Voracious Verite

The whole side has collapsed? -- Peter Jennings, a mortal inquiry

Two of the last films I would see at the Boyd Theater at 1908 Chestnut Street, this being the grime settled retail zoned business district emanating outward from City Hall, with the rotund and pilloried sienna brick lay CVS two blocks below, also of historical interest as a grim, bleak, industrial age factory conveyor belt gray seediness before my time, reflective of how urban planners built for lives of toil, was the 1998 Matthew Broderick Godzilla, detailed slightly in my archives in another context, no particular lucidity attached, and the 1999 Blair Witch Project, the latter leaving me singularly unimpressed in the emotional turbulence of dismay, though I will concede to the always omnipresent gap within our generations, that Sanchez and Mynick anticipate an eradication, a dimensional abstract of openness and claustrophobic undercurrent, which now assails us in pixels, but also offers a shield to species outcasts. These two lackluster fin de siècle dramas offer the near perfect set up to be wary of a “free” movie like Cloverfield being offered to viewers with cultural resentments against Abrams, in the troubled Halloween of 2020, a cheesy, material rendition of transmutation, under threat as a collective, over the top victory and bemusement. Within the past sixty years, which is basically the span of one human life, an average span, even as the median agony of a crone’s visage increasingly makes a centennial and emaciated body more common, sans Joe Biden, sans Pelosi, (does she reign as the most powerful woman for yet another 24 months?), Halloween, at least in both Americas, is about having fun with inhibitions released to the mischievous.

The question isn’t whether Cloverfield is a great homage to Ishiro Honda and his forever inflicted terror lizard. I mean, even if we take one step back in our biologically engineered ability to endure long walks, most of us alive today rarely see the 1954 original with which Honda shocked the collective consciousness. I did make it a point to refresh myself on that matter and will only yield on certain points of innovation: there are elements of greatness in the original film which veer south due to the very nature of post war authoritarian stricture, and by the time we get to Jet Jaguar of Megalon, even coming of age audiences for which it was made might blasphemy into heterodoxy. The industry essentially demolished Godzilla with overkill, and Abrams, as well, is guilty of over reach and series which crumple over on themselves in the post Lost aftershock. The Fringe failed as a transhumanist playboard. Revolution failed in its attempt to take Lost in another direction, as most of these dystopian loss of power movies do. Power plants may be vulnerable to military destruction, but when it comes to credibility, the universal loss of the electronic age for sustained periods due to diabolical menace is highly improbable. Even the Clover creature doesn’t quite achieve this end. The film does open and swivel into horror very well. Abrams likes brackets, and much like Joseph Conrad, uses them as close-ended narrative frameworks, proving the paranoia seeded in the digital age was placed there as high concept before the Trump phenomenon. I was not too perturbed at the thinness of the characters, particularly as these characters are literally dealing with annihilation without the benefit of blame being assigned to nuclear detonation. The question, which I certainly can’t answer, even with two viewings of the film fresh and better sequenced the second time, is whether Abrams is using September 11^th at our expense, or if Clover is successful as a coping mechanism. The movie divides critics on this point, with the enemy who wins. The win, however, is inexplicable, and nihilistic, if not also parasitic, as what happened to yours truly, the content generator, who only has hate as the price of survival, malice against an ethnicity into which she flung herself. In the medias res, Marlena manages to fend off the alien host just long enough for the viewers to grasp the aim taken at Romero with lightning speed, who like Honda, created the animated cadaver, forever and a day. When presented with a life of combat deformity who simply breaks down and cries, a momentary immovable object on tires, in her sagging sex, ambulatory pedestrians might ward her off, or those same pedestrians might have called for paramedics, but in those moments of night, of impoverished frustration, the outburst of tears went unheeded. She drove back to the ten story building with its difficult location on the dead end of Penn’s uncomplicated grid of interconnected squares.

Rectifying Chemical Imbalance

"Don't be so sensitive!"-- Robert De Niro, naturally inclined to mimic palsy

Jack Goes Boating is as much about transference as it is a contrast between experience and innocence, in attempting to come to terms with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, his craft, destructive escapism, and the use of a hookah as a biographical antidote. There is resistance toward full commiseration with the absence of his gift, repugnance toward his pudgy and nascent clueless character he portrays here, four odd years ago, but also admiration for the willingness on his part to savage vanity, passing the buck to Ortiz, whose limousine driver is more than the sum of Vega's contempt.

Why do we see the extended capture of an amputee engaged in rehabilitative training at the pool, which clearly serves for an extended metaphor for fleshing outward towards cumulative maturity? Appreciation of the actor doesn't lend itself toward connective sympathy for the liberal arguments embedded in his roles. He upended that by dying like hundreds of junkies before and since, either on a libertarian or material note, depending on the perspective we have toward addiction, and in spastic's view, the naturalist thesis is the prevailing victor. Complex life forms gravitate towards destructive dependence to alleviate negation, which to me seems covalent with our tendency towards being corrupt hypocrites, sans the plight of Pennsylvania's Kathleen Kane.

The Attorney General might hold my equivocal sympathy for her plight somewhat suspect, as well she should, since her review of Corbett's handling of the Jerry Sandusky investigation clearly had a political agenda to it, but the entire sorry fiasco illustrates that one doesn't have theological objections to gay marriage and the equality of sexual orientation as a purely cosmetic, Orwellian denial of bestiality. Is it really a form of political liberalism that led to the discipline of Pennsylvania's judicial employees over pornographic emails, or is Kane a closet authoritarian? If I disagree with her allegiance to Democratic principles, why am I standing by her now?

Because she's right, even if she engaged in some sort of orchestration of the grand jury to play hardball with her perceived enemies. Next week I'll have more time for substantive research to really wade into our modern jeremiad and the urgent need to scale back from regulatory reliance.  

The Queen no longer bleeds!

I was nearly ecstatic to have WYBE Mind television back on air, studying and absorbing European locales like a sponge. All their stations are down, and WHYY has also gone wobbly (and as of 8/19 has also gone offline, in a reminder of technical fallibility... sigh). Governor Corbett is not out to shorten my lifespan, miserable enough as it's been for me. Don't mistake the incivility of which I'm capable just because I've muted the foul and polluting level of my character assassinations.

European procedurals have their own lockdown catering to progressive mandates, but at least my poor mind had something interesting to study. Please come back WYBE. I'll donate, or whatever, just get your transponder back online!

Complicity, Clintons and Pecking Order

"I find the word 'cured' to be very difficult to define." --Julie Andrews

I am not going to dissect Arlington Road in the same manner that I attempted to flake from the mica of The Brothers Rico as a film; this is in part due to the fact that the agenda of Pellington and Kruger speaks for itself  in the more contemporary narrative. The threat is from within, that the American self-reliant frontier mindset is its own cancer, perhaps a crab incurable, and as dark as any ultra right wing mentality with which it might be compared. Pellington also offers Easter eggs for the flavor of any ideologue.

These are my main points of complicit ambiguity, however, with the understanding, on your part, that I do not have access to the full technical issues surrounding the making of the movie:

1. Was the child Brady a deliberate lure, whether or not Fenimore was switch hitting on bringing Faraday in, or was intent on framing and sacrificing Faraday from the opening frame?

2. Was Hope Davis used in a dual role as girlfriend / operative to suggest that no one can be trusted? Towards the close of the film there is a student, a plant from Fenimore's apparently huge resistance to the federal, progressive sensibility. I cannot tell from the credits whether this woman is an extra cast because she looks like Davis, or she is Davis in a game of masquerade, but the implication is the same.

3. What were Pellington and Kruger implying when Robbins ends the film by telling Cusack "They'll let us know."?

Perhaps homo sapiens is limited and self-deluded by First Cause entrapments in politics and physics alike.

The cult of the icon, however, is the least plausible when it comes to the validity of fronts, props, and powers behind the throne. Are the Clintons, for instance, part of a left centrist snow job? No, not in the Machiavellian sense. Hillary did not drive Vince to his death. She and her husband have a passive aggressive self-justification that was perhaps not the best thing for the US at the time, but they did not run around DC saying "Kill the bastards."

I am not in the Hillary glee club, however, and I never liked her in any of her incarnations, though she receives a passing grade for getting out of State without causing riots in Montana. Marooned taps into the psychic scar tissues that the modern autocracy makes us pay, exacerbating them. Gregory is all too convincing as the operative who has to keep the government safe from its own fallibility, and this makes it more than a movie and closer to a crumbling edifice about the price we pay for the right stuff, how the feminine is hated even in stock objectification. That no one would raise a hand to the mechanized astronaut's wife doesn't mean she isn't discarded because it is necessary, and she knows that she is complicit in the deception thrust upon her.

In Rico the government is like a binary switch. On or off, dismissed until it is a necessary last resort. In Marooned, personified in the abstract of NASA, it is the new secular religion, and in Arlington, it is a duped and impotent eunuch.

Deep Dish Cherry

So shall no foot upon the churchyard tread, being loose, unfirm, with digging up of graves.--Romeo and Juliet, 5.3.5-6

My essential argument, with which most of you would disagree, is that perspicacity should triumph over civility, not so much for trolling as an inherent value in itself, but for the sake of veracity. I certainly respect the way Maher has made a career out of it, and agree with him most of the time, when I spare myself the leisure of paying attention to his routine; it's been a long dry season, as far as that goes, though he would probably be puzzled at my defense of Roman Catholicism despite my lack of parish involvement and my soft atheism. I am having a terrible craving for soda or juice and hate the former. Vending machine in the laundry room but the guard no doubt put it on report if I requested access (sigh). Few things I have been neglecting with Arlington Road, Brazil, which I should make an effort to conclude-- but black ire doesn't concern me all that much. I live among you and want nothing more than to flee from the wonders of the African American codex, qualifying that with the caution that there are discriminations not yet explored in that assertion.

The Mossad Foul is Fair

My attitude toward the state of Israel has invariably shifted over the years, from that of unquestioned idealism to serious doubts about American foreign policy being tethered to Ashkenazi self-righteousness, and today, merely colored by cynicism, I respect the ruthlessness of the Mossad, but much like the Guardian staff, question the morality of that ruthlessness. Though I am powerless to be ruthless, my own morality has suffered from its intractable growth, which justice would staunch, an abstract idea that seems unlikely at this point, though the question of a diabolical disabled evil preoccupies whatever remains of my creative talent, as an ethical, technical problem. Whatever Linda's virtue, she undermines it by unnecessary humiliation, and her employer refuses to deal with it by utilizing an appropriate discipline, which in this case, is forcing her resignation. Linda repeatedly gets "herself into trouble." Her words, disrepecting her colleagues, turning on, and I cite, on the basis of facts I have in evidence:

1. blind subordinates, otherwise qualified
2. minority subordinates, who successfully sued under her administration
3. quadriplegic subordinates like myself, too incapacitated to meet EEOC deadlines
4. paraplegics in the same situation

If she was a corporate executive, do you think her tenure would be so long lived? Her former boss, Fern Markowitz, is as much a bigot as some feel Martin Peretz to be, except that Fern gets a free pass, as a Jewish lesbian, and I don't, because I troll in dark crevices, chewing grubs, but make no mistake, Fern was never about equality. She needed to control wheelchair users like myself, and that is not respect, with the exception of the symbolic tokenism Cassie James Holdsworth emanates. That is untouchable in Liberty's world, but for when I pierced it in anger. Fern took the problem Linda created and compounded it.

"I need to make a living Fern."
"Welllll," she trilled, like that, gesturing her hand at me, akin to a trainer with a rebellious circus animal, one that did not comply, instead of offering me a respectful discussion. Liberty's entire staff operates under this pathology of prevarication, which lesbians exude with peculiar talent, in Fern's case probably generational, and necessary, to evade the animosity Shakespeare reserved for supernatural androgyny, and this is the seed of my villainy, which, depositing in my rare disabled characters, is problematic, for I am taking a conceit, coupled with the real pain of my terribly cruel ouster, which Cassie acknowledged when she team tagged me on the grant proposal I was not going to do for their evil, and disservicing disability empowerment by letting this evil take its course in my work. Fern herself was ousted by a transvestite and his unstable and occasionally vicious partner, so it would be ironic, if, in truly unleashing my view, I wind up with a best seller, which is why I study intelligence. The price of vengeance, however, is an ancient lex talionis in the time warp of a modern age.

It is not Fern I want to eliminate, as Fern is punishment enough for her own reality, but the cruelty of the paradigm that allows her and her successors to engage in nearly untrammeled corruption, it has to go. Nursing homes are not an apologia for federally protected disability center ineffability.

Emily Yoffe: White House Procopius

Now David Plotz will never accept a future piece from me, though this does not deter my brain from its Slate bracket file (and much as anything, my Slate byline aspirations need fieldwork), but I shall raise my voice, gently, on the moderate left rollback of the Petraeus imbroglio: If the neo-Eisenhower moderates, a species with no political home to call their own, exhibit character flaws, journalists like Yoffe roll out the tape measure and say let's be adults. Eh. Not so simple. People get hurt, and even if sex that violates commitments to monogamy is no longer criminalized, the state still has an interest in containing adultery. My fling was inconsequential. All of them were, but that does not mean I could not have gotten killed, and I did immerse myself in a pathological marriage between a draft dodger and his wife, unwittingly. Young and stupid, I wanted the thrill of romance, and married men, I discovered, were not afraid of me, and if I was not florid, cranky, and breast fallen, I'd do it all again, but more coolly, smarter. There is a huge difference between the thrill of forbidden pleasure, however, and illicit affairs that damage employment and productivity. And my former supervisor traumatized me, even if she did not mean to do so, by throwing me off my guard, in an email, about her orgasm intensity, and this in spite of the fact that I sought her confidence. I concede that. I enjoyed her company and was lonely and needed work again, but putting all that together became combustible. I did ask her things I feared asking my mother, and that was my mistake, because Linda is an alpha, and like any alpha, her dominance took over, and I became anxious, and the rest is history. That damage will never go away, and I doubt it will for Holly Petraeus either, and her grief is more salient than mine.

Men with power seem to need that urgency inherent in the impetus to spread their seed. We get that, but Petraeus and Broadwell were military officers. The Bush Administration did a great deal of damage creating Homeland Security, adding additional layers to a security apparatus that may not have made us any safer. Obama will not roll it back, but he is more visionary, and as president he should care that intelligence vital to the nation is well managed; it damages his legacy otherwise, carrying over bad ideas from a corrupt and inefficient administration, like Holder being out to lunch with Fast and Furious. Petraeus and Broadwell are human, and Paula was not nuts. She was enamored, and intense, but neither she nor the general are children, and Emily, perhaps Milbank as well, in a more nuanced fashion, treat them as if they were. We joke about the CIA, but we sober up real fast if, say, China takes North Korea off the leash and Seoul finds itself hit with a warhead, si? To serve within the top echelons of power is a privilege, and that should come with certain restrictions on indulgence. Unlike my former boss, Petraeus did take responsibility for his behavior, and then hired a lawyer, which is seemingly at odds with the idea that there are no extraneous legality issues remaining.

Rehabilitating his reputation is one thing, but whisking him back into executive authority is foolhardy, especially if he could not see the implications of having something necessary to conceal before he and Broadwell became lovers.

We tend to believe our republic does a bit more than mirror that Politburo in the east, but what Petraeus and Broadwell did is equivalent to the Communist Party corruption that makes the west feel so superior.

Titan Cymbals

A Few Good Men (1992) is a dangerous drama exactly because it is so convincing about how conspiracies develop over little things, but suggests that the American conscience prevails in the end, when that really isn't the case.

The factual sequence of events, and actual truth, these are very difficult to ascertain, and I don't buy for a minute that a prominent colonel's career would be destroyed over a private's hazing in peacetime, as we can see how difficult the abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan are to prosecute, and these are far graver tragedies than the back story in this script. The same could be said of any victim's testimonial, mine, or a hundred other bleeding hearts, and this is simply do to the way group dynamics work.

But the film also supports Foucault's observations about how we human animals increasingly mechanize our biological design for the sake of proficiency; it is the entire subtext of the conflict between the characters Cruise and Nicholson portray.