Keitel's Mumbai, Florid

"Pakistan is no ordinary country."-- Benazir Bhutto's last preface.

One thing neither John Irvin nor his screen writer Ken Solarz answer for is the underlying cowardice of Stephen Dorff's character Skip Kovich in their latter day City of Industry. Dorff’s motivation for icing the heist crew put together by Timothy Hutton, who is seemingly in the preliminary stage of getting his lead role on Leverage, this woebegone every American kid of Taps and the brittle, frightening scenes in Ordinary People, invisibly axed in a jump shot by a snow cone Dorff, this flinty indifferent spree killer with scant principle to speak of, we’re to presume he fears Elliot Gould’s muscle, given the carnage that burns through the reel beyond the brief back story putting the figurines in place? He certainly fears being outnumbered.

Irvin’s transition from ensemble to allowing for the aging Keitel to absorb the weight of the lead and the pursuit remains intriguing, as is the relationship he develops between Keitel and Janssen in her role as the vulnerable brass tacks widow. The film itself is also transitional, between then and now. Not wholly a procedural of the past, with a signature detective rectifying matters, nor quite a gut wound graphic, such as we might see with The Following, or in Bryan Fuller and David Slade’s dark aesthetic. Little is left to the imagination, but the gore isn’t quite so pronounced as it would be for Tarantino.

The punishment that the elder Egan absorbs is a puzzling ambiguity, even somewhat fantastical, with Roy hovering between life and death as he fractures Skip’s skull. The agony Keitel projects is the only Dionysian passion he allows Roy Egan to have, as one wonders if he does die and is in fact reborn, miraculously defying his chest wound in these muted enclosures, Hutton’s fatal optimism dappled in Florida sunlight, with Roy’s pursuit of Skip moving in gradations from shadows to the expansive danger of a post midnight world. Does Irvin’s denouement suggest an escapism similar to Morrison’s hymn for her ravenous ghost?

Fantastical flights of fantasy can reinforce narrative meaning, as they do in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or they can make the moral gratuitous, as happens in Beloved. City of Industry wobbles on a balance beam between unifying impact and lack of responsibility for its glamorization, but it‘s worth examination.

Pakistan exists as a weak and marginally governable state because the British administers in Asia did not heed their literary masochist, EM Forster. Thanks to his novels the western hemisphere is a homosexual police state. If you know how Pakistani and Indian differ ethnically feel free to cue me in.

Iron Circle of Zidan

High-throned in secret bliss, for us frail dust
Emptied his glory, even to nakedness -- a young Milton, sighted

Yaphet Kotto's execution sequence in the 78 film Blue Collar is an orchestrated marvel of plausible incredulity, textured with a granular, menacing quality. If the little people like Keitel and Pryor want to vie with the leadership of the union for power, they don't know what hard ball is, not until the bosses demonstrate they can even take on a pit bull like Kotto's character and deal him a lethal hand, and these are auto workers, with families and small row homes. Management needs to divide the Keitel-Pryor united front, and to do that, they eliminate the brawn, locking him in a spray paint trailer with a non-operational mask, turning on the paint nozzles to asphyxiate the little guy loyalist, one who roars like a lion. It is an unforgettable moment in the films of the me decade, and it is a texture the later Zodiac Killer reminiscences with poise and authenticity, the earth tones, the muted palette of ecological anxiety, particularly with the dead and the stressed grey squirrels in cages.

Blue Collar is not a great film, but it is true to the anxieties of my childhood, and if Kotto and Pryor were to be noted for nothing else, how their paranoia feeds off each other under Schrader's poignant look at hardened men who are desperate to make it, is one of the originals in a now nostalgia driven medium. The kill is also as much a metaphor on the consequences of defiance and expulsion as is Leah Remini's splinter from Hubbard's jazz and glitter. We are not so far removed from our primate origins, the ruptures within varying group dynamics, as we like to believe. Qaddfi may have been an Islamic socialist loon, but under his authority Libya at least had a known identity. What is it now? Collateral damage to the best intentions of the freedom loving US, where beneath the surface, how that freedom is defined isn't quite on par with constitutional articles.

Anti-Trust Harpsicord

"I've been missing in action for over a month."-- David Carradine, swinging funerealist

Solutions are always trickier, and always imperfect, but one I can suggest off the bat is to bifurcate advocacy from case management systems. The disability center services recipient controls absolutely nothing. They are merely led to believe otherwise. The ones with the control are the fund allocators for Medicaid waiver services, and, as I've previously indicated, I have some research to do.

As Cassie used to empower her troops by commandeering Septa vehicles, she was also perpetrating the continuation of class conflict (cf Blue Collar) through the intimidation of non-unionized primarily minority CCT drivers, CCT drivers who also victimize and infrequently kill their clients due to poor training, criminal jackets. And Ms. James knows this is a valid charge on her doorstep, has been investigated by the DOJ, and in contemporary terms she mews softly, defanged and spayed.

I've always believed in more constructive engagement, even in terms of old American cities with impossible transport authorities.

For those of you who've suggested work at home on per hour basis solutions, I am not excluding the option, merely hampered by phlegm derived inflammation welling up through my Eustachian tube, building up the ear wax. Writing is and must by necessity be an insulating process, but I need constructive social engagement, not from Presby, and certainly not from 714 Market Street. Linda Dezenski may stay healthy when she is through eating her own by fidelity to the process, but I cannot be in that environment, even after I force her resignation.