Tribunes

"In recent years the star, suffering from Alzheimer's, revealed he was lonely."--Sara Malm

Policy analysts should respect foreign film releases as predicates, and The Horsemen is one of those which might have served as a bolt pistol extension to the brain of the 43rd president, not that our 44th is on much more hallowed ground.

One can understand Omar's vast plateau of superstardom as not contradictory to his loneliness. Who might have ameliorated that loneliness? Would primarily Caucasian westerners have braved the latter day Nubian people in their sciatic dissipation to comfort him? One of his earlier roles, little discussed, perhaps because the film was badly made, not willing to address its own implications, was as the Spanish priest in Behold A Pale Horse, about the residue of Franco's victory. Everything is over by this time-- the time of the film-- though Vietnam was still brewing in the kettle while this black and white docu-drama was assembled, and Omar's character escapes with his life. Peck's Republican partisan doesn't kill him, and the fascist forces are reluctant to antagonize the Catholic Church, giving Sharif a certain ambidextrous fluidity.

Someone in Bush'es cabinet, and why not Dr. Rice, should have consulted a humanist after the shock of 9/11 and played The Horsemen for The Decider. The .02 percent of his literate hemisphere might have listened to Omar's role as the obstinate rider. You do not invade Afghanistan if you pay attention to the coda herein, whether Russian or American. Tight lipped. 

No obituary post the evening his death made the wire. He was already an acculturated mummy entombed, despite his last major role. Unlike Bacall, Sharif was finished as a bankable name after thrillers like Juggernaut came and went. It is the thickened beat in your arteries, the Arabic everyman who never got to be himself until he was far past the age where it might have mattered.

Indelible Banana Peels

I really have you going, don't I? Well, bemusement may be a small consolation for beggars, but what I was straining to remember in Stardust is why I would not offer Jayne Anne any further appreciative missive, or need the mentorship somewhat glazed over by her meritorious caste. She and I appear together in Oxford Magazine, some years ago now. She is transcribed addressing the freshman class, in a rhetorical tropism with angels, why I don't know. Her address opens the issue. My byline closes the issue because the graduate department telephoned me, appreciated my acid pouring forth against the Iraq war, shredding American materialism, and to the extent that this creates a dialogue with a financially secure feminine has been from the south, and a feminine has been who was a has been arriving for departure since she started, it is enough. Perhaps she is a catty embrace your inner bitch type, or has a fragility I cannot hear in my ringing ears. I no longer have praise to offer, nor the power to be moved by her output, nor anyone with which to share. I told myself to stop engaging with my aunt Marie, but I am worried she is going to die, and so returned her call yesterday; the sheer inanity of provincialism never ceases to amaze me. This is why I want to go home to Rome, I ask myself, to listen to histrionic crows screeching in sound and fury?

I cannot live with her again. I can't stay here. Adoption along Rittenhouse Square seems unlikely, and all I wanted to do was watch a movie.

As to the letter I mailed to Ms. Phillips, all I remember is an exuberant gush of the sort I have received from bush babies-- the strange psychology of fandom which may not have reached her, as I sent it in care of a publisher. The only thing I remember about experiencing Black Tickets was the edginess of the authorial voice had its appeal.