Littoral Membranes

 People believe they're self-important!--  Jason Statham smashing his skull through a car window. Revolver

Instead of paying tribute to Ray Liotta by revisiting the seminal Good Fellas, which takes a significant amount of energy, I selected Revolver, where Jason Statham undergoes some queer double indemnity; Ray Liotta’s role as D, however, is essentially the same allegorical switch hitter as in Identity, which is a year earlier, a much better construct, and perhaps Guy Ritchie should spend some time in an actual jail cell before he mashes up such a soporific effort again with such talented players.

I do not feel the same absence of presence in Liotta’s death that I may have felt about others, like Peter Falk. I never enjoyed what Liotta projected, most of the time, that skeevy New Jersey mendacity, not his corrupt cops, not his tough guys with soft paunch centers of gravity. Not everything about Italian ethnicity deserves celebration, and his voice peels off like a scab not willing to heal, although I softened for his support role as the dying father in Powder Blue, where maudlin is Forest Whitaker’s middle name. It is this fake death, in LA made snow, with Liotta’s baby blue eyes, against Jessica Biel, which leaves the man most poignant. It is excessive to suggest a movie like Powder Blue is a type of precursor to this rotten second decade in which I die, but sometimes, the fabric of the universe has a malignant tap when we troublesome creatures push past the envelope, and Powder Blue contains elements of malevolence embedded therein. Bui exacts a heavy toll on his viewers.

Bound Over Tradition

"They were considered to have right wing elements. And perhaps many of them were."-- Luigi Perelli, carving out his justifications for righteous polizi

One cannot quarrel with creator John Ridley over how well made American Crime is, craft and care is evident, especially when absorbing the alienation Pollari is able to project. He is an interesting young actor, but the message within the series, thus far, leaves one with a certain ambivalence. There is an atmosphere of forced intensity to it, freezing jello cubes with little wiggle room, leaving a European take on the grey area between justice and criminality, like The Bankrobber's Wife, seem light, comparatively. But what Ridley reflects is stark, sometimes leaving the viewer to squirm, which is why Shades of Blue earns a preference. It takes chances, but stays within parameters I can handle, and I am heartened that the writers allowed Wozniak to keep his humanity.

I also have to give praise to Liotta where it's due.

I never cared about the man and his acting before, Scorsese or not-- and there is a puzzle-- Scorsese is of my ethnicity with many of my concerns and I am somewhat hostile to his work, not able to quite put my finger on it, what repels me away from it, but Liotta's character work on Shades woke me up and bit, hard, but it's not quite erotic. I was wrong about that. Closer to the shock of recognition in tasting old wine with new flavors. Lopez is Lopez, and we can take issue with her credibility in projecting a cop outfencing everyone, but Liotta is charged, and perhaps age does this to us all, jacking us up to folly in that bracket of time left before things really head south. I mean fuck, he's giving a signature performance, and it rivets. I missed the finale, and maybe I'll run it this weekend, but it is a good show, mixing up the usual expectations in a crime drama. I'll offer more later. I've been online most of the afternoon and I'm looking at overages, barring chasing down a hotspot.

Cringe

Levels of vengeance are coded comparatively. Delight in Ray Liotta's machinations as Wozniak and distaste for Warren Kole's agent Stahl as overly self-righteous still falls within the parameters of a revenge fantasy, even if we weigh how far we're willing to see a world weary lieutenant go. So far Adi is letting Wozniak hold his own, seasoned enough to process rationalizations and methodology, not quite a full sociopath. Invariably, NBC will have an entertaining antagonist fall. Woz will go too far and even wicked delight will turn against him; J-lo will be scathed but left with the possibility of redemption, because this is still television land. Though it is fair to say dirty cops usually get exposed in the real world. This is why beat reporters exist. The Wilkins case, however, is irreparable, and seems to hinge on some bizarre evolutionary throwback. Stealing newborns occurs in the wild, but cases like this, along with aggression in the elderly, and the gruesome microwaved baby case, veer toward unimaginable unease with the inexorable pressures of primate domestication. 

Images of that litigation were never forgotten: the mother testifying on video so as to be shielded from public outrage. Killing a newborn is one thing. Cooking it to death invites bile to rise in the back of our throats. How does an incident like that even happen? Lane's alleged attack is as equally visceral and unfathomable and if found guilty she should be executed, on either a material or metaphysical basis. If we're just a smart bit of meat, the meat doesn't need that mitochondrial DNA perpetuating itself, and if humans indeed have souls, Lane fed hers into a psychosis which is better off dead. Even in the dark side of Mario Puzo's world, the author's intimations about why Vito kills an infant stays within tolerable limits, rather than mere sensational butchery. How poor Michelle Wilkins ever truly recovers from this is beyond anyone's capacity to actualize, even within a world view poisoned by lifelong medical, regulatory regimentation. It would be rather a highbrow solace if NBC allows Wozniak to emerge victorious, the cult hero with blood on his hands, still a Brooklyn capo.

A dowager's bitterness is also in part about her own naivete, so invested in intellectual authority, in literary journal submissions, in independent living paradigms, as a way of life. I was a hot property as a student, and beyond, and now I'm sick of it, an advocate of giving idealists brutishly short lives.

Does Nate Maingard Love The ANC?

"Even as a civilization we are simpleminded."-- Jonathan Weiner, digital location 3450

The post-Mandela ANC may appear to be more humane than the European legacy which evolved into Botha's apartheid, but what is kept quiet, in a "sssh, keep it under your hat mode, is that ethnic black Africans cannot govern Africa according to the principles of inherent natural human rights developed during the Enlightenment. Why? Because black African societies evolved their mores in accordance with totem identification, survival strategies against exotic parasites and malaria, and not all the might of Europe and China and Russia combined is ever going to change a damn thing about that.

Does this mean I side with Arikaners who created the Orange Free State over sweetheart hotties like Nate, who may be wondering why I'm singling him out when he's given the dowager a great deal of latitude?

Ah. Well, things aren't quite that simple. European aggression lucked out in the New World. Natives had a mass die off, and the Aztecs, who were in the best position to fight back against superior European hardware, miscalculated, and as a result, North America eventually took over global hegemony. But Caucasian emigration failed to successfully transplant itself within mainland China and central Africa, and guilt over the Holocaust has gone so far in the other direction that Muslims created a new Fascism.

Granted, Kerry and his counterparts have simmered things down, but what led to the incarnation of ISIL isn't going to fade away simply because Putin is still trying to fend off Anglican satire of Russian backwardness, pretending Slavs are as European as the continent, which Slavic ethnicity isn't.

Radical egalitarianism is a brutal fiction, and the sooner we face up to it, the better. Leave west and central Africans alone, and you know what? I bet they resolve their societies in their own way, and would have done so faster, with more efficiency, than Carter's medical intervention over the guinea worm. What does this have to do with the price of beans, or power sex with Ray Liotta? You know in your heart that behind his comment to TV guide about kissing his informant extra, we avert our eyes from those pictures, don't want to contemplate the grotesque escapades of Hollywood's underside, and even if we did, buying porno invariably uncovers child sex harems. Capisce?

Doyle, as a contemporary of the Boer War on the side of the Victorian Empire closing ranks on what it had left, still peaks a mild interest over that of his autonomic character who "changed the world". (And in a whisper: I have more followers than Weiner, and he's a professor!) So there!

The Strength of Apostasy, a good marina sauce

"A science that strives to understand apostasy as a thoroughly social phenomenon has much to gain by recognizing the members of this curious class [...] for what they are."-- David A Bromley, The Politics of Religious Apostasy, p 116

Ray Liotta's poc-marked projection of shell shocked disembodiment is perfectly diachronic between slumming it with Scorsese in Goofellas, to the complexities of the present day. Nothing is so clearly delineated anymore between our villains, our heroes, our collusions, and though one might grow weary of seeing him parody Machiavellian duplicity until his inevitable murder rectifies the situation, he's done it for so long that he manages to make it a high art in this new high octane series, though we might not take away anything fresh, and J-Lo is as Halle Berry still convincing herself she's the diva cop of yore, retreading Angel Eyes and Enough, as if we haven't seen enough of the tight T-shirt braggadocio to know its keynotes.

Italians have always known this however, even in the classic era. The Republicans assassinate Augustus to "save" the Republic-- in essence to keep power divested, only to initiate the monarchical divine reign of the aristocracy -- which only begins its real death throes in 1945, as opposed to 475 AD.

Perelli's La Piovra, with its grisly lurking cowardice, may no longer be "what it was," according to Wapo, but it is now organic, part of the entire textile which make up Euro-Asian societies as a whole, and it takes a special kind of apostate, one as zealous as Wozniak, to blow the whistle and cleanse procedure once boundaries get too muddied. Did the shock value of the homosexual liaison subvert expectations? Perhaps, but it seemed more like an exploitation fuck which thankfully wasn't overtly faked, the kind which victimizes wheelchair users repeatedly. If we were against Henry Hill in Scorsese's little blood bling, we look at Wozniak, and with secret glee hopes he walks out of a bloodbath with Liotta's trademark "ehnanana" Quite a turn within a quarter century.