Riverfront Alignment with The Brookings Institution

"That is all I wanted!" -- Marthe Keller, dramatic flair

Whether it is Mrs Florrick senior with her post-stroke Cuban nurse, or Marthe Keller behaving like a grand duchess playing off Aaron Eckhart and a Parisian actress of Tunisian descent, video entertainment integrates care giving as a contrivance that helps the elderly stay on their feet, but this isn't what happened to me. A power chair failed, and then I was tortured for the better part of seventeen months by what is now being termed the pink police in intellectual circles, just another nail nail in the coffin of personal liberty, part and parcel of the defeat of free speech Jamie Kirchick so eloquently expresses sotto voce in The Washington Examiner. Right after that link, he tweets a politico link about the dark side of gay innuendo, to which my private smirk is a deft act of self-depreciation. 

I am supposed to go to Magee Riverfront later on this afternoon with the paraprofessional whose first base transference and a hedge of tongue was a mistake. I cannot pity his cognitive and self-limitations too much, as I thank god sexual intercourse did not come to pass. I hate the man, not particularly sanguine about our stroll to the hospital for the courtesy van to Magee's Riverfront location. I do not really want to go. This poorly fitted Quantum via Mainline Medical isn't their fault, and even if they're willing to rectify the problem, the correction will be lengthy, arduous, and I am already barely able to maintain continence over the course of these nullifying seventeen months. With the way Galahad and I presently engage, we may not make it as is. His automobile has failed, and he is therefore under more duress, and onward. No contrivance here, no holistic pair bonding via Bryan Cranston's re-packaging of a French original. Barring a coronary, I'll be back this evening.

Constantly Maligned, the Fang's in Travis Kauffman's Foreaem

"They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgement.-- Zora Neale Hurston

The word I would use is elegiac, as opposed to Poniewozik's elegant, in a description of Matthew Weiner’s The Romanoffs, whose title itself suggests something which is a knock off of an original. I would also suggest that it is fine for viewers to be mystified by how these short movies link together to make an anthology.  The strongest of them is the episode “The Royal We,” which the NYT features in its still photo of Kerry Bishe on a cruise for modern day survivors of the original Romanov family, of whom her husband happens to be one. Kerry, as Shelly, is simply an all-American girl, bohemian enough to get stoned over pizza in her off hours, trying to sort out her husband Michael. Corey Stoll has to suffuse himself as the missing link, tying the knot between Nicholas as the disconnected Victorian Czar about to be sacrificed for the new world order of egalitarianism which we’ve all learned since is a utopian fiction, and the sobering existential angst of the Slavic dark side to brutality. To break away from Shelly’s festering befuddlement, Michael leans into jury duty, and this has its own grotesque allure. You might reflect on how “The Violet Hour” leads to a pregnancy. Aaron Eckhart, despite ostensible star power, behaves like a sheep dog in it, his pleasures as furtive as Stoll’s remorse following on its heels. I never engaged in due diligence on Eckhart following his incisive energies which makes In The Company of Men such a powerful nihilist statement, but Weiner allows the actor some autobiographical footnotes which I certainly found more convincing than his character’s overflow of sexual conquest in the guise of an American dilettante. Ines Melab does better constructing her road map with Keller than as the distressed Tunisian Hajar about to hurl into social alienation but for Eckhart’s bumbling nonchalance finding a cornerstone of appearance and propriety for the sake of what appearance and propriety entail. In its way it’s a more sophisticated upgrade on the Florrick’s marriage of convenience revealing that relationships are more complex than mere residual unhappiness of a mistake.

The dowager wearies of The Good Wife as a foretelling of a Hillary presidency ghosted into a backlash upon which Trump capitalized, and may leave off where it is, with Peter in his effervescent governorship, Alicia with her self-assertion, and Will Gardner on his rampage towards Josh Charles’ exit from the series, effectively killing it. Isn’t Will a senescent liberalism in decline as well, or Diane Lockhart? What concerns me more than Mueller’s quest for integrity, and possible failure to bring down Trump’s crust of an old boys network, is what this undercurrent of appeasement toward Putin is supposed to yield. Its five day old war with Georgia reestablished the Russian Federation as "as a military power" in the words of Sarah Pruitt. Even before Putin emerged after Yeltsin, how was this ever not the case, even with but a limited tutorial available on the Crimean War with the British Empire, before revolutionary dissents within Russian amassed under Lenin? American media figures with access claim that Michael Flynn allowed himself to be orchestrated by Russia’s imitative propaganda machine, which can mimic the western press so cleverly as to not have a valid issue to raise now and again, but even if we accept, as per Obama Administration issues with temperament, that Flynn is a cracked vessel, he spent his career in military intelligence. If were going to think along nice big and easy puzzle pieces, then the argument can be made that contemporary civilization is yoked to the US Russia and China. If their interests were aligned than the rest of Europe might be a mere pacified inconvenience. Matthew Weiner’s fourth episode, “Expectation” entangles itself in a web of mendacity ending in an emergency surgery for gallstones. Telling, in Weiner’s polite request that we apply ourselves.