Blue Patches With Rubber Tips, Bearing the Crutch

"It doesn't have to be a death sentence," --Megan Crowley

It is difficult to adjudicate A Patch of Blue against contemporary standards without viewing it as a public service announcement to maintain silence in the face of differences between ethnic groups not altogether superficial. I must have seen the film a half dozen times, find the echo of my own reactionary fear in Shelley Winters and her recriminating castigation, calling Poitier your black buck, play acting the white trash of which I am a little embodied, or Poitier’s containment of the blind girl’s unintentional disruption, when she nearly topples the fruit pyramid in the supermarket, and yet the movie filters through me like a light urine stream right before a major stool struggle, the arc of the narrative dissipates, leaving behind the poignancy of a connection between a disabled woman and a black man essentially teaching her how to adapt, never actualized, because Poitier’s character realizes the girl’s feelings are based in part on a sheltered dependency. In North Philadelphia, there was, in fact, a blind woman beaten daily and traumatically by a black husband. The dowager was the unfortunate observer of her caramelized face browbeat by crisis counselors and patrol officers, and she disappeared before I relocated to Race Street, a most likely death sentence to an inevitable probable cause, lest you continue to marvel about the scars of the lioness breathing more shallowly beneath my ribs, and so we come full circle, back to my initial rebellion, planting myself in the inner city solely on the basis of a lust to live. To my sensibilities of enduring interior conflict, Shane, (ahem) the paraprofessional tending my shriveled wings, is sexually attractive, and makes me realize what happiness I might have had with such strength as his, and it is rather unfair to discover this, tottering on the brink of  a final weakness towards helplessness I cannot defeat, that the right degree of masculinity ignites my passion, the very will to live, after years of absorbing everything of the emotional pain I’ve written about to my audience. Part of me says to hell with the stigma, and wants to win him despite what I am, despite what he sees every day, and consume him. But I am playing tic tac toe with an aging woman’s embers. He is not the true target, simply a man I like using his strong shoulders as a bulwark for a spastic quadriplegic who was never loved as she wished, with her reactionary anarchist already looking down her nose at having fun with such tensions. It would never work between us, and I know it already because it isn’t a last act of love, merely defiance, fooling yourself the hormones still work in secret. We could not succeed as a couple, as equals in the dynamic of society’s fabric, in any sense. I cannot embrace his world, having sustained such damage in it, any more than he could embrace mine—the world from which I fled, deluding myself in relation to liberal sanctity. Yet I do like him, his energetic man child smile, clinging to him more than a little, like Amy Adams defying narrative frameworks with mystical orthography that eddies linear time. Like the actress, I too ply her thematic imperative, of calling out, “Come back to me,” the life I see as so fulfilling, married to a kindred heart. What sort of love letter is this? One that knows Miss Crowley is in need of a market correction.

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.