As goes Stephen King

"Some creatures are able to inhabit a space you never knew needed to be filled." -- Patrick Stewart, when still able to deliver a sexually enthralling line

Celebrity accounts on Twitter can be problematic, not just for the celebrity, but for those less successful with recognition: In a mere moment of vulnerability, Ken Wahl could make my heart flutter, despite the fact that binge watching Wiseguy wasn't about aesthetic pleasure so much as laughing at the hairstyle shags everyone wore in the eighties, with a sentimental teardrop, and James Woods, (sorely missed) might have floored my miserable self with any direct validation. Whereas Stephen King incurs my wrath, and when he liked my tweet, a caustic pin in his beatitudes toward being spared, it was all I could do not to rhetorically kick his hoary ass from here to Topeka. He isn't the worst suspense writer in the world, and Carrie tapped into the hysteria of puberty with a relevant timeliness. Some might argue that Shawshank and The Green Mile were structural masterpieces on the big screen that encapsulated American innocence as a main redemptive quality. The dowager begs to differ, and lumps all this in with a dismissive hand wave, Scott Bakula falling into the same category of mawkish obsolescence, Quantum Leap here today, gone tomorrow, but enough of a rolling credit to cast him as Captain Archer. Enterprise is one leg of the Trek expansion franchise with which I'm unfamiliar, and while the premise is sound, with a protean NASA patriotic pride from which Megan Rapinoe could learn to chalk a cue stick, Bakula simply can't carry Archer with any sense of majesty. Cogenitor might have been an episode about the history of the Prime Directive, and it might have attempted to be a delicate cur-in about queer repression, but the writers fall short both on Trip's heavy handed egalitarianism and Archer's conflicted regret, and even I, watching "Regeneration" last night, noted no one ever grappled with the fact there's no hint of the Borg in the original, and no tie in with the heady conflicts in the spin offs. I was certainly into it when Next Generation was the currency of its time. I also thought of sending Shatner a nostalgic love letter thread over the classic "Incident" with Joanne Linville but then thought the better of it. William Shatner the actor in the right context can struggle with demons, but his paucity for pity is self-evident in a constant projection of joviality as a florid old man who's lost his looks, the last of the first.

Last Day In April

Take me on. --a ha

I am not certain that I’d incur any significant losses by telling you I am researching bipolar disorder and pregnancy without yet having any potential query clear in my mind. Sourcing obstetricians and patients is, on the basis of contingency, a high wire act, thinking of my mother in her moribund jean jumpers, besieged fertility goddess of her time, blood running down her thick set thighs after she tripped outside a store. She straightened herself out without the use of a metronome during her pregnancy with Benjamin, her last child, only half-brother, rarely to dwell on her memory, slovenly sexual energy shared by eldest daughter with spears of pain in my shins, burdened more by sexual regret than anything, the game still on in his mind, and as my mewing 9:15 ache indicates, still in my mind too. The problem is I don’t have a clear read on what he wants. Why tell me he had an anal sex daydream with me if he wants me to behave? A good deal of the dowager’s arrogance was flattered by this admission, but the man’s passive aggressive baiting then swiping me down perplexes me. If it is mere lechery he could have had me by now, as my reactionary battalion of racial fear collapsed mid month. If these are his weapons, I’ve deployed my own somewhat subtle corral. It isn’t exactly nothing when daddy’s nonna puts poppa on the telephone to greet an African American male over 50 keeping her buttocks in fairly good hygiene, nor is it exactly nothing when this father’s sister decides to take him out to dinner. Marie’s largesse astonishes even me, but my family must appreciate the beatitude of my silence, a shotgun wedding with comedic exaggeration between us, he and I—in his mind, he fears my family will force a commitment on him if our already hairline intimacy billows away the scant coverage shielding the breasts of which he gets a good glimpse on a daily basis. No man or woman can ride this current forever, if it’s there. I’m old enough to remember M-TV’s initial launch on cable, the primitive social media of its day, making micro track musical narratives, all of which lumbered under Ken Wahl’s hairstyle. Though a-ha is an industry promoted boy band, You Tube was smart enough to take me back into time to the range of motion screaming in my soul on the refrain of its confidence. If he and I have such a hold on each other’s need, take on me, take me on, our smart phones are all but a cock ring and dildo apart, in theory, rebuilding the bridge I keep trying burn. There is nothing in my  damaged womanhood he doesn’t know. How did I stay on my knees in this fantasy? Let me correct myself: I have a secret or two left.

Resurrection's Security Detail

"Kate Simon reveals the special charms of the Umbrian hill towns, the enchantments of the Etruscan tomb paintings." Jacket blurb, The Places In Between

The injury which Ken Wahl sustained on the set of Wiseguy during the Tucci Pizzolo segment was mere happenstance, luck of the draw, much as his neck injury was bipedal carelessness, something which fame may aggrandize, and yet, if Umberto Eco wrote a pendulous attack on hermeneutics with his convoluted novel  Foucault's Pendulum (read more than twice), it is not so easy for humans to dismiss pattern recognition. We're configured for it, and the familiar things of more vigorous adulthood are sometimes recognized with shock, recollected schematics much easier to grasp in scope: As an actor, Ken Wahl wore his emotions and his retro-eighties shag doo hairstyle on his sleeve, for me, back then, just more disco culture transplanted onto an organized crime drama which was already part of a bygone era, an era which Mario Puzo captured and magnified for studio players to glorify. Michael Corleone's power, in other words, went the way of the Kennedy brothers as martyrs. We either bury the JFK, RFK assassinations, and move on, knowing the Warren Commission never answered the public unease, or drive ourselves crazy.
Cannell's show was window dressing the moral ambiguities of the 20th century coning to a close, which Kevin Spacey capitalized on to become one of the greatest actors of his time, great acting for which we nearly lack a syntax. Where Wahl is an open book, easily read, even if personally unknown, Spacey is a manipulative master of a humane but ruthless center, even in lesser films, he has the uncanny ability to keep his audience suspended on the wire, until delivery of the dénouement where he triumphs, whether or not Wahl's face was in the mix. Enter contemporary surrealism of 2016, since we're all on twitter with its massive micro data aggregation. I'm there, Wahl's there, and my cancerous aunt, the few thousand like her who find social media alienating aren't, but they, with the dowager and Ken Wahl only two decades behind them, are dying, in their last years, tick tock. A disabled woman makes an attempt to be heartfelt in her usual birdshot method, to a heartthrob of yesteryear who inadvertently took the punishments to his physique that his character sustained for dramatic continuance, followed him and retweeted his adoptive cause and he returned the favor, and to discover that at 2am, just transferring, sent a shot of adrenaline right through her heart, as if she could roll straight back to her hormone raging thirties.
I felt vulnerable, and emailed my sister like a squealing teen, as if tomorrow my knight will finally appear to ride me out of this corrupt African majority city because an actor was conciliatory, if cautiously so, as I also wasn't raunchy in my outreach, also careful, because his past brought me back to a collegiate womanhood before the worst wounds became an inhumane pin cushion, because he made me feel like an Italian American who would have her man, as was once hoped, instead of portents in busted legs getting injured by cameramen, signifying lack of heed for omens, for civilization under strain, the weight of lethargy a valve into which old age invariably gets bottled. I am not conciliatory. I did not vote for Trump because I think conservatives will give me vindication before I buckle under my own weight. I'm not one of the mogul's supporters. I simply understand his insensitivity, and since I wanted to make a choice, afraid of dying, I picked the lack of empathy I myself have learned and roared and got reported for numerous times already, knowing the Clinton mendacity would be worse than a dickhead from New York. As the national voice of Jewish motherhood, Marcus is already in histrionics, but fair is fair.  My notes, too, however, are ossifying on a familiar scale, because all I have are the search for signs, the hope for magical evasions of burgeoning helplessness. You might ask what's wrong that a fleeting connection made me feel flush? Nothing, but it is the vain strength of days bygone, since every defecation, every move I make, is a balance on a tightrope whose safety net is effervescent.

Vancouver's Concession to Brooklyn's Gentrification

"Otho's head is quite tiny, and it's owner's legs loutishly unclean," Catullus, pig of pidgin Latin

Stephen J Cannell reigned supreme over the television airways longer than JJ Abrams due to the fact that the studio system, during Cannell's prime, was in its turn of the century generic mode, not yet imploded in the Reagan era by digital technology turning us all into libertarian rebels; thus Wiseguy was Francis Ford Coppolla and Martin Scorsese on the cheap. By the time Abrams made good on the mystery island island motif to make Lost a sensation, the end of Clintonion global hegemony was already at hand. Abrams may have hit a vein of gold with his spectacular drama, but the expectations created by his plane crash could not possibly be fulfilled, certainly not by ABC, and Abrams managed to dissolve himself, through the radical assertion that none of us are accountable to either circumstance or environment. Cannell's disillusionment with the American empire, however, cannot be dismissed, however made for television his underlying cynicism was, it manifested itself as the gateway to the post-9/11 world we currently inhabit. Neither is Ken Wahl as gut wrenching as Donnie Brasco,. Pretty boy in North Hollywood may leave lonely women slavering for a high quality, more masculine definition of John Travolta, but Terranova's collusion, ethical erosion, is a sequential novella, to Depp's comparative existential insight, and Jim Bynes' "Lifeguard" was already a cliche by the time the character aired and formed, the primitive cyborg, empowered by early metadata and telecommunication advances, even if the perfect starlet fantasy hearkens back to every Southern European girl's brass ring. Ken Wahl was the epitome of working class transcendence for many, especially in the world of Kevin Spacey's Mel Profitt. Cannell might have had the courage to let Spacey's genius go where Spacey's genius took us with the later Usual Suspects, instead of Tucci as Pizzolo, but this might have been too radical for viewers: the self-hating, magnetic, corrupting influence of real power, of which money is merely an instrument, so Profitt was given a fatal flaw, not entirely without insidious capacity, however, in after-effect. It is the men like Spacey's villains who actually run the world, and we know it, even without a Carter administration white paper on sibling jackasses who create international scandals. Chelsea is a more adept Machiavelli, but look at the kind of parents she had to fuck her up.