Brass Tacks

"It sounds like a movie." --Dorothea Stillman, when Newsweek was still a viable rival.

The production values in and of themselves weren't all that flawed. The NBC derivative on the original was shot well. The dialogue was brisk. Underwood was credible, but in the dialectical tension between network past and network present, Burr's more abstract chief was more viable. Those of us who watched Underwood in this tinsel song and dance knew the con was on, but what were the contents which made the snake oil difficult to swallow? The veracity of the character was wrongly concentrated in the script; I've no doubt the FOP bats for officers disabled in the line of duty. Perhaps some get day jobs, but playing a paraplegic who becomes a mimetic of his former mobile self whose physical dignity is respected by his perpetrators pitted against him in a hissing of discharged helium going over the top, this was simply an assault on any viewer's intelligence.

I remember as little as possible about Raymond Burr, but recall enough to know his series was wisely treated as a stage play, Burr expounding accordingly, a muscular, if two dimensional pitch on how Arthur Miller would define manhood akin to the lion in winter. I kept thinking of Denzel, comparing major and minor notes, perhaps even the praxis of performance between them, especially when a girl in school clothes screamed with piercing pitch in my right ear, turning me into a court tv troll. I frightened her, in my beret, glasses, distended teeth, as I admonished her and minority wilding sisters to control themselves in public. Sales associates who know me, witnessing this, suspected something else was afoot. I only occasionally get combative with these cliques, if I see something particularly abysmal. In this instance, the girl's scream triggered a slightly painful leg seizure, so I took it on, the admonishing, not sure what I should feel that I intimidated a school girl who forgot herself.

A racial incident? Yes, no, or depends on the perspective. Kids screaming in the streets could be a harbinger of escalation. I would have flunked out, handling this behavior at the scholastic level or above. Am I a slightly more pliable version of my father? Yes, despite the fact that I can cite socio-economic rationalizations with the progressives in Reich's tableau. I came back to the city of my birth with the best of intentions. There were, or are, remnants of Philadelphia's leisure class who deplore the city's self-depreciation; it is this which is the real blight on the Greater Delaware Valley, regardless of ethnicity. It does not excuse the sense of entitlement which suborns poor social behaviors.

Does Spader Have Head Lice?

"lnventa la noche en ventura
otra noche,
otra espacio"  Octavio Paz, Pasado en claro, with slight license

Carol never had the rabbit's foot, but she educated me about everything else, the elder sister of my best friend to whom I latched after the rift with Susan. Carol was floor captain of the apartment units in my university housing, and instead of turning myself into Vassar Miller or SE Hinton, the blonds of my block fomented my education, like a kid in a five & dime, virgin bugged at the shiny pink and conveniently large penis, less impressed with the egg, vaguely recalling skepticism. Carol was attractive, more mild version of her sister. Sue was voluptuous, more drama queen. I miss them both, terribly. Drank with them both, a drunk pathetic dead weight spaz hanging with the alpha girls who could afford to treat sex like a five and dime. I'm not a virgin any longer, and yes, I really was a mistress to married men, with real sexual intercourse, but those evenings, Carol educating me about pleasures I never could realize, represent moments of positive intimacy with other women I'll never inhabit again; never invested in enhancements. If I did now-- shrug. My clitoris extends slightly, off standard but not unusual. Maybe this is why I shit a horse with Linda's excited email transmission. I miss her too. Not the woman she is, an aged mantis, but the younger tag team we were; there was a personal bond. She sold me down river for an ugly faggot with the emotional repertoire of a five year old, and I can't get away from them, the freaks. His conceptual inequality sounds magnanimous, and I do not doubt Reich has the authentic brawn of a street peddler; he may have even met the transvestite with s/his infantile bitch with testes on the leash, but he'd never socialize with them.

Was there a seduction? I suppose, but not for that kind of experimentation. It was a fencing match and spastic believed I could play the hand, deliberately blind to the fact she and I were in the process of destroying what I should have left alone. My life was about to fall apart, and this game of shirking blades made it worse. The critics are right about Soylent Green. Heston is always a gesture of granite stoicism, but it was a film of my time, textured and colored perfectly for the Me decade jeremiad. Robinson burned in our minds because he really was being cannibalized by cancer that pulled conviction out of Charlton, an intensity of conviction. We did not use the word procedural as a categorization, not in those days, but this was an exceptional dichotomy of pursuit in a world that no longer had standards, practices we trusted.

I can see it, the end of our species. We will not come to our senses, colonize Titan, or have any real sense of intrigue about Spader, in a television slot of viscous and carefully delineated slime, deploying diseases, anhidrosis, like a damn card trick. James, you're of my generation and you are capable of a better disreputable range. What the fuck are you doing?