But can Verdi do Chicago Slam?

Let a free woman fall in love, Camille declares, and she will gladly submit to her chains. More than one hundred fifty years later, the question is whether this has entirely ceased to be true. -- Toril Moi, Introduction, location 209

I cannot provide the exact date I flipped myself in my old manual wheelchair after frothing at the mouth with Jennifer Barnhart. June, I think, and I had an agreement with the ex to come after me, and had a technician visit due. Flipped between bedpost and katty corner in such a manner I could not undo the seat belt, and therein lie the danger, as opposed to the fall itself, Jennifer's voice in my head intonating defensive disengagement, I hated the disability center all the more, her voice in my head, breast painfully wedged on the cat carrier. Knew I did not want to die and that independent living centers were nothing more than exterminating enterprises, simultaneously. Jennifer and I didn't know each other. She came in to Liberty under Tom Earle, but my rage intimidated her, as it intimidates most of Liberty. Even Linda emailed me back, "Why are you so angry?"

I suppose this isn't a good way to head toward entropy and putrefaction, this constant inferno of distemper which isn't sure, with the certitude of Islamic State adherents, that she would not enjoy the delivery of a few significant contusions. Why I hate certain figures, like Debra Horne, with bituminous discharge of scorn can be summarized with the knowledge that Presbyterian Homes hired her to intimidate people. She is not a compassionate person, with that new orange dye hair and thick lard ass, sense of inadequacy around black men who possibly find her sensuality to hover around zero, I stood up to her, hard, very hard, and yet I am hardly victorious in making a nigger matron who wields her invisible truncheon eat rust. Do I hate her enough to see her hurt? Only insofar as I remain trapped here. Oh, the activists whom cannot be trusted, they have her number: Ugly women without prospects have only so many options.

Madeleine Stowe mediates being an fairly attractive brunette with traces of elegance in an interesting way with the 1994 Blink. The plot is somewhat contrived, and the contacts the actress wears in the opening, as always, have a Friday the 13th effect. (Putting real disabled individuals in film, blind or otherwise, brings us into the problematic terrain of exploitation.) But the subtext between Madeleine and Quinn is intriguing. Stowe isn't competing with Patty Duke's spectacular and dramatic habitation of the Keller child, who quite ably controls her family until Bancroft, with compassionate cruelty, wants to give the girl a chance. No, Stowe is negotiating the wounded chick meme. 

Haven't we all been fucked over in one way or another? The surgery her Emma undergoes gives her back her sight which all but the blind take for granted. It takes her out of the security of damage and darkness she knew from having an abusive mother, and makes her newly vulnerable with restored senses she cannot trust, with Aidan alternating between an insecure jackass who wants his cake but not the threat of commitment, and the tough love cop, no genius, no glory, but this is Chicago with its smokey interiors and oily alleyways, conscience smote by anger of Madeleine's fist and the anger of the child of one of the killer's victims, Stowe discovers, once faced with the truth of a deranged fixation, that she is resilient. Given her later habitation of Dumas' Mercedes in the ABC series Revenge, the contextuality of Stowe's femininity mediates between deceptive vulnerability, and a woman's pain over lost causes.

Cruel Seas, Clef

As seems to be the norm for this project, the British have their own peculiar variations, though Esther Costello feels like an American brand because of the standard tilt by Joan Crawford. Lousy performer, the camera loves her despite this, and yet in this muck raking narrative, she seems to struggle in a way that Nicholson's skill would not readily reveal to a viewer, to dim her alpha status for the sake of the story. Heather Sears is far less titanic than Patty Duke as the famous mute, yet there is also more realism, oddly, despite the fact that we're familiar with the prescriptive patterns the studio system followed in the fifties.

I am bewildered, Roger Ebert is dead, and I would have to make the time, or will have to if this really interests me, to discover why Monsarrat wrote this novel, and I do not mean it simply as a question of money, but as a question of Keller's fame conflicted with the issue of exploitation. I would not know where to begin, but it has thrown me a curve. Purchasing the novel is neither here nor there; I do not really wish to buy it. Looking at it can wait until I make space to browse in library, but I keep asking myself if the naval officer was fair to the iconic heroine, and I'm entirely in the dark; in addition, the wiki entry suggests the script substantially reversed the book. The movie, however, covers all the bases I've covered. Sexual development and abuse, chicanery, compliance over tyranny, rebellion, the angel demon dichotomy.

Beneath the film we have, there seems to be a counter narrative, one that was not followed through but would have been more intriguing, though we've seen this motif many times as well: abject poverty creating a banshee devoid of normal human intercourse. It opens the film after Esther's accident unique for its era. I'll see what I can do in terms of further inquiry, at least in a future tense.

Nebuchadnezzar's Amulet

I stayed for ten minutes. What am I doing here reverberating in my browbeaten intelligence, relieved to be familiar with the director, laughing sardonically at their mail, treating a dying and angry entitlement strapped spastic woman like a philanthropist, though to be honest I feel an affinity with their librarian, who was gasping in the galleries, busy day. I left not due to alienation so much as lack of readiness to use my weapons at self-promotion. I am going to make labels, play the game of unsaid to make one last bid to get myself as equidistant from micro Protestant Africa as possible, treated myself to dinner since I indeed looked like a glass of La Lastra Sagovese, 60 dollars for calamari and doggy bags, living death as history. Am I a rabid monster destined for the gallows?

I had no idea Helen Keller was the source of so much salacious gossip in the fifties. Before her deification in the notorious play The Miracle Worker, there was the roman de clef, the story of Esther Costello. Heather Sears before Patty Duke. I am reading picture books of a blind deaf socialist when I was six years old and she was still alive, Keller, an ACLU founder, and possibly a mistress to Sullivan's husband. It just suggests to me things so difficult to convey between where I've been, and how much I hate now, how much I would hate her socialism the way I hate the disabled community I've experienced.

Be glad there is no magic pill people; you would not want to deal with me cured, maniacal with rage. 

International Criminality

There are no easy choices when it comes to mortality; in one of my many Harrisburg conferences, under the old Pennsylvania Citizens Council, where I first met Josie, who even then was odd, owlish, non descript, a plain Jane who needs to wave Jesus I love pussy on her flagpole, (ah spastic, trolling, now now) there was a deaf dumb and blind minority, pretty woman, considering, who could not hear herself scream when a power chair ran over her foot in a beige pump, Anne Bancroft's majesty entirely absent. What choice does a woman like that have? This is what I asked myself at the time, even as the story of the Belgian twins saddens me. As much as we might need to be wary of Europe's move toward euthanasia, to the extent that I am still viable as a disabled American, one who does not want to die, but is suffering due to extraordinary marginalization, I cannot fault the decision these men made. Would you like me to display compassion toward Josie? Unlikely as it may be, but not impossible, that she and I will ever set eyes on each other again, I know her MS has told on her body, and that she is no longer passable as able. I also know, as you do, that I am a demanding figure, but let me tell you why I am so pissed off with her. She had the ability to recognize how lonely I was, had the ability to ascertain how Cecil's intelligence and perception captivated me, and then turned right around and destroyed any hope I had of building a relationship with him. Progressives who want to tell me this does not make all homosexuals vicious and untrustworthy may be factually correct, but with this kind of dirty laundry, no one needs what you feel you deserve in terms of your sexual activity, and your demands for marriage. What did I do to Josie to deserve this? Let's see. I talked to her in email, perhaps too facetious at times. I gave her daughter a Sherman Alexie collection for which I paid 24 dollars. That is what I did, to New Mobility's managing editor. So what do I want? I want activists to examine their consciences. I am still alone, in exactly the same location where this woman dragged her rancid body to sit near me on a fountain after I charged her with my power chair to grin wolfishly at her hand waving alarm. At the time I thought I meant it as a joke, and much as I have my choice of enemies between this activist mafia and the case management modalities with which they dance, Richard Conte is increasingly hemmed in by the syndicate men whom Kubik controls in Rico. As Eddie heads toward his little brother, Karlson has wardrobe dress everyone up as cowboys. Charming.

Johnny got out too, like the middle child, but apparently opted for a real frontier purity, overshadowed by Lamotta, and Eddie, racked by guilt, decides to fray his cufflinks and turn states evidence, and Alice gets the reward of a recommendation by the DA for the orphanage. I do not think Karlson meant for his viewers to be entirely at ease with this quick plaster happy ending. There seems to be an underlying uncertainty about the price of collusion, but I'll sharpen up my knives as I find the terminology, and the framework I seek.