The Taste of Chicken is only Reputed

 And some men need to be killed--Gaosi Raditholo, Warrior

Although I want to spend more time on Pedro Aldomovar and the very rare quality of his rigorous discipline -- offering an almost seamless challenge to my responsive dread, reminding me almost of Otto Preminger, who was more obviously structuralist in his panoramic scope, I want to take a moment to discuss The Book of Eli in terms of an Inverse critic's contention that as a Hughes brothers film it’s underrated, despite its heavy Christian Everyman modality, being at its heart agnostic. The exposition of the script has its moments: the felines almost look like aliens from Mars, whereas the rat Eli feeds upon display of his hunting skills looks untouched, and these scenes may harken back to the old coinage “fat cat,” as representative of Gary Oldman’s character, and I’d argue that Jennifer Beale weaponizes her pre-flash blindness in an original fashion, and the motif of utilizing black liberation theology to carry the burden of white excesses for the sake of equally nascent white innocence, purity, this is something Denzel knows how to do, when he’s not otherwise embracing the pseudo militancy of Malcolm X. He plays a similar sacrificial agent in Man on Fire, but it doesn’t work in this genre, under the guidance of the Hughes, superimposed on a shocking and merciless post-radiation environment. The established religion and its most popular biblical text took centuries to evolve into the sectarian divisions with which we currently abide. If the rather vague backstory of how Christianity was blamed and purged for a nuclear deluge holds, and the young adults coming up out of hiding know nothing of it, then salvation through Christ couldn’t flourish once again, according to tradition. The Hughes brothers enjoy turning out a wry trick or two as auteurs, but Eli has a lot of bloodshed with little sensical return. It is a cop out.

All That Drama Queen Strum und Drag

If you'd really like some evidence, which you do not, of what the dowager temperament is like when it goes off, sine we're engaged in dissecting developmental aggression, (are we?) the novelist Gretchen Laskas, of whom I am actually quite fond, respect a great deal, and whose rational theism has had no small influence on my thought processes, can tell you I flipped out when P&W banned my account 15 years ago, and I've been guilty as charged ever since, more than ungracious, and have no idea what possessed me to send her a friend request on 6/28, waiting in mild suspense to see if I garnered a block. I did not, and was quite happy to restore at least one other Speakeasy contact, I really was. It softened up my alienation just a smidge. I thought she'd never speak to me again, and this is why I tagged her account to my family's attention. All that melodrama! And here we are, with a peak of middlebrow parameters in the looking glass once again, but as you all know, I am an infrequent Facebook participant. I was also off a bit on what she might look like, and is more attractive than I imagined from our exchanges. I'm as over the top as Training Day😎😎

Disgraced Under the Torch

"I believe in genocide," Robert Downey Jr, not emulating Michael Gambon

James Gandolfini begins to be noticed in his supporting roles, in one of those mysterious processes of the sudden obituary for a performer one never knew, like the old friend in your back pocket; his support was small but pivotal in She's So Lovely.

How much the man is to be blamed for the muddle of The Last Castle is open to debate, but he hit the requisite notes as the resentful subordinate. In Fallen, (98), he is supposed to be the false feint to Denzel's righteous Hobbes, but Sigel's cinematography makes everyone look diabetic, and one wants to rush to give Goodman insulin rather than fear his conversion. If Hoblit is connotative about race, it is not implicit, and his unwitting template for the now tiresome bro series, The Supernatural, is not to the director's lasting credit.

The film strives for nuance, however, in a more ambitious fashion than the show. Azazel is a stand in for our inhumanity to ourselves. No obstinacy can eliminate it, just as strength of will cannot eliminate vulnerabilities that thick set matrons, their brains made of alligator stool blockage, will prey upon.

My manual wheelchair flip in 2007 was humiliating enough, lying for three, four hours latched onto a belt buckle which threatened my organs. How many days pass, Trudy, a well trained Oprah gibbon, launches her assessment team upon me, always on a day I have something to resolve, shamble-ass Debra Horne bellowing in the hallway "Do you want to hurt yourself?"

A former vocational counselor from Mississippi's civil service, and then they call out the big guns in April of this year, Department of Health and Human Service assessors. Do they inspect the work the rental agent hasn't done? No. Do they care how many of these aides violated my personal dignity? No, they use their ability to walk to intimidate me, rushing my bedside, before I held their utter impotency at bay on second visit at my door. I've had enough. I am not going to forget, and I'll break the law, if necessary, to punish this cruelty. This is your energy for the vengeance fueling hell. I forced my disability center to file a grieve with DHS, nothing happened, but this same department jumps through hoops for minorities scoping my back as a target, making themselves fools in the process. The state may not fall anytime soon, but bureaucratic procedures at this pro forma level are a travesty. I am prosecuted for my debt on one end and my disability on the other. Why not simply restore me to employment and relocate me? No, my failure means my body will be used now in PA for slave labor. 

Brass Tacks

"It sounds like a movie." --Dorothea Stillman, when Newsweek was still a viable rival.

The production values in and of themselves weren't all that flawed. The NBC derivative on the original was shot well. The dialogue was brisk. Underwood was credible, but in the dialectical tension between network past and network present, Burr's more abstract chief was more viable. Those of us who watched Underwood in this tinsel song and dance knew the con was on, but what were the contents which made the snake oil difficult to swallow? The veracity of the character was wrongly concentrated in the script; I've no doubt the FOP bats for officers disabled in the line of duty. Perhaps some get day jobs, but playing a paraplegic who becomes a mimetic of his former mobile self whose physical dignity is respected by his perpetrators pitted against him in a hissing of discharged helium going over the top, this was simply an assault on any viewer's intelligence.

I remember as little as possible about Raymond Burr, but recall enough to know his series was wisely treated as a stage play, Burr expounding accordingly, a muscular, if two dimensional pitch on how Arthur Miller would define manhood akin to the lion in winter. I kept thinking of Denzel, comparing major and minor notes, perhaps even the praxis of performance between them, especially when a girl in school clothes screamed with piercing pitch in my right ear, turning me into a court tv troll. I frightened her, in my beret, glasses, distended teeth, as I admonished her and minority wilding sisters to control themselves in public. Sales associates who know me, witnessing this, suspected something else was afoot. I only occasionally get combative with these cliques, if I see something particularly abysmal. In this instance, the girl's scream triggered a slightly painful leg seizure, so I took it on, the admonishing, not sure what I should feel that I intimidated a school girl who forgot herself.

A racial incident? Yes, no, or depends on the perspective. Kids screaming in the streets could be a harbinger of escalation. I would have flunked out, handling this behavior at the scholastic level or above. Am I a slightly more pliable version of my father? Yes, despite the fact that I can cite socio-economic rationalizations with the progressives in Reich's tableau. I came back to the city of my birth with the best of intentions. There were, or are, remnants of Philadelphia's leisure class who deplore the city's self-depreciation; it is this which is the real blight on the Greater Delaware Valley, regardless of ethnicity. It does not excuse the sense of entitlement which suborns poor social behaviors.

Perihelion Sight

"Nobody understands what's going on." --George Clooney, not yet in the State Department

Syriana was one of the first films I saw on Netflix, and I cannot say my reaction was compatible to our deceased avuncular critic. Headphones do not compensate entirely for tinnitus and wax build up, and the best I could do was think "oil equals one serious game of expendable collateral damage," and then I otherwise felt stupid, and don't like feeling that way. Denzel's upgrade of The Manchurian Candidate, while more canonical towards the 62 version, had that same diaphanous quality, more trouble than it's worth, not taking "aim at the left and the right," as was written of the original, but equating globalization with opportunistic expediency?  Columnists wrote similar sentiments about the finale of Lost, and if this all adds up to a new subgenre, is this species assisting us in hitting the brakes in a responsible fashion?

I cannot get rid of the Democratic Party. Josie is writing state wide emails about being unable to adopt her nephews and urging an expansion of Medicaid for the Allyson Schwartz campaign. I told the campaign ADAPT's favorite lesbian was my enemy. I told the campaign they would not know the lesbian with foster care snorting out of her every orifice was my enemy, wished them luck, and unsubscribed. I told Organizing for America (Action), to "kiss my spastic ass," unsubscribed, and was then forced to opt in the spam filter, because OFA insists on my loyalty. I am not returning to the GOP, although the idea of approaching Senator Toomey's staff has entertained serious mental calculation. My problems run deeper than aligning with any one part of the political spectrum. Progressive expansion and conservative austerity share blame between them, and this for not studying Heidegger in the pragmatic sense, and not in terms of quantum physics. The tools we use solve fucking problems, while the systems we create make lives of intractable complexity.

Ronstadt Data Lacerations

Astute enough to save my documents and revisions to my external drive, that much I believed I could do, and do not know what was lost in translation. For those not published, this is a visceral pain that creates ulcers for writers. My fantasy story was taking shape, soon to be finished at about 7,500mm. It and other newer word documents may still be on the HP and I am going to wait for transfer cable, or track down a real Creasy and stick enough C4 up the monied rectum of Bill Gates for my own creative destruction. I still really like Man on Fire and Denzel in it with Scott's soft catholic sympathy, and we're still turning this empathy of my own for imperfect vehicles whose flaws provide a pathway toward metaphysical consolation. If my old Dell was a well behaved boy, and the HP a bit of a bitch, this Toshiba is Dexter on an indiscriminate rampage. If I boot the HP now my sanity would be in jeopardy, and so I am holding off, sure I mismanaged Office 07 in some way. This lady may be a toffee Starbucks version of Madonna, but she has nothing on Ronstadt's range.

Straight Arrow

"She showed him it was okay to live again." --Christopher Walken


Since we were most recently discussing reconciliation and its lack thereof, I have forgotten I wish to grate on your nerves one last time this evening, and mention that Tony Scott redeems the flawed vehicle Man on Fire, and yes, it is flawed, with an over-sentimentalized brutality, and a silent ruthlessness hinted at, but not quite evaluated fairly, in Denzel's Creasy or Walken's Rayburn, and the Latino father's Russian roulette suicide is sanctimonious, and yet, and yet-- what makes Washington fatally over the top in Training Day somehow falls into place here, with its gritty textured realism, redeems the monstrosity of our own capacity for the cruelty of expenditure, of willingness to annihilate, whatever the reasons, fraud, money laundering. That Walken downplays his menace, and is world weary, humane, slightly tongue in cheek, compliments the sense of redemption earned, something else your favorite Catholic atheist is roasting on her spit.

When I return, it will be for revisions, and as always, better penetration, even if I never reach the lighthouse.