Acquired Deficiency

"After it happened people stopped calling me the golden boy." -- Jude Law

The reason this Savage Garden song strikes a visceral chord, becoming such an end of the century hit, is actually due to the diving baritone of the lead vocal into the refrain, and I weep along with it for the passions and anticipations of unity never to be. Law's argument, as a sugared honey on whom women like to dote, is to put yourself out there, as per Jennifer Tilly's Nina, and perhaps I never made enough of an ass of myself, however many online follies abound. I used to ask ambulatory men out point blank in my just off North Philly campus days, and would not dream of it now, with the obvious poverty of my distressed lower jaw.

Jay Rosen's tweet about Andy's closure, however languishing, of his Daily Dish caught me by surprise. I remember my email to Sullivan about David Foster Wallace, and by that time did not expect a response, but my first email to acclimatized Briton was impassioned, and he sent me a screen shot of the Amtrak building I look at every day, drawing me in to his "view from your window" theme. Then I chucked civility to the wind, and it's too late now, as I gaze back over the hills and vales.

What I haven't seen said, which doesn't mean it hasn't been intimated, is Sullivan is battling a life consuming disease, that his blog has bounced from one media outlet to another, that very few pay money for blogs unless the blogs have a unique signature, and even before I washed my hands of homosexual equality, I saw no reason why I should pay to read Andy's analyses, despite the fact that he works harder for access in his posts than I do, and my reasons for this are economics. I'd source DIA if I had subscribers, but lacking those, I save my armor for articles I might sell, on spec or not.

Still, he is established, referenced by other established opinion writers, and if he is on the shoals, my fatigue and dramatic commode evacuations should portend dire warnings, yet I do not give it up, whatever that is, writing less and less offline, not out of blockage as much as stamina, chasing cat vomit and other forms of waste, I begin to fear my silence as much as the poet columnist Laurel Speer, sharing hers with me in raw draft. More than likely, I will not wrest myself out of poverty before my COPD puts me on oxygen, crossing my fingers that I can rely on a somewhat feckless woman like Karina. She is basically a sweet girl, 35 and in an arrested development, while I whittle away on aggression which my talent constrains. I can't really look on her relative youth as a source of hope for a declining dignity.

Part of the offense I cause, which liberals would ridicule if I had any legitimacy, is a personalized animosity toward homosexuals, since the majority I've known have been evasive and duplicitous, and Andy, arguably, has some of this in his interview responses-- yet there was a time, when David Brooks turned me onto this mercurial gay English Catholic, that I respected Andrew Sullivan, saw my viewpoints in tandem, if not my ruptured faith. He has burnt out from a relatively privileged platform. I've burnt out sinking in quicksand, too maniacal for an alternate route toward port.

Bakery Frosting

Dick Polman's 2010 article in Obituary Magazine castigating Hitchcock's Psycho at 50 was fair, perceptive in view. I do not think Judith Rossner's Looking For Mr. Goodbar would have been possible without the reverberation of the first slasher movie on camera, but I also cannot find an archive version of Polman's piece for reference, and Dick has no reason to help me out, nor twitter as a whole, despite my pleading. 

Polman was one of the first journalists I read on Blogger, and if I wanted to be that kind of introverted groupie, I could drive to University of Pennsylvania's campus and attempt to place my disenfranchisement in his path, but I was never that far gone for our locally grown national analyst; drifted away from him, not from any distinct animus, not in terms of ideology, though his entirely wasted opinion about Romney and the sect that stuck in Utah provides a good indicator of my waning enthusiasm, with some exceptions, his byline in Obituary being one. I could scold and say "Dick, by the time I get to the library guide to periodicals." Or just be myself and say Dick can you help an old woman out? Unlike Scorsese, who can teach us about what Hitchcock was doing with Janet Leigh in terms of artistry, Dick does not like the legacy of Psycho's impact, which some critics suggest Hitchcock himself attempted to address with the later and even more chilling Frenzy, circa 1972. The opening rape strangulation in Frenzy was a vivid remonstrance of my childhood, and I did not need ThisTV to remind me that British pathology can be just as pernicious, and far worse than Jason in a hockey mask.

Hitchcock, however, is an unabashed structuralist, Polman's grasp of the culture shock in Psycho's wake notwithstanding.. What came after also got messier, and I believe Richard Brooks tried to take his cue from this in Goodbar's climax, which, if the filter is correctly applied, might be seen as Rossner's argument against Hitchcock's stark, manipulative fantasy sacrifice, and not simply in terms of Theresa's masochism goading her into her dangerous liaisons and lack of caution. Rossner's work begins the process of de-glamorizing pathological misogyny which Hitchcock consistently elevated, and Spielberg parodies with devastating irony in his use of Jude Law as the automaton which may not even know it is innocent of our fascination with murder of women in A.I. Law's Gigolo parody is an enhanced version of of the chameleon he plays in Music From Another Room, the Clinton era touchy feelly romance of manner which has not sold me, yet none the less wrestles a rebuttal against too much of a sweet tooth for dandies.

What I feel about Andrew Sullivan's departure as an online columnist, now, is contempt. He deserves credit for pushing back against LBGT militancy to silence hostile and trauma- considered it persons such as myself--but he is in part responsible for this path where the inclusion and destigmatizing of every form of conduct will ultimately be our own undoing. I'd like to see Andy take on the corruption of activists like Erik von Schmettering and Jimmi Shrode. If I had the dexterity I could make a best seller writing a title like Faggot Wars.