Richard Basciano

"A smile opens up the whole body!" Danny Aiello

Local newscasts serve up unethical contractors with the same relish that we dig into a pot roast dinner, and undoubtedly, local journalists will investigate construction bosses with renewed vigilance in light of Basciano's malfeasance. The reasons for the consistent malpractice are probably as long  and drawn out as the history of architecture, the ways in which edifice, monuments, churches and palaces are used, instilling grandeur, making statements about imperial might, material efficiency. Boots on the ground may get reconstructed in historical documentaries, but only the designers are treated with iconic status, whether this is through Charlie Rose, and his desire to educate his audience on design as art, or Peter Greenaway engaged in his curious examinations via cinematography. In the art of negativity, however, it also serves up the disintegration of Italian culture that can never be put back together again, even if there was a good deal of luck involved in the rise, the glory, of the Roman city state.

In one of my unfortunate events when I still utilized Paratransit services regularly, my sexual excitement over a male candy sent my driver into Basciano's local smut forum, closed now, some months prior to the Market Street collapse. I gave a fat no nothing black guy with gristled facial hair a hard on, and to this day, carry that episodic guilt, tuning myself to Kafka's abstract disparities. I might have been raped, or led him to get heavy on another client. Greaseball to jig indictment, hand in hand with long standing Mediterranean ambivalence toward North Africa. In these micro narrative terms, Basciano may be a facsimile, an anti-matter image layered on an already corrosive and provincial retraction (the mafia) of what it is to be a member of the meritocracy, the established figurehead in charge, running things, for appearances sake, while skating the lowest common denominator, because serfs are still expendable. Peasants no longer exist in the modern world. Of course not.

I am still in an exasperated stasis over what I did wrong saving my revisions which apparently vanished on my external drive, retyping because I still lack the steady nerve to open my HP and try to rescue my content. In my new found freedom of repose, sinkhole mattress challenging posture and sleep, dismay over my most influential professor's collection leads me to re-examine why I punished myself so badly over my lack of striving to eclipse him.

I never had certain things that make the arc of life worth living, like the joy of falling into a lover. Franz had many of the same problems as his health would gradually necessitate a disability stipend. I was never partial to his genius, of course, though in moments my prism aligns. 

Princess Andromache, Croupier

.... not so Agamemnon, who spoke fiercely to him and sent him roughly away. "Old man," said he, "let me not find you tarrying about our ships, nor yet coming hereafter. Your sceptre of the god and your wreath shall profit you nothing. I will not free her. She shall grow old in my house at Argos far from her own home, busying herself with her loom and visiting my couch; so go, and do not provoke me or it shall be the worse for you."-- Samuel Butler's translation

How is it that one can eschew James Joyce and still appreciate the consequences of Modernism? There is much to appreciate in Ulysses, regardless if a pauper invalid spends well over five hundred dollars on cheat sheets and the nullification of her own pretensions, particularly the Calypso section, and then Nausicca, and the disjunctions from Nausicca between Bloom and Gerty leading into Circe which I absorbed with psycho-sexual shock, and will ponder beyond the conclusion of this reading group cycle. Joyce is  on par with the blindness of subsuming into appetite, and still illicits my scorn.

Scorn is a strong sentiment, a reaction against pity and the pathos of Joycean grandiosity, something that glimmers in Dubliners, rises in Portrait, and reaches a crescendo in Ulysses. Perhaps I am more Cartesian than I realize, certainly not as skillful as Nick Davis in deconstructing Greenaway. Nick helps me to see why The Belly of an Architect preoccupies and remains an insufferable pretension, and the argument it makes about feminism and legacy is to some extent historically relevant, structuralist, to say the least. Problematic films like these are needed even more than masterpieces. If you need to visualize what I mean in my charge toward a thesis, there is the gnat chameleon aspect of Jake Gyllenhaal's roles: the sounding center geek in Proof, The Zodiac Killer, a type against his A list swashbuckler bid Prince of Persia, a formula for which I could not sit still. Moving in part, more rugged in its realism than Errol Flynn's output, reminiscent of Douglas and Curtis maiming each other unto death, a film based on a game nevertheless doesn't belie expectations.

I ended my implicit contract with the long winded Timothy Artis, the talking mule of the Torah, and this time, I ended it for good. There is little between me and a major shit fest if I do not find a replacement soon, or return to the Medicaid waiver.

Should I give up, prepare for death? Like anyone has the balls to type in my comment section on accepting limitations and the inevitable. I have only a thin, thinning veneer for African American dominion in Philadelphia-- indeed, the cracks in black identity toward true matriculation into the mainstream has ushered itself in a little late for my adoption of developmental dove like expressions.