Back In The Highlife

It used to seem to me
That my life went by too fast-- Steve Wynwood

The most effective censors aren't necessarily powerful boys who allegedly parade their victories wearing Hulk Hogan costumes. My mother's side of the family has corralled me on Facebook, my eldest niece only a partial, if tender, anodyne, and I have even less love today for social media, my chest pounding at three am, I was ready to tweet "fuck you" or "fuck off" to some new franchise authors, which would have gone over splendidly. It is not their fault I am more piecemeal, less sustained, than a novelist, and they are only doing what market forces compel them to do, and if I am solicited to read and review, well, I've been able to do that, whether or not I wish to continue in that vein. I spoiled my New Years take out, dropping part of it, so even with small disruptions, I pay the price, and perhaps it was for the best, as I am slowly cleaning up under the table. Let it go. 
I know, but only desired to enjoy my meal, over a tolerable broadcast channel. Found out just this afternoon I sold a poem. Or, had one accepted, for a byline, and it would possibly be detrimental, or unwise, to convey more than that, but this is a piece with history, taken to a public library workshop, where the facilitator pressed me a little harder than the rest of her group: my skill level was too advanced; I snubbed them, rolled out, "I am not coming back," I emailed her, and revised, and revised, over time, on my own, forgetting what her issue was, no, vaguely remember, the juxtaposition of classical with urban, and here we are. I have published enough work for at least three books by now, and what have I been doing? Sparring with nigger nannies in life or death battles.

I cannot retreat back to literary zine culture and sit there licking my wounds while my artery plague tortures me. If I wanted to pass muster to join Jeffrey Tucker's cache of freedom thinkers and failed because I did not allow myself to percolate, it was a lesson learned. He cannot pay anyway, not now, and as I respect Freeman, I do what I can for it. Get up and skin my damn knees and keep taking the egg. I persist in the belief in my own acumen, even if it makes me loathe, well people, yes, but communal sensibility, and on excruciating days, low pressure isotherms sucking in your ankle fluids, telling you sister was right about heart disease, then let the day be bad. Let it go.

What my underlying argument with Marie's preservation instinct comes down to is a debate about mercy. I buy Clint Eastwood's argument about kill shots, as opposed to what both Marie and my father are doing, for brother and spouse, respectively. My Uncle Joe is suffering. He has dementia, a deadly bacterial infection, and now, diabetes is taking his vision. If that was my situation, I'd put a Glock in the hands of Adam Kokesh, and say "pull the damn trigger you Southern fried poke!" I would not mind a grave in a magic mushroom compound, and what disability activists would never tell you is this: Quadriplegia is suffering. We cannot go jogging, clear our heads, or ride a bike, and too many of you rely on the state to solve our problems. Back to my straightening up, letting the day be bad. 

Linus, Helium Wrapped

The flaw in Million Dollar Baby is the ubiquity of Morgan Freeman's character. Mr. Eastwood could have picked another narrator from which we absorb the bonding between the central characters. Freeman was powerfully cast in Gone Baby Gone, but "Scrap" waters down an otherwise powerful dramatic arc in Clint's seminal work, and Baby is the kind of film which challenges preconceptions, the kind of film that speaks for itself about human will and dignity that serves admirably without the silly political gamesmanship that diminishes the actor's stature, the last of its kind from the old studio system Clint knew how to milk, merging almost perfectly the anti-federal mandate agenda with the tragedy of defeated aspiration. GBG is a weaker, more diluted film, but I bookend it with Baby because both have the ingredients of what could be great films about the tanglewood between our physical frailty, aggregate lack of value coupled with our extraordinary accident of evolution.

This is as far as I can go this morning. For those of you who read "On the P & Q," the woman is hired but will not last very long. She made the exact grimace of economic necessity envisioned by my overwhelmed stress. Frontline will not receive Vatican sanction, but I bless them. "The Suicide Plan" is exactly the kind of exposure of the American  underbelly that matters to me, (and this underbelly is what Affleck wades into with a scorch playing the minute detective) I have criticized PBS for its documentary voyeurism on dying, but in this segment, the video journalists stuck to the story; no doubt did some of us a service.

I have found my inner terrorist. I'd recommend it.

Period Anime

Whether I should add Joseph Merrick's life story or Finding Nemo to my list is debatable. Animation has its own subculture, and seems divided between Walt Disney's pedophiliac psyche and Japanese penile envy. We recognize in scientific terms that spiny damaged fish get eaten, not accommodated. But as to the flick that cemented Anthony Hopkins as the next Olivier, it is not easy to keep The Elephant Man in its period, not from a revisionist perspective. Animus toward clinical specification is a valid activist point of contention, which is probably why death as escape did not involve protests when it came to the earlier Victorian rendition of empowerment, compared to Clint's masterwork, but each film is about the victory and freedom of dying well. Does it make Merrick's life and exploitation a great movie, excusing artistic license? The narrative is a progressive orgasm, perfectly plotted out so the audience learns about dignity, acceptance, and the medical scientist as Frankenstein is necessary as a villainous redeemer. Ambivalence seems warranted, because we do not see Merrick in the less than gauzy terms of actually living his life as an astute capitalist.

The other film in the same time frame which I could not accurately recall was the Dreyfuss vehicle Whose Life Is It Anyway? An appropriation which leaves me ambivalent because it exploits suffering for profit. If it was Richard Corliss, the esteemed movie critic rightly chastised the casting directors for putting the vivacious Dreyfuss in Harrison's shoes. One wonders what drives extraordinary empaths like Dreyfuss to chemical dependency, and I can imagine the demands of such habitation has something to do with it.

Top Ten

All this phrase making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.--Virginia Woolf

When I was all too briefly on Daniel's gmail group, I asked his clique what was the best movie on disability. I am not sure I saved their answers; I have my regrets about Schneider, though one look at his page says our personalities are too similar, which does not excuse the fact that I did not have to react, to him, or anyone. I could have just hit delete and hit delete and pulled on him or the clique when I thought it useful. Not sure what his complaint about Google Search means. With my colorful level of denigration I am lucky Blogger doesn't reinvent the wheel and blow me a kiss. I see nothing wrong with gay panic as a self defense, for example, since women have hit on me, four, five times. Aggression is justified when a firm no doesn't halt the behavior, and I am not a still virile Kevin Spacey gently disengaging Chris Cooper in American Beauty. The more I think about the edits made to this film due to screen testing, the less I like it, but American dysfunction and broken bodies are not quite the same.

The disability movement as it is recognized today started with the American Civil War, and in symbolic and actual terms, this fucking country always reenacts the conflict, so of course one of the most radicalized studio dares is the 1946 classic, which ends with its celebrated inclusion due to love. The double amputee lets his little woman on the inside. Aw. Love. One of Josie Byzek's favorite words of emphasis. The activists she profiles agitate against the able bodied world out of love. The thought occurs. If I log onto twitter and have a row with Hillary Clinton's account, then I'd possibly be in real trouble, and laugh silently due to my curious thought processes. An FBI dossier would get the right individuals to pay attention, and I'd launch the wheels of justice. This is probably why the poor utilize violence to resolve disputes.

Next I'd pick A Patch of Blue, so forbidden and sexually charged. It was a great influence on my desire to become (no, won't type it but I do think it) a black man's lover, which almost happened twice. The third time my father threatened my life, but that third time was a deliberate provocation on my part. I yelled at da last week "I am a throw back to Mussolini and now I am worse than you!" I guess I was trying to tell him he should have killed me. The man is now eighty and cares about absolutely nothing. Not me, his grandchildren, nothing. I am not including The Miracle Worker. All of these films carry Scott's "too schematic" charge, but this play turned movie about a favorite patron saint over does it. Beyond this there isn't much which isn't worth forgetting until we reach the present day. For me this starts in the nineties.

Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby makes the list as a backhanded compliment; the film is not about disability, which the rabid protesters either would not, or could not understand, and I defend its message without necessarily defending the actor's politics. The same entrapments closing over Swank's fighter are the ones I want out of as well.

Beyond this there are allegories, other titles, vulnerable wheelchair users, demonic wheelchair users, the *uplifting* biopic empowerment narratives that bore me in the same way a ritualized prey kill becomes a banal inconvenience, but nothing which reaches the magnitude of Orson Welles, and his ground breaking work, with the exception of Diving Bell, which Amazon finally bought for instant video. I may not view it till next month, depends.

Stories like this give me wicked, diabolical ideas, but with my luck I'd kill the worm after a fest of trots.

Mannequin Manufacture

Yom Kippur has been called the "white fast." That's because it is not a fast of mourning, but rather a fast that is supposed to help the faster contemplate his or her sins and relationship with God. A different fast, one that mourns for the destruction of the Holy Temple, is a "black fast."--Craig Oren, Rutgers School of Law

Was Clint Eastwood thinking about this almost laughable leading man flick when he produced Million Dollar Baby? The dated new wave kill the sex symbol movie and the contemporary morality play, for all their differences, carry the same message: breaking free of the entrapment of sterile environment can be costly, in mind in body and spirit. Asinine activists protesting a narrative that had something to say. Linear minds are so limiting, so unwilling to think, to be challenged.

I have mentioned Marshall Zacharias (bottom still) more than a few times in the course of my writings on Blogger, and I forgive the man. As long as there is a Henry James Society scholars will be throwing spitballs around on bad hair days. I took my arguments about peers and collusion public, however, because Greg would not reply to my private email about the matter, and, as I have told my page views in the past, I hate social cuts, virtual or the three dimensional variety. I would have preferred even an angry response from him to no response at all, and I have to forgive that too. Perhaps his honors program had a crisis, or maybe he did not like how I ditched Louise, but why do I have to be in charge of wounded starlings? I am not getting paid to do that anymore and I didn't ask her to either follow me around online, or follow my example.

Does he look happy to you, or, like half the universe, is he a Zolcroft user?

Yahoo did not ban me for writing this. Surprise. I truly believed a flock of angry posters would have come at me, not two thumbs up. The dawn of a new civil war? Ah, clever spastic, that's all, no doubt, simply clever.

Invidious Distinctions

When I write in Quarantine that Russell Crowe is too generic, another way to frame my contention is to bracket it in terms of over-exposure. He gets the organic nature of paranoid schizophrenia right in A Beautiful Mind, in terms of John Nash's transition from promising scholar to a man beset with illness, and it also felt like an Ike and Churchill rendition era film for modern consumption. Beyond this the star underwhelms, and does nothing to reconcile me to Australia. One of Tatyana's characters felt the same way in her early collection of stories, yanking the land mass out of the ocean like a diseased molar. A film like On The Beach exempts itself, simply by virtue of being early nuclear porn, as we call it today. It is not a fair comparison, but we do see a certain difference in handling impairments, however: the Rhonda of Muriel's Wedding adapts to her cursory paralysis, whereas here in the States, Swank's Maggie and her choice causes reactionary protests.

I happen to be on the character's side. Being a writer is an insulating process, by the nature of the beast, but when it has been your life for half a century, and essentially failed you, even if you always know you can never do anything else, sick now, broken, as well as crippled, making a choice to let go does not seem so threatening. The activists I knew, at least those who aren't dead, have nothing to say to me, and won't, obviously, since I haven't been nice, and on angry days, ah, well, some of you have seen the same diabolical villain films as I have, and can use your own imagination about what I do with a slowly dying vengeance, biodegrading; the very awareness of the fact that I am fragile fuels my urgency to get away, the ever omnipresent American impetus. Migrate. East to west, west to east, or be Hemingway in Paris.

I am running out of time. I am probably not going to make it, and neither stoicism nor protest is entirely satisfactory.