Leslie Howard's Sacrificial Graft

once, as I went past, I drew a sign at a point in space, just so I could find it again two hundred million years later," -- Italo Calvino, A SIGN IN SPACE

49th Parallel, in a nearly exact correlation to Lars and the Real Girl, a film roughly seventy years older, more fluid, less schematic, and even a different genre, is not an intrinsically Canadian film. Canadian films for and about Canadians may exist, and Canadian literary writers love to assume, through the chic ferocity of Margaret Atwood, that a distinctive Canadian identity exists, embodied in the graphic hero of Wolverine, perhaps, but much like X-Men is an overblown extended metaphor about difference and restraint, Canada never truly evolved as a nation, and it had the luxury of not doing so thanks to the fact that Britain Germany and France hate each other. 49th Parallel is actually a dialectical argument about neo-imperialism of two types: romantic absolutism (German Nazism, which for our purposes, for the time being, shall remain disparate from Italy's half-assed delusions of grandeur) and the UK's torturous evolution of virtuous monarchy, itself a national psychosis which is in no way unique to British sensibilities, although every empire has a unique and singular application.

Britain's unique mindset falls under this rubric:We defeated Spain and at least drew a stalemate with France at the end of the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, were therefore the truest heirs of Rome, and we get to tell the rest of the world how to live, play nice, and respect each other's autonomy, according to our rules and laws, because we killed enough indigenous natives, including Frenchmen, to have earned that right.

The Germans came along a little late and said not so fast, and the frightening thing is, the Germans almost won, despite their significant disadvantages, despite Leslie Howard's moral outrage, despite Powell's and Pressburger's near religious fidelity to the justice of liberal democracy, and Olivier's canonization by Pope Pius in the opening scene after the crash. How was the German vision different, setting aside their mechanized methods of sanitizing human civilization? The difficulty lies in the fact that Hitler as Fuhrer obscures why the German establishment rallied to eugenics, and that one ethnicity which had set itself apart for millennia became the handmaiden of the mother of all genocides -- one from which the disabled were not excluded-- but even Nazi's knew when to back off, and in the early days of Hitler's consolidation of power, German families rose up to protect their disabled loved ones, and officers stopped rounding up disabled German citizens to inter them-- setting these issues apart, what did the National Socialists want, or desire to achieve, and was it even possible to alter evolutionary science in such a radical fashion? It isn't an easy question to pose, but in essence, the Fascists, too, had such a radical notion of egalitarian purity that it might have wiped itself out in a mono-biological disaster of a human efficiency model, one which threatens to return with the merger, at least, between human and machine, perhaps in a few hundred years. Life is messy. Hitler's Fascists, unlike Britons, were invested in superior efficiency models as a notion of great civilization.

It was humanity's greatest quarrel to date. The United Kingdom won at such a great price that the lines of the equally messy Islamic insurgency can be traced through it, though this seems to have hit its watermark, whatever else these soldiers for Allah have up their sleeve.

In the same vein, Lars isn't a Canadian film either, but a North Hollywood softball a nod to US selfish shallowness about what community adaptation actually means, with Patricia Clarkson as the lynchpin for accommodating a necessary delusional mechanism, with a conclusion that sails in like a beatitude on a featherbed, but that's a luxury which North Hollywood can concoct only because the British bayonet and Yankee military success at consolidating territory created it.

In these troubled times, the sense of jeremiad in the US is overblown, even if Trump pulls an upset and has a bad term in office, but it is also true that US hegemony will never again quite be what it was, and without it, the Canadian comfort zone, and its presumed benevolence, will cease to exist. Man eating lions are a succinct minority doomed to extinction, but even the dowager has her pet causes.

Flora, Fauna, Cashew butter

"But we like suffering."-- Sebastiano Somma

The Woods, being an 06 release, doesn't lack for atmosphere, but as an allegory for the destruction of Camelot, I am still trying to put the thread through the needle. In this instance, the plot summaries do not fill in the gap. Absentee fathers who make promises they cannot keep, those are long realized, but the wardrobe, the hairstyles are too Kennedyesque not to suggest the worst of the ecosystem against the urbane liberalism built on the corruption of bootlegging during Prohibition. Beyond the implication, however, the feminine anguish loses me. Patricia Clarkson is getting on my nerves, and even when it goes to syndication, I'm skipping Learning to Drive on purpose. 

Clarkson has a range similar to Jane Alexander, pensive Protestant females with good breeding who encompass the disjunctive as best they can within the fine tuned chiseled features: thin lips, kept figure, a nurturing conduit of more mothering than sensual definition. I have had the runs for three days, incommoded with sickly sweet stench, washing the mattress of my damnation, today it is the power chair cushion, and this is happening because I've ceased transferring to my shower stool, in order not to corrode the Jazzy engines, since I shall have to make due with this model at least another year.

I do not mind that I'm sloppy, but losing to a filthy downgrade is another matter, and attendants are not going to tolerate this level of battle fatigue. I give up, resign my fate, go insane in an institution. Commiseration will not alter this reality.

I did construct a plan. I finally settled on one, and hope it will not cause an extreme internal struggle, not that I'm ready for it, fortuitous or otherwise, I cannot seem to go down, not quietly. Is this necessarily beneficial? Time to clean the soil, once again. 

A Good Defecation, Trembling

In our times, as was remarked, no one is content with faith, but "goes right on." The question as to whither they are proceeding may be a silly question; whereas it is, a sign of urbanity and culture to assume that every one has faith, to begin with, for else it were a curious statement for them to make, that they are proceeding further.-- Soren Kierkegaard

Nice old AT&T hasn't booted me. I failed to mention, on Blogger, as well as social media, that sins of overage in my last billing period wasn't simply due to nagging pet children. I've lost my battle with nicotine, and Vuse essentially rekindled dependency, and here we are again, my emotional health doomed to a rhetoric of vehement helplessness. Despite the fact that stuffing Jimmi's balls down his throat is a boring impossibility, let me return to Mr. Shrode's sanction when he spun around on his thick elephant soles to address me with "I read your blog," two weeks ago, the spitting image of Beavis.

Jimmi and Erik are exceedingly disadvantaged freaks, as I've written before, and reading, if Jimmi did read it, that I wanted a laundry list of ADAPT activists dead is a hard pill to swallow; if someone wrote they wanted me dead I too might waffle between context and complaint, but the assertion indicates just how hard loss of faith is, then not being able to leave the source of so much pain.  We all knew each other once, Josie Byzek, Jimmi, Erik, Linda, Cassie, myself, and making assertions like that in public has rental agents justifying their continued dehumanization of my person with rationalizations. 

Erik was a source for my first HTP article, for which I was paid a decent commission. Something I may have also posted before, and I understand why the severity of their disadvantage led to their gaming of the intake center, but they absolutely refuse to admit they could ever be wrong about anything-- hence my emotional health is analogous to Olivier's caricatured sadism in The Running Man. Jimmi said "I read your blog," as if to imply my posts were compensating indicators, and maybe they are, but Jimmi's emotional maturity is that of a thirteen year old in the body of a Shirley Booth who needs a cosmetic surgeon. If he inadvertently winds up alone with me his fear of me makes him sway nervously, which only increases my contempt, this thick, fat child tyrant on whom I've wasted so much energy. He once wrote an article, submitted to Josie, that a disabled lawyer who was matriculated, representing client X against PA's rehab law, would one day "find out" the extent of the jeremiad he was aiding (my paraphrase-- Jimmi doesn't have my diction, and he writes like a wailing tyrant, as well).

It is Jimmi's turn to now learn a hard lesson: Unethical behavior due to a strident and overbearing sense of entitlement can, and does, impact other people adversely, and before I am dead this bully bitch is going to learn why state civil service guidelines have rules discouraging nepotism. I'm going to clip some wings, and the near absolute power Jimmi and Erik had, I intend to see that mitigated within NCIL. Am I really capable of tolerating the degradation of my enemies? I do not know, but I've been known to be unmoved by individual collapse on sidewalks. In Patricia Clarkson, that erosion of empathy might translate as dispassionate reticence. As an actress, she absorbs loss and longing within herself, even while the audience reads her like an instruction manual. She serves her scripts with much the same function James' Maria Gostrey serves Strether. The academics have a term for it, slipped my mind many years ago. We see it over and over, The Station Agent, which, interesting as it is, glosses over her ideation as a mother with irreconcilable losses; in Lars and the Real Woman, she's the doctor none of us have, a real humanist sensitive to the dignity of marginal crackpots. In Pieces of April, she is the tyrannical scourge running out of time. Learning to Drive follows these same reasonable, liberal parameters; I do not need to know how it tests the limits of friendship to everyone's satisfaction, but do know what is broken cannot always be fixed by reconciliation.

American Paladin, a closer look

"He is a man who cannot be rejected."-- Charlie Rose

Not having a phone is a rather radical act of self-assurance for Dinklage's  Finbar, an ascendant insularity that really isn't punctuated by the insistent overtures of the Cuban food vendor, and it is in this sense that I'd argue that McCarthy reverses the polarity of the pro-forma progressive paradigm of The Station Agent into something more unwittingly tragic, not that McCarthy denies Dinklage a human range. Much like Garcia's deployment of the dwarf actor in Things, both these directors go against the theatrical absurdity of type, and Finbar is a person, whom, according to interpretation, is yanked out of his shell by the disruptions of the fallible beings around him, but what do we know at the end of the day, about the train aficionado, aside from the fixation repressed persons without other outlets develop for objects of technological condensation?

We know he had an implied intimacy with the deceased Henry, through affinity and shared interest. We know he's had sex, this through Joe's inquiry, and McCarthy's adept poke in the eye of tiresome ambulatory curiosity, we see a regressive boyhood within the adult whose interior rage dares a suicide but pulls back. We see him chastened into empathy for Clarkson as the inconsolable mother who uses her grief for the loss of her son to feed off Finbar's stoicism; no needy cripple here, only selfish ambulatory grifters, and though McCarthy happily resolves his film into the usual bromides of acceptance within loss while life still moves forward, even chilling with beers on the porch, that is about it. The jester lets down his shield, not performing on demand for the court, as was superimposed on viewers for most of the 20th century. Dwarfs were macabre signatures, from the wizard of oz through the Michael Dunn of Porter's Ship of Fools. Of course, the dwarf in Porter's character study fills the role of the chorus, and is allowed to be a mature persona too wise in the folly of life, but he is still a device, which is exactly what Dinklage remains in McCarthy's world of what's possible: the form of the shrunken human body is a mask, a mask to disguise, cover hideousness that may hide an ideally brutalized heart, in one of Peter Laurie's less typecast roles, straight through Mickey Rourke picking up the time honored conceit in Johnny Handsome.

Dinklage, much like Garcia's Albert, is actually more relevatory in Death at a Funeral as the hyped up prostitute for the secretly gay family man, conveying more in the stereotypical fetish than he does attempting to fully flesh out McCarthy's libertarian, somewhat self-hating freak.

Shoestring budget or not, Clarkson does a disservice to the taxing culture of mental illness, waltzing down the hospital corridor in scrubs, a my bad smile on her face after being the pill popping drama queen. Attempted suicides rolling back the emotional pain which reverberates on all those around them doesn't lend itself to that level of resolution.