Dead Sea Scrolls

Even with fragility being a need, keeping myself at arms' length, Cunningham's work is actually a conventional contrivance, overtly staged. Perhaps the novel lends itself to this almost operatic intensity of monologue. In the film, a great deal rides on Kidman and Harris. They pull it off. And it may be that the performances had such force exactly due to Cunningham's implied disavowal of multiculturalism. Yes, Woolf was sexually fluid and mentally ill, and Kidman's  modern character embodiment was sexually fluid and desperate to flee picket fences, but Cunningham's themes aren't that radical, and are actually fairly bourgeoisie, if you absent the AIDS of the contemporary novelist as metaphor. For me, this is the familiar terrain of 20th century self-interest, nothing more or less, so I don't understand why I found The Hours virtually as traumatizing as Babel, which, to its credit, eschews modernist icing on the birthday cake dessert.

Gladiator Emasculation, Fabricated Sheaths

"She doesn't do anything to make herself attractive," Kathleen Ann Quinlan, in foil against a serial poisoner

Jane Campion aims for  piercing through feminine pain in her 2003 In the Cut, a film which miscasts Meg Ryan as a poet teacher and does  an abominable disservice to my favorite novel. Writers tend to have detached personalities, but Meg Ryan’s teacher is a swishing slut, pale and effervescent in comparison to her younger supporting lead in Flesh and Bone, taken aback by the metropolitan brutality in which she deigns to thrive, in a narrative with an otherwise predictable bait and switch, with Ruffalo’s edginess lacking the requisite ambiguity for suspense. Why Bacon was cast as the jilted boyfriend is beyond this blogger’s ability to enter into, in reference to Nicole Kidman’s verve as the producer; he may represent a generalized post-9/11 anxiety, in addition to serving as the typical supporting character for misdirected suspicion, but the repugnant turgid aspect to his role doesn’t quite  ratchet up the audience sympathy for the imperiled heroine. Damici spoils everything as the Detective Richie long gone into section 8 territory, more meatball than methodical predator.

Despite these posterior impediments, Campion does manage to break past the battery of inured defenses. The lack of a musical score concentrates the sickening stench of the body butchery which hypersexualizes Ruffalo’s Malloy for Ryan’s Avery. Kidman’s iciness cues the damsel backstory, with a nod to the snow white feline sauntering along the alleyway, and Ruffalo cannot save the girl because the girl offered the recognition of the tattoo she recognized to the wrong player. Homage to Doris Day’s Que Sera, as the title track, sears the breasts of every woman who necessarily has to be disappointed with patriarchal dominance, settling for ineffectual decency.

This is an incontrovertibly modern movie, understating drama for a stark view of new century difference, a template perhaps not consciously but certainly genetically related to the 2009 Personal Effects. Hollander may have intended this ensemble view of murder victims to be a marquee vehicle for Ashton Kutchner, but the bad aftertaste Vancouver leaves in our mouths is a sad testament to the fact that studio executives insist audiences have to accept mediocre actors as celebrities. Kutchner doesn’t have Charlie Sheen’s ability to make the camera love him, and the screenplay relegates the disabled to indigestible burdens: the honorable retarded man a scapegoated casualty due to the need to assign blame, a fatherless deaf boy indulging in homicidal impulses to salve his losses. Kutchner may be the duty driven protector, but his cruelty surpasses boundaries, both to the retarded suspect, who he calls “a man like that,” and to his ostensible lover’s deaf son, with whom he deliberately maintains fences. Hollander takes so many shots of the megabird costume he might have well marketed this flick to Henson’s muppet market. Being well made doesn’t always translate into being responsible for your end product, which may or may not be the problem with Ben Carson’s candidacy. I am not the first person to suspect the minority with miracle hands might be gaming the nominating process.

In USA today he calls the racism of the Charleston shooter a disease, and then turns around and associates Sunni extremism with rabies. I don’t necessarily disagree with his rhetoric there, but do acknowledge the sand pit in which he’s trapped himself. Racism is not a disease. It may corrode, and with pronounced virulence, may be symptomatic of physiological decline, but in and of itself, prejudice is not equivalent to illness. To his credit, and despite the mote in my eye, as it stands, he is the only GOP candidate who fascinates me as a journalist in pursuit of a subject, the only one who ignites any semblance of a motivation, but surgeons aren’t generally inclined to be tea party absolutists, as those who administer the brutality of the medical model the disabled have to live, and if Carson isn’t the victim of conflicting mental impulses in his own right, perhaps he is running in the top tier so he can die a black millionaire. Powell did the same thing after he left the Bush administration, but kept it within the confines of accepted parameters. Carson is not, and that is fine, but it may also indicate the death of the American two party system. The lunatic fringe is catering to a hunger for flamboyance, and the democratic left, even if Hillary Clinton prevails, is weak. If Xi Jinping sucks this into his vacuum cleaner, like any good opportunist, I’ll join in with the violinists. With some thinking, I may wedge in a more impassioned post to the doctor later. A long post like this may attest to a spastic with no life, but a power chair turned torture chamber makes a poverty sunken mattress a haven of resignation, with which both Hollander and Campion conclude their problematic dramas.

Toxic Shock

I made myself eat, hoping this unexpected surge from my uterus is not a hemorrhage, but I doubt it. Feels like my period, and no wonder I have been more intense than usual; maybe it was being around the fertile women in the bar. I could wail, you know, really cry out like some disabled people used to or still do, on New Mobility's boards, but that is beneath me. Cunningham's work was too difficult for me today, however, given my family history. How did I know the tyranny of Ed Harris and Kidman would feed my own back to me tenfold? With grandeur, which I lack, at least, unpublished. Literary individuals do not speak in a heightened fashion like that for three hours, absorbing and feeding back that degree of emotional pain, but I cannot undo the impact of Michael's work, and can only undress, surprised and set back, amusingly (no pads) bleed in a chuck, and wait to reset, or not, or give up, but I cannot, for whatever reason. I still want to live, despite the horror of my brother's AIDS death, or war crime rape in the Congo, or my abandonment of little Louise. I know what Louise wanted, a literary friendship, and I understood, but could not trust myself, and tersely broke the link, and feel guilty, but she was too young, and I am too hard, in some ways, despite her own isolation and disability. I could not carry the obligation, in the same way I cannot expect any of you who are relatively decent people to help me leave my landlord safely for a sustained period of time. Staying here is killing me, and giving my notice, a death sentence with a small, small window of being free at last, and then state authorities would dump me into an environment comparable to my childhood.  I need that private security Leonard Woolf utilized to keep his wife alive. How he must have loved her.

Kidman Arc

I hope that Nicole Kidman is not a Scientologist, like her unfortunate ex-husband, because her artistry is more interesting than Tom's, more sinister and intriguing, offering something for a contemporary woman to chaw, even in watered down vehicles like Birthday Girl, a story line too improbable, though she can be applauded for ambiguity. I myself have closer ties to Jodie Foster's man girl obstinacy, and Foster consumed many of my earlier posts on this project. I am not yet satisfied, but grew up with Foster, as opposed to Kidman. Nicole has had currency, more than a decade of it; my perspective on her is still that of a shiny coin, because I am rapidly aging beyond relevancy, and if I should make it to my 70's, like my dialectical rival, of whom I look nothing like, I will be worse, perchance gone baby gone, a freak show like this curiously ugly and gritty little Affleck vehicle, minus Harris and Freeman, and that, simply because these veterans are too well branded, this film is one of those that tells the truth about the hard core underside of dealers, perverts, steaming like hot dung, and thus, hard to watch even without an X-rating.

Is my ongoing battle a disease? Who knows? But if I do not wage it, I have only myself to blame, and my first protest missive has hit the postal service, so I cannot turn back. My father's sister raises her voice that I need to let this go, but I cannot, I am sorry. I want some justice for my old age, something, some small victory for a literary artist's autonomy, a cry for freedom, real freedom, yes, and I should have waged this war in the strength of my 30's. I may pay a price still more undeserved, I may be dismissed, and I am a little scared, but between Liberty Resources and PresbyHomes I have been forced to digest rust for 28 years, a vibrant woman of promise, I am now broken, and the system can break me more, I have no illusions about that, but I am not going down in compliant humility to Pennsylvania's social service system. I will not and I cannot. But by the same token, age marginalizes the marginalized more. I will not live much longer than Vassar. She died with a tube in her stomach. No one will do that to me.

A List Pose

The thought occurs to me that maybe I could one day approach Nicole Kidman's publicist about getting an interview in my own right, even if I cannot make the Henry James Review deadline, and it is quite possible that I will not make it, at the rate I am going. I care nothing about her personal life, and do not necessarily have to meet her in person; it is her art that interests me for a feature, along the lines of The Others (2001) and Birth (2004), if I could develop my own track, not that such a feature article has not been done. Of course it has, I believe in WaPo, and make a note to make a concerted effort to dig it out of archive, but not this morning. Her ex husband is insane, but too high in social status for anyone to admit that as obvious. Cruise and I are exactly the same generation, tail wind to the boomers of whom the gen X are so weary, one of us a self-hating sow always on the verge, the other a sometimes great actor always on, and a cultist, dodging trick wires. I wonder if Tom really has a central core, and knows himself for himself, but I doubt it. I have read some, here and there, about his religion, do not understand it, and a good federal conspiracy would set the Mormons and Scientologists up to kill each other. That's a fun idea.

I might be able to derive secondary material from such an attempted effort toward credibility, while groping toward a thesis in the fog, much as it was created by Amenabar on location.

How The Cymbals Reverberate

When I reviewed, or interpreted The Others earlier this year, I was unaware that Nicole Kidman had followed through on her psychological thriller arc with the equally creepy but possibly more uneven Birth (2004). Though I missed few, the minutes that escaped me were still crucial, and I'd like to screen it once more, but Cameron Bright was used to much better effect here than he was in the stupendous and confusing Ultraviolet, another film that has drawn my mention during my unfortunate LiveJournal stint. Endless revision, tying in the old posts and the new, for what exactly when I cannot solve my application problems, but this will wait until after the holiday, as the dynamic between the new little lady and my poor Vincent has exhausted me, and I am close to giving up the love of feline parenting, though it will break my heart, already rife with fragments. I will not be celebrating tomorrow; indefinite at this point, but I may try a weekend holiday ride to Penn's Landing. In all my years at this location I have never taken the 21 bus to the pier. For me, during the active years of my field work, it was always in the opposite direction, to Darby, smaller maybe, but to my memory the Darby borough is just as bad as the city. Drugs more concentrated, and I have more graphic memories of my mother's drug use, the purple bruises in the fleshy crook of her elbow, the rubber tubing I wasn't supposed to see. What was it that I said about reticence? But the irony of Doty's continued lunging over my review is that particular review was of no consequence as compared to what I write here for the sake of testament, alienating my family, and those who knew me. I think Doty has a lot to learn about what can be controlled in public domains, and what cannot; in contrast to his desire to be loved by his readers, I do not care about my audience in that way, so much as the integrity of my work itself, and if people are dismayed by what I produce, I do not go on a boner about it. I have been praised for the power of my poetry, for how hard hitting I am, or impressed poor Louise, who I abandoned through no fault of her own. She is a perfectly nice young woman who found my work *very raw,* and we should have left it as that. I have been criticized as pretentious, but unlike Doty, I did not harangue the now inactive Usenet poster who threw out that red meat. I like the complexity of my imagery, though it leads to the flaw of a certain top heaviness that can topple my poetic construct. I have been rejected as many thousands of times as the paltry dollars I have drawn in on my work. I have been accepted for publication in sometimes unexpected ways, and I have not been as successful with marketing paradigms as some, including those whom I actually respect, like Cheryl, (not liking the Oprah juggernaut and my expressed frustration at comparative trajectory is not the same thing as disdain; Cheryl is authentic--Doty is a crock, a load on) but there are reasons for this beyond talent, very much related to my vulnerability, strained resources.

Scarlet Verve

Nicole Kidman's travail after her break up with Cruise only entered my conscious minutely, as both she and he are manufactured Caucasian royalty, whatever nostalgia one wants to evoke over the demise of the studio mongul, Hollywood has not changed the ends, simply the means by which stars become different and untouchable. I can be critical of white cultural norms as well, and arguably, figures like Tom Cruise and Governor Romney represent the worst aspects of vestigal European privilege. I know these are real people, as Ebert said on the radio, but I disagree with him to this extent: They are real people trapped within the facade of what projects them, and can no more do the normal things like take a dump in my sterile public housing toilet than I can work myself to death to give myself even a simulated version of Nicole's body. Kidman and Cruise, and to an extent, our favorite vacuous Mormon, are the super whites, the top of the top, and I resent this almost, a sliver not as much, as I have come to resent urban black culture and homosexual lifestyles; but  Alejandro Amenábar deploys this aspect of Nicole's celebrity to great effect in The Others (2001), and I am kicking myself for two things, not seeing the great Jamesian influence on this film, which after doing a search, is quite obvious, and not seeing the film sooner, when Kidman did such interesting promotional articles for it, and I find it, as a cinematic ghost story, to be superb. The cinematography is excellent and achieves what Amenabar wishes to do in haunting us; that shot of the husband's profile on the pillow turning corpse-like next to Kidman's lilly pallor made me shiver with revulsion, and our macabre fascination with infanticide is handled with just the right touch. I evidently missed my calling by not finding my way into marriage with directors like Amenabar or Inarritu. They understand the power of what film can do organically, and how it is different, on a collective level, from narrative text. The Others is worth spending my money to view again, and Kidman managed to reach me more than unnerve me with her hyper vigilant iciness. To imagine what her life was like with Cruise literally makes me think of felines freaking out on a hot tin roof. She possibly deserves better.