Already one step ahead

I already thought about what Michael's reaction might be to Susan Schneider's announcement about Williams being in the early stages of Parkinson's, and I pissed and moaned over the sink, not that I have any brief over Fox, he is likable enough and unlike the wizened Hank Stuever-- how in the name of Christ do professional critics like him earn a living?-- the humor in Michael's canceled show spoke to me; it may have been too deadpan for Michael's viewing spectrum, but it was funny, subversively so-- and Yahoo probably had this fucking piece in process while I drolly sighed over France 2 Frank Riva.

I have no desire to talk to Fox, nor identify with him, but I can imagine that Michael had wished upon Schneider slightly more tact before her damage control efforts. 

Robin is dead. Michael went into a self-pitying alcoholic binge and then became a point man for motor degenerative studies, and I remind myself on a daily basis that killing my former supervisor in no way buries the scars she permanently inflicted on me, and there are not enough hours in the day to plow through Philadelphia's social paralysis toward justice. I am reconsidering that move to Texas while I consider talking to you about the subterranean obsession of every living writer: getting into The Atlantic Monthly. The one really envious divide between Robert Thomas and myself despite our rarefied civil poetic rivalry: he has had poetry accepted by The Atlantic, which, unknown to him, is a mortal wound to my ego. I think Thursday's rejection of my query on an article counts as my second personal response in twenty years. If I have to buy James Bennet a power chair that climbs its own steps, before I am dead-- writers do actually generate articles for other outlets about the impregnable defenses of this periodical toward any strategism known to man, or even Stephen Glass, for that matter. 

I never obsessed over Williams in his life. Liked the work more than not, but this is not one of my pretensions. His suicide hurts. It does, and I tell myself I'm allowed to be mad. 

Zelda?

I do not really pay much attention to twitter as a general rule. I did at first, to a degree of detriment, but I haven't yet read tweets on my cell, and I am cautious about targeting (as opposed to mentioning) followers. Basically I write and tweet, and do my best to stay out of arguments, though I did tell the singer who wrote incendiary remarks about Obama that he was a fool. Early on, when I was new to the site, followers coming or going piqued me, and I did post about three. Homo Tweets seemingly disappeared, and good for him. Being gay and a New York liberal deigning to lecture me about getting therapy was a trifle much, but I had a level of ignorance about how the system worked, and when I was with LiveJournal, I reacted in error. 

Even chatter junkies can be driven ill by continuous feed; hence I keep my distance, and don't really give a fuck about micro blogging in the aggregate, even though we're all people on it. Given this, the attacks on Zelda are baffling. Robin was a privileged man. He had to work hard, grant that, and probably needed cocaine to drive himself, as I do not see how else the relentless improvisation propelled him into becoming a Hollywood convention. But the majority of us aren't so lucky, hence the anger some of us feel about his suicide. Limelight fades; this is an inevitable truth, and the medical model bullshit correspondents dutifully milk to highlight mental health are all well and good, but Williams was hideously selfish, and should have made contingencies aging stars usually make to age with dignity. He did not and set a bad example, but this isn't Zelda Williams fault. She lost her father, and why she was taunted so viciously is inexcusable. She'll be grieving a long time.

Why I was so nettled by the event may be my own fear about stark choices ahead I may have to face that a celebrity like Williams wouldn't have had to contend with in the same way, whatever the state of his fiances, and one would think, after inhabiting a neurologist like Sacks, the comedian would know better; I'll get over my umbrage. I have to, but attacking his child is below all common decency.

Caricature's Lonely Soul with Subtlety

"The material creation is thus an act of necessity, a means for the light-substance to recover what it has lost of itself."--Manichaeism and Its Legacy, Introduction

Celebrity is not a perfect insulator, now that time has softened the blow of Williams' demise. We cannot know if he thought of the very public struggle of Michael J Fox before he hung himself, perhaps not wanting to become another spokesman for Parkinson's as his improvisational genius lost its vigor if not its acuity. Still, Robin Williams wasn't poor, certainly not spiraling into public welfare territory, whatever his problems. In most of his over 40 film work, his nascent childlike innocence wears a bit thin, but had he lived, the embittered widow he plays in Authority is intriguing, a sinister in between figure, with Dick Wolf offering a tacit homage to Terry Gilliam's Orwellian parodies, and Robin reenacting his Manichean figure from One Hour Photo, which amounts to the best acting from a comedian I've ever seen. There are elements of Jackie Gleason's Lonely Soul in these performances, not that dowager knows what was studied.

Being a bird on a wire caught in a dualistic war between opposing forces is not necessarily a way past binary choices, but Robin Williams had that rare ability to express differance in the same way Derrida went in search of it through pushing the boundary of linguistic decorum. Common sense ruralists dismiss Derrida as "word games," and his reputation now suffers in some quarters, or treated as comic relief by archaeologists in inner-disciplinary conferences, and yet he has his defenders, precisely because his textual appropriations offer a tertiary struggle.  In Authority, particularly, Williams moves Meloni's acting up a few notches from sheer A list intimidation, much like my Roman temper despising African obfuscation causes it to tremble autocratic methodology [in translation, white apartment managers would not have attacked me as relentlessly as drafty and vacant niggers like Trudy  and Debra. End clarification, though I am mindful that I want the 2016 Trenton lawyer's assistance, if the firm can take aim at the right cow] , and the conclusion of the 2008 episode of SVU does indeed evade the pat conceits of detective stories. Williams isn't simply entertaining in these examples. He is disturbing, and I wish he had held on, for a little while, but such mania as made his talent has implosive elements.

Shock, but not awe

This was not a headline I expected to see, and there is no way in hell I'm covering it, not even as an aggregate piece, but I knew when Williams played Mork that his hypermania would crash. I am sad, but just as with David Foster Wallace, pissed off. Ambulatory people are so fucking selfish it is incredible, but wheelchair users have to be heroic. Damn it all to fucking hell. I followed his career since I was a kid.

2:36 AM: I am still upset, too little sleep to work due to pet children and the riot act. I had a certain affection for Robin's persona, and despite the fact that this was an expected trajectory, I am agitated none the less, and this is the drawback of failed intimacy: I don't have a man to comfort me while I thresh out my grief.

I believe in the right to die, but Williams still could have put his stature to good use; more later when I'm less raw.

Trail Mix

I wanted to discuss the Gilliam box set in depth, but the very nature of his direction makes this an arduous proposition, and The Fisher King, despite its humor towards social stratification and disruption, is too much Hollywood shellac on The Big Apple. This leads me to recycle Robin Williams and my wrestling match with his talent and sentimentality, his concealed diagnosis, and his interesting ambiguity in maturity, probably not a good idea to continue on in this vein, a bit puss weary from the radiator vapor, and good for me, I caught my drop in the toilet, but if not an accident, neither was it a clean run. IBS and Crohn’s disease doesn’t quite fit my issues with impaction; ulcerative colitis might be closer, and hence, I may not be able to struggle with Septa to go back to daddy until later tomorrow, or very early Thursday. Have I fucked myself royally? Should I take kimmy? I can’t really carry the carrier, meeting up with the wry Johnathan Pryce in the nuisance of Brazil’s blue dyed dystopia. Pryce was the best cast, and Brazil had the best doomed aspirational appeal of all four films, with its conclusion suggestive of clinical torture escaped through mythos with Kim Greist as nihilistic as it gets, gift wrapped in the fantastical, unless it’s Twelve Monkeys, with its muzzle flash panache. Willis and Pitt do a good job in this narrative puzzle, with its sinister subplot, but in terms of aesthetic criteria, this member of the box set pleases me least. Perhaps I will return for kimmy, but this opens more worms with futurist bag ladies and cats. If Brazil is midnight blue in its tenor, Monkeys is a garish yellow, a tilt toward Ra and the Earth’s inevitable roast in a nova, a proclivity toward human error doomed to repeat cycles of destruction. Both Monkeys and The Zero Theorem link mental affect to social disease, with mixed results, as any delusional state is a reflection of its place and time, like the rise of autism as an evolutionary subroutine. In terms of Gilliam’s legacy and his signature, a unique imprimatur in the marketplace of intellectual angst and our defeat by our own processes, this isn’t enough for my digestion, but I am disengaging my anchor at an age no one should, wondering how Robin’s hesitation marks apply. Brazil has a particular significance, of course, a shadow over my own aspiration, as fun as it was on the cinematic screen. It was not the last movie I’d experience in the traditional method of projector technology, but it was one of the best of the last, rivaled only by AI, with AI’s bummer of an end.