Iron Circle of Zidan

High-throned in secret bliss, for us frail dust
Emptied his glory, even to nakedness -- a young Milton, sighted

Yaphet Kotto's execution sequence in the 78 film Blue Collar is an orchestrated marvel of plausible incredulity, textured with a granular, menacing quality. If the little people like Keitel and Pryor want to vie with the leadership of the union for power, they don't know what hard ball is, not until the bosses demonstrate they can even take on a pit bull like Kotto's character and deal him a lethal hand, and these are auto workers, with families and small row homes. Management needs to divide the Keitel-Pryor united front, and to do that, they eliminate the brawn, locking him in a spray paint trailer with a non-operational mask, turning on the paint nozzles to asphyxiate the little guy loyalist, one who roars like a lion. It is an unforgettable moment in the films of the me decade, and it is a texture the later Zodiac Killer reminiscences with poise and authenticity, the earth tones, the muted palette of ecological anxiety, particularly with the dead and the stressed grey squirrels in cages.

Blue Collar is not a great film, but it is true to the anxieties of my childhood, and if Kotto and Pryor were to be noted for nothing else, how their paranoia feeds off each other under Schrader's poignant look at hardened men who are desperate to make it, is one of the originals in a now nostalgia driven medium. The kill is also as much a metaphor on the consequences of defiance and expulsion as is Leah Remini's splinter from Hubbard's jazz and glitter. We are not so far removed from our primate origins, the ruptures within varying group dynamics, as we like to believe. Qaddfi may have been an Islamic socialist loon, but under his authority Libya at least had a known identity. What is it now? Collateral damage to the best intentions of the freedom loving US, where beneath the surface, how that freedom is defined isn't quite on par with constitutional articles.

Virgil Swann

"It's simply impossible for us to live with vulgar people. It's a defect, no doubt; it's an immense inconvenience, and in the days we live in it's sadly against one's interest."-- Henry James, The Reverberator

Smallville, recalled due to wanton disregard for sanctity, was too much about being occult eye candy; Welling was a nearly too perfect retrofit to the solid, self-defined, simple back to basics American that Christopher once exemplified and still attempted to exemplify once he became helpless. 

He could no longer exemplify it as a true expression of quadriplegia; his paralysis makes my ability to drag my upper torso across the floor positively invigorating, and I did not get along with him at AccessLife, being my usually contentious self; yet I feel guilty for the deaths of Reeve and his wife. I had nothing to do with either his subcutaneous pressure sore or Dana's lung cancer, and my interaction with the pair was limited, but there is guilt, right here, in this absence, in an empty space that can only be defined as a void.

Superman necessitates the values of the GI Joe American male; no way to get around that without negating what the graphic contours of his abilities represent. In looking back at the series, and adding the conjunction of Leah Remini's troubles, perhaps Scientology had too much influence on the series. It was in spite of myself television. Nothing on, and a utilized package, so Reeve playing off Welling was less effective than it might have been if I had a) understood Swann as the technocratic prophet; cared about L Ron Hubbard's repressed and rigid disciplines (he looks like a man whose lymph nodes overflowed with hedonism), and understood what the guild was doing with superhero encoding. It was bewildering most of the time, involving fantastical degrees of possession, corruption, and Nietzschean will to power.

Not all men, certainly, but most men are failed overgrown children, which is why I am so perplexed about Frank's hurt and don't know what he wants from me. I became intimate with him as a form of proof that I did not want to find a lesbian stick bitch along former supervisor Linda's lines, and also because I was sexually lonely. He was a horrific and revolting mistake, and leads one into certain temptations about the intelligence of the Hispanic male. If he and I had been young, then I could understand, but this was not a pairing out of love. He is a pig with a past of multiple partners and STD risk.

I need new friends; a new fuck buddy might be too much for which to hold out. If Pope Francis is orthodox this is right and a good thing for the Church. It is time. New Crusade. New Zeal. The Inquisition still exists as a matter of scant resource. The office should be reopened, and since I've lived in hell during my half century as a wheelchair user, there is no greater degree of suffering left which I have not previously experienced.