Back to Black in a Holy Land Apotheosis

We only said goodbye with words I died a hundred times.-- the late Amy Winehouse

We have followed Glenn Close in her various guises of hedonistic, playful, malevolence over the years. The uproar over Fatal Attraction is now nothing more than a cyclic cultural footnote, especially juxtaposed against the reverberating waves of emasculating feminine outcry, castrating the acculturated like Ryan Lizza and the swine like Harvey Weinstein, and even the pedantic like Al Franken. [Erik Wemple is sometimes more filler than substance, but he nails the bafflement squarely on the head with Lizza’s career. Though Wemple is accurate about employer termination clauses, the case here against the noted eastern analyst seems in need of adjudication. I have no vested interest in salvaging a tenacious liberal like Lizza, and I had my supervisor removed simply for putting her husband’s orgasms and performance in the same sentence, so my alarm may seem hypocritical, but to impugn the man over what has a feel of sour grapes seems to be a loss of proportion…] Dangerous Liaisons might be an extended metaphor for weaponizing the AIDS virus, and it is my favorite Close film in a way that The Big Chill is almost instantaneously a non-entity. Like many performers, however, Close embodies the nefarious enforcer, and she can dial her medical professionals up or down, accordingly, always with a slightly malicious air. There are hideously interesting aspects to The Girl with All the Gifts. The opening scene was the only time I have ever seen wheelchairs used as protective devices for a threatened able-bodied minority, but I am going to go out on a limb and call the narrative evolutionary diabetes of popular culture. I have nothing against women like Carey earning a living off of established zombie conventions, but her motifs come on the cheap. Oh, there are creative instances, a distillation of the bond between teacher and student in merciless institutional settings. Sennia Nanua does an excellent job as monster child heroine with her idealism and principles contrasted with insensate drive, with her savagery toward cats a deliberate poke in the eye. Consumers don’t need a reference website to see McCarthy’s imitations of 28 Days Later, stark geography, stark existence in tandem. The dowager wearies of Walking Dead syndrome.

However much appreciative of British one-upmanship against their American colonial counterparts, the BBC and Channel 4, if not ye old Pinewood Studios, love of humbling redneck reactionaries with an elitist sensibility of how acclimated European minorities are simply isn’t a real world reflection of social mobility, inside a class system or not. And we dare not exclude the French from this contention, since David Baiot is the Remorseful, if corrupting, Homosexual of The Churchmen. Audiences cannot possibly dismiss his fully rounded character Emmanuel as not deserving of ordination and grace, unless it emanates from his conscience, not ours. This diversity outcry from Mcdonald may have accurate demographics, but to the English mindset, there is no such creature as a British African who can flip black counter culture on a half penny. Ask Sophie Okonedo. Any regular PBS viewer knows her as the indispensable token of Great Britain’s sobering success, never mind the empire’s ruthlessness when Jamaican field hands were executed for the sake of sugarcane in the 1840’s. Okonedo is the unflappable gauze bandage, exchanging a prosecuting barrister for an unassuming lesbian like a living hologram. It is in this sense “Melanie” is captivating on the cheap: look at the little black girl behaving like a duchess. This is what sells, African appropriation and elocution of Caucasian table manners. If her predatory ferocity is a survival tool in the new world order, exactly what that is in Carey’s disaster remains mystifying, since we have little idea if the fungal symbiosis of the third generation will essentially wind up being the jealous plants of the body snatchers. Contrary to what my audience reads here, I treat the Muslim Saran quite well, especially since my bitterness is beyond her comprehension. I let her have a few dollars here and there, and she has no idea I’d ship her right back to West Africa, that I examine her like a foreign invader who will invariably destroy my United States. If she understood this intolerance, she would weep, and perhaps marvel at the strength of its roots, ingrained by self-inflicted alienation, among other things. Some journalists take the bull by the horns and equate Trump’s behavior with mental disease, and these are in the majority. Will, Sullivan, Joe Scarborough. Wiser men like Ed Rogers see Trump’s behavior as unpleasant, remembering that none of us are expert at psychiatric classification. I am impatient with certain aspects of Trump’s crass, but as someone long wading the trenches of expendability, every time I distance myself from his bluster, the left swings me right back with what is indicative of hysteria. There is still entertainment to be had in making Jerusalem an apocalyptic focal point simply on the strength of conviction. Jewish Israeli’s have  a divine right because the Torah makes it so, or Trump likes to side with winners, in the simplicity of reasonable accommodation.

Perhaps, within a week, or two, I will stop being let down by Mike’s schedule, (the wheelchair mechanic) I can order a new charger and or trade in my kindles and return to reading, actually passing my stool into our civilized sewer systems, as I could in the fall, and be more forgiving of the turn of the screw. I do not think Trump will necessarily ignite a catastrophic third world war. I also don’t believe the GOP will shield him indefinitely. This doesn’t imply impeachment. His reign isn’t worth what that would entail, but I am no judge of what constitutes mental defect. Isn’t Al Sharpton also a bigoted bully?

Mel Gibson, Henry Winkler, an Impostor's Break from Her Break

Like Stalin, Trujillo ruled by turning his rage without warning against his subordinates.-- Publisher's Weekly on Vargas Llosa's novel which pitted itself against the world, only to find that the United States is responsible for San Dominican industry keeping San Dominicans on San Dominican soil

Llosa's interviews on public television still give one pause, make a failed writer take a step back; as well written as The Feast of the Goat is, the assassins bookmarked to return to Urania's opening, her guilt ridden survival, all Llosa really does is confirm politics is a blood sport, a corrosion of any ideal about human governance. Dominicans and Haitians may no longer electrocute each other for amusement-- or is shock therapy only a dirty little secret in New Delhi?-- but the island of two weakling states which both have seats in Manhattan, a pretense toward sovereignty when both are still entirely colonial, illustrates basic geopolitical lies. If one examines things too closely, the notion of a patriotic national identity has fissures world over, and might still be cause for alarm in India, China, even Putin's imperial cult-- but there are strong states juxtaposed against mere contrivance, and this is why Lkosa pisses me off. He takes (a) reader through a historical xenophobic hell, for what exactly? Am I supposed to condemn Eisenhower and JFK for allowing Trujillo to repress socialist collectivism only to wind up with developing world paternalism, in 2010 and beyond, suckling on humane capitalism, patting Indians and descendants of the African diaspora on the head?

I am not envious. I cannot do everything, and Latin American literary gamesmanship I examine, with jaundice. Urania's anguish, the indignation of Trujillo's killers, this means little. I actually identify more with Trujillo's pain, in Llosa's conception of it, than with the humanists who have to carry the valise of his legacy for the rest of their lives. It is more Llosa's ego, and the doors it opened in Hollywood for his relatives to make rip off monster movies, much like Henry Winkler's dramatic irony in Vancouver merely confirms Mel became an entrenched victim of Jewish liberalism, that intellect which is so superior to the rest, and though Winkler is a league or two removed from my Jamesian associates, his satirical undercutting in The Imposter is the best episode of Dead Man's Gun, which can be overly strident-- but Winkler, as executive producer, is toying with our memory of Fonzie as the otherwise harmless variation of Italian bling. I was such a naive girl, not realizing Jewish men were aping Italiano to make fun of it, and also to hide themselves. God forbid people like Winkler or Falk or Nimoy display any orthodoxy after the cataclysms in Europe. This is the secular liberalism Gibson came up against, and took a beat down from the establishment. Far be it for spastic to judge, as a crippled Jewish princess did it to her too, but watching Winkler's peddler learn assertion, using his skills at reading to undercut machismo, represents a subtle, mostly victorious argument against virility, against the necessity for violence to achieve grace. Minority anarchists are doomed to the sidelines, suspecting we're right despite the price involved, and knowing it. There is a time when murder is righteous, even if effeminate behavior is clever enough to evade Satanical burrowing. My femininity was hurt by orthopedic surgery, already challenged before Steele cut into me as a girl. Pubic area was never tidy, well behaved and cupped nicely in the vaginal area, as is the median for such things.
Butch bitches would classify it as intersex, but fuck that. I'm mad I have to get old, to die, with so little to show for what walkers did to me. Oh, men. They fuck me, but wanting me is another matter. Unlike the dykes, who may correctly intuit my submissiveness without also reading my revulsion at enslaving myself to a regressive infantile nurturing. I have plotted these points, and rejected them, but it doesn't mean I'm not pissed, and know I'll be subjected to more advances, if I survive long enough. I hope I get lucky enough to really hurt the next woman. I want to send a message, let them be on the receiving end of surgical cuts that destroyed my esteem. Now I need to close my lost round with The Freeman and dust my ego. 

Thudding Indentation

I cannot actually discuss the column I am working on, even in these days of hyperlinks down to the essential beat reporter, but I twisted myself from the lede to the essential meat of my idea, despite what extreme poverty and physiological duress are doing to me. What I can say is this is a mainstream policy piece about which I care, and as I've written three times, I want to get it right; by the end of next week I hope to have a workable draft nearly ready-- and, if I am declined, be prepared to be a good soldier, as Leonard Nimoy and Peter Falk were, at least on the set.

I may overuse the idea of conduits, but Falk and Nimoy were both filters between Jewish intellectualism and popular culture, and when my battle with Presbyterian pretensions and contiguous minority abusive stigma subsides, at least to some degree, consider these two celebrity character actors a foot note in one of my squiggly segues towards both fusion and difference.

Victor Mature Kills Kitty!

We've all seen the 49 film a million times. But today it reminded me how little time I spend on my work, and how much I hope that feline had a humane stunt double and that the carcass on the set was old, fake, and my own post-modern rendition of the jawbone with a jackass snapshot, rolling mafia Semitic bling all into one.

Cutbank rejected "With The Jawbone of A Jackass," but wrote "It made it past our first reader!," and I pulled the piece, rewriting it when not exhausting myself on mind games with google eye rolling bitch evasions. Judges is an esoteric scriptural contest, the least theological, and the scribe who was faithful to the legend of Samson must have anticipated the rise of the mogul in Cecil B Dmille, or was British, not that Hollywood ever did any prescriptive favors for doctrine, but why does a Hebrew bully so captivate the imagination?

We have no Philistine archaeology, only the knowledge that they were the regional power in play during that period of the Jewish inferiority complex, and if the Philistines were bullies, hey, the sons of Aaron had the appropriate lamentations, and out of yeshiva a bully was born. I may eschew Christ, but Samson, no. I believe he existed and fought for his people. His desire to belong to the gilded mistrusted metropolitan power class a cause celebre which achieved the desired result in the end. The last time I paid attention to lion population estimates they were at 100k. That they've dropped to 30k in 2014 is a terrible tragedy. The most recognized animal on earth. We can't even act collectively for that, and some of you temptingly lecture me about negation. Hmm. Merry Christmas

Personal Loyalties

He handed us fiction after fiction and we printed them all as fact. Just because... we found him "entertaining." --Peter Sarsgaard as Charles Lane

A television commercial when a freshly resigned case manager still had access to cable through a defunct company. One question Americans might ask is how we enforce anti-trust laws when Comcast is the sole provider of pay for view, despite diverse distributors like Netflix and Amazon and Verizon. Verizon is a now redundant spin off of AT&T, but it is a communications utility. Netflix I never fully comprehended but suppose it started as a rental agent. Amazon is a retailer, and now all these corporate models have there own cable box.

In 1997 I was still in job divorce mode which seemed, as a rupture, to take forever to heal, and there was the commercial for The New Republic. I called, subscribed to the print edition, knowing nothing, certainly not that Marty Peretz was insane. I discovered that later on my own in my dialogues with TNR, particularly with Michelle Cottle, but in 97 I read a contributor's article about lice and typhus and old world Jewish quarrels, and fell in love with the writing. I wanted to write like that, doubted I ever could, and understand why David Plotz and Lane want to kill Stephen Glass. I'm a million miles removed from Airforce One's onflight magazine and part of me wants to kill Stephen Glass. TNR has been much changed and diminished in these 17 years. One of their interns was nice to me when I pitched, and I've recounted this, and still get horny over the fact that The New Republic was nice to me and I did nothing with that capital out of fear and intimidation. I emailed them shit on spec later but I myself knew it was shit on spec; that door had closed because I feared to assert myself to get at the former corrupt bastard who ran this city, John Street. I met Street without wearing a brassiere without ever intending to do that. There was a gathering in the parking lot and I had a sudden craving for a burger and threw on shit clothes and rolled down and there was Black Mafia himself and I died. Being ever the politician, he grasped my shoulder and asked how I was doing. No idea I hated him and his excuse for a brother.

Shattered Glass doesn't work as a film because it is too close to reality of events which have damaged us all, and yet, Stephen's breach of ethics, his fabrications, his plagiarism, and the exposure of other notorious cookers of truth who followed, point to a distinctly modern problem as old as the hills. We don't like being drawn in for fools by more temperate psychopaths, remain fascinated by such villains, and don't look too closely at demarcations, such as the fact that bias builds its own slant. I have read John B Judis in TNR's pages, and can't say I always get his policy critiques, but I do not consider him to be virulently anti-Zionist. Jewish liberalism is not always sacrosanct, and has its own unpleasant equivocations which cause undo harm. Philip Roth exposes it however diffident or enthusiastic one might be about the author. I've certainly experienced it, and wrestled hard with my conscience afterwards, despite the roots of poison which have led me to eschew certain other vectors of radical equality.

Yet Billy Ray deserves credit for nibbling around the edges of the edifice we call the fourth estate, and Sarsgaard reached in deep to pull out an inspirational scene on the nature of integrity, despite the fact we have to find ways to entertain the audience, and do it daily. Everyone is in the brand game.

Chameleons

"What _Call It Sleep_ has in common with these lasting works is a determined sense of art sustaining itself in a fallen world, a time of endless troubles, of political and social fright."-- Alfred Kazin

What Kirk Douglas and Paul Newman share in common is the secular submersion of their identity for commercialization, and this despite the fact that Kirk, surviving his new age counterpart, was better at playing the traumatized Zionist who finally gives in to psychiatric methodology. There is something off in Newman's performance in Exodus, something that is not missing in Hud or The Hustler, those devastating new wave heavies-- and what might be allegorical in Cool Hand Luke, not that I'd be able to ascertain if the southern penal system in the 60's would kill a white man, whose assimilated ethnicity was invisible, over vandalism which signified a personal insurgency. I am wondering if this is why Jewish liberalism is almost invariably an unwritten codicil to American Constitutional protections, not that Nazism won't remain as a faux specter, at least until my sister's great grandchildren begin to procreate.

Hud actually reminds me of one of Balzac's grandiose misers, which might be giving Newman too much credit for his uncompromising western brutalist. 

Johnny Abbes

He wished to banish from the minds of chivalry around him his own indecent and unacceptable jest respecting the Jewess Rebecca;" Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, location 1650, or as an object of crystalline hatred, to remind my .0001% regulars, second woman from the right

O, rest assured, part of this is self-flagellation for my own gullibility, never to be entirely gotten over, which earns contempt. I want to destroy a kindergarten case management psychological mindset because its ape like antics, and I mean the literal social agitating of shrieking chimpanzees, did me so much harm.

Woody Allen's defenders are invested. Wilder  must have his dwindling share of proponents as well, yet I was never partial to either the wit and anxiety of the former, nor the hyper-manic slapstick of the latter, despite Young Frankenstein, which had its moments of bestial abandon, one that triggers the primate grin to forestall aggression. Why does dissimulation trigger homicidal rage? In the attempt to balance her excellent magazine feature on Allen's immolation of his stature, Phoebe accented that Mia threatened to kill her former partner. Is there any woman out there who doesn't understand such sentiments? If this had turned into the next OJ Simpson trial, Farrow had a justified defense.
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I have no regrets in my purchase of Llosa's novel, despite the novelist's deep leftist convictions-- yet multiculturalism is not a salve for Caucasian trauma of lighter touch. San Domingo and Haiti are apparently separate countries on the same insubstantial island as a matter of skin tone: Haiti is an African colonial commonwealth of the US, and Trujillo's old patch is a Spanish-Indian infusion with a little more self reliance. I thought I was buying something else, back when I vacuumed up e-ditions for kindle. WTF do I care about this sorry land mass and the legacy of its diaspora? What is Llosa demanding of my empathy, and how much genocide do we have to carry to our graves?

Since I am confronting mortality of my relatively horrific life, with the back of Jerry's corduroy blazer before my youthful asinine eyes playing "The Cripple Who Loved Me," like an Ian Fleming title track, this is the failure of my potential: I have researched Haiti for years. I have handfuls of articles on its flamboyant and ruthless leaders, fascinated, wondering why we don't just eradicate this sorry excuse for a civil society, because I created a Haitian psychiatrist for a longish satirical spy thriller where King Arthur and Guinevere are father and daughter engaged in incest, sodomizing the knights of the round table. I kill them all in the end; hate the story and don't know what I'm doing with it, but like my Haitian psychiatrist. I had no idea Llosa had written a nearly identical tale, but novelists cannot change the world. Mario sort of does what I thought. Crippled lions, k cera, cera

Pruitt's Carrot, Body's Stick

the artist's young spouse, wore a great billowing pastel housedress and flattened espadrilles and was, for better or worse, the sexiest morbidly obese woman Atwater had ever seen. -- David Foster Wallace, "The Suffering Channel", loc. 3973

Everyone remembers Pruitt Vince. The involuntary eye movement, his weight, pasty face. The unique signature of his character makes him easy to recall. The obscenely heavy foil in House, the one submissive john in Monster spared by Aileen Wuornous. Pruitt's part was small but crucial because the tables had turned. The trick was vulnerable and the hard luck bitch minimized herself for the few moments it took to bring on ejaculation. Harsh scene. With the right casting director Pruitt does the good guy, the bad guy, and the acerbic Manichean in the middle. In Identity Mangold makes an interesting choice to pit Molina against Vince, suggesting over-classification of mental defect and the loss of our own agency to it are two sides of the same coin. Molina's countenance also leaves viewers uneasy-- not quite one type or another, almost Byzantine. The ying and the yang meta-fictional reality book end the formulaic red shirt elimination plot so popularized by Agatha Christie. Cleverly done, where even the sanest parts of Malcolm Rivers are corrupted.

Dissociative identity disorder, however, may not be a real mental illness, and it is not so sweet or succinct as famously brought on by the author of Sybil. This has not prevented the industry from mythologizing it, conflating it as a fascinating morality play, and it will no doubt stay that way until a pupil of Aaron Eckhart deconstructs it just as Eckhart deconstructs the dark side of secular liberalism with ruthless, painfully funny, veracity. Pruitt Vince will always have work due to his mild yet egregious condition. Would there ever be a day where he'd get lead billing?

Down Time Binaries

Some philosophers believe the key to solving certain age old metaphysical problems is to embrace contradiction, but I haven't been able to resolve that I can enter into empathy with the father, who is able to draw me in to the hard flint of his psyche, while the son keeps me on the outside, pushing me away with a visceral animosity, the 1993 Falling Down being a notable exception.

Kirk Douglas exudes certain qualities in the best of his 20th century work, qualities that offer a subtle exchange on mind/body vulnerability, that can be exemplified by his black and white films like The Juggler 1953. His game theory with Jewish identity and diasporia doesn't always reach the depth of later Hollywood and foreign film Holocaust revisionism, and I only touched on it briefly in earlier posts, but he is certainly more successful with it at times than Paul Newman, and you may consider this a working outline, to which I shall add, as carefully as the late Christopher Hitchens, that I am critical of Jewish exceptionalism that seemingly makes the modern state of Israel a necessity.