Wary Paradigms

The dowager has written before about displeasure with the Criminal Minds format. "Suspect Behavior," was slightly more of a nonplus intrigue, due to the fact that Forest Whitaker knows how to make minority dysfunction palatable, even cuddly, as in his contingent opening of The Crying Game, but she doubts the original mother ship of predictability will survive the dismissal of Gibson. Shows like this, long running, bordering on nearly speculative absurdist theater, in weaker plots, depend on anchor portrayals along the lines of the Gibson Hotchner model. One suspects there are facts on the ground readers aren't being told: Consider how often a lead series star is fired due to a writer. The SWG is invisible, a running credit under the creator.

Black Adder, Wobbly Amin

"I am not kind, I'm vicious. It is part of my charm." -- Clifton Webb

Forest Whitaker oozes with a glutton's agitation. In a world where whites like the hard menace of Shaft, Whitaker is Fat Albert, edgy and twisted with angst by turns, this asserted with only passing familiarity with his recur on The Shield (a series worthwhile here for its stark honesty; I know, I know, I may never get to it, and only know as much as I do about it because Fox ran it after midnight for a stint and I regret not taking more care--another day). But I do not mesh with viewing Chiklis for much the same reason.

Hypermania is difficult to perform without annoying your audience. Chiklis has it, James Woods finesses it. Whitaker wobbles attitudinally, which is why he fails as a lead. Playing off Foster in Panic Room just works. Prat boy with conscience picks a side, securing his sentence in the process, but Diary of A Hitman doesn't, because it's a slobber, much as of course casting him as the colorful African tyrant.

Big daddy is a fading species. Idi. Papa Doc. Baby Doc. They peopled our latter day socialist stagnation, which is now going to send our republic into convulsions. I am drawing closer to George Will's colorful umbrage, and think the president should resign, but then again, the 43rd president is a war criminal. The 44th dulls Harvard's preeminence considerably. I no longer believe in the American two party system. I do believe Whitaker has an authentic touchstone in The Crying Game. Fat boy out of his depth, playing the hand he had, with bleary gaze, just enough blubber to evince inner city terrain and poor nutrition. This leads to brain plaques, the aggression of dementia. His portraitures may be adept, but not memorial in any conflated measure of acclaim.

Perhaps intense malevolence does have a ripple herd like effect, given the extraordinary cluster of spree killing episodes we have to field. Perhaps the Coke a Cola security footage commercial has a point.

What are Hoodies But Cloaks as Fashion Statements?

no boy will take me because I was born without a nose-although I am a good dancer and have a nice shape-- Miss Lonelyhearts, page 2

Grumbling. I need to get myself on the journo list to make myself available to the paparazzi junket, deploying the term loosely. Patrick Stoner says you put your name on it, this list. I'll turn blue before any salaried member of the fourth estate informs me how this is done. Reluctant admission that one likes Jonathan Rhys-Meyers a little better this evening, though fucking the enemy started on True Blood. One can take pride in a strength which has not yet led to the typical tactics of Caucasian self-destruction, or is it merely functional inability? I glanced at the headlines for our newest network fresh face, and Jonathan babe, you don't know how lucky you are; my adventures amount to not falling off my bath chair. I do not let myself drink as I did when an undergraduate, though you could tell me a few things about wardrobes, the pressures of continuity on a derivative period drama. 

I found an interviewing celebrities module, which earns a belly hiccup of amusement. Despite what some of you may believe, I am not out to break down the insulating level of security people like Jodie Foster need. I don't care who has bipolar disorder, who has a sexual fixation with Obama, who is cheating in the Zeta-Jones saga, nor even who has a cross dressing fetish in green stockings. I'm after a different kind of veracity about performing and film, something similar to the highbrow analysis Kidman did for The Others (2001). That feature profile stays with me because it was damn decent writing examining craft front and center and I can't remember who did it, a WaPo syndicate, more than likely.

Why am I talking to any of you out loud? 

As tolerant European culture is toward Jaye Davidson's Dil, transvestites always seem to have criminality associated with them, no matter how feminine, something not necessarily the fault of the public at large, though she-males transition into popularity with much less success. Willa Cather did males in drag, but her celebrity wasn't derived from that. Jaye stands front and center, however, in a film that seems to convey our seductions matter more than ideological conviction. The actual center of the love story is between Rhea and Whitaker. Dil is merely triumphant in The Crying Game because Rhea's Fergus is guilty. The black soldier he holds hostage breaks past the barrier of conviction, something of a stigma the former terrorist will carry beyond the terms of his sentence. Is Davidson reticent because he is too successful as a gender chameleon?

I don't know how to meet a good man anymore, one who would be interested in me, for myself. Frank said he loved me but I never felt that, and it is irrelevant anyway, due to his poor social skills and my contempt. Before him I have simply an interesting string of rebuffs, a wearied cumulative effect. 

How do you find a companion to walk with you in your last fifteen or twenty years? Is it too much of an effort, habituated as I am?