Ulee's Tributary

"I'd take that into consideration Mr. Bailey, if this was a democracy."-- William Shatner, now a wily spokesman for CPAC cleaners

Even before I started this account, I'd track certain actors, particularly if they expired of cirrhosis of the liver before their time, attempting to gain insight. Peter Fonda was not one of them. Like Michael Douglas after him, Fonda was a pretty face with a shag haircut, engaging in a valiant, dismissive struggle in Futureworld, where Yul Brynner manages to be a better robot in this fraying and cosmetic liberal decade which does indeed seem to have ended in 1978, than Brent Spiner manages to be an android in the Clinton era, and no, this is not a swipe at Data's endearing naivety, only a suspicion that a machine with consciousness may really not wind up in an ontological category which humans would necessarily find favorable, and Brynner perhaps captured just a little better the malevolence of circuits and diodes simulating a gunfighter whose liberty was a facade, an entrapment, and an evil which could be defined as such exactly because it lacked dynamic of the soul. I have no need to reiterate admiration brushed off in my more energetic archives, (nothing if not energetic), about Ulee's Gold. I remember the drug addiction led to the punk show of force upon which Fonda's character prevailed. Certainly not every nuance of this quiet film's local color, and it was a better film for its self-depreciation, but Fonda never fixated me, not like Cassavetes, and did Gena Rowlands consider their match lucky, fortuitous? Or did John's alcoholism rate him as just another more incisive greaseball, as all Italians are? His performance in Rosemary's Baby on those crutches only offers up mitigating hints. Nonetheless, even if I never sought these answers in Fonda's demeanor, his passing Friday morning elicited a mournful, instinctive yowl. Something felled, it clangs in my head in my desperation to get out from under the thumb of the sterile black psychosis unto which I continue to weaken, in every withered African frame the cry of Kurtz, "the horror, the horror!"
This scoring pain Medium's generation shall never understand, as I was busy last week buying into their paywall. Before I kill myself, or decide to try to, some of my posts here may become more ambitious columns there, as if agony actually transmutes.

Cirrhosis From The Crypt

 "You never know how much of the journey you will travel alone."-- Marthe Keller as Anushka

“Yes,” it was noted while watching “A Woman Under The Influence,”  the corresponding lack of judgement embedded in Cassavetes’s directorial captures is to some degree echoed by John McNaughton in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which was released for distribution scarcely sixteen years after this very seventies expose about a blue collar family under duress, essentially excavated for the sympathetic viewer, and only one year after Rowlands buried her iconoclastic other half, curiously enough. There is a correspondence in the focus of the camera between how Rowlands unravels for her directorial partner, and how McNaughton focuses on Michael Rooker as a feral, predatory apex male who makes torture an aesthetic dialogue, although the actual Henry Lee Lucas wasn’t so grandiose or magnetic;  the authentic convict, one suspects, was a dungaree rugged bullshit artist. There is another biopic about Lucas entitled Drifter, a rare catch on an adjunct channel called Through The Decades, more traditional in its approach than McNaughton’s effort to offer us up a seminal perspective, where the actor portraying Lucas was more or less a grease monkey giving the Rangers who apprehended him a run for the taxpayer’s money, and this Henry is perhaps more accurately drawn than Rooker’s.  Less art for the sake of more factual realism,  but Michael Rooker’s Henry functions more like a draught horse sadist, offering up just as much conversation with Otis and Becky as necessary.  The salaried critical class is also correct in its consensus that McNaughton’s overall exposure of bottom barrel sordidness is uneven. At times he offers up a compelling look at torture as expressionistic, then veering into the camp of a typical horror film. The death of Otis almost knocks the viewer off script, as such.  Cassavetes is more disciplined with his composite of Mabel in 1974, and although both films are treating different subject matter, the lead characters are similarly alienated, lousy in their judgement calls, and the world built upon their templates is a liberal world in paralysis. I am also much less sympathetic to Rowlands in her interpretation of Mabel than the Widescreenings examination which focuses on “Influence” within its generational mode, as it should be. We need appreciation of signature independence, but let’s cut to the chase: Rowlands, in spite of her Welsh background, is playing a Jewish princess against Falk, in his ethnic convolutions to sustain his premiere status, as the hyperbolic husband, and furls around in slightly too kittenish fashion, in a type of prelude to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Cassavetes certainly has trace elements of anticipation for the much more powerful Nicholson movie, but he abstracts and collapses Mabel’s sufferance because his story is about the family and community in a concentric circle around that emotional pain. What do we expect of this dramaturgy, when all is said and done?

I have always treated Cassavetes with the same degree of reverential shellac which is comparable to what Ingmar Bergman receives from Sweden, but the old man who gets his insatiable repressions burst by Amy Irving in The Fury is little different than the parodied cripple in Rosemary's Baby of yesteryear. Wry and florid bemusement has little place in the endemic civilization the Carter administration left behind, even when there's nothing we can do.

Of relating to secretion

"No human being has the right to own another."-- John Phillip Law, a progressive magical realist

What does a film like The Fury bring to the table? It puts the restraint of caste on the working class hysteria which Stephen King wrought fairly well in Carrie. In the "me" decade, liberalism was in a virtual stampede toward all the ills that made the US into "the Great Satan" and movies tapped into that underlying anxiety of forsaking god and hierarchy. The Exorcist had a subterranean dimmer effect on the liberated woman, just as the Omen suggested Kennedy's assassination may have been the beginning of the end. Carrie exposed misogyny as a corrosive disaster, and De Palma upgraded it just a bit, gave ESP a certain hauteur, allowing the audience to snigger at the military industrial complex, the Saudi family no more than obliquely referenced. People gave credence to extra sensory perception. Rod Serling used it as a scientific method to try to keep Night Gallery alive, my diet of ad hoc camp, which upon reflection is simply the stuff of silly. De Palma did not need Christianity as an apologia, like those which came before it, and dispenses with it in Durning's litany of awe for telekinesis. Who needs the supernatural when being human is enough of an inexplicable frustration? Andrew Stevens Robin has a petulance which is off key in comparison to Douglas and Cassavetes' playful bouncing ball as industry elders, one to die in his cirrhosis mystique, the other regressing into his amazing second childhood. Kirk's life nearly spans the history of cinema itself, and the definitions he carried with such a razor's edge in his post war films, by 78, are ridiculed, even impotent; there is a subtext in The Fury that masculine definition is under significant threat, but excusing Stevens not offering more subtly to his tantrum, we were worried about turning ourselves into weapons of mass destruction, something Sacks attempted to mitigate, going into neurology. I do not know how many of you may have read Christopher Hitchens series in Vanity Fair on dying. Hitchens pieces carry an undercurrent of a smoker's corrosive guilt. Sacks is sanguine, and as is typical, concentric in the focus of his fortune life, putting himself at the service of the damned.

If there is a perspective on terminal illness and mortality I have not read in over forty years of literacy, perhaps it is in Sanskrit.

Anointing Hillary and Jeb without the bother of retail handshakes

"Is my sex too straight?" Diane Keaton

Brian De Palma is in many ways a shameless hack. Kirk Douglas certainly enjoys himself, realizing, that his lead billing days were fading. John Cassavetes offends sensibility as Childress, and Amy Irving has "fuck me I'm new babette" stamped on her brow, but given all this, I have an attachment to the implosive repressions at play in The Fury (78). People actually were that new age, and the sixties had been that corrupted by Saccharine, making the viewer squint with bemusement. Preposterous, a cheap commercialization that anticipates ISIS aping Arabic stereotypes. To illustrate to my audience that I am capable of mortification, ISIS has gone too far in how it killed the Jordanian. There is absolutely no honor in that excessive overkill toward a fraternal adversary, and Abu Bakr is disrupting my desire to die on European soil, I'm no longer amused.

Even as I'm seriously considering sending Toomey my resume without deleting this blog or the tweets linking to it, but if Toomey's people were willing to consider deploying me as a consultant, then I'd have a pickle. I don't like online shaming, which is why I stand by my belligerent rivulets. It has not yet truly affected my pitching, my attitude, to my knowledge, but it could, and if Toomey's people said "okay she has a point, let's use her mandate attack", then outlets like Daily Beast would look at my posts, privately asking wtf is the Thorzine?

True, I shamed a former supervisor into a demotion, but that is not the same thing as lynching people for sensitivity into extreme life altering circumstances, and I do not like what was done to Sacco, nor did I like the routing of Amy Pascal. I never felt her remarks about Obama's viewing habits were insensitive; they were white, and sardonic, but should never have cost her her executive position, and I hold this take on Jeb Bush'es advisor Ethan Czahor. The left cannot wish utopia into being by wiping out human prejudice. The species would not be human anymore. (I just wrote a radical beatnik type, of the kind with whom I used to associate, sent her some samples and wrote I was against lesbianism. If she gets back to me and I go up before her audience, I might have a routing of my own.)