Viral Transmission

"This is just to test your blood pressure," said Art reassuringly, noticing that the sweating was becoming excessive. As soon as the first slight pressure was applied to the bulb, the man moved. Without warning he screamed in terror and Art was on the floor... The Onion Field, location 459


Joseph Wambaugh's depiction of gay panic is quite different in text than in the screen play adaptation which led to the film, so different even the dowager isn't sold by what is going on in the company Ian keeps on his way to becoming a martyr in the name of law enforcement. In the movie, Ted Danson's Ian is a hastily contrived pastiche, because Wambaugh's underlying concern, as transmuted by the director, is the reverberating impact of justice as a convoluted process. In the book itself, whatever Ellroy's introductory praises, all of Wambaugh's character development seems like a hatchet job, as if he is desperate to imitate Capote and swallows his tongue in the process. This makes Onion Field a fascinating period piece, despite itself, and Wambaugh's hatchet has a nascent driving energy which intimates a command to skip the movie and read the true crime saga in the troubled years of Nixonion paranoia; but the screen writers for the film at least made homosexuality and vice recognizable. Wambaugh, by contrast, seems quite incidentally to border on science fiction.

By 1973 the dowager was growing up in the world, forcibly incarcerated just like Art's patient, and people didn't flip out over a blood pressure cuff due to sexual impulses. They might cry over girls on the ward engaging in mock lesbian teasing, to establish pecking order, as primate groups do, but this curious piece of exposition in the first chapter teeters on the edge of dramaturgic abstract art, as if Michael Rooker's serial killer was introduced on stage by Becket.

If the dowager was inconsiderate to Nick Denton in tweeting her repugnance for Michael Hall's brave and brief exchange with his fictional minority law enforcement officer, it was deliberate, but not quite due to prudent shock. Denton looks ambiguous, the way most radical Britons out of the radical left Labour wing do, and just as most radical Anglo Saxons do, male or female, they reach out to minority short order cooks to make political statements, perhaps covertly, through their sexual liaisons, and Denton does the same thing with his partner, besmirching marriage as a sacrament, defiant and in your face: I'm gay and love a black American. So what? The Western middle class has found a method of appropriating gay difference: elevating homosexual monogamy, even while medical epidemiologists' like Fauci hover in the background. Oh, they don't judge, but they are they failsafes policing sexual adventurism which by normal social standards are still considered criminal, like the use of handcuffs for restraint, for instance. And in a gay cross race relationship, there is always a bit of a hustle going on, cashing in on white privilege. I know it because I've been there, and indeed, could roll out on Market Street in my haggard skirt attire and pick up three black men willing to sleep with me, a broken welfare spastic, but a white broken welfare spastic, nothing more than a reprehensible power play, damning me into abomination territory. I'd like to remind the Holy Father, in this vein, that whatever his Marxist sentiments due to his Argentine background, he is the last Prince on the face of the earth whose statements have world renown impact, and one of religion's remaining functions is to name apostasy for what it is. You are not just a victim's advocate Francis, you carry thousands of years of Roman authority in that burden on your shoulders, and the growing material power of people like Thiel and Denton needs to be countermanded. The battle between them is almost akin to the sins to be plucked out of the Divine Comedy. Denton revels in sexual exposure because he wants to be accepted as a non-deviation, while Thiel blows 10 million on civil tort because he isn't quite gay enough to flout it in a parade, while broken withered crones can't even get a paralegal to do a case assessment on her life long toxic environments and medical model brutality which improved nothing on her original issues wrought by brain damage. Being able to blatantly buy the law simply because an individual created a flicker of a wrestling personality are episodes through which class resentment could trigger serious social unrest.

Tapestry Tracks

"The whole room trembles, expands, contracts, moves a few centimeters to the right or left, up or down, all the while keeping its cubical shape."-- Danilo Kis, Hourglass

I am a bit too dim-witted to understand just whom I am pissing off in the Google/twitter verse to have no referring urls on Blogger for a week. I have taken far more incendiary attitudes in the past than I have of late, though Bibi might find my attitude toward Israel perplexing, and I haven't addressed whether or not my disenfranchisement at the hands of the Jewish princess theme has made me Antisemitic-- though I may have lost a Jewish graduate student on twitter's back end. Even if I wanted to keep track of all that, however, twitter moves too fast. But the answer is no, with qualification, and that being, Jewish liberalism is also a flawed, human institution, This liberalism exists on the plane of Jonathan Swift's satirical bite evinced in Gulliver's Travels, and it is jaundice, but a jaundice with paucity. My Jewish cousins are my most favored family members, and if I could I'd move in with Robin instantaneously. Childhood affections, and she has style, a good metabolism, kept her figure, unspoken griefs shared at my brother's funeral. This is my remaining brother's twitter account, and you see his footprint; he dodges me, his bitter oldest sister. As good as his word, he will shut out my demise in an institutional environment, poor little Benny. Carries mother's maiden name, I don't really blame him. I may eat libertarian ideas as rapaciously as I gasp on fetid indoor radiated air, but Prince Charming isn't going to gallop over to Riverside from social media to rescue me from my remorseful imposition on African American society. If Benjamin cannot handle it, nor my sister, how much more the power males who admire my balls?

Yes, I have them, but only due to the fact I have no vested interest in not calling spades for what they are as I've experienced them, and in transit from Trader Joe's last evening, to the 7-11, I carelessly lost my sock assist, after years of caution, in the usual analogy of density and precocious wit. A simple piece of wood with rubber sealed wire, my entire life has been on the inside of the concentration camp, only flirting with the illusion of freedom in the flickering candle of liberal police states. I can't tell you what it is about the translucent finesse of Danilo's moral guilt that is worth revisiting as my exacerbations thicken with sputum, rereading too much at once, unwilling to fight, but equally not ready to go. I just started The Onion Field. The film made me realize Wambaugh's book would be better, because it isn't simply about a cop killing, but reverberation.

I concede, reluctantly, that small as my account may be, I am part of twitter verse, at least until I get myself banned. Why ever would a smart gal like me do that?

Hantavirus

For hypothetical PETA Partisans, The Black Marble engages the emotional interest. It takes a conceit I was trained to attend, the destruction of animal human bonding, cf, a more crew cut Martin Sheen killing Foster child star's hamster, Mel Gibson's dog killed by an archer in Road Warrior, the cat mutilation in Never Talk to Strangers, and turns it into the central conflict. Wambaugh had the nerve to focus a real slice of life vice on cruelty to animals, and I had a difficult time not uttering death threats at Harry Dean Stanton in a thirty year old film where James Woods looks fresh out of the performing arts-- but this film represents mature original comedies of which place viewers like myself on starvation diets, because they simply aren't made any more. Independent films, with few exceptions, spin their story arcs under the same burden of fragmented expectation. Harold Becker had the courage to allow his actors to be flawed human beings. Even Stanton's Skinner is traumatized by taking out his hatred on hyper terriers.

Most pet owners don't look too closely at the guilt of having faux children. I do; it is at once the ultimate form of narcissism we hold up for ironic exaggeration, and painfully appreciated at the same time. Eschew human children and become an immersible zealot. Favorite swine, favorite whale (orca is scary!), favorite carnivore.

If we really wanted to do a favor to other species, we'd engage in wiser palliative treatments, breed less, and restore habitat.

I have mentioned my senile uncle repeatedly. In the last two years he has has heart surgeries, hernia corrections, bladder surgery, and this week it is a new adventure under the knife; the sole reason I do not spar with my father's sister over this insane Nascar race she runs with bad health and medical model brutality is because I never had a vested interest in Joe and don't have the right. Try having your entire life circumscribed by orthopedic medicine as a curiosity, and maybe my argument for human dignity might not seem so misanthropic.