Seedy Undercurrents

Cagliari has been the capital of Sardinia since at least Roman times. travel guidebook, p 1071

If I was stranded on a desert island, one of the most prevalent of literary motifs in American literature, regardless of genre, as Lost in Space owes its analogue optimism to Robinson Crusoe, and on this island, had the ability to steal wireless passcodes, but could only have one serial, I'd opt for Bruno Cremer's Maigret, not solely based on my fascination with Simenon's ability to be unsparing, stripped and terse, with flourishes; there is just an aesthetic appeasement in the France Belgian production, sadly absent from more contemporary grafting of other writers, like Higgins Clark. These mysteries may be done in France, but they feel like hatchet jobs. Cremer transcends this, when it comes to marrying Simenon's exposes to the modern world, and any number of these teleplays can be studied again, and again. Simenon recognizes provincialism, and the people Maigret knew often serve as lynchpins, either as victims or perpetrators. Maigret's schoolboy friend, from the estate where his father was a steward, initiates the action which leads to the death of a courtesan, and that is still the proper term. We can argue about prostitution as a designation, but these are more properly street walkers, risking their lives, and I am not sure what the local LOTR chapter hopes to achieve today in demonstrating against violence street walkers face as par for the course. I certainly cannot say that legalizing whore houses makes whores any safer than a Craigslist notice. I am, never less, confirmed to attend, rather irritated. I had intended to show with useless objects in a shopping bag, a twenty four dollar butane lighter I no longer use, old Glimmer Train issues for five cents, other things. All this takes time to prepare, and hard winter is around the corner, with my disability insurance static, once again, even if a small COLA was restored for 2017. I am going to have to opt out of Medicare shortly, if I do not want SSI-- SSI has stringent overpayment rules, and even if I never sell another article, I cannot live with threats from Social Security. In 1987 they suspended my entitlement, for what I'm not entirely sure, and I had nothing, for months, in the dawn of getting sucked into Presbyterian Homes-- so those of you who marvel at my obstinacy may want to reconsider. I was a kid, a student, and the Social Security Administration halted Supplemental Income because ?-- I don't know. Lack of case management review. I cannot remember how I survived, but now I'm in my mid-fifties, and I fear government more than I hate Thiel for taking a media outlet away from me and others who challenged boundaries.
I rushed another piece on Daulerio's settlement with Bollea's legal team, against my better judgment, but if I go down, I go down fighting. I'm building a dossier. Why, I'm not sure. Nick Denton revolts me. Every homosexual does, but there are degrees, and I'm still a bit bruised over the fact I wanted to save a radical British faggot's successful media model-- but Peter Thiel, there we have revulsion combined with fear. Homosexual psychology cannot be trusted, and I'll never get away with asserting this in mainstream outlets. It will not stop me from trying, notoriety, name recognition, notwithstanding. If Denton had survived, yes, I would have had the utter nerve to tell him he was a radical abomination, and then showed him my CV, and would have expected him to take me seriously, at least under the ADA. Bafflement away.

Hard Analysis Halt

"Stendhal and Sartre, curious choice,"-- Simenon's dialogue

Blogger never conveyed to me in explicit terms that I could no longer monetize this account through reactivation of AdSense. When I did post to the forums, my quandary apparently wasn't clear to computer literate users. They asked if I had an account. Yes. Inactive, because I was a doofus in initially experimenting with LiveJournal, which ended its partnership with Google's services. I earned a whopping 3.49 cents, and there it sits. I have tried repeated to figure out how to reactivate AdSense with this domain-- though not recently.

I could scrub out my biting temperament and remove the adult content flag. As most of you know, I am more stodgy than explicitly graphic, and even if I wanted to incite in a direct one on one ratio, I'd more than likely just get my ass kicked. The unfortunate bastard elect, who rode the gravy train of my vitriol, can get away with it. I can't, for obvious reasons, as advocating violence pushes boundary lines, and my intellectual pride, most of the time, says invective is beneath me, and even if I pushed and got away with it, I'd have to live with the results, which Donald Trump seems unwilling to do, or is perhaps incapable of doing, taking responsibility for his gut reactions. I'm not quite positive, if I suggest X, and Y followed, that I would not bring Satan into being, but by the same token, I am naturally inclined toward anarchy as something worth experiencing, life on full throttle.

Just not all of the time. Leading me to the perplexity of being always over-extended. If I go to Niume News, I'd get even slower, unless I break up with Blogger, and archive this eclectic thesis for something more topical, policy oriented, at least in an imitation of decency, though I'm already subversively thinking about calling it "The Dump," punning on old age obsession with shitting successfully. [Who really cares if I triumph over anxiety and entropy with commode discharges which avert disaster?]

I am a bit pissed, that in my effort to distangle disability center trauma, I have no choice but to cope with the reality of what is now true physical decline, and no, it simply is not fair. I not only have to live with a criminally negligent landlord and disability "activists" with no ethics, but now the unalterable ravage of the flesh. 32 years of my failure to change this environment and circumstance has taken its toll. I do not, at least technically, have to abandon Disability Arts, but I'd be forced to let it slumber to attempt other interests, even if changing my spots might have a dubious outcome. Simenon seems to imply that Stendhal and Sartre are incompatible, or had a precognitive insight into the spastic dowager's creation. It is perfectly legitimate to see Stendhal as a synchronic gateway to phenomenology.

Simenon's Shrews

"I don't know who Donald Trump represents, other than himself."-- Gwen Ifill

I came on to research Thiel's battle with Gawker, and had previously supposed the outing issue had died a quiet death with Law and Order serials, and tend to believe there is more to it than that, even if a California leftist asshole like Mark Johnson doesn't make for much of an enemy does he, with sop driveling posts like this, linked twice for your edification. He's not much, in terms of an intellectual challenge, and attacked me personally because I gave him access to my work. I can assure you that the cliche about angry liberals having a terrifying mien holds true when it comes to this deadbeat want to be Beverly Hills shuttle cock, a lightweight not even worth the pleasure of a snapped vertebra, so linear and literal minded.

A broken bone must not make for much of a sound effect. Other than radicalized surgeries, I dislocated a knuckle and popped it back in on my own. I am not interested in writing about Thiel and Gawker. I'm not even positive I'd be the type of tattle writer who could offer Gawker any relative value, as I can't pitch my way into City Paper, and I live here, but billionaires having absolute media control troubles me, none the less, much more so than tabloid tactics toward content generation, so, if I have picked a side, learning that writing with passion, from the heart, earns the disenfranchised the wrath of giants, seems to me a cause for concern, even if I'm a hate crime in waiting not exploiting the sick and the deaf, using ALS and spina bifida and the autistic and addicts as shields. It runs through the blood of every procedural, from Poe to Simenon, Dick Wolf, Mankell, Beck. Codename Hunter, of course, puts an Ironside spin on paraplegia, but I'm not into it, just as Maigret and the Old Lady illustrates the great Belgian chaffing under his own formula, as its little more than an old woman's vanity above her station wreaking havoc on the class from which she climbed. I am caught in the middle, not knowing how to play powerful interests to end my life with the quality of peace I feel I deserve, but despising the radical left Johnson professes to espouse while revealing in misogyny toward me because I'm neither pretty, nor placid  Ideologues are rarely what they appear to be.

Fuck Katrina's Anniversary Already

This evening's Simenon mystery was affecting, and I missed just enough of the title not to be able to give it to you, but it was an Assassin La Jeune Fils type. Lesbian petting which doesn't entice me. (My problem is masochism and pain associated with it, but another day when I'm ready to lose 20% of my small social media cotillion for exposing what Keats paraphrased as "hateful thoughts".) Then a grand old woman with her own tragedy trying to save the culprit. Only she goes too far, and the ending, affecting. Fucking French norms. Crazy and yet in part they get it right. 

Dirty Snow I've mentioned. Not ready to reread it. No need to in my five hundred things, but I must have every Simenon title. I must, absolutely, at least before, well. Let me return to the conscience of Charles Lane and suicidal depression. Therapeutic advice runs thus: take happy drugs and don't recriminate over what cannot be changed. 

Okay. Happy drugs do not work for varied technical reasons, and I cannot change a great deal, including not being able to sit outside and get away from a broken transsexual who I despise, not being able to get away from my clients, my fucking ex, who looks like a corpse, and every fucking organization and working class minority tells me to keep going back to Liberty Resources without respecting that I cannot, without respecting that I know too much about the corruption that turns Medicaid into a pimping service. Do you live with the elderly who attacked you? And an ex fiance? And disability center board members who are as corrupt as mafia dons? It is bad enough aging with cerebral palsy to the extent I have it, eating the reverberations of trauma every day. If I want to go to sleep, and I am absolutely sure, then I should be allowed.

I really have become a racist, and I apologize, but black society and its counter culture isn't where I belong, and I have to eat it. More on this later. I've decided to visit City Council and try to greet Denny, and deliberately ruckus, paying the price of the pissed.

... And Les Innocents of Georges Simenon

What I was actually going to attempt to post about was the adaptation of Les Innocents on Worldview. I would drop Patterson for Simenon any day and did, and Marshal's performance as the duped cuckold got to me, pierced, no Maigret in sight; it felt fresh, this implicit complication of human motives.

I make people nervous because I'm obviously willing to use revelation when it suits me. Why trust me with how I post on Blogger? However much Linda Dezenski destroyed my emotional well being, the other side of her willingness to be an expending sociopath is that I've embarrassed her. She went over the top and the crime of it will never stay buried if my work survives-- but there are events, episodes, where I've kept those experiences to myself, particularly my sordid comic flings with married men.

I would discuss him and the others, but euthanasia via cat fights with ex-wives and other confessions isn't what I had in mind, and families are involved, and for once, Simenon opens this egg without too many conceits pertinent to mystery dramas.

We're human. People get hurt, even me, through becoming vulnerable, and Simenon exposes this with certain truisms about why women in spite do what they do; the story rang true, Marie's motives, Jean-Paul's scourged conscience, keeping his deceit close, Celerin's grief forcing him to seek out the verities. The novel was published in 72. The adaptation was fitted for the digital age, more powerful for it, in an evening where I should not have sat for it, perhaps, enjoying my plummet back to asceticism. I shall not be able to sustain it, not much longer. As fragile as our interior sense of self is, however, it isn't easy to die. Life fights for itself.  

The Occupation of Paris

They hoped Petain was playing the Germans at a double game and was secretly planning the liberation of France. --Terry Crowdy

You have to reach for it in odd places, in schematics like The Song of Bernadette, a film not so friendly to institutional Catholicism as it might initially appear, though it is otherwise reverent to Mary, who was elevated by the Church as a strategism against pagan goddesses like Diana, but Vincent Price, in the right role, wasn't all high camp, and rather presages how he'd die in this youthful vehicle. The film, dated as it is, has its own medical model ruthlessness towards cancers we're still fighting, to little avail, and beneath the surface, buttered up with palatable salvation, it is a bit stark about disease.

Of all celebrity absences, I feel Price as a loss, a cutout with his outline that comes through in translation. I haven't quite digested Lauren Bacall's death either, though I have little reason to mourn her, as I study a film like Birth with care, as a precursor to The Others, which also acts as a sealant to Kidman's split with Cruise, maniac man with a grin. I do mourn Peter Falk, but his homeliness is a dated palliative to a liberalism stripping us of every possible anchorage.

In my relief at finding the late Bruno Cremer's new time slot, he too felled by the crab, I wondered if I'd have been happy married to a cool cucumber like Georges Simenon, and rapidly surmised a negation due to a sense of an urgent ruthlessness about his work. If I ever get back on my feet, however unlikely, I need to read more Simenon. My hatred of what I've done to myself is killing me as fast as any future date with advancing COPD, congestive heart failure, or colon polyps. I keep missing medical appointments for script even as I master the shimmy to deal with the Jazzy Quantum, and leave you now to try try again, setting the scaffold, my wheels, at least, still turning; my version of immortality, living on as one of Maigret's enigmatic females. I do not know how to save Europe, but I am related to the Marinelli's in Italy who work the Don Matteo production crew.

All precocious invalids have champions

"The mess has become an old friend."-- a French actress protecting her champion

It is uncanny, when biological rhythms themselves attune to conscious attachment, wake the body without the convenience of the alarm on the device, wakes you in time, despite the familiar eruption of a shameful rectal attack, which is oddly a relief, the battle with control, which is, however, transitioning into what will eventually kill, malady unknown, a sense of vertigo, starting way back at 36, getting significantly worse in the movement past your half century. Through the lens of Simenon, the animosity between the British and the French is utterly comprehensible, because the Franks have this insufferable sensibility of discretion, which would wisely serve us all ably if anyone paid the slightest attention. I don't, having dispensed with it all, but it is spring, I am sick, as usual, having warned myself about the container of almond butter, consumed not from greed. Desire for protein.

Just as Simenon manufactures a homosexual jurist in a dim interior, Maigret rents a room manufactures a faded damsel with broken wings, who thrives only when her spatial relation is rotated away from our fortunately stable sun, and has a love triangle which nearly results in a cop killing. I always try to give Maigret my rapt attention, but why Martinaud had to die for Mrs. Boris--- well being remains slightly puzzling. He was a loan shark of some sort, and the husband, soon to be a pensioner, was no guarantee. She fought Jules past fighting to save the man who valued her honor.

Affairs, much like homosexual secrets, often lead to mayhem as exemplified by the Fletcher case. To an American sensibility, Susan Chrzanowski was a culpable instigator in this locally sensational tragedy, and she paid a price. I could compare Susan to myself, but it is different. A sexually frustrated poet starved for passionate foreplay, setting herself up most of the time, is not the same thing as a presiding judge getting hot and heavy with a malcontent like Michael, who probably did shoot his wife. I base this on the fact that the parents noted Leann hated guns, and I'd never touch one myself, not even for an alpha male too good to be true. (This does not mean I am not joining the Libertarian Party. I am, but guns are dangerous in the immediate process of their utility, and I'm spastic; I'd never touch them.)

Yet we need love affairs. Need them to expose them. I support illicit sexual activity, in other words, without franchising equal treatment for homosexual orientation under the equal protection clause, making my principles rather difficult to defend, but I am going to be dead soon. I've never addressed whether or not I think a lesbian experiment on my part would have led to better sexual satisfaction. I have my reaction to feeling threatened on the one hand, and the passes, Eddie's molestation on the other, and not that it is entirely relevant, but I think not. I am not aroused by breasts, not particularly interested in deltas even of a better class act than mine (my anatomy is non standard) so no, I do not think a domestic arrangement similar to New Mobility's Josie Bysek is something I really desire and am fiercely repressing, despite my latch keys. I cannot stop other women from touching me inappropriately. It angers me, and I understand why those who engage in these sneak attacks are sometimes killed. We'll let Google measure that yardstick of an account in good standing, rolling my eyes.

To clear up any confusion, the company offered me an url for my Google plus account, and indicated I had *good standing". This company wearies, a little.

Dangers of Black Ice

My vague admiration for Georges Simenon is unsatisfactory-- but this is due to a sensibility of not being able to judge him on the basis of Dirty Snow alone, which, excepting for my skid marks over Ellroy, was my favorite genre exposure through Jay Gertzman. I should be awarded my doctorate on the basis of just how many English professors I've waltzed with, how extraordinarily well read I am, even if Derrida may defeat me. I've earned professorial status, but cannot judge Simenon's legacy with the study I've thus far made.

He is unquestionably vulgar, Simenon (hint hint) and the ferocity of his title character signing his own death warrant in this short and sharp little novel made an indelible impact-- and I'm uncertain as to whether Orhan was being a tad too clever with his novel Snow. I'm only speculating. The French Belgian is different in style and tone from the self-effacing Turk with his penchant for Chekhovian mimicry, but both novels offer death knells in a Siberian like atmosphere. 

Pamuk, for those initiated in literary traditions, has forced me to care about Turkey as a character in a geopolitical amphitheater, and I resent him for it. Is this a victory for the power of art? Overlaid with the Turkish actor who plays Cenu in Tatort, overlaid with Grecian Turkish name calling over Cyprus, and this family, which sparked so much controversy and clash of values (the Ottomans in this instance had the upper hand and should have sent the physio-behaviorists packing), or the many easterners on Netgammon I played and sometimes outwitted. It baffles me how good I am at backgammon and chess not so much. Mediterranean blood-- but there are limits, even to the poignancy of identification with the special subset of alienated writers. Multi-culturalism is a voyeuristic activity, but in practice it gets people killed as often as not.

Envy as a nauseous prelude

The care the Belgians took in their production of Maigret was remarkable, when one looks at the copyright. This is a 21st century series that virtually transports the viewer back into the Fifth Republic, a bygone, magisterial age, to steal an excellent adjective from Dana Stevens, who gets paid to turn the lights on when the late Mr. Hoffman juiced himself into the send up of L Ron Hubbard. Ms Stevens found the right word for the era, magisterial-- in the US, it lasted from 52 to 65.

Georges Simenon may be as slithery as an eel to pin down, worth pursuing in his original language, but Bruno Cremer was the best Maigret, and Maigret is the best detection procedural on the face of the earth as adapted for a teleplay. The British can do conspiracy to make the roots of your hair stand on end, with riveting plots, but France simply crucifies when it comes to fidelity, understanding that excellence is derived through attention to detail, the definition of poise to the point of actually being duped into time travel. Maigret is at once an antithesis to the disruptions caused by crippling the body, and at the same time, nearly a brilliant ornamentation of the fusionary aspects between bipedal afterthought and the psychosis of damage hidden in the dark, whether I can chisel an article out of this raw and cooked striving or not, for all his reticence about treating his Parkinson's, Michael Kinsley has vanished from the scene. Whimsy, which carries the voice of his few columns I've seen since he appeared on Charlie Rose trying to control his involuntary spasms, doesn't compensate for his loss of prestige, but he goes down quietly, a gentleman, recognized as a celebrity writer better than most, an astute, perceptive analyst at his peak, none of us dwell on his circumstances, except as a footnote. Slate is a loose jointed progeny, not of Wapo, actually, but of the Time Magazine essayist, which cannot be reproduced on a web page.

What possible objection could I have?

"In the old days I would have worn a pink ribbon!"--Georges Simenon on the myriad variations of French tolerance for lewd behavior.

There is a reason why journalists like Monica Hesse succeed in publishing features like these, one in which Wapo wisely cut off the comment section. Sex sells. It drives everything we do barring post-menopausal low libido. Never mind my opposition to radical sexual equality for the moment on the basis of risky behavior. Kelsey's gender identification plight is merely cosmetic, a form of slacktivism, especially this plea toward the anonymity of personhood. It sounds more like a cry for relief which the medical model isn't able to provide short of aggressive and outmoded procedures, if I too want to maintain currency on the basis of my research. Is Kelsey's plight unfortunate? Perhaps, but it only stands in Kelsey's way because she, as a biological female, allows it. It doesn't prevent her from taking a piss. When I have to piss, I need back up plans. It doesn't prevent her from driving a car, getting an education. If I had even attempted to make motor vehicle adaptations, I might have been dead by now due to aggressive driving, like Blair Underwood in his last episode. If Kelsey wants to fuck, the vast majority of humans available for that purpose do identify as male or female, even if they have transgendered. Hermaphroditic tendencies are invertebrate and pre-mammalian, if you need to see reversion as an evolutionary advance, I doubt it bodes well for transhuman adaptation.

Rejecting gender all together is not a cause, not a mission. Maybe a fashion statement, but Henry James produced more than one bad novel on that basis.

Scourge

"Old age is sordid."-- Georges Simenon

Leave it to me to hire a hypothetical methamphetamine user in Karina in order to ameliorate my justified social fear of revictimization, only to wind up deep fried in turmoil due to her inexperience. The fun never stops. I nearly went into scorn mode and almost lashed out at her, you stupid bitch.

That might apply to me as well, as I apply it to every person associated with Riverside Presbyterian. I liked Ed Berkowitz once, liked him and Suzanne, pitied her epilepsy and used him, Ed, as an example of an "acceptable man," if one like him was available-- and these niceties of social manner evaporated because he tried to hook me up with a nutcase who gives lectures about disparaged Jungian correspondences, subconscious, and disease, and I became illuminated to the fact that Ed Berkowitz was not a knock off of my Jewish side of the family, only a mental health consumer leading the less functional along, and I am pissed. 

Pissed that I reached out to a tenant who likes what he has in the Presbyterian management; pissed that I saw his mental heath issues in his countenance simply out of an innocent meeting with him on the tenth floor for coffee, pissed that I feel duped into have dislodged Zach Tollen's comfort zone, pissed that Karina pissed me off so much that I am willing to disrupt the status quo, putting blacks in their place by fighting back because now the white girl distressed me as well as the fat and thickened black matriarchs, who would have never done what Karina did anyway because they are black. I am the one who gave Karina the rope. I'm the one who has to get over it, even as I initiated my end game with this company.

I am going to give Nakea Fuller the finger too, PHA's *accessibility coordinator," which in translation means a black woman with a better pay grade than Debra Horne, with comparable competency issues.

I never did win any popularity contests, laughing. I am going to be gone soon, and my masterwork? How Philadelphia engenders bigotry and class conflict, reflecting the meanwhile on Scandinavia, placid and static, the palest Caucasians, sterile, polite, with their idea of dramatic conflict to wear dour pouts, get their socialized medical treatments, return to their service vectors with smiling "jas". They would encircle me as if to protect their clime from a foreign invader, threatening to sour the milkweed.

I applied to be a Beacon Writer, after a stumble and fumble, with my best pet peeve: the crony capitalism of real estate. If my father knew that I've thrown down the gauntlet with Presby he'd kill me if he did not have one foot in the grave, but I have to fight.

Ghost Crabs

"Nausee became a sort of modern classic-- without thereby losing-- in the minds of its enormous readership-- its virulence," Richard Howard, sympathizing foreworded.

Wealth and affluence do not, simply as a condition of social status, abscond with unhappiness, or transmutes avarice into altruism. Europe is no more Utopian than America is the Great Satan, guns blazing at the ready, but with this concession readily available to the realist, Scandinavian crime drama is just a shade gray shy of being a misnomer, and I declare it null and void. A miniseries can be as onerous as researching every exhortation Sartre penned in his master treatise. The Danes and the Swedes and the Norwegians enjoy being affable, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but its penal system makes my sojourn with inner city poverty analogous to Melville bracing himself for exotic grub in Tahiti. Oh, the feed given to WYBE is not an exact replica of Dick Wolf or Criminal Mind formula, and cold climes seem to breed repression into the authentic Caucasian genome, but let me clarify something for Miss Desmond-Harris: Italians and Greeks never saw themselves as white in the first place. We're a Mediterranean people, swarthy and olive until you get close to the Swiss border.

I was weak enough, however, to see Dirty Money, White Lies through to its conclusion, and Seim got better at inhabiting Sverre when he seemed resigned, as opposed to his feigned resistance to losing his boy scout status in the narrative opening, and marginally amusing impotence, during the first thirty percent of the saga. I could not really see what the differential was between the actresses who played Ravi and Trude. And what Scandinavians take as internecine domestic conflict is no more than puny whining to an American mindset, let alone the Roman.

Yes, there is a permissive drug culture in Holland. This is why the big countries are merciless thugs while the Swiss are like high end escorts repairing their hymen for the Chinese Central Bankers on this end of APEC. while assuring Jacob Lew that American dollars are an absolute prerequisite. The only modern dramatist who was ever honest was Georges Simenon. Otherwise, the EU is lying through its teeth about its subterranean social mores, and its socialist studio system is cognizant of this fact. 

A Purveyor of Necessities

The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. --James Joyce, Ulysses, location 2112


How comprehensive one can be following a 4:40 am dash on the most frigid day of the new year is a good question, but let me dial myself back slightly, for your understanding: When Greg Zacharias admonished me about conspiracies, he meant my James list posts were not being bounced on purpose, not realizing I was attempting to make a sardonic joke. When my half brother admonished me, he meant my family was not engaged in collusion to put me back in a nursing home, but fuck that. My baby bro and my full blooded sister are selfish whining materialistic parents who let me down and feel guilty about it and are headed for a legal negotiation, while my family elders wish I'd shut the fuck up, and mother's sister has reverted to loving inclusionary noises, all well and good, but la damage has been done, though I grant you, in stealing my mentor's title from an old workshop piece de resistance, that I am the primary purveyor of my bubonic plague. If Rico was a Simenon morality play that the studio turned into an uneasy hatchet job that has a great deal to say about Caucasian caste, then Arlington Road is positively operatic red meat, and on my last viewing I paid very careful attention, and there is enough ambiguity about Hope Davis as Brooke, and the blond operative in the ponytail who closes the film, to leave hanging some interesting questions, and a film like Brazil, satire it may be, ties this up nicely, but I am still thinking, and am thinking now of sleep, and my wry smile when Catherine, the blue-eyed bright progressive, chatted with me and the North Philadelphia minorities, about hostility to the LBGT community. Little did she know I was bitter, disillusioned, and how victimized. She would not, none of them knew, and no, they will not, this ACLU offshoot, be able to accommodate me to do their canvassing. It will be too difficult, though the young woman involved in the Cairo uprising interested me, and though you know not to what I allude, she talked back, and the half century old cripple stood firm, unmoving, a virtual edifice of granite, watching humanity knowing not what it reaps.

Before The Chancel

"What did we do? Burn a few heretics, sell some indulgences? That was in the days when the Church was a ruling body, we let governments do those things today." -- Anne Bancroft, Agnes of God


Obviously, if you speak ill of a suddenly dead dead body guard for stereotypical reinforcing, you can wreak havoc with viruses on one end, and infection flamed genitalia, not knowing which end is which, playing a glass bead game within a fevered intellect, forcing yourself to move, to sit up on your busted mattress using a three dimensional point on a graph of space time, vision unable to be replicated, lost insight into points and reference to location, we last left The Brothers Rico with Larry Gates as a mildly trenchant, deceptively civil sociopath, appealing to his bond with Eddie's mother for taking the bullet meant for him, and then he sends Eddie off, like a bloodhound, while we are cued into this family doom with the near nicety of a deus ex machina, nothing graphic. Paul Picerni bound in a chair, taking a punch, gasping last words, his gel lock flopping. Then Karlson does something interesting with the scene cut to Mrs. Rico's apartment in New York. This is the clash of Old World Europe into the new, and Argentina Brunetti was obviously typecast for culture shock, for her juxtaposition against the American groomed Kubik and Hollywood sugar boy Conte, her English heavily accented, her personal iconography with the madonna captured with no small degree of emphasis, the little bit of Roman hierarchy she needs for her own solace, wary of what her middle child is wresting out of her. This portent is Eddie's second warning, and what does he do with it? Persuading his mother or himself that Kubik is only looking out for the family's best interests?

There are hints, before Conte heads into his central conflict with Lamotta, that he is anxious about the consequences of his actions, not that Karlson takes much opportunity to examine the willful blindness of self-interest, a charge which I doubt can be laid at Simenon's door.

The cream cheese on bread I managed to get to this morning was the best breakfast I had in my life, which is either spelling out mortality's signature, or signifying the extraordinary persistence of will, I intend to pay a visit to the woman's clinic, at least to explore the possibility that this is more than hormonal stress, early next week, as I doubt my ability to flag down a gynecologist any sooner than that.

Canadian Bacon, Danish Pancakes

"I had already killed one of your officers, in the corner of the blind alley that leads to the tannery, in order to take his automatic, because I wanted one. I did things that were much more shameful. I committed the worst crime in the world, but that has nothing to do with you. I am not a fanatic, an agitator, or a patriot. I am a piece of shit." -- Frank Friedmaier, the spree murderer anti-hero, Dirty Snow


If you are an American, or a western European, you would process a BBC report like this differently than you would a profile on James Holmes and his psychiatric treatment, correct? The latter is the price we pay for the taming of the western frontier, the mythology and fact surrounding that domestication, the conflict between the indigenous warrior cultures and a mechanized European military that bequeathed to us the post modern fragmentation and erosion of moral cohesion. Pedophiles need compassionate case management too, remember. Whereas the tea workers, they merely rose up against authority, possibly horrific, but in terms of survival, and resources, understandable. I do not think the tea workers would have any problem understanding my anger against disability activists and leaders who turned on me, betrayed me, abandoned me, and here I sit, and sitting mainly due to inertia. However, I feel empathy for the manager. A mass acted in concert and burned him to death, and this as an escalation is worse than the glamorization of Pesci's temper, in which part of my impulses believe acting on would provide catharsis. I cry for dead cats, but relish the thought of eliminating hypocritical liars, not sure where the truth lies between those two propositions, as I'd also cut off my hand before touching a firearm, but would like nothing better than deploying my fists against the prevarication, ignorance, and cruelty I've had to carry, obviously not unique in this sentiment, as Simenon understood it as well, to create an interested audience, but also to suggest that aggression has a possibly complicated ambiguity, one that should serve as a warning to materialists who want to reprogram our primate origins through neuroscience. I prefer the post-war Frenchman to Cormac McCarthy, because Cormac leans to the superlative. Simenon carefully punctures it.

In some ways we are all Eddie Rico, the man in the middle with his own secrets. Guy Savage created a good synopsis of the film as a hatchet job as opposed to the novel, which I'd like to read someday, but I am not necessarily hamstrung, at this moment, by lack of access to the text. Karlson's adaptation carries the unease of its own certainty, and that includes the rapid fire pace at which Conte has to negotiate between his own culpability and Kubik's desire to eliminate loose ends, eroding loyalty. Is criminality, at the height of its organized power, any different than case management burrowing in its paradigms to obfuscate wrongdoing and enforcing stigma we can find in any baboon troupe? Not a bad question to ask in the ration of bacon, which presumably does not slow the industrial slaughter of the livestock which gives us such an interesting meat, to quote a culinary chef.

Orderly Mayhem

Using a small number of myths taken from native communities which will serve as a laboratory, I intend to carry out an experiment which, should it prove successful, will be of universal significance [sic], since I expect it to prove that there is a kind of logic in tangible qualities, and to demonstrate the operation of that logic and reveal its laws.-- Levi-Strauss, the raw and the cooked


I was in my small cramped and exasperating kitchenette getting coffee when Paul Picerni, the doomed Gino, gesculates to Conte from behind the steering wheel, not that I wanted to miss the scene. Miscalculated the minutes in the commercial break, but since my hearing loss mitigates in certain circumstances, I heard the dialogue, and Conte's equivocation is a contingent issue in terms of willful blindness. Did Eddie know, as Lamotta, (Bellaver) asserts, "what was going on?" and know it the whole time, subconsciously wanting the whole problem to go away so he could erase history and become the all American consumer, his blood ties conveniently eliminated? This exposes a kernel into the heart of darkness this nation sublimates through constant bombardment of advertising, and it took off, ushered in the modern era, after the war. I have mined my Austrian-Polish grandmother repeatedly, and it is from her that I was integrated into the lie of iconic fanaticism, neither entirely vanquished, nor repelled, in continual battle in my psyche, and the thing that killed my mother, at the end of the day. My mother and maternal grandmother, setting each other off, were far more scary than my scarred neural network. Elements of this are in Rico, in a condensed artifice, and in the context of Simenon's sparse, perhaps even elegant, civil brutality, fenced in, certainly, by structuralism.

I am going to start an uproar among the feminine players, and suggest, as Conrad does in Heart of Darkness, that Eddie Rico blinds himself to the truth because he is afraid of losing his wife. Dianne Forster and Kathryn Crosby may not have much to do in this film, but they hold the reigns, and they hold them with a force that was all but eroded and dead not 20 years later.

No, I am not eschewing sexual equality, merely asking you to see that defined gender roles, however constricted in traditional terms, provided payoffs that have long since vanished, but also orchestrated the horror, as our great writer alluded to it, in the price our species has paid for the prevalent domestication of both, natural ecosystems, and primate aggression. The feminine principle is inexorable, and, in the events of this decade, being challenged, pushed back against with indeterminate regression.

In the spirit of Billy Burke, Let's Trade

He paid little attention to what he said, and blamed Glaucus for his stupidity in taking in and feeding maimed and enfeebled persons. --Alexander Pope on the entirely unnecessary apocrypha on the life of Homer.


JJ Abrams has a subtext in Revolution: We are all capable of being hideous, of betraying those we love the most, and yet still remain as human, or not, as we choose. The show illustrates this to varying degrees, in the relationship between Burke and Lyons, however much their acting is studio stock and trade, and is of particular interest when looking at Esposito, most likely the best actor in the series, or the most interesting, given his resume as a supporting actor. It is interesting to look at the evolution of these portrayals against Simenon's complex noir tensions, which come through in The Brothers Rico, despite its genetic 1950's composition. I hope to be able to say something penetrating about those tensions at the end of the day, for those of you who will bear with me.

I left this last at the scene between Conte and the laundry driver (no hint there of corruption or pressure by the Teamsters, but I thought of it anyway, because this was the era of such corruption at its height), and then an impaction occurs, a condensation that is artificial due to editing constraints: not moments after the psycho gangster exits Eddie's office, the call comes in from Kubik for his facade of a detente, and then the game begins.

I will pick it up from this point after a nap, which I hope is due to a hibernation reflex, and not the closer of congestive heart failure and an oxygen generator. I have much to do so this will, hopefully, be a real nap, and I'll be back after the news. My hair is dry now, having washed it after breakfast (in real time 12/19, whoops).

Coital Glamor

"The novel ended with Flaubert and with James." -- Ulysses, Order, and Myth, page 177


Eliot is on point. We are evolving our way out of the primacy of aesthetic choice, killing language, killing writing as a profession except as it remains necessary for engineering, mathematics, physics, computer science, medical data, until such a time as our extinction. I had a geology instructor back in the day when I suspect pedagogy was not quite the science my former flame elocutes like worsted cotton out of his ear drums, who intoned to the class, "MAN can adapt to any conditions." And of course, this is what you tell adolescents to damper the suicide rate among them as a class, but that kind of optimism is illusory. Beneath all these things that add up to the human half, there is the animal, beneath the love of form, beneath the fact that cultural impermanence triumphs over memory, beneath the quest for intricacy, beneath the story, beneath the failure and the persistence of metaphysics, the Alawites and the Syrian Free Army engage in bloodshed, the Israelis invade Gaza, the Israelis occupy Lebanon, the Israelis have been engaged in constant warfare since Yahweh became a conceptual advance over pagan deification, and this spearhead isn't so much about the cost of the Semitic legacy to our species, so much as the Semitic legacy represents the fact that a chimpanzee is pretty much a chimpanzee, and like other species, primates are dangerous, brutal. Everything else, including the fact that we seem to think we now control the genome, is nothing more than distractions for the bipedal brain. That is why tensions remain dynamic in complicit intimacy between husband and wife in the representational fiction, and perfectionist niceties behind the camera, in The Brothers Rico. I'd argue, however, that some of these highly stylized films from between 1948 to 1968 offer us more insights into the cracks that have since been consumed into the post modern maw, than does the glaze over your eyes waiting for post modernism to transmute and close its bracket. The sex between Alice and Eddie Rico was great, but then there is this pesky business of your past as a bookie, dear Eddie, for the syndicate, with no allusion to what struggles Dianne Foster's character incurred in marrying such a man. Was the material status enough, never mind that from which her eye had to turn away? Or was Alice such a feminine catch that Eddie believed his moral compass was clean, for all intents and purposes? Was his history, their history, a case of willful blindness, all for the sake of style, a certain propriety that everyone achieved after the war in an implied contract? Alice does manage to worry about the implications of the communique over that telephone line, and Eddie equivocates those implications, which sums up the conflict of his character through the entire unfolding of the narrative.

Urethra Knives

The Brothers Rico opens with Richard Conte in a glinty house robe receiving a telephone call, and then in a scene I found fascinating for its time and place, he and Dianne Foster have a fairly frank episode of sexual intimacy while Eddie undresses and gets in the shower. I know some of the pre-33 era black and whites were more risqué, but if you really look at this film, it sells star powered sex as hard as New Wave in the next decade. Eddie is obviously virile in his every gesture at the sink, of which we are offered a nice shot of bare chested beef. Alice is obviously happy with her tiger, and the shoulder bite is permissively promiscuous. The suggestion of infertility in this atmosphere of laden sexual satisfaction is left open for speculation, and this is very Eisenhower era, but it is also very much a part of Simenon's methodology, to leave the issue of a barren, and otherwise happy couple, simply hanging in the air. I have another theory. Italians will never be Wasps, no matter how perfect the imitation. Whether or not this was lifted from Henry James, (cf Daisy Miller ) as much as it might be a standard plot device might be debatable, and you can even tell me I am full of shit, but I have two points in my favor:

1. Daisy Miller positively resonated with the American public; it was a huge hit for James, put the fellow on the map like nothing else.

2. Simenon is European, and 2a. The Saxons, Franks, Austrians and Prussians thought it was acceptable to cast Italians as greaseballs. James does it all the time. Even Prince Amerigo is a somewhat sordid character, royal though he may be, and Wilkie Collins cashes in those chips without hesitation in his major virginal hit.

This still had a hold on the generational Protestants of Eisenhower's day, so, voila, Eddie is cursed because of his provincial roots, no matter how assimilated he is into American material power and status. Italian Catholics, like the Jews, like the Irish, can approximate, but it would take the civil rights era, and perceived  color threat, to implode intramural Caucasian prejudices which flag a film such as this.

Time for a pause, but this analysis will carry me through a number of posts, hampered by my imperfect memory of Brazil's timeline, despite the fact I have seen the film three times. Bridge to cross.

I have taken ill, and because of this, have to resign myself to not reentering a late life academic competition, and in fact, should my posts become inactive, depending how long accessing treatment takes me, you may assume that the interns, or medical students who usually evaluate me, fucked up. This is a health issue I cannot allow to linger, however, unless, unbeknownst to me, I get to decompose in much the same manner as mio bambino, a consoling irony?

Beyond Pierre Gringiore

"There is no going back to this other person, this other place. This thing, this stranger, she is what you are now."-- Jodie Foster, The Brave One

French society has a way of sublimating disingenuity which is particular to itself, and cuts across its authorial class, reaching back before Victor Hugo, but certainly linking him in a flowering genus: Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, the genius of Stendhal, the superb Stendhal, Moliere, Proust. Yet it is linked, too, to Spanish sleepiness, the lassitude of the Spaniard's daydream themes, coupled with fervor, and the crafty shrewd Italian. Even Simenon's sparse discipline is not unaffected by it, and somehow, Bruno Cremer makes Maigret greater than the sum of gossip, realism, sliding the calculus in a great hunter's mind. No one is ever discomfited by the deception of gas, slowly bursting as a stool moves in transit. Bloating is just bloating, until it becomes the biological eruption of death, the thing which kills. Bowl blockage, cervical cancer.

For Simenon, this substitute for wasted, withered flesh is the morphine needle, and in Maigret On Trial, Maigret's Patience, the 20th century is perfected to tradition. The stories tell the battle of Maigret and Manuel Palmeri, who may be Italian, what the fuck do I know about borders being porous, and Manuel's mistress, Aline, and the novels hearken straight back to Hugo's genius in Gringiore's adventures with the Circus of Miracles. Dangerous people fake blindness and amputation to steal, to beg, and Simenon's brilliance is entirely aware of this conceit, while the Belgian production and Cremer's near perfect realization, for a bit actor, makes the novels themselves nearly unnecessary to read. Criminality and the law both exploit disability, create it, and ruthless avarice destroys and eliminates it. I am finally penetrating the coda, finally. I can begin to see, despite the alarming length of fecal discharge, my anger with overages I should be perfectly capable of avoiding. 

Violence as an argument, this will always be with us, and I'm a rare woman, like Jennifer Lopez donning Harlee like an overcoat, entranced by her own abuse, who believes in its cathartic consequences, and that's all I've ever really feared, justifiable homicide, even with its anti-climatic dissonance, and so what. Murder, the stuff of the kitchen table, humanity reverting with age to simple, reptilian responses: fight, flight, bite, tear, before the snake asphyxiates your ability to breathe.