General's Patience

"I like girls too."-- Elton John with Kiki Dee appeasing heterosexual conventions when he was a seventies concern

I was once a fanatic for the work of Elton John, and yet, for all that, could never get close, five minutes away from speaking to Taupin on live radio, the producer had a leg crossing discomfort with my question, would not let me through, and then I heard it reiterated in the disc jockey's interview. Fans let things like that go. I've come to regret it, the fanaticism, touched on it previously, and could not follow the seasoned artist's twitter account. The scathing subversive underbite of Elton at his best warped the way I looked at the world, and I had an infantile dismay with his sexuality. Exactly why mystifies me, amid his dichromatic flamboyance, more fascination with it than attraction to it, his weakness was maudlin pathos.

Billy Senese cannot be accused of maudlin pathos. Closer To God alludes and alludes, and yet it is a very crisp film, and rather realistic, however unfortunate this is for the genome project. The tracks of a shrieking baby stay with you. The true climax of the film pierced, and it pierced despite the fact that it was gaming the viewer with Larry Cohen's monster baby. Right before the close of the story, Victor's original child, not meant to survive, goes on a rampage. Jeremy Childs croons to it, Baby Ethan, to lure it in out of necessity, and then Ethan runs to the doctor. flinging his arms around the waist of creator father. The shrieking stops, consolation mitigates its suffering, momentarily, only to be betrayed by a lethal injection, the shrieking starts again, desperate with pain, crescendos into a collapse, overpowered by the chemical overdose. Remove the camp, as Senese does, and discover that a horrified sensibility doesn't know quite which way to turn. The script is not perfectly derivative, but Senese has courage in his daring use of pressure points. I don't envision the science of cloning as a midnight scenario, messy and clinical in parts, as alarming as some transhuman issues. The minute Dolly became cost effective, the fate of manipulating our own bodies was sealed. The only reason a human clone hasn't been done, or revealed, is because geneticists aren't keen on being assassinated, but it is also biologically regressive, like homosexuality itself. Cloning is an inefficient and less viable method of replication. Sexual reproduction was the advance, enabling evolution in its diversity and success: leave it to apes to get excited about stimulating an ovum into carbon copies.

Despite the camp, and its lack of a surgical impricator, the trailer for It's Alive frightened me. I've never been able to shake it off, like one of Warfield's impossible layouts. Patience is not an easy solitaire, but General's Patience is a brain atrocity, a pattern so rigid it's nearly impossible to break. I'd suggest, if you enjoy computer cards, hacking your download to cheat it. You'll live longer.

Carmel in the Niger Sky

This consisted of gentle prods, ridicule so faint and unfocused that it always could be given a flattering turn if necessary. [sic] Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, loc 894

One of the most heuristic of my viewing pleasures was experiencing Peter Falk in Wings of Desire, even if his cameo does indeed feel like a post production interjection in a beautifully romantic and aspirant enterprise. One of his shortest appearances, also his sharpest, radiant with benevolence. It takes such darkness torturing a muzzled poet's spirit to see such light, light we no longer have with the death of presence.

Johnny Cash was doing what any celebrity does in his appearance on the Columbo episode "Swan Song," cashing it the chips. In many ways, this script is one of the more annoying ones, a bit cockamamie, the evidence against the gospel singer pretty much snatching a kid's hand out of the cookie jar, because there was no other way to do it other than through turning the screws on Cash's dark side, whatever items at the site of the plane crash didn't add up. Had the celebrity as nemesis kept his composure, and his broken leg, on a cushion, the forerunners of progressive guilt conscious television would have had a more difficult resolution. This is a reluctant way of admitting Jerry's aesthetic insights into pop culture trump my own, because The Rockford Files remains fresher, more telling on contemporary American angst, than Levinson's morality play, ferreting out the egotism, or giving Johnny Cash his redemption for bilking Ida Lupino's astringent.

To deescalate a little further, as stupid as Kojak is in its hyperbolic urban anxiety, it most aptly captures what the 70's were, if you ignore the plots, and simply breathe its urban exposition. Combine all three shows into an overlaying collage gives an accurate portrait of what haunts my generation: the loss of giants in whom we had moral guides. Of course Cash (and even Falk) had a certain systemic shallowness, the capped teeth, the megalomania, to a degree, but they were touchstones: Falk, Cash, Savalas, with very long genomes behind them. Gardner a little less, because maverick was about as far as his range could go. To transplant myself from this to the black brotherhood was fatal, whether or not my skimming, silent viewers comprehend.

Even if I'm lenient to looks. One of the guards, Anthony, talked to me the week of 5/10/16, perhaps because he felt bad witnessing another brother trash me, and asked me if I was still writing. For once in my life, I was unmoved, as starved for human interaction as I remain. I'll get over Vinnie's death, horrible as it was for me to be forced to use animal control, but something has broken, not to be captured through any blatant expose of a hobbled gimp, trying to outrun his own demons of indulgence.

Clarence Williams III, Dawn dolls in a playhouse

"In addition to Mod Squad, Aaron Spelling and I picked up two Walter Brennan shows, Tycoon and The Guns of Will Sonnett (a fair sized hit)." --Make Room for Danny, 262

In the stray preoccupations which wool gather at 4:20 AM eastern standard time, as if I was reverting to form to get ready for work at the defunct Institute to whose demise I contributed, catching 3/4 ths of Peggy Lipton's vulnerability, vaguely recalled, if Danny Thomas and Aaron Spelling truly knew anything about counter culture dynamics, it isn't evident in this stock formula series, with Richard Dreyfuss, fresh from his celebrity pairing with Amy Irving, or about to head into it, providing us with the most well mannered recital of a psychotic imaginable-- yes, yes, cable was in its infancy and the FCC and terms of service are staple gun muzzles wiring our jaws, but all Squad did for its audience was cater to appearances, to the point even those sorely scored could feel commiseration for Williams' afro standing at attention.

One of the best serials in the 70's might be Columbo, but that would take Levinson and Falk's morality battle out of context. Aquarius may taken great care with its time capsule authenticity, and may even be more accurate in its undercurrents, as we owe so much to the golden state, but the Manson family was its own thing, analogous to the Mormons under Joseph Smith as being not quite kosher, which it isn't. Manson's followers, being really, really out on a limb, nevertheless was a reversion to an earlier American period of denominational instability under the Protestant tent. As a reformer, Luther certainly never intended to fragment Christianity into shards, but he also didn't do it any favors when it comes to transplantation in the United States. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of a series that really encapsulates my place and time as it was without going off a cliff. All in the Family turned a veteran icon into a cult hero, but Archie was a comic book exaggeration, as was the Jeffersons. Eight is Enough merely reigned in the impossible stupidity of the Brady Bunch. I'd pick The Six Million Dollar Man if I had to, but this, again, contextualizes another set of anxieties, apt, but miscued, since our fusions to technology are playing out a bit differently. We're not augmenting ourselves into a super-race, merely ensuring our essential human extinction. Then again, maybe it's Happy Days, if we take the notion of period piece nostalgia out of it.

A better ad in: The Partridge Family. As a series, it was soft folk song and dance, but it hit the right tenor for significant changes in the nuclear family

Our films, here and there, do a better job, and The Driver, though its minimalism is rigorous and circumscribed, is one of them. 

Though golden state vibes are not particularly auspicious to spastic's sentiments, she very cautiously explored Yabberz, and their no-over-the-line fury is reasonable. This doesn't mean I'm tamed, trust me. I know physically I am on thin ice, and economically I'm overwhelmed. I'm simply not a Caesar alpha with his skill set and ability to command an insurrection; to wit, Danielle Allen has an op-ed in Wapo which I'm not reading where she makes a clarion call about Trump's threat to democracy. That is an exaggeration on her part, but in truth of fact, Americans don't know what they mean by a free society. If the first amendment can't withstand what Donald is tapping into, then we aren't an attributable experiment in free exercise.

To the progressive mindset, I've freely admitted I am, within varying flavors, a homophobic bigot, without necessarily vying for a piece of Coulter's turf, since I've been too much inside of a bubble which most of you aren't, as a quadriplegic. Whether I go "too far," for Blogger or anyone else, one, it doesn't matter. Richard Spencer plays up ethnographic separation for money and I'm too old to play follow the leader for a supremacist who would no more lift a finger to get me out of here and let me enjoy my last years anymore than anyone else. I'm damned, rage or acceptance notwithstanding. For Trudy Richardson to deploy HHS to threaten me with Inglis House, after the battle for my life, is something maybe you cannot grasp. I've been 30 years under Presby and seen countless tenants forcibly placed. My intellectual acumen was supposed to withstand this. Trudy didn't scare me, trust me. All she did was make me measure death by cop against my other options.

Guillero del Toro knows better than a cousin

del Toro's 1997 Mimic isn't worth a great deal of time to spend on, and the studio system realized this by producing the sequels direct to DVD, but it is worth mentioning in terms of how American social anxieties evolve. Just as in The Exorcist, del Toro holds the audience with a minister being consumed, and while it might be a demon doing the killing, it is instead a super insect genetically engineered by an entomologist trying to combat a pathogen taking out your children, your blessed future.

Here, as in every New York City film, Dutton is the good tough love cop, whose class tensions with white over-educated liberals are resolved due to united combat against a human manufactured threat,
Giancarlo Giannini developing an interesting if fleeting niche as the world weary European slated for elimination, since he does this against Hopkins playing Hannibal as well, but the problem with the movie is del Toro is stuck with his fly open between convention and taking himself seriously, and can't pull it off. The special child only recognizes that giant insects are inhabiting dangerous abandoned places, and is not killed by the females for reasons we cannot fathom, other than the graphic murder of children is a last wavering line imagists aren't allowed to cross. It always occurs off camera, and if you look at old formula westerns, they did not lack for viciousness despite the two dimensional nature of the scripts. The villain took the Colt prop and killed a wailing baby, if necessary. All the strange child offers in Mimic is the driven sense of urgency. Guillero tapped the right vein; the elements brought to bear on it weren't cohesive enough. 

Carter's Bell Curve

The interview O'Neal does with Smiley, which I highlighted in the spring of 2012, remains interesting because the normal studio promotion mesh falters, grinds to a halt, and the actor with his cancer, disabled son, and his tinsel worship of Farrah seems shallow and incongruous. Overlay this on a method film like The Driver, and an interesting language develops. Bruce Dern, always the prickly pear, has continued on in old age with strong supporting roles, but O'Neal is an echo of the smooth seventies lead, smooth, but intense in investment, nothing but a polite fiction of constraint, ushering in the modern age in which Carter himself is an animated mummy, religious in his humble ex-President striving to save all of West Africa, and though The Driver hasn't a word to say about politics it speaks volumes about Carter era liberalism fallen flat on its face. This was the period of my youth, when the car chase was the studio technological meme, speed rubber asphalt and cool, these the delineated weapons, the process had its own goals toward affluent living on the graft-- crack wasn't yet the new boogie man but the me decade was ripe for it, in their wing tips and thin suits-- all that sturm and drang with its polite codes-- today's police would laugh at Dern's honor system, and Ryan's character could have been arrested for intent even with the empty attache case which closes the film.

The brutality here isn't about much, other than a breach, which, nearly 35 years after the fact, is nearly laudable by contemporary standards. Everything digitized, with GPS, skills with an engine on wheels has been relegated. We watch people in space suits go very fast on tracks with sponsors, helmets, sometimes watching drivers die anyway, fully insured for the risks, the emptiness in excelling at something for nothing, bound by a nearly Victorian entrapment, if not the money, or the law itself, then, simply giving the finger, a gesture of defiance. Intriguing, what it does to people. O'Neal, quieter than others I've mentioned, was a shaper of my era, but if I met him, I'd be uncomfortable, having perceived a little too much about him, not caring for his aura of unpleasantness.

Recognition is strange and intangible in that way, because with a very few, and in my case it would be that, a few select, I'd behave like a fan-- but not with O'Neal. Odd. I may revisit this, not satisfied. but intuitive to a fact that I'm onto the scent of a thesis.