The Death of Merle

"All fault tolerance techniques must be built upon a failure hypothesis."-- Concurrency in Ada, p366

The actual online disabled community must feel cheated by me, as they probably should, with the exception being my embrace of emergent aggression in my pre-sixty years, though I can confirm I already know the literature on aging and violence, I do my own thing, and some actual wheelchair users who surf in may scratch a dandruff flake wondering what Romanek's troubled Reagan era parable, such that Static is, has to do with the terrible toll of human helplessness, and the risks I take, eschewing attendant care in a battered, now protesting Jazzy, without a vendor to service it no less, though Moss at 2400 gave me a vendor to try in an emergency, I am, essentially, at the mercy of chance, my jugular exposed. I can make a correlation, of course, between Keith Gordon's fatal aspirations as Eric, and the disabled community's fatal Orwellian prognostications, but why should normal Americans be forced to think; it runs counter to the American way. More importantly, the Farrelly brothers fail. Shallow Hal comes thumb and forefinger close to fusing deformity and Hollywood into a true aesthetic viewing experience but they cannot pull it off. The jump shots to the guy with his obvious brace diaper padded spina bifida, and the woman with the skeletal arms-- my neighbor down the hall has the same condition-- jar the comedy, taking the viewer out of context on discordant notes, despite the beat written into the script. Even as a high farce, letting birth deformity be what it is mars any genre back to earth, which is why I doubt disability will ever truly make great art, cupping my ear to the carpet for the roar of thunder to follow. True, Christopher Reeve, whom I chastised while he was still among the living, was given a cameo on Smallville, and it worked, but Reeve was a trained actor, and ran his larynx tortured invalid cyborg skit before yielding to a lowly pressure sore, something to which I too am at risk, dying in mid-sentence. The Walking Dead now appeals to me, not that it fools me. The intense declarative sentences lend themselves to some nihilistic bemusement, yet its stark survivalism has caught up with those of us always a tripwire away from the worst at the bottom of the barrel. I feel like waving at the production crew and blowing a kiss, even if I'm necessarily a few seasons behind and don't know how close to season 8 WPHL can bring those without a cable subscription. The gay couple bringing Grimes and the troupe to Alexandria make me sick; that goes without saying, but we understand the South conceded feudalism on the ruthless calculus of General William T Sherman, whose memoirs I've scantily penetrated in the 20 (?) years I've owned my LOA edition, starting them again, and Georgia minds its p's and q's with only the softest hint of subterfuge. I knew Rooker was Merle without acknowledging that this is where the serial killer inside went, into a mean mother of a bastard the Governor's system had to destroy. As naturally born anarchists with claws cannot be trusted, they are exterminated by liberalism and tyranny alike.
What's she getting at? 

Twins, Arches, & Basalt, Voila Auteur

I evidently appreciate Thomas McCarthy vision of progressive pushback despite the fact that trying to live it in my own life has turned my innards overripe. Films being what they are, however, it seems only the Farrelly brothers take risks with the grotesque, with spina bifida contained by leg brace and diaper and crutch, and McCarthy is cautious, not risking this over much in his desired, some might say extracted, performances. Jenkins' Walter Vale has the slight and not unkindly whiff of a pruned Puritan about him, especially in his jagged rebuff of his student, his interaction with the piano instructor who mildly offends his sensibility, Hiam Abbass is muted in ethnicity, not Syrian, slightly too Anglicized so as to evoke empathy and lower defenses. Haaz Sleiman is like the jazz player, infusing the somewhat shriveled European cultural polish. Danai Gurira clips it like a Nile Queen. I've seen the type before, in students, bad attendant pair bondings, but my point being that McCarthy very carefully polishes his collection, edgy, but with all the parts clicking in the right places, rather than the inner city disrupting, or threatening, the pattern of the wearied American academic.

This is still a great film, and it is the real reason I persist with disability themes online, despite what you may believe to the contrary, to deconstruct such precious jewels, probably the only thing that keeps me human, at the end of the day.

What McCarthy manages to expose is the cost of the systems we impose upon ourselves, their crushing weight, sacrificing the gifts of cultural infusion. The gifts of the west are not dead when seen through fresh eyes. Mouna's ability to get emotionally involved with the Phantom of the Opera encapsulates and reflects on her situation, with her son in a dungeon she cannot penetrate, and Mrs. Vale's music offers this mother solace in much the same way that Walter finds an outlet in learning the djembe

No one is accountable here, certainly not the guards at the center where Tarek is detained and removed, individuals against whom a strike would be futile, which Walter finally accepts in resignation. This does not mean that immigration is not an intractable problem due to the imbalance of affluence, nor would McCarthy's compassionate leniency solve for it any better than Arizona hardliners, just to cull an example, but the US certainly lacks a sane and coherent policy, something that transcends administrations.

That such divergent visionaries as Tolstoy and a post modern independent director could illuminate the same problem, how our systems subsume autonomy, points to the fact that we'll probably need to shave a few billion of ourselves off before we scare ourselves straight, and start to really pay attention.

Paltrow's Slinky

In the sense that this is relative, the boys may not find this accurate from their point of view, but I do not find Gwyneth Paltrow particularly attractive, or sexual. She has a mild sensuality at best, a slightly fresher, if still wispy version, of Sissy Spacek, and even Mia Farrow. They are rather the studio workaday blondes, and this ability to be a blending chameleon may be a key to their success, though I may return to my theories on yellow hair and pale skin later.
With these reservations a given, however, I rather like the Farrelly brothers' Shallow Hal. It shamelessly puts the freakish aspects of the human body front and center, exploiting and courageous at the same time. I'd certainly take a cameo with them.

I will take aim at this in more analytical fashion as I can at a later date. This is a backdated post, added in during my 2012 transition, and I am bushed over what for most is a simple process of monetizing two blog accounts while I move from one to the other. I do not know how to add code from AdSense to Blogger while LiveJournal still has third party access, and I cannot afford to waste all this time.