Syndicate Winding

Laughing like children, living like lovers,
Rolling like thunder, under the covers. -- Elton John's pap paean to the blues, toward his late career trajectory as a has been.

Predicting the consequences of impaction can be difficult. In the film Brazil, how the system reacts to it is not only absurd, but a detriment to the health of the body politic. Buttle is killed by an over active police response to a clerical error, and the actual subversive, De Niro's Tuttle, is defeated not as the anti-hero who covets efficiency, through a violent constraint. The luckless engineer vanishes in a paper ordinance glut, just as this same complicity to a perceived threat defeats the protagonist Lowry's decency, and annuls his skill at navigating the information systems hardware. Gilliam was right not to personify a central figure such as Richard Burton in 1984, because no one of us understands the modern autocracy we've created, and any anguish it generates.

If we take Simenon's Rico and place it at the post-war end of the spectrum, and we bookend Arlington Road as a fin de siecle warning to the digital age, a warning that is heeded by no one, evidently: In theory, North Korea cedes its foreign autonomy to China, but that stubborn xenophobic sense of Juche may spark a new conflict on the demilitarized zone. Beware the end of history, because it points to the deeper mendacity of the Bush Administration's offense in Iraq. Saddam was a kitten next to the Jong family. Brazil spans the mid-point between the syndicate, and our complicity with it at the dawn of the material age, and the deceptive new world order that Pellington insinuates through Jeff Bridges well played paranoia in Arlington. Everyone is sacrificed. Mob bosses who lose face, the neighborhood boys who gained through the possible necessity of criminality as a living. Even Conte's Eddie, triumphant in the closing sequence, comes off as defanged, possibly still out on a limb should vengeance rear its head. In Brazil, Gilliam turns the tables on those who survive through deliberate ignorance. All those plastic surgery patches hardly amount to bliss, and in Arlington, we discover Robbins and Cusack have strings too, that they are also being played, private contractors in an internal dirty war.

If I leave the Philadelphia public housing system as things stand, in terms of factual reality, I am setting myself up to face incarceration on much harsher terms, and yes, I realize this, but if I do not shake things up, I face the prospect of being parceled out like pork rinds anyway to the self-interest of those coming up behind my fading geriatric twilight. I deserved better within the environs of the most powerful country on earth, even if you find that sentiment prideful in audacity. 

This may not conclude everything I have to offer about collusion, complicity, and the diseases of the intellect it generates, but I am winding down what has been a lengthy rebuttal from my Jamesian scolding. I have been online a very long time, and I have been with this Henry James community the longest. For what it's worth, they have kept me afloat with a mostly delightful arcane sensibility, and I have the fondest affections for them, even when I have hairballs plaguing my colon!

Bon voyage! (I brace.)

A Purveyor of Necessities

The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. --James Joyce, Ulysses, location 2112


How comprehensive one can be following a 4:40 am dash on the most frigid day of the new year is a good question, but let me dial myself back slightly, for your understanding: When Greg Zacharias admonished me about conspiracies, he meant my James list posts were not being bounced on purpose, not realizing I was attempting to make a sardonic joke. When my half brother admonished me, he meant my family was not engaged in collusion to put me back in a nursing home, but fuck that. My baby bro and my full blooded sister are selfish whining materialistic parents who let me down and feel guilty about it and are headed for a legal negotiation, while my family elders wish I'd shut the fuck up, and mother's sister has reverted to loving inclusionary noises, all well and good, but la damage has been done, though I grant you, in stealing my mentor's title from an old workshop piece de resistance, that I am the primary purveyor of my bubonic plague. If Rico was a Simenon morality play that the studio turned into an uneasy hatchet job that has a great deal to say about Caucasian caste, then Arlington Road is positively operatic red meat, and on my last viewing I paid very careful attention, and there is enough ambiguity about Hope Davis as Brooke, and the blond operative in the ponytail who closes the film, to leave hanging some interesting questions, and a film like Brazil, satire it may be, ties this up nicely, but I am still thinking, and am thinking now of sleep, and my wry smile when Catherine, the blue-eyed bright progressive, chatted with me and the North Philadelphia minorities, about hostility to the LBGT community. Little did she know I was bitter, disillusioned, and how victimized. She would not, none of them knew, and no, they will not, this ACLU offshoot, be able to accommodate me to do their canvassing. It will be too difficult, though the young woman involved in the Cairo uprising interested me, and though you know not to what I allude, she talked back, and the half century old cripple stood firm, unmoving, a virtual edifice of granite, watching humanity knowing not what it reaps.

International Criminality

There are no easy choices when it comes to mortality; in one of my many Harrisburg conferences, under the old Pennsylvania Citizens Council, where I first met Josie, who even then was odd, owlish, non descript, a plain Jane who needs to wave Jesus I love pussy on her flagpole, (ah spastic, trolling, now now) there was a deaf dumb and blind minority, pretty woman, considering, who could not hear herself scream when a power chair ran over her foot in a beige pump, Anne Bancroft's majesty entirely absent. What choice does a woman like that have? This is what I asked myself at the time, even as the story of the Belgian twins saddens me. As much as we might need to be wary of Europe's move toward euthanasia, to the extent that I am still viable as a disabled American, one who does not want to die, but is suffering due to extraordinary marginalization, I cannot fault the decision these men made. Would you like me to display compassion toward Josie? Unlikely as it may be, but not impossible, that she and I will ever set eyes on each other again, I know her MS has told on her body, and that she is no longer passable as able. I also know, as you do, that I am a demanding figure, but let me tell you why I am so pissed off with her. She had the ability to recognize how lonely I was, had the ability to ascertain how Cecil's intelligence and perception captivated me, and then turned right around and destroyed any hope I had of building a relationship with him. Progressives who want to tell me this does not make all homosexuals vicious and untrustworthy may be factually correct, but with this kind of dirty laundry, no one needs what you feel you deserve in terms of your sexual activity, and your demands for marriage. What did I do to Josie to deserve this? Let's see. I talked to her in email, perhaps too facetious at times. I gave her daughter a Sherman Alexie collection for which I paid 24 dollars. That is what I did, to New Mobility's managing editor. So what do I want? I want activists to examine their consciences. I am still alone, in exactly the same location where this woman dragged her rancid body to sit near me on a fountain after I charged her with my power chair to grin wolfishly at her hand waving alarm. At the time I thought I meant it as a joke, and much as I have my choice of enemies between this activist mafia and the case management modalities with which they dance, Richard Conte is increasingly hemmed in by the syndicate men whom Kubik controls in Rico. As Eddie heads toward his little brother, Karlson has wardrobe dress everyone up as cowboys. Charming.

Johnny got out too, like the middle child, but apparently opted for a real frontier purity, overshadowed by Lamotta, and Eddie, racked by guilt, decides to fray his cufflinks and turn states evidence, and Alice gets the reward of a recommendation by the DA for the orphanage. I do not think Karlson meant for his viewers to be entirely at ease with this quick plaster happy ending. There seems to be an underlying uncertainty about the price of collusion, but I'll sharpen up my knives as I find the terminology, and the framework I seek.

Gangsta Grades

Everyone knows that Rome was all bread and circuses.
                                                             --Oswyn Murray



On my way home from the Joyce group Saturday, I paused at the commerce building cubicle to eat my turkey and drink my caffeine like a speed freak, and two of the women in the group, with whom I might have clicked, given they were not grandmothers, or old Irish cops, passed and cut me, quite rapidly, not even bothering to say hello, and as they left my line of vision, a disturbed African American stopped, tried to engage me, screaming at the top of his lungs, "I love you!" "Go away or I'll call the cops." Okay, he said.

Merely an episode, perhaps prescient, given where the local disability activists have left me. Online interaction does not work; patronage has not succeeded, and I cannot imagine what subset of the publishing industry would want to accommodate me on a part time basis, in terms of steady pay, not simply commissioned sales-- and yet we laud violins for poor Swartz, another hounded victim, though his actual crime in terms of digital copyrights seems, at least for Eric Holder's tenure at Justice, mushy.

Public housing has already killed me, and you, Liberty, one day you will immolate yourselves, not by me, because my will is sapped, but you will cause this city such a scandal one day that its administration will be forced to put you into receivership, because this is Philadelphia, the metropolis that invented the ever diminishing returns on self depreciating incompetence, passed between Italian corruption Jewish liberal lesbianism and black and white Protestant denominations of least qualification like a platinum coin worth a billion dollars for the supremacy of the jackass model. No, I am not going away, but even if a lawyer will sue for me, I am already lost, sitting in the kitchen, drained of any desire to believe that I am still a real human being, still capable of thriving, and then a squabble of the usual sort among the Jamesians revived me temporarily, led me to a brief surge, and I send them all hugs and kisses, even Greg Zacharias, who, like my brother, thinks I need SSRIs in an appropriate dosage to modify my view about the conspiracy against me.

From my earliest posts on Arlington Road, I have been in an in depth argument with Greg, actually, and also my family, to show that yes, non compliance creates the trauma that makes the system act to operate against our universal desire for autonomy. Ah, the cripple and her scholar tweaking! Such small joys, let's finish up with The Brothers Rico, though the film may linger on for some time.

Before The Chancel

"What did we do? Burn a few heretics, sell some indulgences? That was in the days when the Church was a ruling body, we let governments do those things today." -- Anne Bancroft, Agnes of God


Obviously, if you speak ill of a suddenly dead dead body guard for stereotypical reinforcing, you can wreak havoc with viruses on one end, and infection flamed genitalia, not knowing which end is which, playing a glass bead game within a fevered intellect, forcing yourself to move, to sit up on your busted mattress using a three dimensional point on a graph of space time, vision unable to be replicated, lost insight into points and reference to location, we last left The Brothers Rico with Larry Gates as a mildly trenchant, deceptively civil sociopath, appealing to his bond with Eddie's mother for taking the bullet meant for him, and then he sends Eddie off, like a bloodhound, while we are cued into this family doom with the near nicety of a deus ex machina, nothing graphic. Paul Picerni bound in a chair, taking a punch, gasping last words, his gel lock flopping. Then Karlson does something interesting with the scene cut to Mrs. Rico's apartment in New York. This is the clash of Old World Europe into the new, and Argentina Brunetti was obviously typecast for culture shock, for her juxtaposition against the American groomed Kubik and Hollywood sugar boy Conte, her English heavily accented, her personal iconography with the madonna captured with no small degree of emphasis, the little bit of Roman hierarchy she needs for her own solace, wary of what her middle child is wresting out of her. This portent is Eddie's second warning, and what does he do with it? Persuading his mother or himself that Kubik is only looking out for the family's best interests?

There are hints, before Conte heads into his central conflict with Lamotta, that he is anxious about the consequences of his actions, not that Karlson takes much opportunity to examine the willful blindness of self-interest, a charge which I doubt can be laid at Simenon's door.

The cream cheese on bread I managed to get to this morning was the best breakfast I had in my life, which is either spelling out mortality's signature, or signifying the extraordinary persistence of will, I intend to pay a visit to the woman's clinic, at least to explore the possibility that this is more than hormonal stress, early next week, as I doubt my ability to flag down a gynecologist any sooner than that.

Kubik's Chameleon

The sheriff's Goddamn was a murmured curse
        Not for the dead but for the blinding dust
                                                           -- Allen Tate, The Swimmers


I sigh in disappointment, but no studied individual in filmography is assisting me, whether or not they care that Schneider and I sparred each other's bones, and I doubt they do, even in the likeness between Mr. ChickenFried and myself as ugly brunettes and the related caste resentment. Shame at the provocative trigger, and the feeling that I have an occlusion the size of a walnut thrombing in my armpit, waiting for the exact implosive stressor. A little worm made my mind flag slippery in my observation of Larry Gates as Sid Kubik. I should have placed him against Poitier as Endicott, or in the classic anti-communist polemic. Long term memory subtly alerting me, but not effectively until I linked him in this mild winter storm that technically prevented me from driving to the DVM. In actuality, a packed defecation made me fear a Presley simulation. Mildly faint, from leg to left temple, I am the daughter of my grandfather's terminal coronary, "Poppa Lilly," I called him, so you know my Roman grandmother ruled us with an iron fist. Her husband was soft as marshmallow, handing the eight year old in the armchair a copper penny, shiny with the magic of his broad smile, "What 'tis?" He bent over me like a jowl wagging hound, but it is Lillian whose absence pulls; she lived very long, but I miss her the most of all my family. She kept me fluent, beautiful woman, every inch the grand belle, silent strength, auburn hair coiffed perfectly, my body tells me I will be back in her warmth and homemade escarole soon. Mi dispiace nonna Lilly, ti prego perdonami.

Bow our heads. Whatever his ethnicity, for the purposes of the studio system, Gates was a blank check, and did not have any point of origin; he wasn't supposed to have those traits, unlike Ernest Borgnine. This does not mean he could not have been a mafia Don. Northern Italy has its Sweden spillover, fair skin, the type who could have kept a Rico like Eddie rolled in pork grease. Karlson condenses this with theatric artifice, as I mention. Real life does not suck you in to a methodical quarry hunt not minutes after you put a punk in the dungeon, warding off the potential fury of your wife  who will probably rip out your eyes if she doesn't get that baby, properly adorable, and a necessary retrograde: Dianne's Alice will not be deprived of the blessings of new life, a happiness given to a man as uncomplicated as a truck driver employed by her husband. Conte flies to New York, in an affluent cosmopolitan mobility, that might have been a stage set for a cabinet meeting with Ike. There is no question, that to all intents and purposes, Sid Kubik is the assimilated appearance of senior management at the country club, and Conte can be many things in the example of Sinatra, the rat pack play boy, the swarthy breeder whose seed is desirable, but make no mistake. Only Gates can aspire to WASP pretensions, whether or not he is merely a brilliant imitation.

They parry, the nervous avoidance of eye contact by Conte effective; he may not know that Gino has been caught, marked for death not ten feet away, but are we supposed to believe that Eddie buys Kubik's fancy footwork. Is pretty boy really that gullible?

Canadian Bacon, Danish Pancakes

"I had already killed one of your officers, in the corner of the blind alley that leads to the tannery, in order to take his automatic, because I wanted one. I did things that were much more shameful. I committed the worst crime in the world, but that has nothing to do with you. I am not a fanatic, an agitator, or a patriot. I am a piece of shit." -- Frank Friedmaier, the spree murderer anti-hero, Dirty Snow


If you are an American, or a western European, you would process a BBC report like this differently than you would a profile on James Holmes and his psychiatric treatment, correct? The latter is the price we pay for the taming of the western frontier, the mythology and fact surrounding that domestication, the conflict between the indigenous warrior cultures and a mechanized European military that bequeathed to us the post modern fragmentation and erosion of moral cohesion. Pedophiles need compassionate case management too, remember. Whereas the tea workers, they merely rose up against authority, possibly horrific, but in terms of survival, and resources, understandable. I do not think the tea workers would have any problem understanding my anger against disability activists and leaders who turned on me, betrayed me, abandoned me, and here I sit, and sitting mainly due to inertia. However, I feel empathy for the manager. A mass acted in concert and burned him to death, and this as an escalation is worse than the glamorization of Pesci's temper, in which part of my impulses believe acting on would provide catharsis. I cry for dead cats, but relish the thought of eliminating hypocritical liars, not sure where the truth lies between those two propositions, as I'd also cut off my hand before touching a firearm, but would like nothing better than deploying my fists against the prevarication, ignorance, and cruelty I've had to carry, obviously not unique in this sentiment, as Simenon understood it as well, to create an interested audience, but also to suggest that aggression has a possibly complicated ambiguity, one that should serve as a warning to materialists who want to reprogram our primate origins through neuroscience. I prefer the post-war Frenchman to Cormac McCarthy, because Cormac leans to the superlative. Simenon carefully punctures it.

In some ways we are all Eddie Rico, the man in the middle with his own secrets. Guy Savage created a good synopsis of the film as a hatchet job as opposed to the novel, which I'd like to read someday, but I am not necessarily hamstrung, at this moment, by lack of access to the text. Karlson's adaptation carries the unease of its own certainty, and that includes the rapid fire pace at which Conte has to negotiate between his own culpability and Kubik's desire to eliminate loose ends, eroding loyalty. Is criminality, at the height of its organized power, any different than case management burrowing in its paradigms to obfuscate wrongdoing and enforcing stigma we can find in any baboon troupe? Not a bad question to ask in the ration of bacon, which presumably does not slow the industrial slaughter of the livestock which gives us such an interesting meat, to quote a culinary chef.

Slouching Towards Gomorrah

Cessation is one of my counter narratives, for those of you clever enough to catch it, my own doubts about zeal, doubts about how much hardship I am willing to inflict on myself for the sake of principle, and what I truly believe about liberty and the reality of my biological entropy. Not acceptance, but cessation, giving up, shutting myself down, falling silent, to avert the price tag of a self-immolating anger. Overwhelming and losing my identity in savagery defeats any purpose in having an agenda in the first place, and a sense that nothing I do, no matter how hoarse I make myself, changes anything, or will, and that the very people I am inviting to see through my perception are those who flee, finding me "frightening," to quote Gary, the Jungian, and very old Speakeasy regular (and remarkably, David Harris is still there, a tug of nostalgia, not knowing if this is a good or bad thing, that the forum has a steady bald Jewish Virgil to guide you through to the Messiah of your choice. Not a bad guy, David; we had some interesting conversations, but if he is a real author worth reading or a pedagogue who thinks my obsessive drama nothing more than pyrotechnics, that we can leave unanswered. Why not try and return? On a simple level, I do not know if the moderator would remove me if I assert my identity as a voice from the past, and on a more complex level, we'd save ourselves from the doom of extinction by methane gas for at least a few centuries if we roasted a significant percentage of MFA students and indulged in limited cannibalism. I may not be where I wish, but P&W has nothing to offer me but more of the same: institutional compliance). I have nothing against getting the MFA, but it would not help me and I cannot afford the debt, so let me dial back and make a correction: the point of impaction in The Brothers Rico begins with Conte in that bright rat pack dress robe on the telephone about harboring the psycho he finds in his office. Let us not gloss over that robe, whether it is satin, nylon, or velvet (any trivia assists here appreciated, wardrobe geeks?) Karlson's dominating shot of it subdues the audience with a grand sense of Eddie's style, not just his material status; marks him as a target, for us, for his antagonists, and in the coda of lead billing, he is the star. Or is he? The coital pleasures with Foster remain an interlude with its own unease, the letter from her sister, as a plot device, contributing.

The meeting with Gino in the car escalates this tension, which leads to an important question: Why doesn't Conte act to save his brother in the immediacy of that moment? Is his delay plausible, attributable to lack of realism?

Pause. Spastic goes like the ghost of Denmark's true king to go whimpering to the evil ACLU, even though I might as well rupture my spleen. If American communists are one of my limited weapons, however, the arsenal of the powerless is what it is, ready to abort what should never have been born.

In the spirit of Billy Burke, Let's Trade

He paid little attention to what he said, and blamed Glaucus for his stupidity in taking in and feeding maimed and enfeebled persons. --Alexander Pope on the entirely unnecessary apocrypha on the life of Homer.


JJ Abrams has a subtext in Revolution: We are all capable of being hideous, of betraying those we love the most, and yet still remain as human, or not, as we choose. The show illustrates this to varying degrees, in the relationship between Burke and Lyons, however much their acting is studio stock and trade, and is of particular interest when looking at Esposito, most likely the best actor in the series, or the most interesting, given his resume as a supporting actor. It is interesting to look at the evolution of these portrayals against Simenon's complex noir tensions, which come through in The Brothers Rico, despite its genetic 1950's composition. I hope to be able to say something penetrating about those tensions at the end of the day, for those of you who will bear with me.

I left this last at the scene between Conte and the laundry driver (no hint there of corruption or pressure by the Teamsters, but I thought of it anyway, because this was the era of such corruption at its height), and then an impaction occurs, a condensation that is artificial due to editing constraints: not moments after the psycho gangster exits Eddie's office, the call comes in from Kubik for his facade of a detente, and then the game begins.

I will pick it up from this point after a nap, which I hope is due to a hibernation reflex, and not the closer of congestive heart failure and an oxygen generator. I have much to do so this will, hopefully, be a real nap, and I'll be back after the news. My hair is dry now, having washed it after breakfast (in real time 12/19, whoops).

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.

And Coital Absence

"You put writing first, and I put teaching first."-- John Tassoni trying to put a positive spin on one of my disappointments as our real time relationship was drawing to a close.


We've seen where those respective value judgments have left me, though you cannot see it in John himself, his evolution as I have plotted its points. He was not necessarily drawn to violence as my brother was. Two years older than I, since I was a late comer to the collegiate scene because of the surgeries and rehabilitations subject to that, I know only the sketchiest details about John's life in the smaller, if not less dangerous badlands of Chester. My brother did not have to go far to find trouble in the suburbs, to cope with a mild personality disorder that bordered psychosis once he was dying from AIDS. Both he and John used drugs to cope with emotional pain. John's vanity, masking an intrinsically warm and basically kind man, is what enabled him to use meritocracy for his present day satisfactions. How much more I am going to drop about his past, I leave unresolved, not particularly desirous of confrontation even in writing to preserve what escaped me, narrowed my own scope because it eluded me, what I thought desire held to be authentic. There would be absolutely nothing to resolve between us. Had we dated it would not have worked, however genuine I believed my feelings to be; not simply because of my broken and florid homily peasant Italian body that rated his same ethnicity as quality grade stock "I'd never get," to quote my sister. I believed, initially, that he was attracted to me, but feared the burden of fucking a naive cripple twit, and that I then dimmed his interest through my lack of reticence. He would deny this, maybe accurately, maybe not, but spent a good deal of time catering to my want of his attention until the woman who commanded his balls hit the scene, and, if I wanted to be even crueler to my deluded youth, he strung our interaction along because I was a special education dilemma; that degree of veracity hurts even more, but this frank assessment doesn't contradict the initial poignancy of having been utterly smitten. Without a shadow of a doubt, I know that sleeping with him when I was nineteen or twenty would have been transformative, would have healed my sense of inadequacy. Desire can be counter intuitive, but not in this case; it would have been a culminating union, not born of lust.

However his urban environment scathed him, John remained human. My brother did not. He was Tessio and what frightens the able bodied world about me is exactly the fact that my father gave me Tessio's temperament and satisfaction in being an assassin, a temperament that may one day take over what is left of my empathy. I have been struggling for thirteen years with the fact that my supervisor should pay for her assault on my dignity, and my nature, being what it is, will never lose sight of this injustice, and the deployment of a medieval code of lex talionis against it. I murder Linda daily when my scars open at their most vulnerable points, and what is actually going on in my creative execution of her charming sociopathic sensibility is the restoration of my power that she psychologically raped, and a fantasy of choreographed physical control that bests her own. This is impossible. I am merely contorted, florid cellulose, and she is the prevaricating stick bitch who mews like a kitten and gets a slap on the wrist every time she unsheathes her claws to leave some subordinate's gut dripping stool blood; that her career is protected by the very disability lawyers I am supposed to be able to turn to, by Liberty's board of directors, by my former gay activist associates with their own ethical sleaze, activists who despise her, novas the sun in front of my eyes, and I either achieve justice in some way, or I break the law trying. Feed that into the breach of manner calculator while I change to drive to the same old CVS, with its carnival of souls. It is time to hit the dead zone, except for the fact that I have been malingering, unmoving, perhaps wishing my strength would collapse. Eventually it shall.

After I eat, a convenient delay tactic into the urban poverty I cannot handle again with the fortitude of youth, this supposition of an overlay will return to what it superimposes, and that is, John's assimilated manner is as much an affect as Conte's acting in Italian dramas..

The editorship I did want to make an effort to aspire toward is not part of this, but in the time I had remaining, my aunt knocking me off my game, and now my infection, escalated finally into a cold, was a factor. I have to go through mounds of documents that the move displaced, and when I had the strength, my aunt would not listen, and I have an unsightly, useless piece of foam blocking my back wall until I find a booster or throw it out, so I have to bide my time, and if something else turns up, try again. Even if I do find my AccessLife editor, his stewardship was brief, and taking myself seriously in strange lands in North Carolina requires a will, an assertion, that my aunt wore out of me, because she is sick herself, and in pain, and my father is hitting his eighties. If I had a choice, this evening, I'd simply resign.

Yet I cannot bring myself to put an end to this conclusively. Give my damn notice if I need movement more than anything else, and that would put me into an eclipse, anchor me compact to a speck of dust under the constraint of a police baton; hunger must be sated. When I hit auto destruct, it will reverberate, rippling like a pebble, or thrashing, an inept swimmer soon to sink

Coital Glamor

"The novel ended with Flaubert and with James." -- Ulysses, Order, and Myth, page 177


Eliot is on point. We are evolving our way out of the primacy of aesthetic choice, killing language, killing writing as a profession except as it remains necessary for engineering, mathematics, physics, computer science, medical data, until such a time as our extinction. I had a geology instructor back in the day when I suspect pedagogy was not quite the science my former flame elocutes like worsted cotton out of his ear drums, who intoned to the class, "MAN can adapt to any conditions." And of course, this is what you tell adolescents to damper the suicide rate among them as a class, but that kind of optimism is illusory. Beneath all these things that add up to the human half, there is the animal, beneath the love of form, beneath the fact that cultural impermanence triumphs over memory, beneath the quest for intricacy, beneath the story, beneath the failure and the persistence of metaphysics, the Alawites and the Syrian Free Army engage in bloodshed, the Israelis invade Gaza, the Israelis occupy Lebanon, the Israelis have been engaged in constant warfare since Yahweh became a conceptual advance over pagan deification, and this spearhead isn't so much about the cost of the Semitic legacy to our species, so much as the Semitic legacy represents the fact that a chimpanzee is pretty much a chimpanzee, and like other species, primates are dangerous, brutal. Everything else, including the fact that we seem to think we now control the genome, is nothing more than distractions for the bipedal brain. That is why tensions remain dynamic in complicit intimacy between husband and wife in the representational fiction, and perfectionist niceties behind the camera, in The Brothers Rico. I'd argue, however, that some of these highly stylized films from between 1948 to 1968 offer us more insights into the cracks that have since been consumed into the post modern maw, than does the glaze over your eyes waiting for post modernism to transmute and close its bracket. The sex between Alice and Eddie Rico was great, but then there is this pesky business of your past as a bookie, dear Eddie, for the syndicate, with no allusion to what struggles Dianne Foster's character incurred in marrying such a man. Was the material status enough, never mind that from which her eye had to turn away? Or was Alice such a feminine catch that Eddie believed his moral compass was clean, for all intents and purposes? Was his history, their history, a case of willful blindness, all for the sake of style, a certain propriety that everyone achieved after the war in an implied contract? Alice does manage to worry about the implications of the communique over that telephone line, and Eddie equivocates those implications, which sums up the conflict of his character through the entire unfolding of the narrative.

Urethra Knives

The Brothers Rico opens with Richard Conte in a glinty house robe receiving a telephone call, and then in a scene I found fascinating for its time and place, he and Dianne Foster have a fairly frank episode of sexual intimacy while Eddie undresses and gets in the shower. I know some of the pre-33 era black and whites were more risqué, but if you really look at this film, it sells star powered sex as hard as New Wave in the next decade. Eddie is obviously virile in his every gesture at the sink, of which we are offered a nice shot of bare chested beef. Alice is obviously happy with her tiger, and the shoulder bite is permissively promiscuous. The suggestion of infertility in this atmosphere of laden sexual satisfaction is left open for speculation, and this is very Eisenhower era, but it is also very much a part of Simenon's methodology, to leave the issue of a barren, and otherwise happy couple, simply hanging in the air. I have another theory. Italians will never be Wasps, no matter how perfect the imitation. Whether or not this was lifted from Henry James, (cf Daisy Miller ) as much as it might be a standard plot device might be debatable, and you can even tell me I am full of shit, but I have two points in my favor:

1. Daisy Miller positively resonated with the American public; it was a huge hit for James, put the fellow on the map like nothing else.

2. Simenon is European, and 2a. The Saxons, Franks, Austrians and Prussians thought it was acceptable to cast Italians as greaseballs. James does it all the time. Even Prince Amerigo is a somewhat sordid character, royal though he may be, and Wilkie Collins cashes in those chips without hesitation in his major virginal hit.

This still had a hold on the generational Protestants of Eisenhower's day, so, voila, Eddie is cursed because of his provincial roots, no matter how assimilated he is into American material power and status. Italian Catholics, like the Jews, like the Irish, can approximate, but it would take the civil rights era, and perceived  color threat, to implode intramural Caucasian prejudices which flag a film such as this.

Time for a pause, but this analysis will carry me through a number of posts, hampered by my imperfect memory of Brazil's timeline, despite the fact I have seen the film three times. Bridge to cross.

I have taken ill, and because of this, have to resign myself to not reentering a late life academic competition, and in fact, should my posts become inactive, depending how long accessing treatment takes me, you may assume that the interns, or medical students who usually evaluate me, fucked up. This is a health issue I cannot allow to linger, however, unless, unbeknownst to me, I get to decompose in much the same manner as mio bambino, a consoling irony?

Subjunctive Sinews

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy. Georges Simenon

I am not an expert in the revival of American minimalism, but Georges Simenon is much more interesting precursor than a man like Cormac McCarthy. Cormac is exceedingly aware of his craft, but that craft, much like Lionel Shriver's, has flaws that illuminate flags for me, flags that do not allow my applause without reservation. Simenon pares it down to the bone, but his stature has been on the rise in recent years, perhaps because his sparse diction leaves room for intrigue and ambiguity.

I examined, as opposed to truly studied, Dirty Snow with Jay Gertzman (second reviewer) and it was worth the entire participation in the live book club, and aside from Maigret, I hope to pursue more of Simenon's oeuvre. It is his contribution to The Brothers Rico that makes this more than just your sanitized Hollywood mafia staple, and also why it is an interesting adjunct to later films like Brazil and Arlington Road. My wheels have been spinning on this through the last week and a half, through my last three posts of equally minimal political sentiments, through the fact that I still mourn mio bambino and apparently cannot be kind to my internal loss and allow things to take their course. Like most pet owners who disagree with science, I am convinced that Vinne misses his brother still, and that dear kimmy does her best to take charge of both of us (which reminds me I need to get on and use my wonderfully sardonic verbal skills to help my shelter friends, about whom I have never uttered so much as a barb, and why is that? Because I snivel in torrents for my Joey? mio bambino, mio bambino, weeps the soul I no longer have; had I only died with my boy, this throbbing wound for a feline, six months going, is this why?) The little girl sticks her ass in my face, as if to say I am here now, get over it. And oh, grief shall fade, but I'll never have another bond such as that.

Let us examine Rico a bit, and although I rarely put the plot under a microscope, what analytical skills that remain tell me this is the best way to continue my pursuit of this thesis.

Complicity Bounding

"I meant it in the sense that we were conspirators."-- Linda C Dezenski, defending her descriptions of her climaxes with her husband. quizzically riding on the heels of their divorce.

For all the efforts taken to circumvent Netflix, and the inconvenience of a DVD collection, sometimes streaming video denies us instant gratification. It was on the ABC affliate, the aforementioned chronicle, but weak signal and laborous transfer provided only glimpses of a vehicle that is possibly intriguing. Just blanked out in blinding white panic on telephone number; synapses assured by last summer's paper bill. If Alzheimer's is in my future more than likely I will be beaten to death by a caretaker, in the sense that verbal ferocity invites provocation. You've glimpsed my Iago already, the interior provocateur of a facile sophist. With that being the opening lead of a future preponderance, the kindle paperwhite yet another catalyst in knock offs to a weakened, weakening stride, let's return to the avenues opened by Paula Broadwell and Arlington Road, though I cannot pull a rabbit out of the hat into the immediacy of revelation, there is something larger here, an overarching issue worthy of grasping, like the proverbial tiger who will maul out my innards unless I unravel the maze. It is a difficult one, but the real life event, the sexual license which seems to go hand in hand with state secrets, keeping and uncovering them, ties into what the studio reflects back. Pellington's fin de siecle is dangerous because it suggests what cannot be said in the mainstream, that everything we think we know is a front for facts not in evidence, that McVeigh may not have been an implicitly independent actor, that federal agents misdirect themselves and miss real threats that might have been caught otherwise. Clinton's sexual misbehavior, for instance, may have exhausted our energy, not leaving us alert to pay attention to Osama, though the right bears blame here too, given that Kenneth Starr suddenly elected himself the American prelate (much as I am doing by airing out the dirty laundry within the homosexual community, by the way-- I have not dug into this, yet, but can assure Blogger that spastic's probing may hit a nerve, and won't we have fun! Do we ban this disabled woman, or what, damn it, we're about efficiency, not defamatory speech! Why us?) -- and while Wiki does a good job describing Kruger's taunt script,  Pellington's texture complicates things, like his jump cut to a Hope Davis replica after her supposed elimination by Robbins' charmingly superlative, and thereby incredulous, glee club, suggesting that Bridges' Faraday was so out of his depth that the only way he could have won was to join the conspiracy, vanish into it. This is partly where Gilliam leads his protagonist in Brazil, who is doomed simply because he tries to be decent, and longs for a kind of purity, that, due to its impossibility, leads to expiration. As phantasmagoric as Brazil is, it leaves Gilliam's fans uneasy, and exhausted Terry's output. 12 Monkeys and The Fisher King, though competent, lack the same force. The third film that binds all this together, surprisingly, is, The Brothers Rico, and this is not simply due to economic pressure. Then again, fans of Simenon understand that we are all complicit in the damage of corrupting and collusionary impetus. I'll take a break, pick it up next post.