Tall Pyramids

Joseph Hayes The Desperate Hours is like a harpoon piercing the heart of the Eisenhower era, but what caused it to tap into the anxiety of its audience? Post-war GI PTSD? I grew up with Bogart as the desperado with a conscience as a kid, and the lines of the threat in the film were not yet ready to lift the sheath behind the real psychic wounds of violation. Escaped convicts made headlines sixty years ago, then were carefully stage managed. In contemporary mindsets, escaped convicts are almost the charming amicable anti-heroes while we chew the fat over spree shootings and family annihilators, with American gun ownership out of control.

We might comprehend the libertarian argument for the individual right to bear arms, but with gun ownership comes a weighty responsibility. As a nation, we fail in this responsibility, and I'll shock my mythical homosexual adversaries with the assertion that weapons and their owners need regulation. When a driver can no longer operate a vehicle their license is revoked. Same principle should apply to police, soldiers, and every Okie spooner north of Ohio.

My rare lighter side procrastinates with Majong puzzles, and I'd like to cold cock Microsoft. On the verge of winning a format not the most complex, but rarely beaten, automatic updates slipped my mind and shut Toshi down, which, again, is the only reason this post is here. The save prompt did not take, and now I'm pouting, but should be working anyway. In Diamond Park, amid the vandalism, and domestic travail, gimp dealers stabbing their bitches who screamed and ran dripping blood down the hall, I worked. I did not win contests or get paid until I obtained online access, but I worked. It runs deeper than my resistance to the den mother mindset of the nanny state. I've stopped believing in myself. I knew my savings would disappear from my early days on LiveJournal, and my preposterous solution to that were penny articles for Examiner. Sigh. I believe I'm still employable, but I need the right habitat, unless I want to give myself a reason to go on parole.

I haven't engaged the police, just yet. It feels like a satire. Hannibal against the Roman Republic, post menopausal tits added, like Artemis and Sheeba. Bogart always has that underlying vulnerability to his machismo, the bobble head before the actual toy invaded pop culture.

Pugilist Transformations

"In the ensuing war, particles of divine light-substance are imprisoned in the darkness."-- John Kevin Coyle, Manichaeism and Its Legacy

Examiner.com put out one of its mass memos last week about Google News crackdown on thinness of content, which points to the problem of hyper-linking. I consider myself an ethical writer regardless of my proclivity toward lack of reticence, but even my head is spinning at this point about original sources, and I have no direct contact with Examiner's editing staff, this in order to learn what they would like me to change.

Boxing is yet another metaphor for the industry's delight with its cannibalistic dark side, which is why we have so many films about the sport and liberal outrage about who, and what, it spits out. Raging Bull takes a slightly different timbre on this, as it is more about the awe and artistry in Marciano's fury, darker than Stallone and his perpetual hound dog lovable pull the girl in. Di Niro's variation on Marciano forces us to pose questions about rage, self-destruction, homicidal intent, without benefit of easy answers. Scorsese has his elevations, and the hard schematics from Humphrey Bogart's final years on which to draw, or Anthony Quinn's pustule diction in Requiem. The Harder They Fall (1956) picks its bones in a few easy places, and is an early indictment of sports media collusion with graft, but the real issue is Bogart's character, trying to square his conscience 30 odd years before Spike Lee hopscotched out of Brooklyn with a chip on his shoulder. There are subtexts within subtexts, as Bogart, I think, is also saying something about his status in the industry, the syndrome he and Lauren  virtually manufactured with single-handed charisma, and who really holds the reigns of capital in the studio system.

Yesterday I mentioned the senior advocate over me after John spiraled at my former place of employ, and, if I were still talking to Dan, my issue wasn't, and still isn't, matriculating the black welfare class upward. My issue was that I took a job where a black girl from the hood had supervisory authority over me to the point that we all reached a limit. I'm not Hillary Clinton, but I had graduate credits which I had hoped to complete when I was at Matrix, and had to toddle about like a goose in leg irons with a senile queer and a black girl who had no desire to matriculate herself further; I did-- hence my hydrochloric acid toward attempting to trust Philadelphia ADAPT later. My civil liberties have been violated repeatedly; my trust betrayed, repeatedly. Acceptance is one thing, but outrage isn't born in a vacuum.