Bound Over Tradition

"They were considered to have right wing elements. And perhaps many of them were."-- Luigi Perelli, carving out his justifications for righteous polizi

One cannot quarrel with creator John Ridley over how well made American Crime is, craft and care is evident, especially when absorbing the alienation Pollari is able to project. He is an interesting young actor, but the message within the series, thus far, leaves one with a certain ambivalence. There is an atmosphere of forced intensity to it, freezing jello cubes with little wiggle room, leaving a European take on the grey area between justice and criminality, like The Bankrobber's Wife, seem light, comparatively. But what Ridley reflects is stark, sometimes leaving the viewer to squirm, which is why Shades of Blue earns a preference. It takes chances, but stays within parameters I can handle, and I am heartened that the writers allowed Wozniak to keep his humanity.

I also have to give praise to Liotta where it's due.

I never cared about the man and his acting before, Scorsese or not-- and there is a puzzle-- Scorsese is of my ethnicity with many of my concerns and I am somewhat hostile to his work, not able to quite put my finger on it, what repels me away from it, but Liotta's character work on Shades woke me up and bit, hard, but it's not quite erotic. I was wrong about that. Closer to the shock of recognition in tasting old wine with new flavors. Lopez is Lopez, and we can take issue with her credibility in projecting a cop outfencing everyone, but Liotta is charged, and perhaps age does this to us all, jacking us up to folly in that bracket of time left before things really head south. I mean fuck, he's giving a signature performance, and it rivets. I missed the finale, and maybe I'll run it this weekend, but it is a good show, mixing up the usual expectations in a crime drama. I'll offer more later. I've been online most of the afternoon and I'm looking at overages, barring chasing down a hotspot.

Sobering Pressures

Whatever one feels about John Ridley and his second season, I do not remember high school being as serious for teenagers as we all once were. In my era, drugs were a disruptive issue, but we never had lock downs and aggravated sexual assaults on the grapevine, and this was at the beginning of the Carter Administration, 78-79. In my district, somewhat affluent, like Leyland, bearing in mind this is Pennsylvania we're talking about, as opposed to Indianapolis, diversity was moot. Spastic was the diversity, not African Americans. I did not slam into class conflict and the cultural wars over black and white until the uproar at Widener over Huckleberry Finn and how to teach it. I pitied my academic advisor, Michael Clark, whose memory is one of the few instances of hallowed ground for me, I pitied Mark Twain, his legacy, and his towering achievement being obliterated over a pejorative which in the 19th century was part and parcel of linguistic currency, good and bad. It's a word, and when I use it I don't use it to "take away its power," as some angry black comics do, ones we no longer hear from-- I'll look it up later-- regardless of my context. When John and I had a heated debate at the tables of Cafe Walnut last summer and I said it in anger that was an accident, but I was hurting because a Market Street rent a cop denigrated me for going into my ATM, and I'm lucky I did not end up drawing the police on a holiday; perhaps it is a symptom of degeneration (I looked it up because that was one diagnosis that slipped by in the field) and the actor journalist was right. Taylor's mother had a serious illness, and we would have never seen anything like Pollari's assault on network in my youth. It was brave of ABC, maybe too brave, how easy it is to die like that. I took it, because that was what life was like for my deceased brother and his clique, but I'm amazed ABC allowed us all this brave linguistic honesty, the truth of our volatile dysfunction.

Now I need digestion time.