Osteoporosis on A Metronome Beat

It could always be worse. -- Dana, a precursor to my current stomping testosterone laborer

I suppose I can live with it after all, that a man’s mistake led to a brief uproar and the inevitable retrenchment, so much intense back and forth. The service coordinator, once my title also, frightened me into an essential resignation, ashes in the sandbox, the oxygen and energy sucked out of me by my despairing cousin; if Galahad and I are chameleons, one moment a simulation of a couple, the next two worn out individuals who’ve time lapsed half a century, Monday had a tinge of a high school pep rally, as if he could charge at my shrieking and tremulous physique like a point guard. My cousin’s misery makes my emptiness seem relatively infinitesimal. My cynical, callous side resents her for it, but her situation is as equally a teaching tool. She married twice, the one she’s in now with my blood relative fractured by hideous wounds, which, for once, out of personal loyalty, the dowager shall not reveal, if otherwise to be burdened with tight-knit bond through text only. I, by contrast, never married, and there is nothing ironclad about a future abandonment between this man and I.

I did blink first, and was going to withdraw from his employer, my current provider, but I’d have to fend off inquiries, and my departure would have been because we did not violate the rules altogether, and intercourse now carries too many riders, almost an afterthought. I never really had him. The fellow simply hasn’t been laid for 15 months. The last date I was in my fiancé’s bed is beyond my memory, 2006? The care worker found it incredible, and there, Pam and I have a bond. She and Bill abstain, from what inferences she offers. This you may know, which means I don’t care enough if it gets read and I land on even more familial estrangement (my half-brother). My sister-in-law and I had an unforgiving quarrel on Facebook, giving me insight, therefore, about social media creating its own news. It finally happened to me, with my nephew sleeping in his car while his trollop mother parades her granddaughter, his child, like a trophy. Dawn, my brother’s wife, is forever high school trailer trash, but look who’s talking, my aspirations defeated by a former Walmart cargo-handler. I was, of course, going to go into racial epithet mode, then considered the racer from Nederland, which is in Colorado. I owe the man an apology for thinking he was actually native African. No harm. Speed is a drug, like Mia Farrow’s kidney-stone liberalism.

In comparison to my barren womb, my cousin has two children. She owns her home. I own nothing, and yet I’m so much stronger than this whining, self-pitying bitch, so much so that I offered to put myself in the middle, see if I can suture her marriage into healing, drawing her and Bill out with a couple-friends dynamic. She’s afraid I’ll spill her secrets, like Meyer’s blood guilt driving the visions of his conscience, sans Match Point.

What Allen asks in this film is to consider the price of adulation over and above desire, but he does not expiate himself, distastefully trapping Scarlett Johansson as a situational victim because she gave in to an unhappy husband, simply through association, with her own parallel relationship discord. Allen loyalists deem his capture of Soon-yi to be creepy. Galahad is of the opinion that it was sick, and I'm inclined to agree. There was no letter of the law crime, but he fell on the sword against his own backlash with the mortality counter, condensing his time. It doesn't seem to make Mia any more sympathetic, curiously, hiding, as she does, as a leftist in mortal combat. Is my gratitude toward Galahad a blinder, after a fashion? Given my history as a victim of black dysfunction, our sparring match over what is genuine and isn't has been remarkable. I know him better than I ever did Frank, but he's still a shackle in a sandpit, and my mortal coil has a ton of work to do.

If I remain loyal, contrary to my inclination, and he finds other employ, a woman? I've been writing the script of an ugly, stark, care giver's murder for a long time. I may have mentioned it, even.

Vantage Point

"What, you want her to adopt you?"-- my sister, while I was trying to explain Mia Farrow had disabled children in her care

Spring is a difficult transition; went so far as to telephone the office, interrupt my father, to say I was going to the hospital, and didn't think I'd be on tonight long enough to nose dive a G, but I'll be back soon, however near an end game I am approaching. Perhaps it was too much over the counter appeasement.

Morning de clef

Within the annoying habit of tiring oneself out for absolutely no reason, brief observations may be made: We all know Rosemary's Baby is a scathing send up of liberal pretensions, and we all know it has the distinct signature of an auteur who like Mr. Allen after him, got caught up in a grandiose self-importance. (I struggle with the rape and the artistic genius and we'll say fuck it and leave Jacob wrestling the angel on the precipice in perpetuity.) Beyond that, we may get frustrated with the finesse of the satire and finding a language for it. Richard Fleischer offers a sharp contrast to Polanski's invidious mission creep with See No Evil (71), a fast paced thriller that dispenses with analogy-- if Polanski's Satanism is a representative stand in for urban stratification-- and has a dialectical argument which dispenses with the dynamic allure of masochism. Fleischer adamantly keeps his feet on the ground. Mia is still the damsel, but merely an unwitting one, as opposed to Polanski's inimical manipulation of a heroine who has few tools with which to alter her destiny as a modern Pandora.

We'll hold this conceit for a significant length.

Soon Yi and silent acquiesce

When you started aborting, we were still watering-- Vincent Peloso

I am critical of the nanny state over which Nutter resides and Arenda adjudicates with an overzealous tilt. I have trolled in reactive fashion over my dimly varnished view of African American culture, thus diminish any creditably I might have once wielded with what I perceive to be legitimate criticism. I realize this culture isn't monolithic, and can strive to command respect. Despite the fact that I am uncouth, and more than not dismissed by serious scholars who put in a great deal of leg work, I do respect McWhorter, but his iconoclastic streak sometimes confuses me about his reactive tendencies.

The governance of the city of Philadelphia is rather sterile; this is not solely attributable to Nutter's administration. PA is one of the original 13 states, and Quaker imprinting hasn't always been conducive to the dynamics of entrepreneurial energy. Liberty's static existence is a microscopic representation of Philly's sterility, with little pockets that thrive, like center city finance. Center city urban design; it isn't enough against the stoic fatalism of black residential areas-- or even the Rosenbach's tacit acceptance of neighborhood fruitcakes-- a rare criticism of the the museum's insular yet egalitarian embrace of the residential disparities within its ranks.

I migrated back to Philadelphia shortly after the Move bombing, in my incalculable timing, and I'll say this for Wilson Goode: He started a tradition of ineptitude getting our city serious media coverage. Not that this is a form of urban exceptionalism: NYC is as sordid as Woody Allen's arousal triggers, and the the adopted daughter he grafted from Mia has the poise reminiscent of a  Khmer Rouge survivor-- which takes us into the caverns of Shoah beneath the sting of Woody's satire-- his early work even had a subversive anti-Semitic charge thrown at it, one I am not studied enough to analyse fairly; Detroit is a smaller inner city version of Brotherly Love. Even San Francisco has the Tenderloin-- but what it illustrates is that the left is not free of the socialist tokenism Ralph Ellison so brilliantly crucified now nearly 3 quarters of a century behind in Invisible Man.

The Obama Administration friend zone designation is more of the same. I have to try and go out now in this weather for dry cat food. A stressor to finish me off, perhaps.

Rosemary's Thistle

#3:  Soon-Yi was Woody and Mia’s adopted daughter. False. Soon-Yi was the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow and André Previn. Her full name was Soon-Yi Farrow Previn. -- Robert B. Weide

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What authenticates The Burrowers isn't Petty's underlying condemnation of what forged the last, now doddering, superpower. Any polemic in narrative can do that; it is his real appreciation for hands on tactile sensation. The soil, and foolish human primates roaming about on it until they forget themselves and become carcasses. Ulee's Gold, more than a decade older with subtly different aims, nonetheless has a similar physicality. The curious thing about Peter Fonda's poignant swan song, I might add, is, despite my displeasure with Easy Rider as a self-conscious farce, it provides Ulee with a textually richer undercurrent that would have been lacking otherwise. Derivative pleasures like this become somewhat complicated, always improving on older origin concepts.

To indulge my underlying misogyny, my loathing for Jane Fonda, which is visceral, doesn't spill over to Peter. He is quieter, less of a chameleon flitting across the screen, to quote from Jane's daughter with the delightful cruelty of an accurate observation (and yes, I give Jane credit for giving Charlie Rose this gem), and I'm more in sympathy with his center of gravity. Ulee's Gold was my life with my mother and her raucous lovers. The film gives viewers a sense of resolution: Ulee relents, realizing his son and daughter-in-law aren't beyond reform. This is a gravely wounded family, but one that doesn't quite break once the avarice of the white punks is harnessed and contained. The industry has to be placated, but we all know that addiction doesn't work that way. My dead brother can't be walled off in my bereavement as a monster. Yet he was indifferent to any number of things: the shame he brought to my family, committing felony rape, infecting himself with AIDS, not because he had any experience with sodomizing men, but because he blithely used dirty needles. The end of his life in 1995 was agonizing. "We had a brother who was a bit of a shyster." This is how my sister summed up little Nicky for my ex, the Nicky who passed HIV onto his girlfriend without my mother deigning to interfere. She was afraid of possible litigation.

The engine of the freight train has been idling on track a quarter mile off from my window since Thursday morning, giving me palpitations. I'd do anything to get out of Riverside, anything, except there is little use in exploring other public housing options within the city. I already know I couldn't expect to find creative and safe solutions networking online, so I research Woody and Mia, condemning sexual liberalism. What no one is willing to say directly is the price Allen made Mia Farrow and her children pay for his trophy happiness with Soon-Yi. He sounds like John Updike's failed little boy with his thumb stuck up his ass. I do not know if Dylan's memory of molestation is true or false, but that she did not like Woody's thumb in her mouth, that felt real to me. My stepfather sneak fondled my breasts that way.

I started writing my own piece on the scandal. Because of Roman Polanski, what I relearn reviewing his mastery of repression, of what he intimates about sadism. More than that; yet as to Farrow herself, I never saw myself as a fan, not in terms of her performances. The poem never leaves me, the one in my head with wombs and spawn, the World Trade Center, the Empire State building, through her eyes. A few years ago, I caught the revision of the piece in hand, then lost it with the Vista driver crash. I have to redo all that research once again as well. Hypothetically, if I get it published, tweet her a link, how would I react if she thanked me for the tribute?

I'm unsure. If Woody had done to me what he did to her, he'd be dead; I'd be a cause celebre in prison, so in terms of being aggrieved, I have picked a side. That does not necessarily mean, as a disability journalist, I need access to her. I am not Orth, the Vanity Fair journalist who reignited old rivalries.

Would a mutual interaction be beneficial? Ambivalent about that, what she's like beneath the pixie damsel of Roman's coaxing, or Allen's irony.

Cranly's Arm

I may have been inadvertently misleading when I linked my dismissive sentiments about Irish folklore to my fading mentor Jerry. That hostility came about because I made a serious misjudgement about staying in a graduate level course with the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. He did not want to pass me and I did not want to do the work. His ego and and my weariness with a life of protective campus cubic journeys collided, and it turned out that I had exceeded my credits to get out. I booted with the skin of my teeth. Interacting with him was the worst experience of my life, and I sold everything related to the class, no acrimony intended. I enrolled thinking one thing and he expected a dissertation on folklore, I cannot remember, and would have dropped it, spared myself a burning shame, but the government, well meaning, dissuaded me. He'd no doubt suspect I'm a fatal masochist tackling Joyce. I can hear a sharp "ach" out there in Dublin. Do eighty-four year old's use apps?

I may have also been hasty dismissing the labor of Ulysses, reminding myself that Lance is a young teacher who is not grading me and will not have the same level of expectation. I am driving myself here, maybe stupidly-- in my deepest insecurity, I am just a cripple to be patronized, right? But driving myself to leave at least one critical, worthwhile observation behind me before I can no longer, and Joyce had valid reasons to obfuscate in his allusions, burying what at the time was a radical subversion. I did study his pre- Ulysses output and will reluctantly have to reread Portrait, meanwhile researching Mia's past as if I was Faustis with a ms. You can blame that on the anniversary of the scandal cracking the scarred and mortally wounded poet back open. I am hoping since she rears disabled children that she will allow me journalistic access, poem or no poem, she was certainly proto-anorexic to Frank's quasi-mid December impotence. If any of you have any tips on how I can access the film Secret Ceremony (68) [not silent, apologies, retention error] without renewing my Netflix account, do pass it along; if you have streamed it on hula without many technical issues, for instance. New York Magazine's feature is the investigative journalism that would suture my wormwood, but here I sit; it also in its own way obfuscates the truth, or lack thereof, of humans trapped in these celebrity casements. I'll leave you there this morning.

Farrow and Allen Show My Age

This is the snapshot of Elaine's as it is today, shuttered. When I lived at Rusk Institute I might have whined to my medical student dorm mates about spying out the upper end Manhattan socialites. Pit the lower East Side against North Philadelphia and use your imagination. This is a thread you can pick up from Henry James and trace straight through to Husbands and Wives, although for those of you in your 30's, 20's, Woody is an emaciated pervert and Mia is the old rerun starlet when nothing else is on. It is not for me to judge her over compensating.

As rapidly as online technology is changing, it still frizzles my brain waves that I have tweeted to Mia Farrow at the same time that I am using her persona for my own literary powers. Would you just submit your work using the traditional submission routes, or when finished, post it where she'd be able to read it? I was never a huge fan of Woody as an auteur, though Husbands and Wives is surreal, so painfully ironic it could kill, and what Allen coaxed out of Pollack touch on my own interpersonal tensions. Mia's career baffles me more, preoccupies me more as a peculiar feminist problem, given the history of the men around her, since Polanski has his own nymphet issues. Where Polanski is concerned I am more ready to equivocate.

Even if Woody and Soon-Yi are happy, even if their affair technically is in the realm of the legal, and even if his relationship with Mia became moribund, what he did is unforgivable, regardless of his influence and stature in cinema. Most of us realize, even today, that there are certain boundaries. My younger sister and I may never reconcile, but I would never allow a romance with her husband. My stepmother (em) did the same thing to my mother, marrying my father after she and my mother finished nursing school. My lover once objected, "Your parents were divorced?" and they were, just as I was also by default invading the terrain of my lover's wife, but there is a difference between a fling and using friendships to steal. Allen committed a crime, imploded a stability of the sort that made our species successful. No wonder we enjoy seeing high society as a morally corrupt contract with resonant forces not to be trusted.

Farrow's Generation

The angst I chew in Beckles is rising in prominence, and I know none of you know what to tell me, as only I know my growing physical weakness and remaining strength, but applying for this position would involve a great deal of work in and of itself, labor about which I cannot be too specific, but I would have to jump over many hurdles just to submit a competitive CV. If I do all that would I be strong enough? The question makes me want to split my skull for coconut juice, because the position truly interests me, and the very thought of fighting for it has inspired me with hope that I have not felt in a long time, but there are many issues involved, including my reading voice, which has suffered. Ebert has sustained catastrophic illness. So has gnostic man, who, if he ever mentioned my writing at all, would probably say I represent a safety net failure of unspeakable sadness, but their cases are different. These men are established, and I am a real jock cripple who has tasted what success could mean, but tragically never cemented my opportunity. If I go for broke, I will really have to break some eggs, and if I then get to an interview, I will need to be on, and I have never snorted coke.

Fuck, fuck, and to make a triple play, fuck.

Okay. I managed to get up to view this post RB Farrow vehicle, and let me make a quick observation before I return to burrow in later: A dirty little secret in the disabled community is that most of us want able-bodied lovers like Norman Eshley, which is why I did not let go of getting burned by Tassoni for a great length of time, or burning myself, not playing my cards properly. When I found his picture online, I had an Indian girl then, also an abuse victim, circa 2002. I squealed and blushed and did not see him as he was, a bald half assed jock academic who saved himself from being a punk through publishing on the finesse of his pedagogical concerns, no, I saw the only Italian American of my youth with whom I wanted to repopulate the Roman Empire, and my then Indian helper inflected her voice, "You really had a thing for this guy, huh?"

Yep, even if he suggested a label and then trotted off, not minding Faulkner's adage about the past not being the past.

In my brief scan of his abstract, my scurrilous lack of softened nostalgia burrows deeper, beyond the failings of my tie to him as an unrequited longing: I should have never believed that publishing papers such as his would have amounted to success. He himself was something of a jarring minimalist, as a writer, and I see traces of it in his jargon on interacting with his students as an instructor, much as my first person account of those years is just as poorly abstracted, though I do not toss the narrative because I still want certain parts of it, as a kind of personal mythos.

I want to write one or two academic articles on both Henry James and Italian Modernism, and then I am done; not sure I'd have much left after that, but since I am not an active or independent scholar, I am not sure I could meet the expectations of peer review, disadvantaged as I am.