The Grimace of Machiavelli

Machiavelli's most famous work, Il Principe, brought him a reputation of an immoral cynic [sic]

The Italians. If my life in Philadelphia amounts to an abject deconstruction of perennial, thwarted aspiration, I am under little illusion about what it would amount to on the peninsula if I managed to land and assemble for transport in Tuscany. Cramped store outlets barely large enough for a 5 foot 7 inch male of perhaps 175 lbs to stand behind a small counter, equally compact flats in which to wedge persecuted Arabic foreigners, juxtaposed around the scenic beauty of Lake Como, a plethora of earthquake collapses in Naples. One thing native Italians share with my enthusiastic to fade away contingent of Turks is an overweening penchant for flowery allusions embedded in death threats which are basically meaningless, an emaciated breath of history from the tombs of the Medici. Is Beppe Grillo a little Mussolini with saccharine smiles for Rai’s studio lightning? I yowled at a copywriter who dropped me because I enjoy Matteo Salvini’s pugnacity, and it is into this subterfuge of less precise detail that lurking in on Tassoni’s prep school immaturity triggers an irascible desire to hoist myself on my own petard, but lurk I do, nonetheless. Then I emailed him once again, approximately the third time since I tracked his career accolades. I mentioned Brandon’s name, the Negro assailant who nearly took my life. “It would have been better had he killed me,” I wrote, nearly petulant with despair, still accusing.

Why weren’t you there to protect me? This was the embedded outcry to my interpersonal Rocky who rejected me when I was 19. Now who’s being prep school, the dowager asks wryly, so easy to believe you still love the one who got away? John Tassoni was, indeed, my Rocky Balboa, and my mild bout of digital hysteria elicited his solicitude, the little monkey on his back, the nascent savant who can’t get over a punk from Chester who was kind to her, bear hugged her, made her realize that masculinity needn’t be toxic. Imprinted for life, no matter whose husband I slept with, but sitting here, with the mock up board of our lives on social media, you take stock in the realization of unhappiness with a player. Had I been successful in seducing him, chaffing or not, the interpersonal would have wound up where I left the serial novel of Alicia and Peter Florrick, keeping up appearances as a matter of showboat necessity on the hollow knell of the attraction which brought them together.

This episode, the one where the flawed values of a moderate political couple defeat the NSA, would have been courageous on the part of everyone, including Ridley Scott, to leave it conclude right there after the departure of Charles. Alicia was far too ruthless with Peter. You may adjudicate that assessment for yourself.

I’m dropping The Passage, as edgy as it purports to be, and scrolled through Tucci in Fortitude as a British DCI, to my delighted surprise. Somehow, even with the edginess of an Arctic locale, British thrillers are grounded in domestic tensions which are anti-climatic. On the American scene, they are instances of grand theater. Another citizen from my homeland with its tertiary angles has joined my ranks, and like John, a doctorate. I’m mollified. For the time being.

Fugue

Perhaps I presume, but we'll presume then. Melinda looks like a gentle soul who perhaps took a knock or two during the recession, and despite the fact that my virtual life hasn't done much for me, or, the little it has done is a little late, her picture with the boy recalled home and some better moments in Ridley Park. It was not all sexual abuse by proxy of my mother's men. She picked them up like stray dogs. Joe the Flop, Walt the Indian, a Jamaican I never met, Don, Beaky. Men drawn to over-sexed fat volatility, even my ailing father on his knees begging her not to divorce him. Mom had a way. I guess men smelled she was a whore, ignored the weight. 

I am so depressed I am like blackberry juice on the fingertips, and want to give my notice, without a damn plan in all the world. I want out, more than anything, I just want out of this building, though it is the same in every public housing building, and all tenants spar with building owners. Karina is causing me grief, and I cannot trust myself during inspections tomorrow not to go at it with the staff and want not to be here but bottle blond has her own problems and I can dismiss her from service twice too and laugh starkly. I might as well be bisexual with the shit I am putting up with for a 35 year old white girl who reminds me of home, home that no longer exists for me.

I am not in the best of shape. My father's sister is dying. Stomach cancer. No surprise, but Marie has been my only support since my mother died, and padre is exhausted trying to keep wicked stepmother Louise alive, and if I follow my heart, and scuttle downtown to the Italian consulate, let's assume I tantrum my crippled poverty across the Atlantic. My regret will consume me five minutes after docking, because the still virile Stanley Tucci was right. Italy has nothing but history, and yet I want to go, and upon getting there, storm into RAI and punch Luigi Perelli to ensure his prostate remembers my fist, the crafty old socialist. He is a liar, and so is The Washington Post.

I would not know what to say to Melinda, at least not in digital idiolect, except to say thank you for a picture of her smiling peace with life. I'll never experience it. Would she like a roommate?

Vancouver's Concession to Brooklyn's Gentrification

"Otho's head is quite tiny, and it's owner's legs loutishly unclean," Catullus, pig of pidgin Latin

Stephen J Cannell reigned supreme over the television airways longer than JJ Abrams due to the fact that the studio system, during Cannell's prime, was in its turn of the century generic mode, not yet imploded in the Reagan era by digital technology turning us all into libertarian rebels; thus Wiseguy was Francis Ford Coppolla and Martin Scorsese on the cheap. By the time Abrams made good on the mystery island island motif to make Lost a sensation, the end of Clintonion global hegemony was already at hand. Abrams may have hit a vein of gold with his spectacular drama, but the expectations created by his plane crash could not possibly be fulfilled, certainly not by ABC, and Abrams managed to dissolve himself, through the radical assertion that none of us are accountable to either circumstance or environment. Cannell's disillusionment with the American empire, however, cannot be dismissed, however made for television his underlying cynicism was, it manifested itself as the gateway to the post-9/11 world we currently inhabit. Neither is Ken Wahl as gut wrenching as Donnie Brasco,. Pretty boy in North Hollywood may leave lonely women slavering for a high quality, more masculine definition of John Travolta, but Terranova's collusion, ethical erosion, is a sequential novella, to Depp's comparative existential insight, and Jim Bynes' "Lifeguard" was already a cliche by the time the character aired and formed, the primitive cyborg, empowered by early metadata and telecommunication advances, even if the perfect starlet fantasy hearkens back to every Southern European girl's brass ring. Ken Wahl was the epitome of working class transcendence for many, especially in the world of Kevin Spacey's Mel Profitt. Cannell might have had the courage to let Spacey's genius go where Spacey's genius took us with the later Usual Suspects, instead of Tucci as Pizzolo, but this might have been too radical for viewers: the self-hating, magnetic, corrupting influence of real power, of which money is merely an instrument, so Profitt was given a fatal flaw, not entirely without insidious capacity, however, in after-effect. It is the men like Spacey's villains who actually run the world, and we know it, even without a Carter administration white paper on sibling jackasses who create international scandals. Chelsea is a more adept Machiavelli, but look at the kind of parents she had to fuck her up.

Comparative Predation

I surprised myself by finding something derivative out of Sebold's metaphysical triumph over trauma in The Lovely Bones. If you like dark parlor games, consider Stanley Tucci as George Harvey against Michael Rooker as Henry, against Hopkins as Hannibal. That is your job spastic, might saith twitter, might saith the hapless surfer, or those who chance posted with me prior to community banishment. My rebuttal is distillation takes time, and my facial ligaments are in pain.

For me to watch a film twice in rapid succession means the transcendent caught my interior suction cups, and decided me to track Sebold even though I cannot do it her way, find my way through the thorns to loss of my own ego. My escape as a writer is to burrow into the agony, with or without substance aid, like Thomas More in his hair shirt, willing to accept the assassin. But my challenge to the Sebold victory is this: Would a mouse be owed the same consideration? It is the snicker bar on the evolutionary scale, killed swiftly, killed slowly, high pitched squeal as its spine is snapped on a glue trap, or pummeled and then eaten by Joey, speared by his brother. What does the fabric of space give the insect, krill, or plankton, for that matter? Why did I pay for my pet's ashes if I am a non-believer? There is also Aaron Eckhart's work, scathing and stark, which I thought of during the morning hours before Sandy's landfall, but evaded me in the initial post draft. In the company of men is a different genre, a masterpiece of social manner, critically acclaimed, then buried by the public, but it is a vehicle willing to be honest in its illustration that blind justice, fortune, are projections about how the primate moral code works, possibly no more than a facade; yet Sebold strikes something a mass audience needs, just as I needed Joey's remains, my deceased, now part of all minimalist dead pet theatre.

Even if we keep it on the human scale, is the serial predator simply an evolutionary outcome our self-domestication refuses to accept, or is it disease, as we attribute it in clinical terms? A footnote on which I'll have to catch up. Tucci's performance here nearly matches his more physically magnetic role in Big Night.

Seafood Risotto

I ate as soon as I woke today, putting an end to that particular drama, if only because I heated up a risotto with a nice helping of fish, seafood, and it made two meals, recalling the early sequence in Big Nightwhere Tucci's lone customers are baffled by the seafood risotto that Shalhoub's character would see as a metaphysical victory for the culinary arts. I ain't quite sure what it is about my hard-fuck love for this film, perhaps nostalgia for basically fictional constructs, but it involves inimitable qualities: I equally would have needed a culinary education on the miraculous properties of risotto as a rice, just as the couple and I would have also indulged in an unschooled query over the lack of shrimp, or mussels in the shell.



Love is a many splendid thing. Be patient with me until next week, and understand that my penetrations take time, even if I may not have the luxury to complete them, entirely.

Big Night is not a perfect metaphor, and corollary relatives like Tampopo have a slightly better infused aesthetic sense, but nothing makes me long to be fully Roman more than this quiet masterpiece, which is just a shade off, by that much, with a made for television look.

Please, be kind, and come fetch me back to Tuscany. Spastic only longs for a small glimmer of happiness. Ciao!