collection, of something like "The Jerry Memoirs," as my bondage to his memory fades, and he is a wisp of an old man on a stick. I dug up his 2012 reading on YouTube. Same old McGuire, and yes, I expected, for him, some sort of expansiveness, instead of a parody of his forceful 40's. I do not know yet, but corrected my self-awareness. I attached myself to him out of shared conceit. If he was the best Shakespearean on the east coast, I was going to be SuperCripple, if this is easy enough for mass mindsets to grasp. The late entry 19 year old needed a piece of that ego, and latched, however unconsciously intuited. I believed that he could spare me a condemned fate, and had I been more dispassionate, I might have been right, but he ignited my cunt, as reductive as that is on end note.

Morning de clef

Within the annoying habit of tiring oneself out for absolutely no reason, brief observations may be made: We all know Rosemary's Baby is a scathing send up of liberal pretensions, and we all know it has the distinct signature of an auteur who like Mr. Allen after him, got caught up in a grandiose self-importance. (I struggle with the rape and the artistic genius and we'll say fuck it and leave Jacob wrestling the angel on the precipice in perpetuity.) Beyond that, we may get frustrated with the finesse of the satire and finding a language for it. Richard Fleischer offers a sharp contrast to Polanski's invidious mission creep with See No Evil (71), a fast paced thriller that dispenses with analogy-- if Polanski's Satanism is a representative stand in for urban stratification-- and has a dialectical argument which dispenses with the dynamic allure of masochism. Fleischer adamantly keeps his feet on the ground. Mia is still the damsel, but merely an unwitting one, as opposed to Polanski's inimical manipulation of a heroine who has few tools with which to alter her destiny as a modern Pandora.

We'll hold this conceit for a significant length.

Nobody's Visible Legend

Is it too much to infer that the blind man Tommy Lee Jones and his captive come across before crossing into Mexico, in the 2005 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, is emblematic of a Tiresias-like prophet, with all the turbulence of Grecian tragedy? Jones is not much for southern comfort in his later films; Estrada is no exception, and its opening structure has a satisfying sense of ridicule about man’s capacity for destruction with the 19^th century technology of projectile weapons. Shooting wild dogs like coyotes, whether for legitimate purposes or simple sport, has unintended consequences, unraveling puzzles for quixotic figures like Penkins to piece together in his stark landscapes, one in which challenging questions about identity and marginalization are posed, since Estrada himself has very little identity, other than a dream of paradise, and his bond with his buddy, whose subsequent tunnel vision might be driven by guilt, just as Norton’s reactionary bile is driven by fear, and whether or not as the antagonist, this border agent truly sees the humanity of the “chicano” by the close of the film, I’d argue this is open ended, despite guilt shredding his psyche to pieces. Unlike the dowager, Jones is a morally decent conservative, one who posits a true form of liberality. It is admirable, and partly why we might stand against the border wall with Mexico.

Who ever made this meme is as whimsical & inspirational as the old Dr. himself. pic.twitter.com/xWi2c0Z0tv

— Deplorable Eva (@EvaSofii) September 30, 2017

But this 13 year old vehicle is an unforgiving parable. No figure like Clint Eastwood’s trainer stands ready to take the consequences upon himself to alleviate the suffering of a sterile, ailing life. The old man apparently forgives Penkins, since he lies to the posse of agents on the trail of our rather dubious hero. Penkins achieves resolution, but what he took to get there has a gut wincing cost. Although we can assume that a dummy model was used for the dun pack horse which bucks itself over the escarpment, that was some significantly brutal ecological footage, nearly equivalent to the courage of Melissa Leo’s branded, mildly rancid nakedness. Yet Texan mendacity is still entrancing.

Acquired Deficiency

"After it happened people stopped calling me the golden boy." -- Jude Law

The reason this Savage Garden song strikes a visceral chord, becoming such an end of the century hit, is actually due to the diving baritone of the lead vocal into the refrain, and I weep along with it for the passions and anticipations of unity never to be. Law's argument, as a sugared honey on whom women like to dote, is to put yourself out there, as per Jennifer Tilly's Nina, and perhaps I never made enough of an ass of myself, however many online follies abound. I used to ask ambulatory men out point blank in my just off North Philly campus days, and would not dream of it now, with the obvious poverty of my distressed lower jaw.

Jay Rosen's tweet about Andy's closure, however languishing, of his Daily Dish caught me by surprise. I remember my email to Sullivan about David Foster Wallace, and by that time did not expect a response, but my first email to acclimatized Briton was impassioned, and he sent me a screen shot of the Amtrak building I look at every day, drawing me in to his "view from your window" theme. Then I chucked civility to the wind, and it's too late now, as I gaze back over the hills and vales.

What I haven't seen said, which doesn't mean it hasn't been intimated, is Sullivan is battling a life consuming disease, that his blog has bounced from one media outlet to another, that very few pay money for blogs unless the blogs have a unique signature, and even before I washed my hands of homosexual equality, I saw no reason why I should pay to read Andy's analyses, despite the fact that he works harder for access in his posts than I do, and my reasons for this are economics. I'd source DIA if I had subscribers, but lacking those, I save my armor for articles I might sell, on spec or not.

Still, he is established, referenced by other established opinion writers, and if he is on the shoals, my fatigue and dramatic commode evacuations should portend dire warnings, yet I do not give it up, whatever that is, writing less and less offline, not out of blockage as much as stamina, chasing cat vomit and other forms of waste, I begin to fear my silence as much as the poet columnist Laurel Speer, sharing hers with me in raw draft. More than likely, I will not wrest myself out of poverty before my COPD puts me on oxygen, crossing my fingers that I can rely on a somewhat feckless woman like Karina. She is basically a sweet girl, 35 and in an arrested development, while I whittle away on aggression which my talent constrains. I can't really look on her relative youth as a source of hope for a declining dignity.

Part of the offense I cause, which liberals would ridicule if I had any legitimacy, is a personalized animosity toward homosexuals, since the majority I've known have been evasive and duplicitous, and Andy, arguably, has some of this in his interview responses-- yet there was a time, when David Brooks turned me onto this mercurial gay English Catholic, that I respected Andrew Sullivan, saw my viewpoints in tandem, if not my ruptured faith. He has burnt out from a relatively privileged platform. I've burnt out sinking in quicksand, too maniacal for an alternate route toward port.

Taps

High features, naturally strong and powerfully expressive, had been burnt almost into Negro blackness by constant exposure to the tropical sun," Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

The more we learn.  It was an accidental circumstance that a Jewish public housing tenant, who is in a comparatively soiled outhouse more lowly than the gorilla below me, reconnected me to mental illness empowerment intake; my anger was triggered because I asked the aforementioned tenant for more information, and should know by now that ethnic Communists undergo lobotomies in terms of gate-keeping skills. My spirit, my very essence, needs a change, and the reason America is in jeremiad is because the social safety net is destroying our ability to take the initiative, and my starvation for fresh space is turning into a pathology, and it need not.

This is not about mood swings. I have client confidentiality I need to maintain-- Christ-- but I knew well enough how pedestrian Edward is-- never again. Never. You may hold me accountable. No more overtures to public housing residents. That the president has lost all credibility with me is not nearly as disconcerting, but represents a national disheartening. I would prefer to leave the country, seriously. I can more readily doom myself under European case management than rot in the city of my birth, watching my digital clocks tick. Given the time I should be resting, but I am trying to contract typhoid like John Malkovich, who also does blindness in his first major supporting role. Actors never get it right, even the top billed like Malkovich whose face is now in protean death mask stage, sightlessness. Not Cameron Diaz in Garcia's vignettes.

Things You Can Tell is very good, merges into itself and its inclusionary frictions, yet I balk at saying it is a great film meshing disability, urban loons drawn familiar, to our recognition. I have dealt with Garcia as auteur before-- but the film doesn't fit on the mantelpiece properly in terms of really challenging viewers. This is how I am dealing with it now. With Garcia, it is about the magical realism of the father. The style is a shield, because we know we're looking for nuances of interpretation. These days we're all magical realists, our wars fought to be cached on YouTube. Living the science fiction we read as affixed adolescents, our government at the bidding of a Charlie Rose scoop. Yet despots fascinate us. Admit it. We create narratives around them, held by megalomania, giddy when it is fractured by hubris. Mussolini hung like a dead and bloated mule carcass. Czar Nicholas out of tune and executed in countless variations of Doctor Zhivago; all of Russian literature is Doctor Zhivago, the American induced mortal illness of Hugo Chavez, or Elizabeth's beheading of Mary Queen of Scotts via Glenda Jackson.

The blind rarely have a fixed eyeball. Their countenance usually has the appearance of a pronounced brow ridge.

Some affection for Isabelle Allende. The aide who received the stories of Eva Luna recognized me this morning. She was a single mother child herself years ago. Blows to the solar plexus aren't helpful. Deep breaths. I thought Edward Berkowitz cared enough about my concerns to be discriminating, and taking a few minutes to categorize the situation behind these private lectures he disseminated with Zen-like laissez-faire would have shielded me from a past with very negative consequences. Perhaps some of you understand how leaving a job is like a divorce. He worries my use of detail compromises online safety, but my emotional vulnerability never crossed his mind; he and I know each other and have the ability to ascertain each other's reality, unlike forum moderators. Existential hopelessness.

In the spirit of Billy Burke, Let's Trade

He paid little attention to what he said, and blamed Glaucus for his stupidity in taking in and feeding maimed and enfeebled persons. --Alexander Pope on the entirely unnecessary apocrypha on the life of Homer.


JJ Abrams has a subtext in Revolution: We are all capable of being hideous, of betraying those we love the most, and yet still remain as human, or not, as we choose. The show illustrates this to varying degrees, in the relationship between Burke and Lyons, however much their acting is studio stock and trade, and is of particular interest when looking at Esposito, most likely the best actor in the series, or the most interesting, given his resume as a supporting actor. It is interesting to look at the evolution of these portrayals against Simenon's complex noir tensions, which come through in The Brothers Rico, despite its genetic 1950's composition. I hope to be able to say something penetrating about those tensions at the end of the day, for those of you who will bear with me.

I left this last at the scene between Conte and the laundry driver (no hint there of corruption or pressure by the Teamsters, but I thought of it anyway, because this was the era of such corruption at its height), and then an impaction occurs, a condensation that is artificial due to editing constraints: not moments after the psycho gangster exits Eddie's office, the call comes in from Kubik for his facade of a detente, and then the game begins.

I will pick it up from this point after a nap, which I hope is due to a hibernation reflex, and not the closer of congestive heart failure and an oxygen generator. I have much to do so this will, hopefully, be a real nap, and I'll be back after the news. My hair is dry now, having washed it after breakfast (in real time 12/19, whoops).

Farrow's Generation

The angst I chew in Beckles is rising in prominence, and I know none of you know what to tell me, as only I know my growing physical weakness and remaining strength, but applying for this position would involve a great deal of work in and of itself, labor about which I cannot be too specific, but I would have to jump over many hurdles just to submit a competitive CV. If I do all that would I be strong enough? The question makes me want to split my skull for coconut juice, because the position truly interests me, and the very thought of fighting for it has inspired me with hope that I have not felt in a long time, but there are many issues involved, including my reading voice, which has suffered. Ebert has sustained catastrophic illness. So has gnostic man, who, if he ever mentioned my writing at all, would probably say I represent a safety net failure of unspeakable sadness, but their cases are different. These men are established, and I am a real jock cripple who has tasted what success could mean, but tragically never cemented my opportunity. If I go for broke, I will really have to break some eggs, and if I then get to an interview, I will need to be on, and I have never snorted coke.

Fuck, fuck, and to make a triple play, fuck.

Okay. I managed to get up to view this post RB Farrow vehicle, and let me make a quick observation before I return to burrow in later: A dirty little secret in the disabled community is that most of us want able-bodied lovers like Norman Eshley, which is why I did not let go of getting burned by Tassoni for a great length of time, or burning myself, not playing my cards properly. When I found his picture online, I had an Indian girl then, also an abuse victim, circa 2002. I squealed and blushed and did not see him as he was, a bald half assed jock academic who saved himself from being a punk through publishing on the finesse of his pedagogical concerns, no, I saw the only Italian American of my youth with whom I wanted to repopulate the Roman Empire, and my then Indian helper inflected her voice, "You really had a thing for this guy, huh?"

Yep, even if he suggested a label and then trotted off, not minding Faulkner's adage about the past not being the past.

In my brief scan of his abstract, my scurrilous lack of softened nostalgia burrows deeper, beyond the failings of my tie to him as an unrequited longing: I should have never believed that publishing papers such as his would have amounted to success. He himself was something of a jarring minimalist, as a writer, and I see traces of it in his jargon on interacting with his students as an instructor, much as my first person account of those years is just as poorly abstracted, though I do not toss the narrative because I still want certain parts of it, as a kind of personal mythos.

I want to write one or two academic articles on both Henry James and Italian Modernism, and then I am done; not sure I'd have much left after that, but since I am not an active or independent scholar, I am not sure I could meet the expectations of peer review, disadvantaged as I am.

The Value of Retaining Habits

Undaunted, Richard Lynn has with The Chosen People accomplished a yeoman's task in summing up work done thus far on Jewish intelligence.-- John Glad, undaunted in his own eugenics sphere.

The television network system, in its former monopoly on what viewers were fed, has a somewhat lengthy populism of its own in soft pedaling the Catholic tread on monotheism. The dowager wouldn't be able to remember the content of Sally Field's Flying Nun adventures even with a hypothetical inducement from Peter Thiel being willing to overlook my grimace, offering me a charitable donation to debate him like a fool on why my diffidence against homosexuality matters, but I do remember her self-effacing smile at the conclusion of her playful gymnastics had it about right, in the wholesome humility the public was willing to buy, the abuses pounding the doors of our district attorneys today then still an indulgence of Bad Catholics, according to latter day Commonweal contributors. There may be some hardy souls who point out that my willingness to destroy Presbyterian Homes as a fraternal brickbat stands in direct contradiction against my preference to preserve Roman Catholicism as an institution, but that is a huge thesis I inadvertently rolled into. It is easier this evening to disparage Michael Landon, rumble slightly about Della Reese and angel touches, and point out that Early Edition is beyond superficial, although, in its essential elements, it operates under the same premise as Joan of Arcadia, which respects itself.

However, Shanesia Davis has better facial expressions to pretend blindness than Audrey Hepburn does in Wait Until Dark. The dowager, in her most cursed moment of carelessness thus far, caught only the last 20 minutes of the thriller. Arkin almost looks like another actor. I am not attempting to be hard on the iconic princess. One wouldn't want to be shocked if she had really dug in, but blind people do have facial dysphoria. Here is the evidence of it in the unpleasant leftist Shaf Patel. (I knew it wouldn't work, but swallowed my loathing, followed him back, briefly, still suffering from brotherhood syndrome.) Saramago does imbue a grisly realism to his inexplicable parable of white death, but network never quite knows how to carry disability, pretend or otherwise, for itself. The able majority prefer not to notice, and the deprived, adapt and stiffen. Other than Chandler's sidekick, I am not sure what her role is in the series, other than to cross her fingers that she gets friended a cameo in the ever recurring confirmation bias.

Anarchist José Saramago

Also, of course, you inevitably pick up some friends you could manage without: to wit, queers, neurotic ladies, Jewish psychiatrists, Muslim boys, and young Presbyterian assistant ministers. Those who hold this position (which I do not hold) would argue that the responsible citizen necessarily gives up. The situation is hopeless, and as a reasonable man the responsible citizen becomes indifferent. All the available options disgust him, from Ayn Rand to CORE to the Birch Society.
--The Sunlight Dialogues, location 1128-29