Biagio Cocuzza

Wilder recruited the famous Texan transvestite Barbette as a consultant to Curtis and Lemmon. Barbette ... was now in retirement. He'd had a glittering circus career before it ended prematurely due to poor health.-- Aubrey Malone, The Defiant One, p 80

Columbo's "Forgotten Lady", as written by Bill Driskill, is the only one of the original episodes to veer off the conclusions viewers expected of the series-- and is also one of the few episodes that immediately locates me back home watching it as a kid, not then nuanced enough to realize the regal Janet Leigh was here taking a rough 75 minute opportunity to vainly attempt to refute what Hitchcock did to women in the creation of the slasher genre. While not to be taken as a promotion of censorship, I tend to agree with the old lion's hostility to Psycho, whose legacy can be traced straight through to rap lyric misogyny, that jump cut butcher knife and shower curtain of which we'll never be free. It is an amoral thrill, the master's tease with his audience's hostility to feminine withholding. This is how Leigh utilized her stardom. If Monroe dripped with with lascivious intercourse, Leigh was another cup of tea entirely, despite the fact that daughter Jamie not only exists but carried on, even cheapening mother's legacy. For Janet Leigh, sexual energy is restrained. The pageantry of gazing on her looks and social grace comes first. Her style was the cake, as opposed to the exercise of love in and of itself, and Hitchcock with real malicious portents said "I'll show you," and eviscerated the shields of womenhood so well we never fully came to terms with the consequences, despite the fact that her foil against Falk isn't so much her crime as mercy for it against an aging medical impairment of which her character was unaware. The aneurysm, from which the patriarchy which she removes attempts to protect her, might be taken as a very early warning sign for Alzheimer's, which would ultimately kill Falk, whose eye cancer never advanced beyond its singular ravage which gave him his quixotic facial expression, a humane persistence for the sake of moral sanction, and even prefigures Leigh's end of life battle with vasculitis, with both actors barely making it into this century with any relevance, Falk only because he was beloved, and our nostalgia for that granting permission for Columbo to carry us forward on the back of twentieth century icons sending us off to a new century still trying to find itself, discontent with the price of the modern civilized world much closer the IRA of Hennessy than the other doomsday scenarios that preoccupied us at the time, including "global warming". Both then, and now, the west looked on the Troubles as the localized problem of a dead empire, but those guerrillas of the hot thrillers of my era were more than successful instructors for the turbulent horrors of these last two decades, while those of us who make for the fading Grace Wheeler's, desperately clinging to tarnished capital, are told the best we can do is transfix to the past, with the same passive intensity with which we try to break it. 

Bakery Frosting

Dick Polman's 2010 article in Obituary Magazine castigating Hitchcock's Psycho at 50 was fair, perceptive in view. I do not think Judith Rossner's Looking For Mr. Goodbar would have been possible without the reverberation of the first slasher movie on camera, but I also cannot find an archive version of Polman's piece for reference, and Dick has no reason to help me out, nor twitter as a whole, despite my pleading. 

Polman was one of the first journalists I read on Blogger, and if I wanted to be that kind of introverted groupie, I could drive to University of Pennsylvania's campus and attempt to place my disenfranchisement in his path, but I was never that far gone for our locally grown national analyst; drifted away from him, not from any distinct animus, not in terms of ideology, though his entirely wasted opinion about Romney and the sect that stuck in Utah provides a good indicator of my waning enthusiasm, with some exceptions, his byline in Obituary being one. I could scold and say "Dick, by the time I get to the library guide to periodicals." Or just be myself and say Dick can you help an old woman out? Unlike Scorsese, who can teach us about what Hitchcock was doing with Janet Leigh in terms of artistry, Dick does not like the legacy of Psycho's impact, which some critics suggest Hitchcock himself attempted to address with the later and even more chilling Frenzy, circa 1972. The opening rape strangulation in Frenzy was a vivid remonstrance of my childhood, and I did not need ThisTV to remind me that British pathology can be just as pernicious, and far worse than Jason in a hockey mask.

Hitchcock, however, is an unabashed structuralist, Polman's grasp of the culture shock in Psycho's wake notwithstanding.. What came after also got messier, and I believe Richard Brooks tried to take his cue from this in Goodbar's climax, which, if the filter is correctly applied, might be seen as Rossner's argument against Hitchcock's stark, manipulative fantasy sacrifice, and not simply in terms of Theresa's masochism goading her into her dangerous liaisons and lack of caution. Rossner's work begins the process of de-glamorizing pathological misogyny which Hitchcock consistently elevated, and Spielberg parodies with devastating irony in his use of Jude Law as the automaton which may not even know it is innocent of our fascination with murder of women in A.I. Law's Gigolo parody is an enhanced version of of the chameleon he plays in Music From Another Room, the Clinton era touchy feelly romance of manner which has not sold me, yet none the less wrestles a rebuttal against too much of a sweet tooth for dandies.

What I feel about Andrew Sullivan's departure as an online columnist, now, is contempt. He deserves credit for pushing back against LBGT militancy to silence hostile and trauma- considered it persons such as myself--but he is in part responsible for this path where the inclusion and destigmatizing of every form of conduct will ultimately be our own undoing. I'd like to see Andy take on the corruption of activists like Erik von Schmettering and Jimmi Shrode. If I had the dexterity I could make a best seller writing a title like Faggot Wars.

The Faberge Egg of Ponzi Schemes

"They defended a stubbornly held view of themselves, which was that they were ordinary and in the right of it."-- Doris Lessing, kindle loc 27

Dick Polman utilizes the rule of thumb that when mainstream media zigs, you should zag in the other direction, but Jantjie is an irresistible confirmation, a nefarious joke of first order rebellion against saturated accolades of a top heavy liberal era doddering under so many finely attenuated victories. I can only imagine the swarm of stringers and interns who have contributed to the fall out, the back story juice. One flagship outlet blames Afrikaner subjugation, and I don't doubt it. I remember the townships. I also remember Winnie's gang, politely swept under the carpet for the soaring oratory. Many analogies made between apartheid and American segregation, but the Dutch settlement of Cape Town and the European bloodbath which created the United States are not quite identical. White Americans stigmatized a diverse ethnic group, including themselves, and came out of it with an uneasy plurality and an archaic bureau which yelps in decimated cycles, reminding the citizen uneasily of nineteenth century pacification.

So I pick at scabs. To what end? We could speculate that perhaps forced co-existence of diversity, such as within the absurd theocracy of public housing, doesn't work any better than the refugee camps of my favorite Afrikaner film. What District 9 says about racial hatred is not quite easy to parse, as the native Africans are and aren't integrated, and both black and Afrikaners hate the prawns.

Toe nails on ailing left foot clipped successfully, I am absolutely ecstatic that I now understand how an aggregate works, having forgotten that I posted my Blogger address in my profile statement, my poor brain dancing with pieces in my life already over-extended, and alas, now I have to troll for subscribers, but we're all in a spam lot, just like Gorden Gekko is a parody of a pissing army ant. Why Oliver Stone had to make the 2010 sequel is a bit of a dribble, not that the drool of the story line rests entirely on Douglas's shoulders. I'm beaten people, beaten even if I get the fuck out of this building, even if I feed my former supervisor her head on platter. The aesthetic vanity of a grand dame in dignified old age is beyond and away, dead alive rolling through the motions. I will stay with Examiner.com for a time, however. Sedentary lifestyle-- with patience maybe I can join the editorial team, if I can keep my thinking cap.