"Kate Simon reveals the special charms of the Umbrian hill towns, the enchantments of the Etruscan tomb paintings." Jacket blurb, The Places In Between
The injury which Ken Wahl sustained on the set of Wiseguy during the Tucci Pizzolo segment was mere happenstance, luck of the draw, much as his neck injury was bipedal carelessness, something which fame may aggrandize, and yet, if Umberto Eco wrote a pendulous attack on hermeneutics with his convoluted novel Foucault's Pendulum (read more than twice), it is not so easy for humans to dismiss pattern recognition. We're configured for it, and the familiar things of more vigorous adulthood are sometimes recognized with shock, recollected schematics much easier to grasp in scope: As an actor, Ken Wahl wore his emotions and his retro-eighties shag doo hairstyle on his sleeve, for me, back then, just more disco culture transplanted onto an organized crime drama which was already part of a bygone era, an era which Mario Puzo captured and magnified for studio players to glorify. Michael Corleone's power, in other words, went the way of the Kennedy brothers as martyrs. We either bury the JFK, RFK assassinations, and move on, knowing the Warren Commission never answered the public unease, or drive ourselves crazy.
Cannell's show was window dressing the moral ambiguities of the 20th century coning to a close, which Kevin Spacey capitalized on to become one of the greatest actors of his time, great acting for which we nearly lack a syntax. Where Wahl is an open book, easily read, even if personally unknown, Spacey is a manipulative master of a humane but ruthless center, even in lesser films, he has the uncanny ability to keep his audience suspended on the wire, until delivery of the dénouement where he triumphs, whether or not Wahl's face was in the mix. Enter contemporary surrealism of 2016, since we're all on twitter with its massive micro data aggregation. I'm there, Wahl's there, and my cancerous aunt, the few thousand like her who find social media alienating aren't, but they, with the dowager and Ken Wahl only two decades behind them, are dying, in their last years, tick tock. A disabled woman makes an attempt to be heartfelt in her usual birdshot method, to a heartthrob of yesteryear who inadvertently took the punishments to his physique that his character sustained for dramatic continuance, followed him and retweeted his adoptive cause and he returned the favor, and to discover that at 2am, just transferring, sent a shot of adrenaline right through her heart, as if she could roll straight back to her hormone raging thirties.
I felt vulnerable, and emailed my sister like a squealing teen, as if tomorrow my knight will finally appear to ride me out of this corrupt African majority city because an actor was conciliatory, if cautiously so, as I also wasn't raunchy in my outreach, also careful, because his past brought me back to a collegiate womanhood before the worst wounds became an inhumane pin cushion, because he made me feel like an Italian American who would have her man, as was once hoped, instead of portents in busted legs getting injured by cameramen, signifying lack of heed for omens, for civilization under strain, the weight of lethargy a valve into which old age invariably gets bottled. I am not conciliatory. I did not vote for Trump because I think conservatives will give me vindication before I buckle under my own weight. I'm not one of the mogul's supporters. I simply understand his insensitivity, and since I wanted to make a choice, afraid of dying, I picked the lack of empathy I myself have learned and roared and got reported for numerous times already, knowing the Clinton mendacity would be worse than a dickhead from New York. As the national voice of Jewish motherhood, Marcus is already in histrionics, but fair is fair. My notes, too, however, are ossifying on a familiar scale, because all I have are the search for signs, the hope for magical evasions of burgeoning helplessness. You might ask what's wrong that a fleeting connection made me feel flush? Nothing, but it is the vain strength of days bygone, since every defecation, every move I make, is a balance on a tightrope whose safety net is effervescent.
"Do you know what they do to people who can't walk?"
--Dustin Hoffman
While I still have the ability to tell you about absence, one arm naturalized into a broken wing position, held in against the chest, spine tilting my larger breast to the right when I do not consciously fight my posture, my pelvic ligaments sliced by this American Baghdad butcher, who did for invasive orthopedic surgery what Henry Ford did for automobile assembly, so that my legs which I once long ago could command to motion, control through my own methods, on my knees, grabbing arms, standing, then pivoting carefully, hoisting myself, now dangle in useless, delicate constrictions of pain, echoes of foot fusions I should have fought, made my father annihilate me, as he no doubt wished, as sinister in the height of his strength as Kevin Spacey, when Kevin still had the intangible qualities of a box office draw, a zenith created by what? Talent? A slow dance with Helen Hunt, perhaps, in the usual mawkish morality tale?
In American Beauty, Spacey might have been an impersonation of my father, a slightly better constructed version, and thus worthy of my arms around his neck, inside the bubble of our own slow dance, lost into the unity and vulnerability of the other, the silent dialogic I wanted with this man, circumstances not sparing me from the observation of the fact that he had it with Gail, and you did too, as well, at your senior prom? Or at a wedding buffet? His arms encircled around your waist, in rhythmic accord. When I tried to believe, I bargained with your despicable icon to allow me to know this fullness of womanhood, as is proper, and if he does exist, I'd kill him, for he denied me this, but once, when John snuck up behind me in his winter jacket so I could feel how cold his hands were, but all I knew was the blood pounding in my temples, the knowledge in my soul that such a love with his arms around me, his children in utero, was the fulfillment, completion, and the loss that now defines the end of my life, tears still welling in my eyes, never to be held by the right one, the man who could see and read me, wrap his arms around me, insist we have a proper lunch as husband, as wife, dancing to the marvelous climax of the falsetto in the transition of Taupin's expression of passion from "we all fall in love, sometimes" to the somber melancholy of Curtains, I cannot even construct a false memory, never knowing your binary freedom, the right lover's hand cupping my face. There is no pill for this empty space, never shall be.
I would not mind going to Edgewater. Frank and I were still duking out the end game of our relationship as a couple when the building was going up; two minutes down the block from my building, and now you definitely know where I live, by inference if nothing else, it might as well be a world away, and in fact, when they were ready to inhabit, sent me a postcard, and I never bothered. Now cursing that lack of investigation, the man I spoke to did not sound sanguine, or if not that, at least vague enough to confuse me, asserting that "you would not qualify as a section 8 tenant." Why not if one of my former clients lives there under similar circumstances? Is it optimal? No, as I'd still be in the same location, a street over, but anything not Presby does remarkable things, lifts my spirit, restores hope, with the prospect of being able to tell Ms. Horne and her cohorts they can go fuck themselves royally making me chortle with glee, sheer delight to be free of shanty town. You have no idea the full extent of what the residents here have done to me-- it was not simply constant harassment by the managers, not simply my near death in Diamond Park, and the mere prospect of anything else not in a crime plagued environment, for my health, I need the hope of movement, after 27 years of dehumanizing bigotry, my god, no wonder I identify with the extremity of Taggart's pain, though I did not lose children and drive a spouse mad. Hesitantly, I believe last evenings pill did the trick, and I am "clear," to use the standard call of television cops, but we shall see. There have been no flares. Before we return to the long dangling Ricos, I want to expend just a little more energy on Newtown's grief, partly due to my own fantasy valve despair deposits, in which I take no pride, trust me, but after years of the action thriller implosions on screen, are we not saturated with these video special effects as an outlet?
The left is entirely correct on its political sentiments about automatic weapons and the ease of executions. I live in a city of which in circumference is 85 percent a war zone in waiting, after all, though I am not entirely sure that mental health services is any more than a polite euphemism, as I cannot say if I was not a cripple I would not have sustained this much damage. I am a cripple and my life was never anything else. The question is why those in pain resort to violence as opposed to those in pain who do not. What lifts lethargy to go outside of legal mechanisms in place? I do not need David Brooks to know that most mental health clients are bullshit artists, preying on the vulnerability of more stable service providers, and would no more be spree killers than my former writing friends, or current friends, like the novelist Gretchen Laskas (who will never speak to me again), or the poet Robert Thomas (who, all things being equal, probably will).
I think if you take the Virginia Tech shooter, the Aurora shooter, the Giffords attacker, Adam Lanza, that it runs deeper than weapons cancer, because guns have always been part and parcel of what forged American identity. We live in an age of autonomic desensitized alienation, fed on a diet of Kevin Spacey masterminds, and those who are sick get this same steady diet that hammers away at the fact that the human animal is expendable, and more than that, the poor, or those that climb, and then fall, are the unforgiven, and can thereby be bitch slapped in a bureaucracy that no one understands, nor is anyone accountable to it. All I want to do is safely relocate out of the city, and receive justice, but that is a virtual nightmare.
I have been to Farmington CT, and fell in love with the Yankee sensibility that made the US the beacon of the world, but that self reliance, hardy and firm, the point of departure for much of the corruption of worldliness in Henry James, has all but been vanquished by guilt and victimization, which I, as an ostracized disabled woman, have been very much a part, as much a part as Jovan Belcher, or Michael Vick. Forced social equality has assisted in lowering moral cohesion, whether or not you want to accuse me of oversimplifying, it is still the truth. Had I not fled my life in Ridley Park, I would not be a broken old woman exposing herself before you, not horrified by how tolerance represses the truth of what we live. Nor am I conveying that we should re segregate ourselves according to ethnic contours. But throwing out the cell phones and the rest of our gadgets, and not creating EEOC crimes in email, taking responsibility when we're wrong, and being honest that we are different, for Christ's sake, well, that is a start.
