"It was one of those grimy brick houses which existed in large quantities before the era of reconstruction. [sic]" Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, location 4-11
Even in incidental moments, slicing the dwindling supply of potatoes to get you through a traumatic riddled weekend, not really paying attention to The Blacklist, the Gordon Lightfoot soundtrack craters you in, as Spader methodically wastes another traitor ally with humane ruthlessness right on the edge, his acting, between the emotional wounds and internalized flippancy, though the opening first season episodes offered a wry subversive bemusement, interest waned with all these mysterious processes swirling around the rouge agent character of Elizabeth, her brutalized psycho husband who apparently survives major cavity wounds. No one is that important, and the brutality offered by the directors doing the captures and the cuts is somewhat complicit, served up as fantastic, with Reddington something of a vengeful deity, except that some clever staff member remembered Lightfoot. This was all it took, for those of us who grew up on the emotive breadsticks of Croce's legacy, one which never envisioned Nigerian swaggering with thickened buttocks on the streets of Rome.
Dowager learned of this social ill through Don Matteo, and has no empathy. Let the Italian government ship their charming red light migrants to Jamaica. If these women want to leave Lagos, then they should stop complaining as to the consequences of marginalized, alien status. I tutored Nigerian students, and liked it better when they were restrained Franophiles absorbing western education for improvement. The difference between Matteo and the progressive video journalists soliciting the pity of privilege, is the mystery drama blames Roman lewdness, its sexual excitement over difference. Reporters on the ground liken them to untouchables, confined to their own foreign ethnicity, who cannot pay them well-- which will take us down memory lane to the fickle years of Usenet.
If I've mentioned JoettaB before, it was perhaps with scant detail. In 2016, coming to its close, I cannot flush out my interaction with her to a very great degree. She tried to help me over the CIL rupture, seemed to have a special interest in unstable males prone to violence, and posted one of my essays about smoking on her website, which I wasn't ready to abandon, then she vanished, and I assume this was due to harassment, or being threatened. "It was not I," the dowager proclaims, hands raised in an exposure of innocence. I bring this up because the general rule of thumb is, if it is posted, then it's published, and first printing rights have vanished, even if it doesn't quite feel that way. Nonetheless, I am including a variation of the piece in my collection, because it is a piece of my early post Matrix history, and the woman's disappearance troubles me, and since I take a hideously long time to gestate, "The Zippo Lighter" may lead me to a commission on addiction. Joetta met Kiefer Sutherland online, and she prided herself on that connection. It seemed a credible boast: He sent her tickets. Whatever her troubles were, I regret the space she left. Given what I face in real life, online nastiness hasn't really penetrated in that way; though it is a stretch, I think she was impaired through MS.
"lnventa la noche en ventura
otra noche,
otra espacio" Octavio Paz, Pasado en claro, with slight license
Carol never had the rabbit's foot, but she educated me about everything else, the elder sister of my best friend to whom I latched after the rift with Susan. Carol was floor captain of the apartment units in my university housing, and instead of turning myself into Vassar Miller or SE Hinton, the blonds of my block fomented my education, like a kid in a five & dime, virgin bugged at the shiny pink and conveniently large penis, less impressed with the egg, vaguely recalling skepticism. Carol was attractive, more mild version of her sister. Sue was voluptuous, more drama queen. I miss them both, terribly. Drank with them both, a drunk pathetic dead weight spaz hanging with the alpha girls who could afford to treat sex like a five and dime. I'm not a virgin any longer, and yes, I really was a mistress to married men, with real sexual intercourse, but those evenings, Carol educating me about pleasures I never could realize, represent moments of positive intimacy with other women I'll never inhabit again; never invested in enhancements. If I did now-- shrug. My clitoris extends slightly, off standard but not unusual. Maybe this is why I shit a horse with Linda's excited email transmission. I miss her too. Not the woman she is, an aged mantis, but the younger tag team we were; there was a personal bond. She sold me down river for an ugly faggot with the emotional repertoire of a five year old, and I can't get away from them, the freaks. His conceptual inequality sounds magnanimous, and I do not doubt Reich has the authentic brawn of a street peddler; he may have even met the transvestite with s/his infantile bitch with testes on the leash, but he'd never socialize with them.
Was there a seduction? I suppose, but not for that kind of experimentation. It was a fencing match and spastic believed I could play the hand, deliberately blind to the fact she and I were in the process of destroying what I should have left alone. My life was about to fall apart, and this game of shirking blades made it worse. The critics are right about Soylent Green. Heston is always a gesture of granite stoicism, but it was a film of my time, textured and colored perfectly for the Me decade jeremiad. Robinson burned in our minds because he really was being cannibalized by cancer that pulled conviction out of Charlton, an intensity of conviction. We did not use the word procedural as a categorization, not in those days, but this was an exceptional dichotomy of pursuit in a world that no longer had standards, practices we trusted.
I can see it, the end of our species. We will not come to our senses, colonize Titan, or have any real sense of intrigue about Spader, in a television slot of viscous and carefully delineated slime, deploying diseases, anhidrosis, like a damn card trick. James, you're of my generation and you are capable of a better disreputable range. What the fuck are you doing?
The prolonged Cold War—that Manichean drama of projections and counterprojections; the Vietnam War—not generally acknowledeged as the longest war in American history (1954-73); the protests against the Vietnam War, which forcibly divided the generations-- Joyce Carol Oates, ferocity shrew
Dashiell Hammett could teach those rushed kindle authors a few things about making light surface fiction interesting. I have studied him more than once under Jewish and Gentile liberal. James Joyce may rouse my hostility as an unforgiving fuck who smirks his way into the apologia of the dimmer dial, but Hammett doesn't thin his gruel for the sake of the puzzle, and The Maltese Falcon is one of my favorite commercial novels. My money is on Sam Spade teaching alien archaeologists more about civilization than the joke on Leopold Bloom. James Spader seems to embody a bit of each character, the Manichean detective, the corrupt and corrosively mocked Jew. It manifests itself in his early and quixotic role in Stargate, a breathtaking speculative cinematic otherworld. follows him in Wolf, manifests a wickedly promising menace in Boston Legal, only to fizz in The Practice. It is a menace of more complex nuance than that offered by Christopher Walken. Walken carries a bit of jingoism in his ruthless irony, but Spader leaves one unsure, as if he is a fervent convert to Satanic possibilities, or a Crusader who just discovered the potency of salvation. We're never sure which in his manipulative antipodes.
It is not enough for The Blacklist, which is patently ridiculous. No one man can manipulate die hard gum shoes and the ruthless hardened criminals and stay three moves ahead of either, not even America's unifying KGB statesman. With that qualification, the show may be of use, in its idiotic television way (Ukrainian ordinance guerrillas apparently inhabit the capital and spring to life for the convenience of the screen writer's guild, but hey, who is starving in corrupt government housing methodologies, not screen writers!). Good and bad each have debilitating costs and secrets, in the measure of how far brutality has come, gut stabbings are routine in gratuitous teleplay, a delight! If producers wanted to do it right, they'd anglicize a Persian and twist his balls in a confused identity matrix. The real Islamists can't be killed fast enough, but multicultural humanism on an American campus is a pasturized entry pass.
As decent as I am in creating contextual issues for this project, I may be faulted and rightly so, for my lag time, and my interest in saving Mike Nichols' ambitious mythology upgrade was left to lag during my transition out of LiveJournal onto Blogger, banging my skull against the wall in the median of moving my content, yes, Blogger is better, technically, but I am not there yet, and getting there would probably involve leaving Blogger as well. Writing is difficult enough, with more rivulets for authors than there are people, and I am a cripple too big for her britches who knows she can do TNR but is fearful of the scars this would entail, much like Walter Kirn, who fails to persuade me toward any sympathetic movement as far as LDS is concerned. Why write this piece? What Mormons deny, and what columnists like Kathleen Parker shrug off, is that Joseph Smith was a home grown psychotic who lacked the savvy of our contemporary spree murderers. Kirn cops out on giving TNR readers a hard look, and I've read better in dead independent ventures, like DoubleTake; it is hard enough, writing, and the digital age threatens depth, but to follow from my archive post, last paragraph, the critics of Nichols transitional literalism are correct, the shift from werewolf metaphor to dress animism weakens Wolf, because to take the camp in horror seriously, it needs anchoring with a gritty earthbound texture, and Nichols aims for a liberating mystique in the totem of the wolf pack, during the climax, one which cannot escape the entrapments of comparison that it tries to avoid, unlike An American Werewolf in London, a film not afraid to be playful, affectionate, and provides a rush in a great transformation scene. Is Nichols wrong in the implication, that certain aspects of primal aggression are liberating (Nicholson), but vicious without noblesse oblige, as in Spader's despicable foil?
On an aggregate level, I am not sure, but like Kirn, I cannot go full steam ahead for eighteen hours daily, and need a nap before I return to pushing deadlines, and still fucking around with my rage at Linda, and our vanquished disability center generation. Some might argue that I am too full of my own self-importance, and that may be valid, but at a basic level Liberty Resources stole the last and best of my strength, illegally, in the sense that I cannot reinvent myself at this age. Am I an asshole? Should I leave them alone with their grade school mentality over skills training contradictory empowerment within compliance paradigms? If I let it go, what this network did to me, next time the next spastic may not come out of it without more substantial injury. I am no longer young, and physical discomfort is also taking its toll; I genuinely want to spare another spastic of the future such a bitter pill, and those of you who know the inside like I do, and have been disillusioned, as I have, need to join me. We have to reform this.
There are things to be said about Blade's life and biography that serve as a stand-in for seediness in an urban environment, I just don't like the films as they have been adapted from the graphic form, and do not really see how Snipes used the role as anything more than a thug camp throw away. There are a number of threads within vampirism, of course, and the Blade saga weaves them together in a somewhat crass fashion that smashes together with the subtlety of bumper cars, with jump cuts into the hyper-stylized martial arts choreography.
The Stoker Gothic/Romantic tradition is one, though I tend to find the Nosferatu meme of fevered consumption and insatiable appetite leading to eco-devastation more compelling, but there is also another motif, not exactly distinct, but more carnivorous and animistic, in films like 30 Days of Night. Here the horror is just the feeding impetus, and little else, with Goth incorporation almost quaint.
The fact that Blade is black may evoke Richard Matheson, at least for enthusiasts, but there is not much allusion or irony in the films. Then there is Let The Right One In.
I enjoyed this film, but remain as perplexed by it as the early TNR reviewer was upon its initial release, and its meaning is something of a mystery. I believe I mentioned this in 2010, when I was still part of LitNet, and some future revisions may be in order.
I saw Wolf again this morning, and Nichols does devolve the storyline, which is very nearly an early Prada on steroids, but I'd like to sit on what I am thinking for a day or two, because I do not think Nichols was attempting a short sell. I think the literal half of the film was a compliment to the clever weave of the mythology and totem in the first part. Does James Spader turn being despicable into high art, as Janet Maslin suggests?
