Blood Guilt Gentility

Even now, I can hardly bear to tell the tale. --McMurtry, in every author's heyday

Despite the time and effort I have put into taxing Safari (outdated) and Chrome, my memory of the mid-nineties, when I was immortal, and actually had a white collar career, suggests that Lonesome Dove had a vibrant currency, but it may not have been the series out of Alberta, where Christianne Hirt, as Hannah Call, is too good to be true. Canadians, being the winsome sops that they are, tried to reference this in the climax to Season One, prior to Baristow developing his bitter streak in the "outlaw years". I only caught a glimpse of Robert Ulrich, in the other variation on the now faded Larry McMurtry franchise of poignant Texan tales, when I had not passed the ladder rung of 35. The show never caught on, though it may have simply been a scheduling conflict. I have been studying the drama only this year, along with Comanche Moon, and admit that the Canadian production is of greater depth and quality than Henry Winkler's partnership with Showtime and Dead Man's Gun, but it still has an undercurrent of being somewhat too holistic, perhaps as a paean to the mythos of American innocence. With this complaint duly noted, however, Eric McCormack more than aptly captures my growing sympathy for the Confederate ideal with his depiction of Francis Mosby. To throw in the usual dowager tire iron, I could almost hate the man for then taking on the part of Will, in that superficial, flinty, metrosexual  comedy, evidence it might be conducive for me to time out the virtual world and fight the barren parameters of my real world existence, but I'll editorialize the white out developed for typing paper on this particular caveat.


Granted, this is a studio presentation of pretty people groomed on the set, costumed to Victorian era corsets, but the voices of Grant, Lee, and General Sherman, can be overlaid on the actor's presentation with some degree of admiration. When it is done right, the power of the aristocratic mien we've lost to industrialization, commercialization, liberalism, is something to be regretted, and Mosby has trace elements of something already entombed in the catacombs during the active years in which the frontier was being subsumed into a superpower that would last approximately 57 years. I date the rise of the United States as starting in 1939, and  beginning to crater around the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Armchair scholars may take any issue with this as they please, as we can say, as well, that American power was predestined in the wealth of the Gilded Age, but I tend to feel the Second World War cemented certainty out of what was before then a likely possibility. I also don't single out the Lewinsky phenomenon to lay blame with the Clintons. The Reagan era ended abruptly with the ouster of Bush 41. Bill and Hillary were only representative of a liberalism that no longer recognized itself, made a feint, and then blindsided neo-conservativism into a grave mishandling of an ideological disaster. I don't think we'll recover, regardless of whether or not Trump is shown the door. I am not attempting to suggest American decline has a genealogy marker, and I haven't read Dr. Ferguson's rise and decline summation of the American Empire. But the Iraq War as solution to September 11th, 2001, opened up a cascade, like a broken vending machine, and the western hemisphere has a yellow underbelly, and my skepticism about China picking up the slack is unchanged. What exactly did the Middle Kingdom do prior to the 17th century other than coalesce the territorial landmass of Asia we currently recognize? I am not talking about gunpowder, or other appropriated technologies. I am asking what the Emperors and mandarins did before the European tea trade at the point of a bayonet? An insulated history, in which non-Han Chinese were "barbarian," still informs what global Chinese leadership could look like fifty years from now. I am not particularly heartened by the picture: it is China which will not allow the Korean peninsula to unify, grow up, develop better living standards. Hong Kong is a game of cat and mouse. I don't know where else to look for a better outcome than to a more realistic stratification of the past, with recognition of the reality of caste. Mammalian primate hierarchy isn't a polite fiction. It is an ecological reality for complex living organisms, hence the character of Francis Mosby, and nobelesse oblige, the uniting force of that within group dynamics to which we unfortunate, and remarkable finely tuned apes always turn: I've written enough in my embittered online voice for today.

Auto Struct Alpha

"I wasn't rude enough to let them know what I was thinking."  -- Patrick Stoner, passionate Sherman detractor

Careful attention was paid. How Stewart's voice rose across the table from the intrepid interviewer whose mannerisms and verbal stilettos where formed in the states of American feudalism, but who knew when to hold back with the classically trained presence before him. "Why did he do it?" Patrick's voice rose an octave, not losing control but invested, trying to sort out the enigmatic nature of Shakespeare's darkest protagonist. Macbeth is less John F Kennedy getting his magisterial head blown off like a ripe melon, more Eliot Spitzer using his prosecutorial techniques to rationalize the perfect legitimacy of his needs to exhort power through ejaculation. Any literary mind can relate to Patrick's outcry. Why in the name of god does a good lieutenant destroy the sanctity of his place of honor in the realm and over reach, triggering an apocalyptic bloodbath? Beneath this is the unspoken frustration in the mind of a man who knows no matter how well trained he is, his fame rests on his inexplicable role as a Frenchman with an English accent in a children's science fiction series that turns grown men and women into loons, hence his modulated dialectical mentorship and rivalry with Ian Holm, who can play a synthetic android and escape being fenced in by a figure like Jean Luc Picard.

Stewart owes a great deal to Rick Berman's send up of European finesse, despite the entrapment, but the hints of frustration remain for public distillation. In his minor roles of ruthless villainy, one could envision Stewart actually inhabiting the Union's terrorist general, the one who raped the Shenandoah Valley. William T Sherman's destruction of the South was necessary. His mind was brilliant, critical, calculating, compartmentalizing native tribesmen into nuisance thugs. His brutality paved the way for this modern world where identity is paramount and genocidal in the same breath, and true value is in the efficiency profit margin.

We can't all be matinee icons.

Fangs In The Profiteroles

Set in my styles with a beady eye,
I got connections with the underground.-- Bernie Taupin, Caribou


Eddie and Alice Rico are a fortunate couple in their connubial bliss, but the underlying tensions fray their marital complicity almost immediately into the opening of the film. There is anxiety about the adoption (acquisition) of a child to flesh out their near wealthy status as a 50's family was then defined. There is the argument, not successfully suppressed, about the telephone call Eddie receives about harboring your traditional Americana thug, and the untimely meeting with Gino, the revelations of which you would tend to think would make a pack rat imitator wary. Perhaps it does, but if so, Karlson takes the time to show us how Conte keeps it under wraps with one of his truckers who recently had a child himself (no aura of victimization here, not overtly) until he then gets the call from Kubik.

IMBd, user generated, lists the film as shot on location in Miami, seemingly accurate, given the atmosphere of seediness, something that plagues the eastern corridor of the US well into the 20th century, Philadelphia, DC, and the entire state of Florida in particular. This is the state where Sherman (I wrote Grant in error when first published) tracked down indigenous Seminoles for being threats to civil order some years prior to the fictitious panorama of our civil war, but our plastique Disneyland peninsula, not quite the paradise it is cracked up to be, forms an interesting vector between our agrarian and cosmopolitan norms, as well as the subculture of the American mafia, which has yet to be truly demythologized, and will not be by me to any great extent. I cannot speak for Sicily, as my family, on both sides of its peasant roots, is Tuscan, though we interbred with Austrian officiers and thus have a strain of finer bloodlines, not an uncommon thing in the modern struggle for Italian unification.

I am now as sick as the proverbial dog, and suppose this can serve as your intermission and a place to pause in my labyrinth. I missed the Joyce group Saturday without meaning to despite my poorly stated petulance, shaking a defiant fist. I thought tossing my money at patronage would be a good thing for me, without meaning, inadvertently, to recreate a tepid link back to Temple University, and the young instructor is, as I have written, affable, but I am not forming any real sense of acquaintance with the men and women who also pitched their Joyce pennies, and though I am the dumbest shit in the world for sinking myself in quicksand in my various rationales for thinking I'd succeed in an urban environment, I could have plotted my own study of Ulysses had I wished, without spending 500 dollars for a future essay on which I am likely to earn only a forth of that back. I am not claiming that I have Lance's resources or skills, but as a metafiction, the text is not all that intimidating, and like any other classicist, I would have found my way. To paraphrase Charlotte Stant, making myself stupid, in this instance, would have been a virtue. I have to rest and decide if I am well enough for the 6 PM session.

Convalescent postscript: I have yet to read Grant's memoirs, and I meant General Sherman from the start, but I was multi-tasking, getting a huge attack of bronchitis, thinking about Joyce. This is why I substituted the future victorious drunkard scandal riven Ulysses for his more ruthless and efficient understudy.