Are we willing to wash the feet of our neighbors?--holy Thursday
I tweeted that I was lying back down at three am, and did, but got up again immediately, embarrassed that I was caught by such a powerful stressor that I barely had time to pivot. It is not that I do not care about my intestinal battles; my esteem is tied into a good transfer, but I flaunt incontinence as a rebuff, the consequence of my survival. I am trying to challenge you all about this. My official statement to the bull bitches downstairs asserted I would vacate the premises tomorrow but given my quadriplegia, would need time to extract my possessions. Once I roll out, I am not entirely certain I am getting back in. I cannot afford it but may need a motel for a night, and thus far, bathed my feet, dialed the usual network of eliminations, all I could, for this morning. I read Ross's opine on Hefner's overstayed decline, and I am not sure where my recently acquired shrugs of depreciation come from, but was Playboy that big a deal? And my father's girlie mags of three decades back made the Trumpism of today possible? Ross is doing what we all do with this curious tool of the sign, the hieroglyphs we all recognize according to the geography of linguistic development, but the Harvard veneer gives it too fine a twist.
Nothern's straight forward outcry in the face of our repetitive cataclysms is my preferred arrhythmia, and no, I do not have a serial killer collection, but it was mere coincidence, in real time, while the Vegas massacre was happening, that I was watching footage of beautiful Norway caught in Breivik's grip, and the backstory is puzzling. If he displayed psychopathy at three years of age, why was he left with mother? And if the EU is so restrictive with firearms, how could Breivik acquire them? His attack on his own countrymen makes no sense, neo-Nazi or not, as I am probably not long for the world, without any friends, sustainable supports. This has a great deal to do with what section 202 eroded in my life. I have nothing, no contacts, not so much as an old college buddy. Social media, twitter, at least, may give me contours, a certain familiar pattern. Nothing else.
Wilder recruited the famous Texan transvestite Barbette as a consultant to Curtis and Lemmon. Barbette ... was now in retirement. He'd had a glittering circus career before it ended prematurely due to poor health.-- Aubrey Malone, The Defiant One, p 80
Columbo's "Forgotten Lady", as written by Bill Driskill, is the only one of the original episodes to veer off the conclusions viewers expected of the series-- and is also one of the few episodes that immediately locates me back home watching it as a kid, not then nuanced enough to realize the regal Janet Leigh was here taking a rough 75 minute opportunity to vainly attempt to refute what Hitchcock did to women in the creation of the slasher genre. While not to be taken as a promotion of censorship, I tend to agree with the old lion's hostility to Psycho, whose legacy can be traced straight through to rap lyric misogyny, that jump cut butcher knife and shower curtain of which we'll never be free. It is an amoral thrill, the master's tease with his audience's hostility to feminine withholding. This is how Leigh utilized her stardom. If Monroe dripped with with lascivious intercourse, Leigh was another cup of tea entirely, despite the fact that daughter Jamie not only exists but carried on, even cheapening mother's legacy. For Janet Leigh, sexual energy is restrained. The pageantry of gazing on her looks and social grace comes first. Her style was the cake, as opposed to the exercise of love in and of itself, and Hitchcock with real malicious portents said "I'll show you," and eviscerated the shields of womenhood so well we never fully came to terms with the consequences, despite the fact that her foil against Falk isn't so much her crime as mercy for it against an aging medical impairment of which her character was unaware. The aneurysm, from which the patriarchy which she removes attempts to protect her, might be taken as a very early warning sign for Alzheimer's, which would ultimately kill Falk, whose eye cancer never advanced beyond its singular ravage which gave him his quixotic facial expression, a humane persistence for the sake of moral sanction, and even prefigures Leigh's end of life battle with vasculitis, with both actors barely making it into this century with any relevance, Falk only because he was beloved, and our nostalgia for that granting permission for Columbo to carry us forward on the back of twentieth century icons sending us off to a new century still trying to find itself, discontent with the price of the modern civilized world much closer the IRA of Hennessy than the other doomsday scenarios that preoccupied us at the time, including "global warming". Both then, and now, the west looked on the Troubles as the localized problem of a dead empire, but those guerrillas of the hot thrillers of my era were more than successful instructors for the turbulent horrors of these last two decades, while those of us who make for the fading Grace Wheeler's, desperately clinging to tarnished capital, are told the best we can do is transfix to the past, with the same passive intensity with which we try to break it.
