Inversion Therapy

"I do not mean to suggest this was a conversion of convenience. I wanted to believe."-- Reza Aslan, Newshour damage control candidate

William Holden was before my time. Why he is a Hollywood celeb is beyond my comprehension, in much the same way that Miley Cyrus might be Tralfamadorian. It is solely due to Kathleen Parker that I gather Miley is a soft pornography performer, and I wail, too young to be in the generation gap, but here we are. It seems Holden's one and only elevation is against Bogart and beautiful Audrey. Audrey Hepburn transcends stardom. Looking at her face, I may not want to believe in God, but can understand why we have angels dance. Holden only confirms my tendency toward nihilism; hated Earthling when it recollected my youth. The man is not an actor, and this makes me rapacious, willing to drown Sri Lanka so that Kwai exists as a CinemaScope travesty. Guinness had a good death in Kwai, but Alec Guinness actually has theatrical force, much like Simon Schama.

I do not care to read Rough Crossings, but I am thinking of Schama's recognition of the dialectical tensions between Britain and the US on liberalism, because it can be seen in the majority of the twentieth films between the last imperial power and its fabulous offspring, and I half toy with the idea of contacting Schama and saying I need a fucking vocabulary mate, hey, help a cripple out dear boy. But why would he assist me? Pounding my fist, I see it, trying to encapsulate it, but it's difficult, a heterodoxy between the glamour of Hannibal and the documentary ruthlessness of 10 Rillington Place. Attenborough's Christie triggers memories of my assault, and frightens me more than Michael Rooker in Portrait, despite the realism of Henry's alienated outside status as a predator. 

Marie the aunt tells me to forget the Brandon Phillips who nearly killed me but I cannot; he lives in every sexual assault I experienced before or since, and this inner city brawn boy minority coward whose grandmother was a Presby tenant on the floor above me may one day make me famous, unpacking every middle brow Catholic girl's worst nightmare, I know the terror of Christie's victims, as well as the bemusement over Aslan's kerfuffle. Academics can also be pandering hacks, and this will be a scab I may pick for some time to come.

I would not have posed the question the way Lauren Green did, but the Newshour is also guilty of bias over the Zealot fiasco. Propping up Aslan was more important to the PBS team than being objective in terms of the quality of the text. Green was actually challenging Aslan's doubt, whether or not her interrogative stance was an unfair blow to his integrity. Remind me that I am pushing myself too hard for my age, and that I cannot live on maple walnut brownies, but I have fallen in love, not with William Holden.

Fedora's Lurk, Like Reza Aslan

The prolonged Cold War—that Manichean drama of projections and counterprojections; the Vietnam War—not generally acknowledeged as the longest war in American history (1954-73); the protests against the Vietnam War, which forcibly divided the generations-- Joyce Carol Oates, ferocity shrew

Dashiell Hammett could teach those rushed kindle authors a few things about making light surface fiction interesting. I have studied him more than once under Jewish and Gentile liberal. James Joyce may rouse my hostility as an unforgiving fuck who smirks his way into the apologia of the dimmer dial, but Hammett doesn't thin his gruel for the sake of the puzzle, and The Maltese Falcon is one of my favorite commercial novels. My money is on Sam Spade teaching alien archaeologists more about civilization than the joke on Leopold Bloom. James Spader seems to embody a bit of each character, the Manichean detective, the corrupt and corrosively mocked Jew. It manifests itself in his early and quixotic role in Stargate, a breathtaking speculative cinematic otherworld. follows him in Wolf, manifests a wickedly promising menace in Boston Legal, only to fizz in The Practice. It is a menace of more complex nuance than that offered by Christopher Walken. Walken carries a bit of jingoism in his ruthless irony, but Spader leaves one unsure, as if he is a fervent convert to Satanic possibilities, or a Crusader who just discovered the potency of salvation. We're never sure which in his manipulative antipodes.

It is not enough for The Blacklist, which is patently ridiculous. No one man can manipulate die hard gum shoes and the ruthless hardened criminals and stay three moves ahead of either, not even America's unifying KGB statesman. With that qualification, the show may be of use, in its idiotic television way (Ukrainian ordinance guerrillas apparently inhabit the capital and spring to life for the convenience of the screen writer's guild, but hey, who is starving in corrupt government housing methodologies, not screen writers!). Good and bad each have debilitating costs and secrets, in the measure of how far brutality has come, gut stabbings are routine in gratuitous teleplay, a delight! If producers wanted to do it right, they'd anglicize a Persian and twist his balls in a confused identity matrix. The real Islamists can't be killed fast enough, but multicultural humanism on an American campus is a pasturized entry pass.