Competing Transformations

 "I am not the person I was. Everybody fades Martha."-- Tcheky Karyo

Just before the nearly non-advent of the winter holidays, as I violently convulse myself into the new year of 22, one of my followers liked a younger woman’s request, raven-haired if my scant view of her thumbnail was accurate, for depressing movies, and the usual pop culture cohesion thread began on video Twitter verse. Lars von Trier's Melancholia made the rounds, and although I am not going to scroll back through weeks worth of tweets to indicate a correction on my part in the stagnate world of my social media interactions, I do indeed stand corrected. Von Trier conceived the idea for the end of the world as metaphor in a therapy session. I streamed it on Prime once, and X-ray cued me in on important allusions made to painters active when German Romanticism was at its height, and I know a majestic homage to Stanislaw Lem is involved in Trier’s dense compression of emotional fatalism, but haven’t we digressed enough already? Melancholia has at best a tangential relationship to cloning as a way of life in the Western Hemisphere, and another one of my followers whom I’ve mentioned before on this account, (gee, don’t you want to know who he is?)  brought up his distaste for the very British Never Let Me Go,  a film faithfully based on the very British Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. The film’s stark reality about knowing how the end of your life is going to go, just as I know how the end of mine is coming along, is very comforting, and rather neo-imperialist, which is comprehensible. Britain was one of the last modern empires civilization could recognize  in the 20^th century, and so was Japan. Hence Ishiguro’s rather dynamic, brilliant, at times, immersion into Western sympathies. It is also interesting to note The Island came out as a box office disappointment around 2005, on or about the year Ishiguro went to press, and this latter film takes the Rip Van Winkle approach: knowledge is power, and by dint of sheer luck, the American clones destroy the institutional harvesting built around them, deceiving them with notions of paradise, when in reality, they were no more than livestock for their wealthy hosts. Ishiguro’s plot takes a more egalitarian approach, with only hints about why the students brought up in these schools didn’t rebel, like the V-chips inserted in their wrists. It amazes me that Romanek creates the culture shock of an alternate universe far superior to that of Michael Bay, simply by placing the doomed in a recognizable landscape long imprinted on our visual cortex as familiar, like Masterpiece theater,

The British Left of The One-Armed Man

 "When they live like that, they die like that."-- Liev Schreiber, season one apologia

Theodore Johnson is elevated into the documentary examination of how parapsychology informs on his low-burn serial murders not for the murders themselves, but because of his successful manipulation of Britain’s criminal justice system in relation to them. It is difficult to gage at this juncture whether the eleven years he received for the murder of his first wife Yvonne wasn’t an equitable balance against the loss of life, as there is no reason why a husband cannot be abused in the face of domestic discord with suicidal ideation. In this criminal defendant’s case it’s borderline as to whether mitigating circumstances applied, but to all accounts, Theodore served his full term for manslaughter before he once again married a second Yvonne, produced a daughter, and then strangled her mother. He got out on early release again because of the daughter, with a less than scrutinized stipulation that he was not to engage in relations with the opposite sex from the wagging paternalism of Europe and the United Kingdom’s belief in rehabilitation. Canada and Britain both seem to have excessively brutal murders from their emigrant populations, whether they’re Indian, Asian, Iranian (at least two of these were particularly savage), or as in this case, Jamaican. Retired DCI Colin Sutton, with traditional Anglo-Saxon shrewdness, may delineate the investigation and mechanisms for British and American audiences alike, but he and other documentary analysts, including psychologist Linda Papadopoulos, fail to ever mention geographical displacement or immigration policy. Why not? Is this somehow a liberal taboo, particularly as it relates to the European forge in the creation of Jamaica today? Although film critics assert that Marlon Brando’s neo-imperialist movie Burn is hot to trot about the domino effect regarding incursions into Vietnam, it reads far more closely about British guilt over hanging Paul Bogle for killing civilized Caucasians, and of course, no judge today is that self-conscious as it relates to clemency for indigenous individuals in this age of technocratic supremacy, but the case that being too lenient with the descendants of human trafficking is as harsh as being too authoritarian can be made, and it cost Angela Best her life, because apparently, the only humans who still know how to draw lines in the sand are Nigerian extremists, but let’s not forget Johnson himself; it’s theorized that his last suicide attempt, throwing himself in front of a train, was germane, setting himself up as the nebulous figure which drove David Janssen and his pursuer through every episode of The Fugitive, but this is one amputee not slated for the release of the disabled on compassionate grounds.

Collard Green Extraction

"I no longer walk with a limp," James Woods, Against All Odds

My old flame of 37 years ago, (concurrent with the invasion of Grenada, no less) reminded me of a word I rarely use on Blogger: morale. It is a difficult state of cohesion for me to locate as a writer-journalist in hindrance at present, but the liberal-progressive bandwagon follow then block my account on Twitter isn’t helping. To a degree this is arbitrary, sometimes not worth mentioning, like the British transsexual RD Ronald who followed me and then beat a quick path back to her disturbing body decals of gunshot wounds. Seconds before she fled my digital space, my question read, “Are you a real transsexual?” I was baffled, found her Facebook page and excoriated her deliberately. If the LBGT activists want to play mind games with me they will be dealing with smoking skid marks, particularly as consequences for the dowager are negligible. There was too the donna from … Naples, was it? Her cut stung, as my use of nomenclature was only an attempt to welcome a comrade; but the BrowneProject, which as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, consists of a guitarist named Chris, followed me on July 28^th, and barely gave my palsied forearms 48 hours before he blocked me for querying the question as to what he wanted. Yes, we all unfollow and sometimes block accounts daily, but in this instance, whatever his circumstances, his virtual cut has the semblance of discrimination against a disabled woman only attempting a reminder that I have never been a paid music critic, though I will give the forthright the benefit of the doubt, like Ali Spagnola, who came to me through Medium. I admire her spunk, and have filed away to my ailing synapses that her oeuvre is due some consideration, as Russ Still will also receive, if I can accrue some semblance of my own autonomy as I had it last year.

Having asserted this, however, music will not heal my present anguish over a night to day helplessness from loss of machines and furnishings that kept me functional, nor will the social psychology of Mark Goulston, the doctor from California whose suicide prevention tweets aren’t relevant to my medical vulnerability. I let him go, wish him well, but my existence is intolerable, and needs more intervention of “boots on the ground,” and additional technical devices than the American welfare system will ever provide. Empathy isn’t going to prevent the collapse from infections borne of my own waste, if it continues. If Chris Browne is representative of the best the British left can do, “loving his friends,” believing in lyricism’s healing, but blocking me in a simple attempt at conversation, it gives me insight into British conservatives who’ve friended me and proven themselves resourceful.

Brilliant end to the day with my twin bro @BrowneProject 😁😄🤩😍 pic.twitter.com/a2d6bdAXIf

— 🌣 Nature Druid 🌣 (@n_distractions) August 25, 2018

As I cannot spontaneously visit my family and raise a glass of bubbly, these twins are cruel people. I'm the one who can't walk.

Rubies of Fixated Pollination

She was my favorite daughter, a wailing mother

 One of the saddest and most irrelevant foreign spousal murders which could ever have been brought to the attention of the American viewer is that of Varkha Rani, a Hindi woman who, according to the dictates of caste and tradition, was a potential, then selected betrothal of Jasvir  Ginday, former employee of the Royal Bank of Scotland. In the YouTube video uploaded amid the furor of the trial, there is an insert of her mother’s outcry, before the eye is drawn back to the celebratory and vivid costume of their wedding day, a still photo of which leads The Independent’s byline, Ginday’s mauve turban, Rani’s veil and dress of translucent pinks. Under the long serving terms of Narendra Modi, such a lavish assertion of Hindu identity is as much a post-colonial place card as a Muslim hijab, and might even be reassuring to classicists who find comfort in preserving these said  traditions, if it wasn’t for the fact that this matchmaking ceremony was a façade. Ginday acquiesced to his mother’s matrimonial wishes to conceal a homosexual lifestyle which The United Kingdom’s ever burgeoning liberalism allowed him to pursue, and Rani, allegedly perplexed with Jasvir’s lack of desire for her, as the investigation reconstructed the timeline, discovers her husband’s ruse. Jasvir crushes her windpipe out of fear with a weapon of opportunity, then incinerates her body in a domestically purchased incinerator, pointedly referred to by presiding Judge John Warner as a “meticulous” plan for disposal. What it wasn’t was a particularly logical construct for not being outed, which is why it became a story with enough teeth to gain international notice, roiling through  The Hindustan Times and other Indian outlets to earn a lede in the BBC, which aimed for a fall-from-grace approach, emphasizing Jasvir’s mugshot, purportedly with Varkha’s scratches on his face, indicative of her attempt to survive. Once court reporters had finished wringing their hands with this new wave pathological behavior, hardly in need of further sensationalizing, it then became a tawdry documentary reenactment, repackaged in mildly playful series like How (Not) to Kill Your Husband, whose staying power is reflective of an anodyne for the incredulous and discarded to rally around John Walsh.

Marriages of appearance have been deployed as optimization commands for centuries. Henry VIII turned the Mosaic concept of divorce into a mechanism of ridicule which diminished imperial authority. The union of Charles and Diana made the continued reign of Winsor problematic; Governor Schwarzenegger’s merger with the Kennedy’s through Maria Shriver failed in terms of cementing a political legacy, but these are about prominence and suspension of disbelief, whatever questions they pose about the success of monogamy or its circumvention. If Jasvir Ginday wanted a token heterosexual union to work, (it’s difficult to know) such as that between Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, the public at large can still surmise, and has, that springing this on a nascent bride from the British Empire’s territorial crown jewel was overwhelming, even cruel in terms of its malignant narcissism. Killing Rani and then deliberately cremating her remains because she reacted in hurt and repulsion only accentuated how such malignancy escalates, leaving  those with sympathy for this young woman wondering if the penalty imposed, 21 years to life, wasn’t this side of too lenient. Elsa Lanchester didn’t have the benefit of Rani’s cell phone technology, but the devastation she expresses is as relatable as Varkha’s, who didn’t have the benefit of time to absorb such a manipulative deceit against her. The impetuosity of youth, the status of women in India in its restive independence, these items are no excuse for the febrile impotency of patriarchal insecurity burrowing itself in the undercurrent of social norms. This case also provides ample proof that homosexual activists don’t have the last word on the ever expansive progressive tent. Hinduism, by its very nature, expresses a certain degree of fluidity, hence there was no Christian condemnation waiting in the wings if this man had told mamma the truth. There may have been other consequences brought about by familial conservative mindsets, betrayal, disappointment, but none of that was worth the savagery of this “gay panic”. Sociologists might look at this crime as a failure of assimilation between the former ruling power and the nation it helped to equip once beyond the cataclysms of the 20^th century, but the failure may also lie with Britain’s leftist radicalism. Two years after Jasvir Ginday ignited the media’s oft puritanical mindset, in the opening year of Theresa May’s conservative Brexit government, Gordon Semple died in Stefano Brizzi’s flat, in an even more grisly autoerotic accident. How Brizzi squared his conscience in the limited evidence of life he offered his prison wardens, in the year before his death in the winter of 17, is between him and his troubled faith, but Semple was a constable, a middle-aged man with a partner at home, who should have had some knowledge of the seediness vice squads are still expected to contain, but there he was, on CCTV, casually scrolling through Grindr, looking for a hook up. No safety net in Andrew Sullivan’s extraordinary success with gay marriage here. Why should there be? The sexual revolution has emphatically taken the closet off its hinges.

Back to Black in a Holy Land Apotheosis

We only said goodbye with words I died a hundred times.-- the late Amy Winehouse

We have followed Glenn Close in her various guises of hedonistic, playful, malevolence over the years. The uproar over Fatal Attraction is now nothing more than a cyclic cultural footnote, especially juxtaposed against the reverberating waves of emasculating feminine outcry, castrating the acculturated like Ryan Lizza and the swine like Harvey Weinstein, and even the pedantic like Al Franken. [Erik Wemple is sometimes more filler than substance, but he nails the bafflement squarely on the head with Lizza’s career. Though Wemple is accurate about employer termination clauses, the case here against the noted eastern analyst seems in need of adjudication. I have no vested interest in salvaging a tenacious liberal like Lizza, and I had my supervisor removed simply for putting her husband’s orgasms and performance in the same sentence, so my alarm may seem hypocritical, but to impugn the man over what has a feel of sour grapes seems to be a loss of proportion…] Dangerous Liaisons might be an extended metaphor for weaponizing the AIDS virus, and it is my favorite Close film in a way that The Big Chill is almost instantaneously a non-entity. Like many performers, however, Close embodies the nefarious enforcer, and she can dial her medical professionals up or down, accordingly, always with a slightly malicious air. There are hideously interesting aspects to The Girl with All the Gifts. The opening scene was the only time I have ever seen wheelchairs used as protective devices for a threatened able-bodied minority, but I am going to go out on a limb and call the narrative evolutionary diabetes of popular culture. I have nothing against women like Carey earning a living off of established zombie conventions, but her motifs come on the cheap. Oh, there are creative instances, a distillation of the bond between teacher and student in merciless institutional settings. Sennia Nanua does an excellent job as monster child heroine with her idealism and principles contrasted with insensate drive, with her savagery toward cats a deliberate poke in the eye. Consumers don’t need a reference website to see McCarthy’s imitations of 28 Days Later, stark geography, stark existence in tandem. The dowager wearies of Walking Dead syndrome.

However much appreciative of British one-upmanship against their American colonial counterparts, the BBC and Channel 4, if not ye old Pinewood Studios, love of humbling redneck reactionaries with an elitist sensibility of how acclimated European minorities are simply isn’t a real world reflection of social mobility, inside a class system or not. And we dare not exclude the French from this contention, since David Baiot is the Remorseful, if corrupting, Homosexual of The Churchmen. Audiences cannot possibly dismiss his fully rounded character Emmanuel as not deserving of ordination and grace, unless it emanates from his conscience, not ours. This diversity outcry from Mcdonald may have accurate demographics, but to the English mindset, there is no such creature as a British African who can flip black counter culture on a half penny. Ask Sophie Okonedo. Any regular PBS viewer knows her as the indispensable token of Great Britain’s sobering success, never mind the empire’s ruthlessness when Jamaican field hands were executed for the sake of sugarcane in the 1840’s. Okonedo is the unflappable gauze bandage, exchanging a prosecuting barrister for an unassuming lesbian like a living hologram. It is in this sense “Melanie” is captivating on the cheap: look at the little black girl behaving like a duchess. This is what sells, African appropriation and elocution of Caucasian table manners. If her predatory ferocity is a survival tool in the new world order, exactly what that is in Carey’s disaster remains mystifying, since we have little idea if the fungal symbiosis of the third generation will essentially wind up being the jealous plants of the body snatchers. Contrary to what my audience reads here, I treat the Muslim Saran quite well, especially since my bitterness is beyond her comprehension. I let her have a few dollars here and there, and she has no idea I’d ship her right back to West Africa, that I examine her like a foreign invader who will invariably destroy my United States. If she understood this intolerance, she would weep, and perhaps marvel at the strength of its roots, ingrained by self-inflicted alienation, among other things. Some journalists take the bull by the horns and equate Trump’s behavior with mental disease, and these are in the majority. Will, Sullivan, Joe Scarborough. Wiser men like Ed Rogers see Trump’s behavior as unpleasant, remembering that none of us are expert at psychiatric classification. I am impatient with certain aspects of Trump’s crass, but as someone long wading the trenches of expendability, every time I distance myself from his bluster, the left swings me right back with what is indicative of hysteria. There is still entertainment to be had in making Jerusalem an apocalyptic focal point simply on the strength of conviction. Jewish Israeli’s have  a divine right because the Torah makes it so, or Trump likes to side with winners, in the simplicity of reasonable accommodation.

Perhaps, within a week, or two, I will stop being let down by Mike’s schedule, (the wheelchair mechanic) I can order a new charger and or trade in my kindles and return to reading, actually passing my stool into our civilized sewer systems, as I could in the fall, and be more forgiving of the turn of the screw. I do not think Trump will necessarily ignite a catastrophic third world war. I also don’t believe the GOP will shield him indefinitely. This doesn’t imply impeachment. His reign isn’t worth what that would entail, but I am no judge of what constitutes mental defect. Isn’t Al Sharpton also a bigoted bully?

Leslie Howard's Sacrificial Graft

once, as I went past, I drew a sign at a point in space, just so I could find it again two hundred million years later," -- Italo Calvino, A SIGN IN SPACE

49th Parallel, in a nearly exact correlation to Lars and the Real Girl, a film roughly seventy years older, more fluid, less schematic, and even a different genre, is not an intrinsically Canadian film. Canadian films for and about Canadians may exist, and Canadian literary writers love to assume, through the chic ferocity of Margaret Atwood, that a distinctive Canadian identity exists, embodied in the graphic hero of Wolverine, perhaps, but much like X-Men is an overblown extended metaphor about difference and restraint, Canada never truly evolved as a nation, and it had the luxury of not doing so thanks to the fact that Britain Germany and France hate each other. 49th Parallel is actually a dialectical argument about neo-imperialism of two types: romantic absolutism (German Nazism, which for our purposes, for the time being, shall remain disparate from Italy's half-assed delusions of grandeur) and the UK's torturous evolution of virtuous monarchy, itself a national psychosis which is in no way unique to British sensibilities, although every empire has a unique and singular application.

Britain's unique mindset falls under this rubric:We defeated Spain and at least drew a stalemate with France at the end of the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, were therefore the truest heirs of Rome, and we get to tell the rest of the world how to live, play nice, and respect each other's autonomy, according to our rules and laws, because we killed enough indigenous natives, including Frenchmen, to have earned that right.

The Germans came along a little late and said not so fast, and the frightening thing is, the Germans almost won, despite their significant disadvantages, despite Leslie Howard's moral outrage, despite Powell's and Pressburger's near religious fidelity to the justice of liberal democracy, and Olivier's canonization by Pope Pius in the opening scene after the crash. How was the German vision different, setting aside their mechanized methods of sanitizing human civilization? The difficulty lies in the fact that Hitler as Fuhrer obscures why the German establishment rallied to eugenics, and that one ethnicity which had set itself apart for millennia became the handmaiden of the mother of all genocides -- one from which the disabled were not excluded-- but even Nazi's knew when to back off, and in the early days of Hitler's consolidation of power, German families rose up to protect their disabled loved ones, and officers stopped rounding up disabled German citizens to inter them-- setting these issues apart, what did the National Socialists want, or desire to achieve, and was it even possible to alter evolutionary science in such a radical fashion? It isn't an easy question to pose, but in essence, the Fascists, too, had such a radical notion of egalitarian purity that it might have wiped itself out in a mono-biological disaster of a human efficiency model, one which threatens to return with the merger, at least, between human and machine, perhaps in a few hundred years. Life is messy. Hitler's Fascists, unlike Britons, were invested in superior efficiency models as a notion of great civilization.

It was humanity's greatest quarrel to date. The United Kingdom won at such a great price that the lines of the equally messy Islamic insurgency can be traced through it, though this seems to have hit its watermark, whatever else these soldiers for Allah have up their sleeve.

In the same vein, Lars isn't a Canadian film either, but a North Hollywood softball a nod to US selfish shallowness about what community adaptation actually means, with Patricia Clarkson as the lynchpin for accommodating a necessary delusional mechanism, with a conclusion that sails in like a beatitude on a featherbed, but that's a luxury which North Hollywood can concoct only because the British bayonet and Yankee military success at consolidating territory created it.

In these troubled times, the sense of jeremiad in the US is overblown, even if Trump pulls an upset and has a bad term in office, but it is also true that US hegemony will never again quite be what it was, and without it, the Canadian comfort zone, and its presumed benevolence, will cease to exist. Man eating lions are a succinct minority doomed to extinction, but even the dowager has her pet causes.

Are the English European?

Momentary chuckle. Yes, I can answer my own question about why these pond mates are following me. Twitter is primarily a promotional format. I've had little to convey in positive or negative fashion about the European disabled community other than to offer mild praise to the journalist Will Self, who came to my attention through the indomitable Granta Magazine, whose editors are engaged in a conspiracy to turn the clinically depressed into pub sausages, or just horribly slow in updating their next travel issue.

I'd love to write a Granta travel essay. I know the voice right here, underneath the pungent odor of little Vincento's piss. Hard to tell if he has feline dementia as he has always been rebellious with the litter box before I came to bear responsibility for his brother's death, and it is mine, not the veterinarian's. Joey did not like a urinary tract diet and he wore my nerves. I'm guilty. Philadelphia has nullified my spirit, however, so interesting Granta's readers in any rite of passage of mine will take some doing. Warning to @EnhancetheUK: I can be vitriolic, and I have my own little personal black book of assassination targets, if you believe you can tolerate that. 

However, I turned on the Toshiba in the opening of a trying week of bloody busy weather, and it cheered me a bit to find you. 8mate is it? Or is that Australian? If I want to convert and vandalize the limousine of Prince Charles and Camilla I'll give you a toot. And oh yes, I intend to get this independent living center dissolved for corruption, hate crimes, and illegal collusion, and I am going to do it, too.

Stay tuned. 

Warhol Whittled, 15 Microcrons

Being and non-being create each other.--the Tao

Do Britains themselves remember that their military used to be efficient and even ruthless? Not that I expect Elizabeth to suddenly recalibrate her decorative, if sovereign authority over the isles, but if I had Cameron's ear, I would publicly execute these suspects as no better than rabid dogs, and I mean publicly, in the centre of London if need be, after two days of watching video of these ethnic Nigerians behaving no better than if they indeed had a rabies infection, a more than glaring example of how we have outpaced ourselves, how diversity backfires, and how medieval norms seem to insist on cohabitation within a digital age. I used to believe that juxtapositions such as these events were merely literary conceits, merging post-modernism, futurist techniques, but it is another thing entirely to be living amid such disconcerting savagery, and I am not entirely blameless there. Then again, neither are you.

The fact that these attacks are increasingly shallow and cosmetic illustrates how efficient western military technology has been against Al Qaeda, but I cannot imagine even an old and comforting militia like the I.R.A. engaging in such barbaric cowardice that these two Londoners exhibited, and to publicly shame them in a ritualized hanging might do the body politic some good, *Christian* and *Islamic* alike.

Short of snapping my foot fusion, or breaking my leg, which has not quite happened yet, I had a horrible day with my lateral transfers. If someone had sat me down when I was 23 and said "Liberty is going to destroy every hope and aspiration you have," I would have snorted with incredulity, just like you probably sneer at my posts in the same manner, but they did. I am not going to be able rub Aladdin's Lamp and marvel at miracle magic.