Winter Moonlight's Vapor Shroud

The Code Black episode which ran last evening seemed to intentionally reference the Spanish Catholic motif that the unpleasantness of life is a dream from which we invariably wake, with varying degrees of courage or fortitude to follow suit, whether it's Dona Luz coping with a deceitful lover and becoming content to be a virtuous single mother thereafter, or the futuristic sensibility of Vanilla Sky rather unevenly adapted for Americana. It was an irritating cheap trick, whether or not there is a certain degree of commiseration for William Young as the compassionate patriarch who knows when to give in to the disruptions of the urban disenfranchised. Spastic has no particular affinity for current medical serials, however more sophisticated scripts, but Raza was at least a curiosity, whereas Rob Lowe is the manufactured, if seasoned veteran, who delivers line readings with new found square jawed machismo. To go from that to the silicon metrosexual tweaks of Pure Genius is insufferable. The public airways may be frambrosia next to what retarded and fed baby boomer narcissism, but it makes taking a backward glance at Cary Grant beat one's chest for glamour, and bourgeoisie style held in place by gleaming hair gel and aerosol. 
Grant was already a mausoleum plague in the Columbo era, but what appealed to our mothers, that vaudeville charm, holds the same magnetism now as then, whether tightly wound in Hitchcock, or more subversively timed in his comedies, which can be decoded along the same lines as Rock Hudson, if with more heartbreaking effect. To scroll a tawdry digital gallery and read that Grant was gay simply because he lived with another male friend was indeed shocking. We may not be able to read orientation on a whim, but Grant? It drew tears, when a more cautious intellect might have challenged the veracity of such claims. As a journalist, rebelling in despair at an encroaching twilight, blows having already broken her back, delving into this particular undercurrent would be akin to chasing Loch Ness: His grandchildren would disavow it, and there is no proof which can be confirmed. The reasons these rumors dog the star stem from the very things that made him one of the greatest celebrities. He toys with sexual secrets to keep his female admirers on the bait, even if we don't give much of a thought to poor Ingrid Bergman, the *gay bachelor's* patsy, as she was against Anthony Perkins in :Goodbye Again (though I would have fucked Perkins in that movie, and again in On The Beach). Bergman is not particularly sexual. She is a gracious elegance of poised need. And the idiot who cast her against Matheau in later years should have lost his job. It did not work. If you see her as the wife of Sartre, sacrificing all for such a great ego, that works. That is how women of her era derived standing, but there is culpability in that social form that shields the deviations of dandies which Proust exposes like a montage in the tide. Spastic cannot read it in Grant, however, the inclination toward sodomy. He might have been an empty vessel mimicking the upper echelon whose ranks he joined by virtue of his talent, but risking that for more roughshod homoerotic experimentation seems beyond where his attention to personal detail would take him. 

A break from the break of a sax serendipidity

You purchase Pain with all that Joy can give,/
And die of nothing but a Rage to live.--the last enlightened hunchback

The 1961 Goodbye Again is a masterpiece of my era, still a vibrant, living film. All Night Long, despite its fidelity to Stratford, cleverly embedded in a beatnik improvisation, fails the litmus test of its underlying anxiety, unsure of its own liberalism. Paul Harris does a good job of reversing expectations as the naturally regal chieftain, and McGoohan does as well as my managerial agent Trudy Richardson exaggerating the cowardliness of dissembling, but much like the problem of Othello itself, McGoohan loses hold of Johnny's core, and there is no accountability here for anyone. Des is not in forensics with ligature marks. Cas doesn't press charges, Rex abandons his band with Oedipal guilt, his wife chasing after him submissively, perhaps as an albatross of uncertain omen, and Patrick bangs his drum in insolence. Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?, five years older and nearly as evasive, is nearly down by comparison.

O comes nearly 40 years later, transliterating to the jazz on the court, is more provocative, but at least has a rationale? If Cosby wants the opportunity of a comeback, one way he might do it is by challenging the meandering estuaries of Obama's legacy. We have the 44th president of the US excoriating a comedian who could be his father on the basis of civil court transcripts-- this says as much about our national uncertainty as the controversy over Iran's entry into the nuclear family. We cannot define Bill Cosby as a monster and simply ask Congress to revoke his medal. My attacker was a black addict. I've forgiven him. 

I have interacted with Joan Tarshis and could have easily lied to the woman. She thought I was in the Cosby press corp and I gently corrected her, but it was within that interaction that I came to sympathize with Eugene Robinson's dissonance over Cosby's serial accusers. Social shaming has its place, but can rapidly capsize too far leeward.

Il disprezzo de Blond Bombshells

I gave up viewing Blindness at all, and took a shower, which is the only bit of drama remaining in relation to my own control of my life, my ability to set my own parameters. I have some things to do this week, not many, but some, and need to do my best with this unfortunate body, the battle with hygiene over its age and contortion, but I do not look like a woman worth fucking, except to black hustlers, and when they take aim at me, I grin behind glass, drive on. I would never sleep with one of them. With white trash, you can picture the hand wobble gesture that goes with "mmm, iffy." My mother picked up such men like hopping lice, one louse after the other. I have a hard time forgiving my mother for her licentiousness; it led to so much danger and violence for her children. I have lost count of how many times I was threatened with, or subjected to sexual assault, terrified that Stuart, my pathological stepfather, would kill my real dad, which is why I think the three of us, me, my estranged sister, deceased brother, never went to our father. It was not simply his pain and the emotional void of his ruined marriage. I believe we the children were trying to shield him, and it is why I have such a difficult time mourning for my mother, forbidding myself. I do not mean coping with the shock of the initial grief. Most would be hit hard, writers, failed writers, even my father. I mean mourning after that torrent is cooled. I do not allow myself certain things, like loving her memory, hating it. I know she was sick, and of course, I see some of her symptoms in myself. Her younger sister, me, Stephanie, we are a milder continuum. The added burden of my brain damage (sigh). I suppose we have been through my self-righteousness and justifications in two years of posts, but my mother's illness involves a great deal of repression; when she was alive, it erupted. My sister would say my face went purple and I should have my heart checked. Death has not staunched the wounds. Nor therapy. Nor drugs, nor the longing for jubilant abandon in the arms of a good man, to paraphrase the Brigitte Bardot of Contempt.

New Wave fascinates me, I fear, and some of you say to yourselves that I cheat my topic; this is both true and false. False in the sense that when I look at A list material it is with the view toward deeper deconstruction. It slipped my mind that Bardot is still alive, and turned into a reactionary crackpot, but in researching and finding myself back at Alberto Moravia's doorstep, I recalled Bardot's anti-Muslim stirrings in the news. What does this aging diva live on? I almost find myself pitying her. I am falling apart after 27 years of horrible struggle, and I feel sorry for Brigitte Bardot, her loss of relevance.

Contempt fails in its conscious structuralism, unlike the 61 Goodbye Again, for which I have a passionate abandon, and Bardot is indolent more than anything else, but it is, none the less, sending what cognition I have left on a hopeful romp.