The Death of Merle

"All fault tolerance techniques must be built upon a failure hypothesis."-- Concurrency in Ada, p366

The actual online disabled community must feel cheated by me, as they probably should, with the exception being my embrace of emergent aggression in my pre-sixty years, though I can confirm I already know the literature on aging and violence, I do my own thing, and some actual wheelchair users who surf in may scratch a dandruff flake wondering what Romanek's troubled Reagan era parable, such that Static is, has to do with the terrible toll of human helplessness, and the risks I take, eschewing attendant care in a battered, now protesting Jazzy, without a vendor to service it no less, though Moss at 2400 gave me a vendor to try in an emergency, I am, essentially, at the mercy of chance, my jugular exposed. I can make a correlation, of course, between Keith Gordon's fatal aspirations as Eric, and the disabled community's fatal Orwellian prognostications, but why should normal Americans be forced to think; it runs counter to the American way. More importantly, the Farrelly brothers fail. Shallow Hal comes thumb and forefinger close to fusing deformity and Hollywood into a true aesthetic viewing experience but they cannot pull it off. The jump shots to the guy with his obvious brace diaper padded spina bifida, and the woman with the skeletal arms-- my neighbor down the hall has the same condition-- jar the comedy, taking the viewer out of context on discordant notes, despite the beat written into the script. Even as a high farce, letting birth deformity be what it is mars any genre back to earth, which is why I doubt disability will ever truly make great art, cupping my ear to the carpet for the roar of thunder to follow. True, Christopher Reeve, whom I chastised while he was still among the living, was given a cameo on Smallville, and it worked, but Reeve was a trained actor, and ran his larynx tortured invalid cyborg skit before yielding to a lowly pressure sore, something to which I too am at risk, dying in mid-sentence. The Walking Dead now appeals to me, not that it fools me. The intense declarative sentences lend themselves to some nihilistic bemusement, yet its stark survivalism has caught up with those of us always a tripwire away from the worst at the bottom of the barrel. I feel like waving at the production crew and blowing a kiss, even if I'm necessarily a few seasons behind and don't know how close to season 8 WPHL can bring those without a cable subscription. The gay couple bringing Grimes and the troupe to Alexandria make me sick; that goes without saying, but we understand the South conceded feudalism on the ruthless calculus of General William T Sherman, whose memoirs I've scantily penetrated in the 20 (?) years I've owned my LOA edition, starting them again, and Georgia minds its p's and q's with only the softest hint of subterfuge. I knew Rooker was Merle without acknowledging that this is where the serial killer inside went, into a mean mother of a bastard the Governor's system had to destroy. As naturally born anarchists with claws cannot be trusted, they are exterminated by liberalism and tyranny alike.
What's she getting at? 

Gravity Tends to Pool

I live on a big blue ball--Waylon Jennings, whaler on the belt

Just how Lawrence Schiller managed to draw such an illicit expression from Tommy Lee in that parking lot, during the filming of Mailer's obsession with Gary Gilmore, is nothing short of miraculous. We've all seen movies about psychopathy in one form or another, and Jones has been around a very long time, but that turn on his face as he is walking into the gas station, resolved upon his own damnation, is as terrifying as Henry Lee Lucas, in his own words, is inadvertently ironic.

In 1979, Mailer turned Gilmore into a cause celebre, that much was impressed upon as an anecdote logged onto youthful synapses, but the teleplay never made it into consciousness. There is no liberal argument for that level of malevolence in the human animal; it is, in fact, a mystery to me how an actor we've been so familiar with in his various hunting modes could, for a few precious moments, depict evil with such transcendent energy that the recoil was visceral. Wolf's team hacked the outer framework to have an ethical debate about human potential which perhaps was arbitrarily hollow. Screen writers cannot hit it out of the park all the time. Whether by design, or not, Schiller and Jones simply turn liberalism on its head with this more canonical adaptation of Mailer's moral wrestling contest. The damnation writ large on Tommy Lee's face is beyond any form of redemption humanity's metaphysical struggle can bring to bear on it. This was a made for television movie circa 1982. It puts any number of composite formula films to shame, in small, telling sequences, in its attempt to inhabit cyclical American tragedies that make our violent propensities an international brand, lapping up our ruthlessness.

As difficult and gruesome as it was to absorb Michael Rooker as Henry, a few grades down on the level of depravity even for my turbulent instances of domestic discord, Jones, as Gilmore gone bad, might have scared me straight if there was any real optimism left to save.

Inversion Therapy

"I do not mean to suggest this was a conversion of convenience. I wanted to believe."-- Reza Aslan, Newshour damage control candidate

William Holden was before my time. Why he is a Hollywood celeb is beyond my comprehension, in much the same way that Miley Cyrus might be Tralfamadorian. It is solely due to Kathleen Parker that I gather Miley is a soft pornography performer, and I wail, too young to be in the generation gap, but here we are. It seems Holden's one and only elevation is against Bogart and beautiful Audrey. Audrey Hepburn transcends stardom. Looking at her face, I may not want to believe in God, but can understand why we have angels dance. Holden only confirms my tendency toward nihilism; hated Earthling when it recollected my youth. The man is not an actor, and this makes me rapacious, willing to drown Sri Lanka so that Kwai exists as a CinemaScope travesty. Guinness had a good death in Kwai, but Alec Guinness actually has theatrical force, much like Simon Schama.

I do not care to read Rough Crossings, but I am thinking of Schama's recognition of the dialectical tensions between Britain and the US on liberalism, because it can be seen in the majority of the twentieth films between the last imperial power and its fabulous offspring, and I half toy with the idea of contacting Schama and saying I need a fucking vocabulary mate, hey, help a cripple out dear boy. But why would he assist me? Pounding my fist, I see it, trying to encapsulate it, but it's difficult, a heterodoxy between the glamour of Hannibal and the documentary ruthlessness of 10 Rillington Place. Attenborough's Christie triggers memories of my assault, and frightens me more than Michael Rooker in Portrait, despite the realism of Henry's alienated outside status as a predator. 

Marie the aunt tells me to forget the Brandon Phillips who nearly killed me but I cannot; he lives in every sexual assault I experienced before or since, and this inner city brawn boy minority coward whose grandmother was a Presby tenant on the floor above me may one day make me famous, unpacking every middle brow Catholic girl's worst nightmare, I know the terror of Christie's victims, as well as the bemusement over Aslan's kerfuffle. Academics can also be pandering hacks, and this will be a scab I may pick for some time to come.

I would not have posed the question the way Lauren Green did, but the Newshour is also guilty of bias over the Zealot fiasco. Propping up Aslan was more important to the PBS team than being objective in terms of the quality of the text. Green was actually challenging Aslan's doubt, whether or not her interrogative stance was an unfair blow to his integrity. Remind me that I am pushing myself too hard for my age, and that I cannot live on maple walnut brownies, but I have fallen in love, not with William Holden.

The Postman Always Rings Twice?

"Stop being a wuss." The American idiom. 

Yes, the half dead cripple down a ways from Harvard's faculty offices upbraided the merry Niall Ferguson. WTF do I know about Keynesian stimulus and aggregate demand? Not nothing, but also not very much, and the reason for this is a very studied winner, on or around the time of Gerard Debreu, won the Nobel in economics for the radical assertion of "doing nothing" to manage free markets.

But let me deconstruct what Niall meant, in a revisionist sensibility: Keynes was a repressed homosexual and this therefore this influenced his lack of optimism in bust cycles; it may not be true, but Ferguson was acknowledging difference, and goodness forbid. Pink camels like Manuel read their public the riot act on the hidden genocidal impetus toward gays. This is poppy cock. I befriended a number of gay individuals Manuel, and not all of them intended me psychological harm, but many of these people hurt me, and then they wander off. Niall is not blaming Keynes for the great recession, only asserting that Keynesian lack of optimism came from a darkened well spring. This assertion may be contended, and is, vigorously, but it is not an observation made out of hate.

Me? I am asserting that my personal experiences created the hate, and that the hatred is justified. I simply haven't expounded on what this means, since I do not believe extermination in any measure is viable. Murder may be liberating, but it also consumes a significant amount of energy to conceal, and has no geopolitical justification.

Neither does subsistence, however, which, like my latest spring head cold, threatens to envelop me, and that is in some measure my fault, with lack of post-graduate completion, but not entirely, as I have always known I wasn't healthy enough to field an average teaching load. Hence maybe I wasn't wrong not to accrue more debt. But you have no idea what it's like; you cannot.

The majority of babies born disabled should be euthanized. Oral history informs that I fought for my life, and surprise. If someone had shown me what my life would be, would my premature struggle had been so adamant?

Candy Land

"'I'm truly sorry I retweeted a spoiler."--  Kevin Bacon, local boy.

Why my tolerance is tested during episodes of The Following is something not entirely clear to me. The series shares other Fox family values where evil is clearly delineated, with hard edges, whatever commonality Ryan Hardy shares with Jack Bauer. I made an effort to watch one early episode of 24, the one with Mrs. Bauer in sweater and on cell phone, and that was it. Not that I never watched any other segments, just this, that its immediacy never held my interest.

Hannibal has style, but The Following triggers scar tissue, despite the fact that I was never raped by a megalomaniac. The series is certainly not as exploitative as Dexter, nor does it echo Cassavetes, and yet I need to keep my distance from it in modes of vulnerability, perhaps because it was a cult, a Catholic charismatic off shoot (not quite a true cult, but as close as I came in adolescence to it) which sheltered me from my stepfather.

What gifts we receive when heavy weights like Fishburne grow too old to be Morpheus. 

Comparative Predation

I surprised myself by finding something derivative out of Sebold's metaphysical triumph over trauma in The Lovely Bones. If you like dark parlor games, consider Stanley Tucci as George Harvey against Michael Rooker as Henry, against Hopkins as Hannibal. That is your job spastic, might saith twitter, might saith the hapless surfer, or those who chance posted with me prior to community banishment. My rebuttal is distillation takes time, and my facial ligaments are in pain.

For me to watch a film twice in rapid succession means the transcendent caught my interior suction cups, and decided me to track Sebold even though I cannot do it her way, find my way through the thorns to loss of my own ego. My escape as a writer is to burrow into the agony, with or without substance aid, like Thomas More in his hair shirt, willing to accept the assassin. But my challenge to the Sebold victory is this: Would a mouse be owed the same consideration? It is the snicker bar on the evolutionary scale, killed swiftly, killed slowly, high pitched squeal as its spine is snapped on a glue trap, or pummeled and then eaten by Joey, speared by his brother. What does the fabric of space give the insect, krill, or plankton, for that matter? Why did I pay for my pet's ashes if I am a non-believer? There is also Aaron Eckhart's work, scathing and stark, which I thought of during the morning hours before Sandy's landfall, but evaded me in the initial post draft. In the company of men is a different genre, a masterpiece of social manner, critically acclaimed, then buried by the public, but it is a vehicle willing to be honest in its illustration that blind justice, fortune, are projections about how the primate moral code works, possibly no more than a facade; yet Sebold strikes something a mass audience needs, just as I needed Joey's remains, my deceased, now part of all minimalist dead pet theatre.

Even if we keep it on the human scale, is the serial predator simply an evolutionary outcome our self-domestication refuses to accept, or is it disease, as we attribute it in clinical terms? A footnote on which I'll have to catch up. Tucci's performance here nearly matches his more physically magnetic role in Big Night.

Pest Control

One day you are twenty-three years old, perhaps tremulous in the environment of the inner city, but young, fickle, still able to squeeze in denim, you strut in in that power chair, no ass, no hips, but men can feel you swivel, that you are willing to sexually take risks, and then in the blink of an eye, you are fifty, and realize you predicated your entire life on a mistake, your best years behind you, beaten by repressed duress, repressed dysfunction, white suffering lodged up against over-weening black matriarchal collective censure, even when orchestrated by white Protestants. Depression is one thing, but I sit here in a moon night shirt with a profound sense of loss, biting my tongue not to spearhead you with a sharp ugliness, what lifelong public housing has done to a woman like me, the sheer poison of it, crying out for god's sake, what have I done?

And you realize that most of this damage has come through the exterminators, the mandatory federal insistence on killing insects, mice, juvenile rats, carriers of plague reverberating in our collective memory. Brandon was able to attack me because the exterminator was due the day I took off from work to prepare my transition to the next employer. That Henry was a pest control technician, a freelancer and a poseur both, has only recently struck me in terms of its grim significance, especially after 27 years of pressure and counter-rebellion between me and Presby after visits from the guy with the chemical hose. That this is a necessary exercise misses the emptiness of my energies it has left behind, periods of plateau and escalation. I threw down the gauntlet with manager Trudy yesterday, and the travesty is that it does not matter. My strength dangles from a paper clip. My father put me away when I was nine, nine. What freedom have I in all actuality had? I never applied for a mortgage, can never lose the rehabilitation hospital leash. What has all this been for? Not one person from Liberty can or will answer that, nor will Linda ever take responsibility for what she did, the disastrous blow it was, the causal link to so many subsequent defeats. My aunt mentioned the Empire shooter this morning. We were trying to figure out where I might go. "What's wrong with this country?"

"That's what happens when you lose your job."

And so many of you think I am unstable for not letting the bad things go.

Obesity, Shorter Life Spans, Untouchable Agenda

How are you?-- a courtesy

Why wasn't I strong enough to push Precious away? Short of what Michael Rooker's character does to women, in his fantastical composite of Henry Lee Lucas, or the legend of Lucas we think we know, Sidibe endure the worst of the worst. Shut it off, go to bed. You do not need to keep reliving the five plus years of your case management limitations.
The sexual jealousy of the mother is common in families destabilized by incest. "Amelia" was one of Ted Danson's first post-Cheers roles, near the height of his popularity. And the cadence of Harlem nigger speak was superimposed on the television special, pulled up like an old Dewey decimal index card in a catalog. I lived situations as comparably graphic to the film, when I lived on 1500 West Page Street. Eight years worth. Mariah Carey's emotional armor as the AFDC social worker is of the caliber which creates spree killers, 30 years of it.Yes, spastic was provoked, as Daniels and Oprah intended the provocation, but not in the direction of Enduring Love, although having that Daniel Craig vehicle pop in isn't a bad example of altruism in excess, putting James Bond in the suburbs.

Right now, I really cannot go on without alarming Blogger as to the extent, or seriousness, of a pathological pain breaking the bonds of what is humanly possible in a public square, but whether Daniels intended it or not, the climax of this movie is a lampoon, turning Dr. Sonia Sanchez and her African American studies students into the capuchin from Outbreak.