Begrudging Victory

Hugo (2011) is a great 21st century film primarily due to its visual structure, and the effect of being shot in 3D. If I can acknowledge Scorsese's motifs and still find reasons to contend with them, he beats me here, hands down. This is what I get for believing he only shot in New York. The Paris we visualize in the opening has a fairy tale quality, the opening set up isn't afraid of leaving you utterly baffled, and the script offers us a dazzling feedback loop which only cinema can do, in all its magnificence. If I wasn't in such a crisis of age, I might have wept over the saga of Hugo Cabret and all his secret passages. Oh, the A-list team did its part, not Kingsley so much-- this type of role, an ambiguous character with secrets, is part of his terrain, but Lee as the stony, ominous librarian? Law as the myopic father who might have been nominated for sainthood? This might be a good place to quit Blogger. Beneath the surface of every liberal is the hypocrisy. The Internet did help me, but this was before social media had its shit fest, between 99 and 04. Since, I've been scrambling for pennies on my labor. All my words have changed nothing: Trudy Richardson is still a southern nigger transplant with bran for brains who has put me under nearly impossible levels of duress. Just because we do not speak it doesn't mean it isn't true. Lisa Durden understands this, so did Google's engineer. Both have suffered  economically for it. Where is the virtue of freedom of speech if, in corporate culture, it is financially punitive? The abuses I die with are a deck of cards with their own range of flavors, and as I've never been loved, I am too old to be capable now. I am not having the best week, but I will not go too far afield.

Pleurisy Lamps

darkness darkness, be my friend

Your favorite dowager never cared much for the British invasion, outside of Elton. I still love the music and lyrics of the pianist and Taupin. That cannot be excised. And I personally believe that Captain Fantastic is a masterpiece equal to any other musical genre, but regrettably, I have to close the valve on EJ's seductive fluidity. It is not so much the politics of culture wars. I knew the entertainer was homosexual when I was 13, on the ward, clinging to my sole pop idol. Today, at 54, I'm psychologically too brittle for the pathos of the duo's best work: "I used to know this old scarecrow," as an obese New Yorker I hung with, intermittently, remarked, is a ballad to determine movement toward cessation as well as catharsis. I can no longer let myself go, for the chords or the falsetto the geek "can no longer do." And I have to keep my distance not to get abusive with old faggy. Just the way it is. But The Stones? People who idolize Mick and Keith are sorry, shriveled souls. Scorsese and I would grimace at each other across our egos, if I had access to  him. We'd quarrel, Martin and I, which I acknowledge is idiosyncratic, given the shared heritage. He is a great artist, Martin, but I'd eviscerate him with pleasure. The Rolling Stones aren't even worth the effort of fending off my narcissism, my terror of losing control of my life. I took a NSAID, to clear some hay fever, and feel easier, avoiding my hard work despite looming deadlines. 
I will not, under any circumstances, go back to a home for cripples. I will use violence, and intense suffering, to avoid it, even if conservatives like Toomey feel that my intelligence will need to accept it, eventually, I will not, and instead force my death, whatever my sin against Catholicism in so doing. or even as a secular breach. Suicide is tough, difficult. Not even depression truly strives for it, within eroding positive love of life, but there are worse things, and institutions like Inglis House are vestiges of fascism we accept as medically necessary. However brutal. I do not truly know if such homes are legitimate forms of capitalism as Adam Smith envisioned the economic system, but it is one area where I reject it, ruthlessly. People are better off dead, whether or not they feel clinging to life under such regimented circumstances is their choice. Euthanasia can be equally as profitable, and though I mock bowl headed junkets like Brian Jones, illustrating my conservative streak against addiction's gleeful destruction, an overdose is a bright and shiny little glory against such suffering I case managed and lived as a little girl. If I have to incite a criminal act against certain cruel minorities lobbing hate crimes with impunity, so be it. I will not go back, and will die on my feet. I don't understand your bipedal rhythm, and cannot convey that lack to you: my dream persona races wind and leaves on wheels, or always looks up at her father, dead grandmother, fat slut of a mother's tortured soul. Intellectually, I get the mechanics, one foot in front of the other, the efficiency of two legs, but even on crutches, walking into class hoping that Jerry would note the distinction, walking is not part of my innate wiring. Perhaps that makes me diabolically clever, clever enough to be stunning, and within this, lies an embedded rationale for eugenics. Another day.

Bound Over Tradition

"They were considered to have right wing elements. And perhaps many of them were."-- Luigi Perelli, carving out his justifications for righteous polizi

One cannot quarrel with creator John Ridley over how well made American Crime is, craft and care is evident, especially when absorbing the alienation Pollari is able to project. He is an interesting young actor, but the message within the series, thus far, leaves one with a certain ambivalence. There is an atmosphere of forced intensity to it, freezing jello cubes with little wiggle room, leaving a European take on the grey area between justice and criminality, like The Bankrobber's Wife, seem light, comparatively. But what Ridley reflects is stark, sometimes leaving the viewer to squirm, which is why Shades of Blue earns a preference. It takes chances, but stays within parameters I can handle, and I am heartened that the writers allowed Wozniak to keep his humanity.

I also have to give praise to Liotta where it's due.

I never cared about the man and his acting before, Scorsese or not-- and there is a puzzle-- Scorsese is of my ethnicity with many of my concerns and I am somewhat hostile to his work, not able to quite put my finger on it, what repels me away from it, but Liotta's character work on Shades woke me up and bit, hard, but it's not quite erotic. I was wrong about that. Closer to the shock of recognition in tasting old wine with new flavors. Lopez is Lopez, and we can take issue with her credibility in projecting a cop outfencing everyone, but Liotta is charged, and perhaps age does this to us all, jacking us up to folly in that bracket of time left before things really head south. I mean fuck, he's giving a signature performance, and it rivets. I missed the finale, and maybe I'll run it this weekend, but it is a good show, mixing up the usual expectations in a crime drama. I'll offer more later. I've been online most of the afternoon and I'm looking at overages, barring chasing down a hotspot.

Ecclesiastical Concerns

Fortuitous it may be, but I can empathize with Tarek Mehanna, although the Islamic faith is equivalent on my dung list along with the Church of Latter Day Saints. My disdain doesn't preclude an understanding of how a psyche can be drawn to radicalization and zealotry. If I woke up tomorrow cured of cerebral palsy, I'd leave the United States as a sheer act of equal opportunity hatred. And I mean clean, clear unbridled hate for it all, the millions trapped in public housing vectors, as I am, the elitism and disconnect of Romney, the pussy willow progressivism of Obama, with his bipolar inability to lower the temperature of Bush era paranoia, disability/LBGT activism and the African American seeming inability to see the end of history with the civil rights movement. Yet, terrorist acts, even when successful, or just, according to the beholder, simply carry too many costs, and I suspect this is the case even for Al Qaida jihadists at the end of the day. The scars of mass murder become unspeakable.

I may yet lose my mind, I don't know. I visualize my fault lines which may ultimately decelerate me into an old woman's delusional vat of aggression, forcibly constrained, but if it happens, its causation is a life of too much trauma and victimizing in the first place, leaving me in a rut of circumstances closing in on me, and from this vantage point, fanaticism's entry points are not strange, or alien. Violence is not kindled in vacuums.

Films like Bringing Out the Dead do not reinforce my conviction for an anthropomorphic god. I part company with Martin in terms of faith and belief, http://tinyurl.com/7r24z75, but rather, what he does here that works is the retention of elemental mystery about the human animal's self-awareness, the very process of an ontology. Steve Martin's 1992 Leap of Faith does the same thing in a less ambiguous fashion, suggesting that hucksterism can achieve positive social cohesion and resolution. It might have been a more complex testament if its climax did not lower its expectations to cater to Midwestern self-reliance, but it still represents an interesting examination of religious cynicism. More details may come in later posts.

Laurie's Fractures

I took the time to eat, and refreshed myself on the episode "Under My Skin," which is one of Anne Dudek's last recurring appearances on House as Cutthroat bitch, primarily because I pitied the ballerina, and needed to recall the mystery surrounding her skin sloughing off. Finished my oyster cheese omelet on cue for a change, no spills, minimum mess. This episode fooled me the first time. I thought Cuddy really was assisting House detox, and thought that the maverick actually did beat the rap, when it was the set up for Andre Braugher's entry, all the same, but even Braugher wasn't victorious, and House went from mental breakdown to prison; whatever the last episode will be, the moral of the series is that genius has a price tag, and that people don't change. I see now what the writers were doing. House was hallucinating his anti-social tendencies through Amber, and his conflicted attraction to decency through Cuddy.

I also took the time to mount my kindle drive successfully, I believe, no crash, and now I can work my article, one that is proving more difficult than I would have supposed, at first, and because I need the money, I'd prefer not to fail, but guess if I do, it is not the end of the world. You could no doubt jump into your shower, cleanse and reset, but my body will not hear of it, not tonight, not for fish oil, nor for Aleve, and I have no homeopathic remedy available for stress induced panic, surfing excepted, and I have to be online anyway, to start piecing what I have together, to see if I can emerge with the source that will coast me in over the next forty-eight hours. It has been rather educational, learning either that deaf support specialists are as insular as the Amish, or simply won't respond to a query. I am not sure just yet how far I am willing to browbeat local resources, whether making an actual roll in would shake me out an audiologist who has some seasoning.

In my sibling ruptures and on-going argument, and I'd say Stephanie and I are still fighting through non-communication, my brother told me he hopes I find closure, but I happen not to believe in it. The things that wound us may diminish over time, and yes, they have in my case as well, or I probably wouldn't be sitting here, but whereas a pedestrain double XX Slate journalist can write about losing her mother as a healthy passage through grief, losing my mother was not of the same arc, nor was losing my brother, nor my lack of a pleasurable sex life, nor the knives in my back from Linda and the disabled community around us, nor what I have been through in this city, and its home care services.

I carry a great deal more than most other able bodied female American writers, though maybe not quite as much as some African women might, not that the comparative measure matters, in any relevant sense. I argued earlier on against my twitter detractors that I was proud of my survival, but the moral of my story, whatever its conclusion, is that my price tag was simply too much, whether or not I can fairly assign blame. In many instances, I can't, even if I want to stretch, and say if my grandmother Pauline had committed her daughter after my mother's first suicide attempt, than this half-century of detail those of you with strong constitutions are actually reading, it would not be here.

Bringing Out the Dead is actually symptomatic of the American disease that most of us live, and that I firmly believed I deserved to avoid after the butchery of my youth. Perhaps my indignation will only become worse over time. The film is repeating, and I liked it so much I can reenter it that quickly, or, in other words, Scorsese finally scores in spastic's psyche!

Comparative Temptations Also Count

Scorsese finally made a film that I can enjoy for its own sake, without grudging the excesses of his imprint, in his 1999 Bringing Out the Dead, with Cage and the ever supernatural Patricia Arquette. The tonal whine in her voice has the ability to grate the nerves, but she serves as a well cast foil here. I'll be percolating on it, as usual.

I am sure some fine analytical mind already compared Scorsese's more theologically superlative Last Temptation to Gibson's Passion, but I will not oblige by caring to do the same, not for the time being, I suppose it is due to the hyper manic personality cult that Martin generates, one to which I am not  partial. Mel interests me more, due to his self destructive implosions that have tarnished his seasoned celebrity arc.

Though I have had a few scuttle butt moments as a white trash Catholic, myself, and feel guilty still about that brashy 14 year old at Rusk Institute, which me believes I posted about in brief, in 2010, I do not share Mel's scope of prejudice, but do still have issues with the Hebraic adhesion to secular liberalism, and one day I am going to make myself more popular still by describing my interactions with Fern Markowitz, who was once the epicenter of the universe at Liberty Resources, but not today, still snooting for sources as I am.