Joe Caroll

Beneath the stark application of its squish bags, and its cheats, (we'll never see Purefoy actually killing the females who then comprise his dark art), The Following has a subtextual frustration with liberalism which appeals to Fox's audience. One can understand the need to gut progressive propensities and squelch around in the carnage, and beneath every moderate, domesticated middlebrow lies a secret zealot. The show's writers are careful to placate progressives in one possibly unrealistic sense. Caroll doesn't discriminate over whom he inducts. Perhaps due to political sensitivity, we do not see any Cambodian cult members, but blacks and whites and Indians are equal opportunity looms or hard ass informers, hence the show's dark humor between its graphic eruptions. Yet I cannot watch much of the series without an undercurrent of fear in my own vulnerability, one which Hannibal doesn't elicit. Both shows are applying ascetic values subversively, however. Both have an aesthetic defense, which I am not sure applies to the chances I've taken with my reactionary scorn.

Disability in Entertainment Arts will never be promoted in mainstream outlets, even if I clean it up and find a way to stop insinuating murder revenge plots according to powerful medieval Curia codes. Different as Britain's worldview is from Roman bloodlust, both imperial modalities understood ruthlessness, something which gave the original Avengers a modernist style which cannot be copied. I was a young girl during its American run, and its satirical arrows toward the superpower it spawned was over my head, but Emma Peel was an early and impossible superlative standard. I cannot wear leather without connoting granary sacks.  

Angel Gabriel Mews

"I'm shrinking."--Gina Torres

Thought I recognized Barnes Tobias from the cop out Apocalypse season of The Supernatural in the Fromage episode. Human enough still that this studio manufactured violence begins to take its toll, as if Dacy is our moral Mobius strip without a booth barrier, I have to back off from some of this, and I am dropping Kevin Bacon and his embodiment of Ryan Hardy, pondering my befuddled interrogative on why Hannibal kills his patient in this episode. Out of mercy? Because he seems conflicted in this teleplay, engaging in predatory measuring up against a rival, only beating Tobias to the punch because he could not protect Freddy?

Even if I wished, I simply do not have the time to read how Harris gave Lecter the interior rationalizations that Fuller paints on video.

Both The Following and Hannibal deploy a gaming theory, an inside wink, as it were, the former a parody on zealotry, the latter offering up more effective subversive suggestions on the nature of a cosmopolitan lifestyle. To what end I am not sure.

If we can see this as an unqualified endorsement, however, let me make NBC and Amazon happy: I do not know how long I can hold the line, but in that holding, I intend to buy every season of Hannibal.

The power of art. I am allowed a cliche in convalescence.

Oh, to pull a Prospero memory lapse, I did catch Little Man Tate, and believe I saw it before and must have forgotten. Another day.

Candy Land

"'I'm truly sorry I retweeted a spoiler."--  Kevin Bacon, local boy.

Why my tolerance is tested during episodes of The Following is something not entirely clear to me. The series shares other Fox family values where evil is clearly delineated, with hard edges, whatever commonality Ryan Hardy shares with Jack Bauer. I made an effort to watch one early episode of 24, the one with Mrs. Bauer in sweater and on cell phone, and that was it. Not that I never watched any other segments, just this, that its immediacy never held my interest.

Hannibal has style, but The Following triggers scar tissue, despite the fact that I was never raped by a megalomaniac. The series is certainly not as exploitative as Dexter, nor does it echo Cassavetes, and yet I need to keep my distance from it in modes of vulnerability, perhaps because it was a cult, a Catholic charismatic off shoot (not quite a true cult, but as close as I came in adolescence to it) which sheltered me from my stepfather.

What gifts we receive when heavy weights like Fishburne grow too old to be Morpheus. 

Oligarchs

"Snakes don't eat people."-- the incredulous Jennifer Lopez

Luis Llosa may have been offering a homage to Spielberg with Anaconda, but the film was ridiculous, barely lucid in its underlying subtext of preserving the Amazon's mystique. At this point in my life I fail to see why mechanical sharks and snake machines with a malevolent sense of humor shouldn't be made Secretary General of the United Nations, and if I ever get through The Feast of The Goat by Llhosa the novelist, I will have to view the filmmaker's adaptation, and this unwittingly brings me back to my trouble: my literacy fluency has done absolutely nothing for me, not in terms of personal security, and Llhosa has stated to English media repeatedly that he belonged to a Latin American left which thought it could change things. But that seemingly took forever in blue jeans.

Modernism changed literature and left it for dead, which does not mean that content will not continue to be sold as impulse products for consumers, but what has modernism done to the moral glue, the third chimpanzee's empathy? And by that I mean us, culling Jared's title. I have spent my entire life consuming the English novel and science fiction, and only later getting into the subtlety, sheer marvel, of the action taking place on the continent. Stendhal is more than Balzac's equal, and I can only wonder at where Marcel picked up his cues, not quite 100 years later-- but Joyce? If we were to superimpose Ulysses onto the scripts for The Following, aren't we saying that an abstract modality, taken to its absurd forms, makes it easier to clear the way for immolation? And yes, I get the subversive irony of the fact that James Purefoy brings the terminal degree scholar into the ever burgeoning tent of the American serial killer (hello to my internal vengeance driver). Late 20th century cold war thrillers were an early version of this video game mentality, with the real monster being the American operative flipped for money, or the thrill of it.

In the good old days, I would not have feared a Soviet agent. The Soviet agent believed in what Lenin and Stalin bequeathed, but today's Russian thugs lead us back to Bulgakov's ridicule, which doesn't need an apologia for its reductionist, dystopian tendencies. Bulgakov may not be the best counter example for me to use to bolster hostility towards Joycean meta-fictional overlay, because I may hear the jazz in Mikhail's masterpiece, but cannot say he is right about Christian orthodoxy, but unlike Joyce, Bulgakov is empathetic to the need for hope.

I said something stupid in group when some there asked me if I was a grad student. I said we have a lot to blame the Modernists for, in the accusative. Let me put it this way: I doubt Joyce could have foreseen Osama Bin Laden, but I can see what the rise of Al Qaida means when I read the mock epic of this over educated Anglo-Irishman.

Since I had my bowel impaction yesterday, went off schedule, and have to go to the store, I leave you with that questionable lucidity.

Ostler Lone

The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Thomas Paine

Methinks I am as comfortable as I am going to get this afternoon, with this body always in pain and nearly always rank; had something of a near miss with my feminine urinal so you can add caffeine laden piss to that, my continual coffee intake either masking or preventing diabetes. I don't suppose German netizens wish to inform me why they are my most numerous viewers after those in the US? Any recommendations? I am an extraction of Mengele manufacture without benefit of concentration camp assembly. His eugenics legacy lives on, in much the same way that Gene Hackman is always Gene Hackman and yet inhabits his characters, with the possible exception of his supporting role in Lilith, but even there, he was an adept shrub. And it is quite a distinct idiolect, one that not every actor can inhabit, being Buzz Lloyd and yet distinctively Hackman, in simultaneous fashion. Marooned is ruthless in its imprint of the American global ascent, and I'd in fact argue it is almost as post modern as this guy's work. It is a film without pretense despite a multi-layered contrivance, powerful for those of us who actually lived through the aspirations of the   Apollo missions, as I did. Gregory Peck insinuating suicide to Richard Crenna and getting away with it for the utilitarian good of NASA? This is the decade that was covert about my mother's suicide attempts, a woman who should have been institutionalized, and wasn't. Before she died she told me that, my mother: Had Pauline and Louis her father committed her she would have gotten worse. Not for me to speculate, but her children would not have suffered Stuart Lone, who remains on my hit list (and that my former supervisor ranks nearly in parity to this stepfather, in this exclusive club, tells you how seriously I take her criminality), finger fuck step father who attempted to rape a nine year old girl and made me sick on Jack Daniels so he could violate me. Let Blogger ban me for being desirous of his murder. Monster. Filth. I shall not forgive. I cannot, not for the suffering he inflicted on me, on my sister, now estranged.

This is the reason this series is making me uneasy. Not that I don't *get it,* of course I do. Malevolence can be as methodical as police investigations for the greater good. Prior bad acts can lead us one way or another, but it is still a difficult show, symptomatic of our national ailment, and it doesn't have to be that graphic not to make me want to vomit at its implications.

There is a brief description toward the end of Cormac's nuke porn where diarrhea is dribbling down the father's pant leg, a mortality signature signifying the price this man paid to keep his boy alive. This was my mother's second husband, jigging around on a heroin crash with shit spilling out of his crack, seeping into his denim. The Presbyterians browbeat me for 28 years after on the sentiment that cleanliness, divinely guided, is curative towards the scars of such trauma. Personally, seeing the backend of my domestic malfeasance in blackface only accentuates my despair of humanity. You no doubt see this as narcissistic, but this is how I'm feeling today, arthritis easing momentarily.

Exeunt With The Bear

I'm like a connoisseur of champagne cognac, the perfume nearly beats the taste. Pete Townsend, Empty Glass

I spent a very unproductive day chasing after these Tuesday, trapezing on Locust, which I rarely do, kicking myself over my imposing introduction to @PhillyTechGuy. Could have cut my crisis time in half. Possibly saved a few dollars. Getting laid momentarily crossed my mind; their pitch is accurate, however, and the store seems pleasant. Do I ever drop my pretense?

I was not as invested in Dorner's issues as my posts on the event he posed may seem to indicate, not in terms of taking him off the beat and assessing his impaired judgment, but had he escaped it would have been thrilling. The DC sniper scared the living shit out of the east coast. I was there, and like a substantial minority in the media, I thought the US faced the possibility of an insurrection. Muhammad's death was nearly sanctifying in light of that possibility. Dorner's? Idiotic. It seems apropos then that I came in a little late to The Following. Better production values than the CW's tacky rival. Bacon when he is on, solidly grounded. Emma is an elfin echo of Mia Farrow. Muhammad could have had an insurrection; he was methodical enough, cold enough, and this is what made the true aspect of humanity's universal tendency to close ranks behind authoritarianism rear its head against Dorner. He was one of the very few who could boast leverage; he succeeded in illustrating that but had no real contingency thought out so that the abused, the wronged, the angry, could have united behind him. I certainly would have, all things being equal, had he truly applied his intelligence as opposed to raving on FB. Many courageous historians point out, accurately, that the US is democratic in its rhetoric, and tyrannical in practice, re: the moment I committed to paper that I would be seeking legal action against my landlord, they started leaving me alone. After 28 years of dictation on how they want me to live, Presby and their regulators have gone mute, one, because they are fully aware that in their book, spastic has no civil liberties, and two, they are up to no good, so I really need a public housing attorney. Injuries may magnify, but sometimes they have legitimate cause, and my pain is in part a reaction against black bigotry, with their white managers pulling the strings. Presby suits are far more fearsome than Catholic molesters. Let Karen chaw a pithy tweet out of that contention.