The Interstice Between the Blades Which Run Us Through

"A story about a British actor who never was, one who couldn't even make it here."-- Rue McClanahan, with the best lines.

It is difficult to believe that Petersen's Das Boot is nearly 40 years old, given how well made and modern it still offers up to repeated viewings. I studied it with a military history professor whom I might have paid the appropriate courtesy, and didn't, of respecting his syllabus. To echo his words, however, Petersen is a little too adroit at humanizing the German military under Hitler's rule, and Jurgen Prachnow, I have never fallen out of love with. He represents the best definition of European masculinity any woman with a reasonable chance would kill for, which is the best restraint I can offer in terms of printable aspiration, with a feminine zeal to match that of his wolverine U boat captain. Subservience to that male principle speaks volumes about why sexual unification predominates, whether or not its impetus is child rearing-- but to rebut my former instructor's caution, Petersen is brazenly cutting through the superlative bombast of master race sensibility in the very act of deploying how our soul goes into what we create, like the marvel of submarines. The captain miraculously keeps his submersible in one piece, returning to dock in national honor, only to have crew and ship torn to shreds by Allied squadrons. For 1981 it is a daring argument, one that Eastwood would later imitate with the Japanese, but by that time, with the war nearly out of living memory, mature audiences could handle that the conflict wasn't quite so binary.

Levinson and Link, Columbo's creators, were active in the same decades as Wolfgang Petersen, and we can only observe how things have to be obfuscated: to my knowledge, Peter Falk never allowed himself to be Jewish on screen, much as his longer survived contemporary, Nimoy-- but Nimoy, if you spend time listening to what he reveals about grafting himself to speculative genre, was a sneaky bastard. Much of Vulcan culture was appropriated from attending synagogue. What's that tell you? The later Columbo mystery movies have an uneasy tension between the formula and adaptation to the modern era, and the 98 "Ashes to Ashes" might have been a good place to close the book. Neither Falk nor McGoohan are having much fun, both are shrill, though Patrick stays preserved to a greater degree, in the ever wondrous anomalies of biology. Sympathizers can see here that Peter Falk is losing his touch, on the verge of dementia, when the Internet and smart phones were just taking hold. Levinson, Link, and Falk combined  have to sublimate a great deal to comic antipodes, against what liberalism, even Zionism, promulgates with the scourge of history behind it. Petersen does exactly the same thing, through Heidegger's dictum of focus on the thing itself-- he evades, simply looking at the empirical process of survival in futility.

"The end of history," is a catch phrase. What it means, precisely, is no one is entirely justified? No one has the absolute cause, whether or not causes themselves are now null and void, and we're better off just raising hens to lay eggs before we lose memories of husbandry altogether. Despite how familiar I am with the routines in my unhappy environment, I no longer feel safe, not simply from urban crime statistics. I'm frightened. Is it old age? Or my fault for breaking so many bonds simply because I must by necessity only appropriate the mobile world, by and large? My only intimacy is through a damned device with my own voice, dropping depth charges. I legitimately started my examination of disability in entertainment to bring us together, looking for commonality, and I've failed, holding myself together only by sheer force of will, one which prefers, at this point, to compromise my personal security rather than complying with the rules your taxes, and mine too, pay for. I only have a few days to hand over the documentation these minorities who've humiliated me repeatedly need, knowing full well that vacating, with such scant resources, makes me that much less human, even though I couldn't be, ipso facto, the crazy homeless hag everyone ostracizes. Without power, I'm helpless, a brain crammed with world weary absorption through her filters, not even having the decency to sink in the harbor, conceding surrender.

Mel Gibson, Henry Winkler, an Impostor's Break from Her Break

Like Stalin, Trujillo ruled by turning his rage without warning against his subordinates.-- Publisher's Weekly on Vargas Llosa's novel which pitted itself against the world, only to find that the United States is responsible for San Dominican industry keeping San Dominicans on San Dominican soil

Llosa's interviews on public television still give one pause, make a failed writer take a step back; as well written as The Feast of the Goat is, the assassins bookmarked to return to Urania's opening, her guilt ridden survival, all Llosa really does is confirm politics is a blood sport, a corrosion of any ideal about human governance. Dominicans and Haitians may no longer electrocute each other for amusement-- or is shock therapy only a dirty little secret in New Delhi?-- but the island of two weakling states which both have seats in Manhattan, a pretense toward sovereignty when both are still entirely colonial, illustrates basic geopolitical lies. If one examines things too closely, the notion of a patriotic national identity has fissures world over, and might still be cause for alarm in India, China, even Putin's imperial cult-- but there are strong states juxtaposed against mere contrivance, and this is why Lkosa pisses me off. He takes (a) reader through a historical xenophobic hell, for what exactly? Am I supposed to condemn Eisenhower and JFK for allowing Trujillo to repress socialist collectivism only to wind up with developing world paternalism, in 2010 and beyond, suckling on humane capitalism, patting Indians and descendants of the African diaspora on the head?

I am not envious. I cannot do everything, and Latin American literary gamesmanship I examine, with jaundice. Urania's anguish, the indignation of Trujillo's killers, this means little. I actually identify more with Trujillo's pain, in Llosa's conception of it, than with the humanists who have to carry the valise of his legacy for the rest of their lives. It is more Llosa's ego, and the doors it opened in Hollywood for his relatives to make rip off monster movies, much like Henry Winkler's dramatic irony in Vancouver merely confirms Mel became an entrenched victim of Jewish liberalism, that intellect which is so superior to the rest, and though Winkler is a league or two removed from my Jamesian associates, his satirical undercutting in The Imposter is the best episode of Dead Man's Gun, which can be overly strident-- but Winkler, as executive producer, is toying with our memory of Fonzie as the otherwise harmless variation of Italian bling. I was such a naive girl, not realizing Jewish men were aping Italiano to make fun of it, and also to hide themselves. God forbid people like Winkler or Falk or Nimoy display any orthodoxy after the cataclysms in Europe. This is the secular liberalism Gibson came up against, and took a beat down from the establishment. Far be it for spastic to judge, as a crippled Jewish princess did it to her too, but watching Winkler's peddler learn assertion, using his skills at reading to undercut machismo, represents a subtle, mostly victorious argument against virility, against the necessity for violence to achieve grace. Minority anarchists are doomed to the sidelines, suspecting we're right despite the price involved, and knowing it. There is a time when murder is righteous, even if effeminate behavior is clever enough to evade Satanical burrowing. My femininity was hurt by orthopedic surgery, already challenged before Steele cut into me as a girl. Pubic area was never tidy, well behaved and cupped nicely in the vaginal area, as is the median for such things.
Butch bitches would classify it as intersex, but fuck that. I'm mad I have to get old, to die, with so little to show for what walkers did to me. Oh, men. They fuck me, but wanting me is another matter. Unlike the dykes, who may correctly intuit my submissiveness without also reading my revulsion at enslaving myself to a regressive infantile nurturing. I have plotted these points, and rejected them, but it doesn't mean I'm not pissed, and know I'll be subjected to more advances, if I survive long enough. I hope I get lucky enough to really hurt the next woman. I want to send a message, let them be on the receiving end of surgical cuts that destroyed my esteem. Now I need to close my lost round with The Freeman and dust my ego. 

Cheese, Crackers, Blank Slate

Dagger of the Mind is not in the memory bank, and it was on this morning, but this was one of those days I needed extra rest. My physiology is like that, and spastic believes it is a natural adjustment. Sometimes I need extra sleep, and if I stream it I'm going to feel mortified, given that I undoubtedly know the story and simply cannot remember that I do, as it is not the later mystery movies, which tried to be more involved, yet one I saw recently, "Prognosis Murder" felt stale, as if Falk was diffident despite his character's cash cow. I only vaguely remember his turn of the century stint inside his celebrated constable. This is merely a lede for some continuing thought processes. 

The syndicate from Delaware will run it again, but I am not sure if I want to wait, and now want my coffee. whatever else I'm eating.

Comparative Hypocracy

At that time, in March 2003, was that the right decision?  And now, as we look back on it 13 years later, would it have been better if we’d taken the opposite decision and what would have been the consequences of that opposite decision?  If you can’t answer that question, then you’re a commentator and not a decision maker.--a former superficial narcissist now only respected in the Northern Hemisphere

Although the dowager shuns flash fiction, while she sinks in dread of her fate in her damaged Quantum, brevity can sometimes have great power, especially when a secular Jewish actor so successfully submerges his ethnic identity that fans not salient on the biography tended to believe he actually was Italian, yes, you may make fun of a bitter and nasty savant lashing out in real life at minority wardens last week to the point of no return, really pissed, burning bridges not to be rebuilt with apologies, Peter Falk's very early and forceful portrayal of a religious fanatic on the Alfred Hitchcock Hour's "Bonfire" episode rival's that of Robert Mitchum's psychopath in Night of the Hunter. One might even speculate Falk at least examined Mitchum's film performance, which, if the more youthful Shelley Winter wasn't always a fatalist easy lay who passively  shrouds acceptance of misogynist terminal violence, might have even been more forceful. Not that the Hitchcock teleplays don't play the same conceits, but Bonfire is far more insidious because of Falk's ability to project conviction. It is an amazing performance prefiguring Columbo's tenacity; whereas Mitchum oozes fraudulence which crests to a breaking point. In Cape Fear, he essentially inhabits the same role which triggers threat anxiety in a truly illicit fashion. But Falk's character believes his own psychosis wrapped in Pentecostal fervor-- not to say his preacher was aping this Oklahoma groundswell of sectarian hokum. He kills the old woman in the opening as deftly as any modern nursing home angels of mercy never discovered due to the shortage of forensic pathologists. It is a real to life parallel rarely tackled in the sixties, with the exception of the British film I mentioned years ago-- no energy to spend fifteen minutes digging it up. Later, if I have any serene moments left dashing around trying to shake out a safe landing, but still, Falk's submersion, much like Nimoy's in primitive science fiction, and even Kirk Douglas, to a lesser extent, intrigues, perhaps because of the dowager's tendency toward voluble revelation, she is fascinated by the unsaid, the burrowing of identity in the closet.

Real crips would say I am peddling calcified cow chips to justify my own aesthetic inquiry, but in a non linear fashion, Falk is succinct towards the fusion of subsets, and also an argument against me, and my ferocious scorn. The Modern Catholic might be pleased to know that I feel bad about what I did Friday, but let me cue some people in: my dying aunt has been the only one there for me in recent years, tried to support me, and one covert round with these black women who run this building, and she folds, all eliciting my contempt, now irreconcilable, though I love my aunt. They stressed her out, preyed on her own insecurity about how she's going to die, and interfered in the small amount of familial support I had. I cannot continue on in such an environment; it isn't Christian to me, and in point of fact, my aunt found a custodial person she was going to send over. That's gone. One thing I realized though. The Libertarians are right. Stupid hicks with power can do all sorts of things, and engaging in such petty cruelty as they have, calling my emergency contact behind my back, only confirms my lack of species optimism. I may be afraid of my vulnerability; only natural, but these bitches are nothing, not anymore.

Thudding Indentation

I cannot actually discuss the column I am working on, even in these days of hyperlinks down to the essential beat reporter, but I twisted myself from the lede to the essential meat of my idea, despite what extreme poverty and physiological duress are doing to me. What I can say is this is a mainstream policy piece about which I care, and as I've written three times, I want to get it right; by the end of next week I hope to have a workable draft nearly ready-- and, if I am declined, be prepared to be a good soldier, as Leonard Nimoy and Peter Falk were, at least on the set.

I may overuse the idea of conduits, but Falk and Nimoy were both filters between Jewish intellectualism and popular culture, and when my battle with Presbyterian pretensions and contiguous minority abusive stigma subsides, at least to some degree, consider these two celebrity character actors a foot note in one of my squiggly segues towards both fusion and difference.

Biagio Cocuzza

Wilder recruited the famous Texan transvestite Barbette as a consultant to Curtis and Lemmon. Barbette ... was now in retirement. He'd had a glittering circus career before it ended prematurely due to poor health.-- Aubrey Malone, The Defiant One, p 80

Columbo's "Forgotten Lady", as written by Bill Driskill, is the only one of the original episodes to veer off the conclusions viewers expected of the series-- and is also one of the few episodes that immediately locates me back home watching it as a kid, not then nuanced enough to realize the regal Janet Leigh was here taking a rough 75 minute opportunity to vainly attempt to refute what Hitchcock did to women in the creation of the slasher genre. While not to be taken as a promotion of censorship, I tend to agree with the old lion's hostility to Psycho, whose legacy can be traced straight through to rap lyric misogyny, that jump cut butcher knife and shower curtain of which we'll never be free. It is an amoral thrill, the master's tease with his audience's hostility to feminine withholding. This is how Leigh utilized her stardom. If Monroe dripped with with lascivious intercourse, Leigh was another cup of tea entirely, despite the fact that daughter Jamie not only exists but carried on, even cheapening mother's legacy. For Janet Leigh, sexual energy is restrained. The pageantry of gazing on her looks and social grace comes first. Her style was the cake, as opposed to the exercise of love in and of itself, and Hitchcock with real malicious portents said "I'll show you," and eviscerated the shields of womenhood so well we never fully came to terms with the consequences, despite the fact that her foil against Falk isn't so much her crime as mercy for it against an aging medical impairment of which her character was unaware. The aneurysm, from which the patriarchy which she removes attempts to protect her, might be taken as a very early warning sign for Alzheimer's, which would ultimately kill Falk, whose eye cancer never advanced beyond its singular ravage which gave him his quixotic facial expression, a humane persistence for the sake of moral sanction, and even prefigures Leigh's end of life battle with vasculitis, with both actors barely making it into this century with any relevance, Falk only because he was beloved, and our nostalgia for that granting permission for Columbo to carry us forward on the back of twentieth century icons sending us off to a new century still trying to find itself, discontent with the price of the modern civilized world much closer the IRA of Hennessy than the other doomsday scenarios that preoccupied us at the time, including "global warming". Both then, and now, the west looked on the Troubles as the localized problem of a dead empire, but those guerrillas of the hot thrillers of my era were more than successful instructors for the turbulent horrors of these last two decades, while those of us who make for the fading Grace Wheeler's, desperately clinging to tarnished capital, are told the best we can do is transfix to the past, with the same passive intensity with which we try to break it. 

Even the doo is telling

Perhaps because it aired so late in the series, "Make Me a Perfect Murder," with an actress who had no relevant staying power, (Van Devere), brings us a bit closer to the dawn of post-modern sensibilities making jagged edges. This is still Columbo, but Falk minimizes his Jewish working class doggedness, and our dimmed feminist anxieties, glass ceilings, are more important than disposing of the patriarchy, as represented by shooting the male with the script. For 50 minutes of airtime, I like Devere here. She's sharp, but on the curve. Her Firestone isn't yet the "Dynasty" bitch, but her voice modulation is still her weapon, maybe even me in a good body. 

It's something to regret, because what we love about Columbo is unraveling in 1978. We all know it, but let Falk reprise the character well into the first decade of y2k,  until senility encroaches. Everything else unraveled too. My hatred of Yabberz, and my urgency to wipe it out, is nonsensical, but there was too much pattern recognition; too much California dreamin' crashing smack into one of David Foster Wallace's automobile suicides, and I cannot get involved in interactive portals of that category anymore, and it is not about my aggression.

It is about my clock. The only way to beat my scar tissue is work, not that dancing aggregate crap. 

I hate it; I cannot engage like that, not ever again. I do not mean in policy details. Anyone can trip me up on detail. I cannot explain it yet, but I'd rather be thrown under wild horses than to utter the name Horton ever again. Donny Brasco, cf.

Jack Cassidy's Covert Collaboration

"Get on and get up over your hill,"-- a poignant track to Stargate Universe, never viewed

The poet Laurel Speer and I had a brief correspondence of the old fashioned sort, type written, envelope and stamps, the last missive received, one of her essays, in which she conveyed the writer's worst enemy: the loss of words. I certainly never anticipated the spectre of weariness would begin to threaten the only thing I have keeping me on the ground and alive, my work, as a very minuscule author, if you like, as well as a journalist poet with a string of bylines a mile long.

Who am I to push back against Peter Thiel's power, or be distressed about where my next pitch is coming from, or going to? Assuming that Mateen had an objective to achieve something against homosexual liberation, tactically, yes, it was a strategic mistake, precisely because it was a spectacle, one which will ultimately give sexual permissiveness more power, not less, consuming the  media for an extra period of time, however long it may be. Reactionaries need necessarily be shrewder in the methods they deploy, the exception being with Muslims, regardless of who they are, where they come from. They need to be extracted, deported, from Europe, the US, Canada, and any other civilized society. They need to be fought, and defeated, and only then can the rest of us contemplate mercy. The struggle with evil can be an intellectual contest, reflecting both sides of the coin, but it can also be simplified, and I refuse, regardless, to have any sympathy for individuals who insist on applying a Mosaic mindset to the modern world, even as we continually unravel our boundaries, which if you'd bother to apply yourselves, you'd realize we all need.

I am conflicted, when it comes to the Cassidy family, whether I'm more enthralled by the debonair father or the inauthentic son, with his squeaky clean shag and ineffectual strum on his amps.

Carmel in the Niger Sky

This consisted of gentle prods, ridicule so faint and unfocused that it always could be given a flattering turn if necessary. [sic] Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, loc 894

One of the most heuristic of my viewing pleasures was experiencing Peter Falk in Wings of Desire, even if his cameo does indeed feel like a post production interjection in a beautifully romantic and aspirant enterprise. One of his shortest appearances, also his sharpest, radiant with benevolence. It takes such darkness torturing a muzzled poet's spirit to see such light, light we no longer have with the death of presence.

Johnny Cash was doing what any celebrity does in his appearance on the Columbo episode "Swan Song," cashing it the chips. In many ways, this script is one of the more annoying ones, a bit cockamamie, the evidence against the gospel singer pretty much snatching a kid's hand out of the cookie jar, because there was no other way to do it other than through turning the screws on Cash's dark side, whatever items at the site of the plane crash didn't add up. Had the celebrity as nemesis kept his composure, and his broken leg, on a cushion, the forerunners of progressive guilt conscious television would have had a more difficult resolution. This is a reluctant way of admitting Jerry's aesthetic insights into pop culture trump my own, because The Rockford Files remains fresher, more telling on contemporary American angst, than Levinson's morality play, ferreting out the egotism, or giving Johnny Cash his redemption for bilking Ida Lupino's astringent.

To deescalate a little further, as stupid as Kojak is in its hyperbolic urban anxiety, it most aptly captures what the 70's were, if you ignore the plots, and simply breathe its urban exposition. Combine all three shows into an overlaying collage gives an accurate portrait of what haunts my generation: the loss of giants in whom we had moral guides. Of course Cash (and even Falk) had a certain systemic shallowness, the capped teeth, the megalomania, to a degree, but they were touchstones: Falk, Cash, Savalas, with very long genomes behind them. Gardner a little less, because maverick was about as far as his range could go. To transplant myself from this to the black brotherhood was fatal, whether or not my skimming, silent viewers comprehend.

Even if I'm lenient to looks. One of the guards, Anthony, talked to me the week of 5/10/16, perhaps because he felt bad witnessing another brother trash me, and asked me if I was still writing. For once in my life, I was unmoved, as starved for human interaction as I remain. I'll get over Vinnie's death, horrible as it was for me to be forced to use animal control, but something has broken, not to be captured through any blatant expose of a hobbled gimp, trying to outrun his own demons of indulgence.

Clarence Williams III, Dawn dolls in a playhouse

"In addition to Mod Squad, Aaron Spelling and I picked up two Walter Brennan shows, Tycoon and The Guns of Will Sonnett (a fair sized hit)." --Make Room for Danny, 262

In the stray preoccupations which wool gather at 4:20 AM eastern standard time, as if I was reverting to form to get ready for work at the defunct Institute to whose demise I contributed, catching 3/4 ths of Peggy Lipton's vulnerability, vaguely recalled, if Danny Thomas and Aaron Spelling truly knew anything about counter culture dynamics, it isn't evident in this stock formula series, with Richard Dreyfuss, fresh from his celebrity pairing with Amy Irving, or about to head into it, providing us with the most well mannered recital of a psychotic imaginable-- yes, yes, cable was in its infancy and the FCC and terms of service are staple gun muzzles wiring our jaws, but all Squad did for its audience was cater to appearances, to the point even those sorely scored could feel commiseration for Williams' afro standing at attention.

One of the best serials in the 70's might be Columbo, but that would take Levinson and Falk's morality battle out of context. Aquarius may taken great care with its time capsule authenticity, and may even be more accurate in its undercurrents, as we owe so much to the golden state, but the Manson family was its own thing, analogous to the Mormons under Joseph Smith as being not quite kosher, which it isn't. Manson's followers, being really, really out on a limb, nevertheless was a reversion to an earlier American period of denominational instability under the Protestant tent. As a reformer, Luther certainly never intended to fragment Christianity into shards, but he also didn't do it any favors when it comes to transplantation in the United States. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of a series that really encapsulates my place and time as it was without going off a cliff. All in the Family turned a veteran icon into a cult hero, but Archie was a comic book exaggeration, as was the Jeffersons. Eight is Enough merely reigned in the impossible stupidity of the Brady Bunch. I'd pick The Six Million Dollar Man if I had to, but this, again, contextualizes another set of anxieties, apt, but miscued, since our fusions to technology are playing out a bit differently. We're not augmenting ourselves into a super-race, merely ensuring our essential human extinction. Then again, maybe it's Happy Days, if we take the notion of period piece nostalgia out of it.

A better ad in: The Partridge Family. As a series, it was soft folk song and dance, but it hit the right tenor for significant changes in the nuclear family

Our films, here and there, do a better job, and The Driver, though its minimalism is rigorous and circumscribed, is one of them. 

Though golden state vibes are not particularly auspicious to spastic's sentiments, she very cautiously explored Yabberz, and their no-over-the-line fury is reasonable. This doesn't mean I'm tamed, trust me. I know physically I am on thin ice, and economically I'm overwhelmed. I'm simply not a Caesar alpha with his skill set and ability to command an insurrection; to wit, Danielle Allen has an op-ed in Wapo which I'm not reading where she makes a clarion call about Trump's threat to democracy. That is an exaggeration on her part, but in truth of fact, Americans don't know what they mean by a free society. If the first amendment can't withstand what Donald is tapping into, then we aren't an attributable experiment in free exercise.

To the progressive mindset, I've freely admitted I am, within varying flavors, a homophobic bigot, without necessarily vying for a piece of Coulter's turf, since I've been too much inside of a bubble which most of you aren't, as a quadriplegic. Whether I go "too far," for Blogger or anyone else, one, it doesn't matter. Richard Spencer plays up ethnographic separation for money and I'm too old to play follow the leader for a supremacist who would no more lift a finger to get me out of here and let me enjoy my last years anymore than anyone else. I'm damned, rage or acceptance notwithstanding. For Trudy Richardson to deploy HHS to threaten me with Inglis House, after the battle for my life, is something maybe you cannot grasp. I've been 30 years under Presby and seen countless tenants forcibly placed. My intellectual acumen was supposed to withstand this. Trudy didn't scare me, trust me. All she did was make me measure death by cop against my other options.

Sbaro di Anzio

When a writer says "I'm no good," it is a conventional phrase that can mean any number of things in a desultory midsummer predawn with its fetid, heavy air. There are always the typical reasons for procrastination, but in this instance, it is the over-whelming weight of the obstacles to surmount as a woman's mid-fifties encroach, the difficulties of trying to reenter the labor force pretending one has the same enthusiasm and drive more readily tapped at a younger age. It is too late for children. The husband to divorce went as far as a broken wedding engagement. Equity in the quicksand of the welfare state is a pipe dream, and so dull edged free broadcast television is a form of equivocation with impending nullification.
"Go to bed," is an imperative ignored for the staid films of the late middle twentieth century, whose texture in Panavision, sometimes Technicolor, now has the drab feel of a Stalinist museum done in oil on canvas. Anzio has this quality, the sixties era spin about the folly of Europeans killing each other over political ideology, where Robert Mitchum as the skeptical liberal supposedly radicalizes World War II by parsing it down to an essence: men enjoy killing each other, while Peter Falk is the supporting foil who needs the adrenaline. In terms of the zillions of war films out there, Anzio evades the moral repercussions of genocide and types of governance for which we engage in armed conflict. As a character study it doesn't engage with any sartorial interest, given its historical context. Black and whites from this generation seem more energetic even when script writers bracket them as if they were being read off the newswire.
This was the next. My life is over. A wail of narcissism, of poverty, loneliness. A black and white of more of the same, or so the failed writer thought. Anthony Quinn. Brave Bulls. Another tiresome war film? No. Mel Ferrer has the Hollywood face the camera loves in a lanky body. A documentary style film about Mexican bull fighting without really much of a storyline, but Mexico isn't much of a storyline. Mexico is the tragic end result of exploitation and interbreeding between Spaniards and Aztecs, that reputedly fierce tribe of human sacrifice which couldn't stand up to horses or bayonets or measles. Interior digression wonders how the United States was so lucky, but the convenient answer is lack of British stomach for killing its former subjects who rejected a monarchy for something much worse: the federal government, which really only started to become what it is today under the Roosevelts. Another story.

One thinks of Ciudid Juarez as a dangerous city in relation to kidnappings for ATM withdrawals, or Traffic with Michael Douglas. Rossen's story is much more schematic than that, and yet has the same fractures beneath its surface; the developing world is a literal anxiety, an exposure of civilized insecurity. The fact remains that a that majority of peoples eek out a life of subsistence. This writer's American subsistence is perhaps a notch or two above the contemporary Hispanic working class which stays put. Rossen seems to wish to convey with this weird film something about those who didn't migrate, about defiance against the odds, that bravery may not be what it appears. That a white Mexican platinum blond woman is a premium trophy too good to be true, so she dies off camera with Quinn, a diffident traitor to his protégé. Ferrer recovers his manhood in the slaying of a good fighter. Thud. What the hell was this?

Remembered childhood debate about bullfighting with a closet lesbian. Youthful conscience made strenuous objections. Fifty three may be a more dispassionate age, but there is still discomfort with the business of breeding powerful  cattle for torture, even as Rossen illustrates the alternate view of the matador as a professional engaged in a unique cultural signature, a vestige of imperial glorification, endeared to the citizens of a weak state, one that resents invasions and loss of territory. The gay Hispanic writer Richard Rodriquez claims the Hispanic race is a fiction, without qualifying what he meant by it, and an otherwise unemployed journalist who hasn't had a contract in years can't pretend to have the camaraderie with an angry liberal and former public television regular to ask what he meant by it, unless one extrapolates from it that sorting out the indigenous tribes from those of mixed race heritage doesn't make the people in Latin America a homogeneous ethnicity.

The bulls never win in the contest, even if the occasional goring due to lapse of attention or skill leads to death. The bull is never honored like Baal, the Mesopotamian threat to an anthropomorphic creator. A pause to consider the folly of rooting for aggressive male herd animals over an aggrandized species like homo sapiens, though in our collective intelligence, we enjoy rooting for the underdog's ability to strike back against our system, our technologies. Godzilla, Lassie, Black Beauty, the Lion King, why not the damn bull if the animal is to be used for entertainment and gilded displays of predatory gaming dominance? It is a symbolic totem in the world of high finance, whose gilded capital only trickles down the margins of static safety nets of the predominant welfare state, so top heavy it boggles the mind, the strictures of entitlement.

It too is a business, socialism. Women without looks need something to do, so they case manage indigence, their pensions in some sort of portfolio, all of us with a paper trail, the most marginalized to the most affluent, commingling only in theatrical downfalls of our fictions, or disgraced in scandals, while those in anonymity, broken by the service sector and impulsive choices, remain resistant to commercial formulas, value content, angry with the patronizing assurances of disability intake centers whose bread and butter is the Medicaid Waiver budget, basically no more than a regulated pimping system for low skill caretakers, the one in downtown Philadelphia run by a legally blind Mexican lawyer whose outcomes are no better than those before him, Thomas Earle, who paces softly, an effeminate man, girlish legs and buttocks, often tapped for speeches, offering ten minute conversations to those expurgated or preyed upon, of course, unable to beat the clock, aging out of a vindicated matriculation. Due to his vested interests, Mr. Earle couldn't be expected to admit to bad coordination leading to victimized outcomes. That is why we have tort, and settlements off the docket, unless circumstances precluded the hire of legal assistance, and we continue to sink, hostile landlord, hostile paradigm, toppling under our own weight, like the last shot of the bull, lying recombinant, really dead by sword thrust, or wrangled by a handler, the climax is still the same. The beast is slain. Hail the conquistador.

Shards and fissures

I used to believe I'd automatically get myself excluded from the established press if I told the truth about inherent bias, but it is something of which most readers are suspicious of already, not without justification. Let me give a for instance. Eugene Robinson yesterday faults the administration's liberal self-righteousness in villainizing Putin's provocation in the Crimea, and indeed, Eugene's voice sates progressive outrage with the Bush Administration's 9/11 overreach. Nothing wrong with pandering to a liberal base trying to shore up a fading promise Barack Obama represented. If candidate Obama had not aspired to the presidency, one can speculate what he might have done as an inspirational leader on a more nuanced platform.

Like Robinson, I actually remember Grenada. I can neither affirm nor deny that it was an appropriate domino effect for Reagan era spheres of influence, but citing the US incursion on the petite Caribbean paradise doesn't explain Ukrainian turmoil. Neither does citing America's systemic destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. There is a minority viewpoint which doesn't equate Putin with Mussolini, which is not to be blind to modern Russian brutality. I am not unaware of ugly brute force in Russian penal systems, but this doesn't preclude Vladimir from acting out of legitimate national interests.

In that vein, plagiarism is not quite the crime journalists make it out to be, and that was what I was driving at in my column about fraud in my Examiner piece on Glass's inability to acquire a legal license. The editorial chicks who deign to approve or reject my pieces for a certain degree of promotional status didn't like it as newsworthy commentary. Certainly their prerogative, though I stayed up all night researching it, debating a call to the bar association contact. I am on to a thesis which matters, at least in relation to veracity. I do not believe my finished product, as such, does all that badly getting me where I want to go.  

I have to watch a very young Peter Falk play a spree killer for Hitchcock again; it was an interesting rationalization. Past informing the present; Falk did not mind spoofing himself, but he never played his audience false. I miss him. He loved life, tumbling with adversity and coming out of it with a twinkle in his eye. Tassoni had the same propensity toward sardonic affection in his gaze.