As goes Stephen King

"Some creatures are able to inhabit a space you never knew needed to be filled." -- Patrick Stewart, when still able to deliver a sexually enthralling line

Celebrity accounts on Twitter can be problematic, not just for the celebrity, but for those less successful with recognition: In a mere moment of vulnerability, Ken Wahl could make my heart flutter, despite the fact that binge watching Wiseguy wasn't about aesthetic pleasure so much as laughing at the hairstyle shags everyone wore in the eighties, with a sentimental teardrop, and James Woods, (sorely missed) might have floored my miserable self with any direct validation. Whereas Stephen King incurs my wrath, and when he liked my tweet, a caustic pin in his beatitudes toward being spared, it was all I could do not to rhetorically kick his hoary ass from here to Topeka. He isn't the worst suspense writer in the world, and Carrie tapped into the hysteria of puberty with a relevant timeliness. Some might argue that Shawshank and The Green Mile were structural masterpieces on the big screen that encapsulated American innocence as a main redemptive quality. The dowager begs to differ, and lumps all this in with a dismissive hand wave, Scott Bakula falling into the same category of mawkish obsolescence, Quantum Leap here today, gone tomorrow, but enough of a rolling credit to cast him as Captain Archer. Enterprise is one leg of the Trek expansion franchise with which I'm unfamiliar, and while the premise is sound, with a protean NASA patriotic pride from which Megan Rapinoe could learn to chalk a cue stick, Bakula simply can't carry Archer with any sense of majesty. Cogenitor might have been an episode about the history of the Prime Directive, and it might have attempted to be a delicate cur-in about queer repression, but the writers fall short both on Trip's heavy handed egalitarianism and Archer's conflicted regret, and even I, watching "Regeneration" last night, noted no one ever grappled with the fact there's no hint of the Borg in the original, and no tie in with the heady conflicts in the spin offs. I was certainly into it when Next Generation was the currency of its time. I also thought of sending Shatner a nostalgic love letter thread over the classic "Incident" with Joanne Linville but then thought the better of it. William Shatner the actor in the right context can struggle with demons, but his paucity for pity is self-evident in a constant projection of joviality as a florid old man who's lost his looks, the last of the first.

Cowed Into Submission?

Nevertheless, America's "culture of celebrity" remains misunderstood, particularly when critics discuss its historical roots.--Charles L. Pounce de Leon

I cannot say I am intimidated so much as astonished. Miles O'Brien not only responded to an innocuous question of mine, straight out of disability culture---

@milesobrien Why not use a prosthesis [sic] on camera?

— Joanne M Marinelli (@Jozannyme) January 31, 2017

but followed me back. I am not an uber fan of his CNN rapid fire delivery, but decided his reporting was occasionally useful to me, and then, with his unfortunate accident in 14, lifelong cripple decided to take pity. He never noticed me before, and I just telephoned my entire family within local range to express my jaw drop at this offer of credibility from a video professional with whom I could never compete. I certainly cannot chastise a recognized science journalist for not paying attention to what he was doing, and unless I delete significant portions of my caustic rancor from this account, and never tweet another post, it won't last. I violate every aspect of decorum this fellow's moral clause contract imposes upon him, regardless of whether or not it is a natural inclination of his personality, or learned behavior. I do not deserve what his follow signifies, but I will bask, momentarily. Perhaps it came about because he learned a thing or two in the club.

Tony Todd Beneath A Pyre

"My life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man." Dan Fogelberg

Old women. Old unhappy women, wretched like an Olivia Newton John pop song plea. As faulty as our memories may be, the day Elivis died my mother was in my bedroom on my mattress watching the news of it, weeping and I, perplexed, either in wheelchair or kneeling on the floor, with stridency, asked "Mom why are you crying?"

"He was a big singer once, when your father and I were young," weeping in her unhappy indolence of fat, shrewish pale blue eyes, before I was born my mother was a knockout, a near perfect imitation of Sophia Loren. No one used classifications like bipolar disorder, and a trigger was a mechanism for gunpowder ignition. I was born because my mother was friendly with Marie Marinelli, my long suffering aunt, and Marie hooked my mother, my mother in near matricide with her mother, hooked her up with my father, and I was born because my mother miscarried a firstborn son, this attractive Italian couple who knew Fabian, and grew up in the first dawn of conglomeration of superstardom such that Elvis spawned. I was never a fan but I heard the soundtrack of "Falling In Love With You," female rendition, and couldn't work, the baritone of Presley's voice like a tidal wave over the bandwidth of reminiscence, carrying that ballad with the longing of vulnerability, swallowed into the contradictory passion of unity. It is never like that, our desire to envelop in the face of God, yet a corn bred bubba had the voice with the pull of such gravitas.

I wanted Afghanistan wiped off the face of the earth after 9/11. Then after 13 years of war we calmed down, tired of it all, but the Bergdahl swap is an unseemly and sordid business, especially if the lives of soldiers were lost in the attempt to recover their comrade. Kathleen makes a salient argument. That is how she makes a living, without room for now militant reactionaries like me, always diffident about President Obama even when I voted for him, but in this instance, I disagree with the swap. Suspending judgment on the issue of desertion, that I have to do, as how does an American desert in a wasteland where men are patriarchal savages? Men who live on medieval prescripts, addicted to heroin, like dogs, and no better than rheumy eyed dogs? 

I met an Afghan girl in high school, a refugee salvaged by Carter. To her, overwhelmed as she probably was, I wonder if I was even doubtlessly human, how I registered in her mind, or what the word cripple amounts to in Farsi. She registered to me, barely, as a foreigner. Too young for the implications, my parents, Nicholas and Joanne, were a stunning couple. Sequins and tuxedo, Sophia Loren and a sharp Kevin Spacey. In his prime, mio padre was more the handsome than Spacey. I do not want to lose my father, falling in love with you. A white man who could sing like nigger, with all the conviction of it, for. I. Can't help. Falling in love with you. Never in my life has this happened, not like it happened for Presley, whose daughter must have had an interesting time of it in the bedroom. Her father dying in a pool of his own vomit, a man who was an international headline in an army uniform, melting in my dead mother's breast, my eyes burn, my histrionic fists beating on Jerry's chest, while he wrote me factual letters from Romania.

Why are you crying, these mine spastic burning eyes?  

Cruel Seas, Clef

As seems to be the norm for this project, the British have their own peculiar variations, though Esther Costello feels like an American brand because of the standard tilt by Joan Crawford. Lousy performer, the camera loves her despite this, and yet in this muck raking narrative, she seems to struggle in a way that Nicholson's skill would not readily reveal to a viewer, to dim her alpha status for the sake of the story. Heather Sears is far less titanic than Patty Duke as the famous mute, yet there is also more realism, oddly, despite the fact that we're familiar with the prescriptive patterns the studio system followed in the fifties.

I am bewildered, Roger Ebert is dead, and I would have to make the time, or will have to if this really interests me, to discover why Monsarrat wrote this novel, and I do not mean it simply as a question of money, but as a question of Keller's fame conflicted with the issue of exploitation. I would not know where to begin, but it has thrown me a curve. Purchasing the novel is neither here nor there; I do not really wish to buy it. Looking at it can wait until I make space to browse in library, but I keep asking myself if the naval officer was fair to the iconic heroine, and I'm entirely in the dark; in addition, the wiki entry suggests the script substantially reversed the book. The movie, however, covers all the bases I've covered. Sexual development and abuse, chicanery, compliance over tyranny, rebellion, the angel demon dichotomy.

Beneath the film we have, there seems to be a counter narrative, one that was not followed through but would have been more intriguing, though we've seen this motif many times as well: abject poverty creating a banshee devoid of normal human intercourse. It opens the film after Esther's accident unique for its era. I'll see what I can do in terms of further inquiry, at least in a future tense.

Red Ball-- Minority Report

I have some nerve; even my detractors have to give me that, as I sit here almost every day with a decanter of unrequited love, and there she is, one of the very few woman authors who has been able to elicit the cooing pleasure of the Gerber baby out of my blunted emotional cynicism. From a fantastical daydream of a literary BFFL like her to a 30 second cryptic tweet as if we were equals, and yes, if Jayne Anne follows me I shall squeal, diffidence about mutual achievements aside; next to hers mine are minute. Despite my length of time online, it is still disconcerting. I frame my past of longing for a nostalgic farewell, slightly frustrated at lack of email access, since I still enjoy the art of the epistle, and she has a concurrent virtual footprint while I am fomenting the arc of lesser and greater influences. Do boomers ever get used to this pancake collapse of psychic space?

In the hierarchy of recognitions, if it was between Mia Farrow reaching out past her celebrity, or Jayne Anne Phillips willingness to indicate she remembers the issue of which I posted, the latter means more to my aging decline. This is unreal; totally unreal. Chill break.