Showing posts with label diane keaton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diane keaton. Show all posts

Monday, January 26, 2015

Fossilized Valor

Looking For Mr. Goodbar has to be studied when it is passed around on the small screen, as there is little other way to view it in the present tense. I cannot compete with Ebert's pique at Richard Brooks. I was too young, and though my mother let me into a hedonistic and disturbingly subversive world as a tantrum throwing evil coming of age tyrant I was (Milkman and his passive mother in Morrison's daddy novel imprinted on my psyche in a bad way: I was too young for Solomon even though my rereading of the novel was immediate and intense as an upperclassman), she kept the gate closed on Judith Rossner, with good reason, as I am now haunted by Theresa Dunn, I knew Goodbar as a cultural marker in my younger days, but wasn't literate as to what these markers truly entailed, and now that I am, I have to go back and read the novel. Brooks may have distorted Rossner's story, but the masochistic elements remain, a rotten egg transliterating anger into bad behavior, even if Keaton does obscure Theresa's more destructive triggers: Did I self-consciously want to die when I defied my father and Jerry, my surrogate authority figure who abandoned me (!), according to my inner child (I knew he didn't but my solution to this emotional need to cleave to this Irish Shakespearean was to flee, and no, I am not over it, though he looks like Gandalf today and I am Roseanne Barr who cannot afford veneers) and moved into the inner city?

I almost succeeded. And it takes a great deal of courage to look as closely and boldly as Rossner did in her investigation. She opened the flood gates, with nary a closure in sight. For myself, I may have the courage, but was never a long form fiction writer. My story that fictionalizes my assault is stark, and highly prejudicial. A former farmer friend named Jack suggested "I tone it down," and did, but I let the main character have my anger, and run with it. My conceptualization of its arc is the most difficult literary motif I've ever envisioned.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

LeVar Burton's Home Remedy For the Exsanguination of Diane Keaton

"The only thing I can say is there is a hell of a lot more Arabians than there is Jews." Billy Carter

The Family Stone might in some ways be a capitulation to Keaton's character in Looking For Mr. Goodbar, offered as a fumigating afterthought, missing the first 40 minutes or so of the classic dark side of liberal promiscuity. Thursday morning futilely challenging creditors who assuredly know, barring a miracle, the Treasury Department will soon garnish my entitlement. What would they do, my account holders, if the minority bitches get what they want and make me a new old home for cripples problem? Thus it is to be boxed in, seething with a detonator's destruction. I hate Keaton, always have, with her toothy minuets of peevish dismay, with Berenger aptly encapsulating the macho fag, since he later plays a genocidal racist against Winger in Betrayal, or whatever it was, the end of Goodbar was nonetheless a shock. Not graphic, but a shock. Feminist Liberal Self-Sacrifice in big capitals, my body is still adjusting to the Aero's demise. "Give it time," I coax myself, the correspondences are obvious. The deaf kids of Keaton's teacher, the deaf gay couple in the latter film whom Parker zings in much more polite reactive fashion than you'd get from me.

My mother passed away quite suddenly in 2005, which is when I accidentally lit my hair on fire, and my then support coordinator, Ann Piccinotti, sent me a voodoo priestess from Germantown. "I took care of a Jewish woman who said let me give you my money." This is what I had to deal with, in the middle of bankruptcy, my parent's funeral, I had to fend off an African with gaping teeth in head scarfs who thought she could siphon me. Progressive disability activists call this "mutual respect". I call it Spencer's cash register, though even if I still had some of my assets, I wouldn't fund him. not that I am above seeing that the far right generates cash flows. Most American neo-Nazis are, for evident reasons of non-adaptation, welfare recipients. My smirk is one thing. Calling for body armor then charging into battle against the infidel motherfucker is another matter.

I remembered my spin off pitch from the Cosby scandal, and need to put it in my file. Joan might be useful for this, although I wonder if we're all learning more about the strange aspects of black libido than we really wish to know. I'm still angry about the rapacious ghetto woman violating the sanctity of my grief. I got rid of her with a future truth, that Liberty Resources would no longer be my provider. Imagine how deep my impulses must run for a stocking to fill with ignots, sweet to crack a skull. I may be better tuned over the weekend, awaiting deliveries.  

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Deep Diving

Whatever comedy writers borrow from Shakespeare in terms of partner switching, what is funny in translation from the Elizabethan age becomes circumscribed in American films. The Family Stone (2005) suffers from as much, with shades of the white neo-beatniks, the good guys in this case, and shades of the white power professional, encapsulated by a Sarah Jessica Parker fresh off her Sex and the City run, pretty, affluent, misguided about materialism and soul, and to really strain the issue of social propriety, the gay son is deaf and in a cross race attachment. Pow, and oh no here she goes, but no, I am not going, except to point out that if the black actor had attitude like James Brown, and if the cute white son looked more like my old friend Jimmi with his gluttonous pallor and Goth nail polish, the film would have flopped, but Tyrone and Brian are just cute and cuddly, with the bare minimum of eroticism needed so as not to create any threatening aspect. On a superficial level, Stone may seem vastly different than The Brady Bunch, but it runs virtually the same playbook, with the English romantic miscues thrown in. You might ask me what risks I wanted it to take, and it is simple, real life doesn't erupt with lightning rod realizations; no matter what the studio system does, it virtually always distorts representations.