The Provenance of Meringues

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match. [sic]-- Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, p65

I can cheat, of course, pillage a substantial portion of my content here and move it here. I've adapted somethings already, bending my neck like Vincentio, casting his net over Vienna, hanging rogues, but this morning, we have a slight inverse. I will clarify some of my incendiary sentiments from "The Welfare State". The "balking," referred to about my article is marginally related to failure, more grudgingly belabored toward heavy lifting for a mere contributing byline, something I moved past under contract, but these days, have little choice but to make my way back in, beyond vanity posts, for nothing but a dose of ether in the fog; if I succeed with the publisher, all well and good, but it is still nothing for nothing, wondering why in the fuck I continue to support Writer's Market. My concluding sentences on this unfortunate Niume outcry were also harsh. Indifference toward walking it back notwithstanding, what I actually desire is to strike back, to purchase justice by brute force if necessary, but, and I've written it before, Trudy Richardson is a difficult enemy to characterize, and if I expend all this energy to broil her ass like tofu, there are thousands of minority women exactly like her, not worth more than one of my initial starting salaries. I go up against a sea tide of women such as she, process pushers, otherwise stupid people, running a Chinese drywall building on handbooks. She is no British pasteurized Colin Salmon, who plays a Jesuit librarian in The Statement (03), a film directed by Jewison with laden gravitas, marred by a flimsy narrative, egging its way toward dry heaves of Roman Catholic collusion, but for moi, worth watching, even if the aging Michael Caine is not alluding back to his maverick energies in the equally flawed Marseille Contract.

There is much to read into The Statement, despite the fact that it's an overdrawn game of cat and mouse. It is a European vehicle according to Hollywood vacuum packing, Swinton's feral energies wasted, although here she applies them as an obstinate avenger out maneuvered by ever brimming French scandals.

I overtaxed myself, however, rushing to vote at 7:19 last evening, disappointing my conviction never to touchpad choices again. Duty triumphed because I know I'll be gone soon, and nearly blind as a bat, having left my glasses on the lamp, the voting warder assisted me going straight GOP ticket, having no idea what choices I tossed in Toomey's war chest. That is an extended metaphor. It is also true I want to digest my impressions of the movie a bit further.

Brute Cojones

Anthony Quinn had been an overly familiar figure for a long time by the time I came to know his face, and it is an insult that he was cast for Zorba the Greek, whatever argument you want to feed me about bankability, or whether or not he passes for Mediterranean, with Spanish blood running in his veins. Man from Del Rio translates as follows: peasants want the good life just like anyone else. It is an early version of his mentally disabled boxer in Requiem, except that in Rio he is allowed his heritage, and sexually kept in his caste, learning lessons about the battle scars of dueling contests. The dowager is not quite sold on Quinn who taught himself how to be a gunfighter who escapes the vortex of destruction, but when you look at his casting, it may make you wonder: he played a founding Arabic tribal leader (against O'Toole), a fascist, a CIA administrator, various godfathers, the scapegoat Colonel in Lost Command, and exactly who-the fuck buys Quinn as a hardened French officer who prevailed over the Vietnamese?

It is a business, I know, but it doesn't mean I am to be denied the pleasure of a certain degree of annoyance. I also hated him as the mayor of Axis collapsed Italy after Mussolini, not that he didn't fit the role. Zingaretti might have given Quinn a blood transfusion during the older actor's end of life respiratory failure. Where is the substance in celebrity? Why is the Screen Actors and Screen Writers Guild so powerful? And why do I enjoy an abstract straight to syndication thriller like The Marseille Contract of 74? I like this transitional movie for its veracity in the realization that scores need to be settled outside of legal frameworks. Quinn and Caine are intermediary figures here, certainly not the black irony of Hannibal Lector, for this is Jeffrey Dahmer territory, now an inside joke on HuffPost Live, our relationship to the worst aspects of our own predation (why not feed people like Dahmer to lions?)

The Marseille Contract is mostly chic brutality-- not entirely-- Quinn is now the old man who is supposed to diddle his dick under a desk--and there is actually a transference. The star on the rise, as represented by Michael Caine, nothing special in his Cockney blood, but Hollywood now controls who exactly is a pedigree, transfers to Quinn's Old Bull a sense of how to be cool, with the requisite distance to drop James Mason like a rack of seasoned ribs to be smoked. Violence is an argument, despite my predicament, my scars inflicted from it, and my likely probability of collapsing under pressure to it, in its fatalistic, reverberating consequences. How Presby has treated me is also a force of argument. A simple eviction notice is more straightforward, hence what do these HUD protections amount to? Look at how fearful I am of their next move, how much pressure I'm putting on myself to say I want no more.

This isn't about housekeeping. I never denied I need assistance, but a Medicaid paraprofessional and a good domestic aren't one and the same. There may be more about Del Rio later. It is a marque role for a player already seasoned by 58.

When is bloating discomfort a sign of Appendicitis?

"Yeah I like Senator Toomey!" -- Nicholas Marinelli, enthusiastic

Even for the decade in which it was written, The Marseille Contract (74) is little more than a composite pastiche that justifies a decorum to its violence with an almost Victorian reasoning: Anthony Quinn gets in the car with the two Parisian hitmen because he was asked, why else? And yet I chose this flick to dull the monotony of a Memorial holiday weekend with no plans, over a modern, mature, virtuoso performance film like The Aviator. The only thing DiCaprio and Quinn share in common is diffident gestures towards being Everyman to every director's demand. Caine doesn't quite have the range to do this, and yet this film, which we've all seen run half a dozen times over the years, is the only Michael Caine role I actually enjoy, racing automobile toys along Cannes as a stylized foreplay, prefiguring Clooney in The American, as a perfectionist, although this assassin flicker is also more deeply flawed than it has to be. 

I can concede total victories to liberals every so often: AO Scott does his job, and there is something simply off about Clooney here, miscast. Not so Caine in Marseilles. Even Quinn rises to the occasion with practiced cynicism. Should we spill so much blood over underworld kingpins? Not a chance, and yet the film should offer you cues about my argument as to when, and where, violence is acceptable to achieve certain aims, as in my rage with the concept of warehousing wheelchair users in elderly poverty housing as something of an upgrade on a centralized facility: not really, and only in a decorative sense.

Another case in point, which some may read as retributive: I am being subjected to a hostile environment anew here at Riverside. Erik's personal care attendant, Chris, has been behaving like the real belligerent, as opposed to Harambe. The incidences may give me the opportunity to put the squeeze on my old freak ally, because I'm crafty, whether or not I truly *fear* a ghetto boy's denigration. Let's make Google wince: Chris is worthless to me. If my local right wing alliance beats some contusions into his ignorance for me, I've taught the ape who actually needs manners a lesson.