Orwell in Dubai

Italy is a peninsula that acquires the shape of a boot.

In his 2003 physique, Tim Robbins looks churlish naked. Perhaps he is supposed to look that way as Code 46 draws to a close, with Samantha Morton showing Deborah Winger how it's done if you you want to challenge ethnic types. There is a bit of Sheltering Sky to this speculative venture, one which doesn't add any additional spice with ad hoc contraceptives. Other than that, Winterbottom and Boyce paint a depressingly accurate portrait of our future, regardless of what we believe about the ability of neurologists to manipulate our minds.

There is also an aura of fatalism about European/American individualism invariability giving way to Asia's sheer mass. Was this intentional? The film ends with Morton's ironic glance of knowing the pleasures of defiance, enough to suicide by or take comfort in. In the past, Tom Reid and I would have talked about it for awhile; it's the type of film which would have interested him. I no longer have college friends, and but for digital props, it was as forceful as The Man from Earth, virtually free of anything but good acting and Tony Todd engaging in cream puff antics better suited to Forest Whitaker having a mood swing. There is depression, and there is the downer of an accurate portrait of where our societies are headed.

Damage Differential

The pubs and eateries along my radius on Walnut Street have a certain old city charm, and the Cafe at 2011 can boast a certain picturesque insularity, this wounded warrior gratified, that, last spring, the burly Irish got me over the innocuous step, onto the portable ramp, and I set eyes on the Black Adder for the first time, sort of indicting myself for a now pronounced anti-social aura that radiates from me, as I asked him if I could "stay". His response: All are welcome, and while I am not quite as committed an ideologue as he, I've become emotionally invested in the Liberty on the Rocks Meet Up.

But I'm self-conscious in terms of my physical dilapidation. This is  not to convey I was ever great at flaunting my femininity through dressing. Orthopedic surgery made my flexed contortions worse even in youth, but I have graduated, since I wiped out my savings in 2013,  toward a more thorough deterioration. I look like someone now living off the street, except when the will that has kept me alive resurges. Episodic breakthroughs.

I'm also tired of sitting outside, forcing my boys (whoa!) to sit with me on the sidewalk tables when they'd rather congregate in the bar. It is chilly now, and even if the thick set Irish firefighters were so inclined to haul the Jazzy Quantum up the plank, I cannot risk a circuitry breakdown as a result. My Quickie P-200 was already battered that spring, and was off balance, falling apart, so I cannot assume a gratifying struggle to enter the Cafe actually shorted it. I live in the power chair, and no model is that durable, but the Quantum is basically a battery and a plastic caster wheel casing, metal base, and I hate the fucking thing, know it cannot be subjected to punishment. If I attend, therefore, I will be consigned to waving at the guys through the window, feeling alienated as a result, irritated with my hearing loss--but the group matters to me. I've developed an emotional attachment to center city's marzipan radicalism. What to do?

I no longer support the Americans With Disabilities Act. It is a useless statue if properly scrutinized, and for every activist victory, there is regulatory pushback. The owner of the Cafe should not have to modify his establishment for a former middle class cripple on the skids, nearly deranged from the banquet of human suffering exposed and experienced in the Quaker geography of Southeastern Pennsylvania; Black Adder cannot be blamed for picking a location not modified for access, and it may be I am not perceived the way I imagine. It is equally true that I cannot fully engage if the clique has to be charitable by making a point of coming to me. They are there to mildly booze and share a meal while discussing politics. I am there to constrain my inner Mussolini from engaging in a shoot out with federal agents. Maybe one or two of them could hook me on downers, but it is not particularly a soluble issue. If Tom Reid were to pop up, and remember our off campus watering hole called Walios, he'd look at that continuum, probably shocked to compare me as the undergraduate he knew then, turning herself a corkscrew for Tassoni, hanging on Jerry McGuire's sleeve, to the ravaged grand dame that a non-violent software developer, with some additional assistance from Tony Stiles, has to reign in. A handful of local anarchists, conservatives, proselytizers, to these I've attached such internalized importance, in the waning days of functionality. A real diehard libertarian would probably say that the doctors kept you alive as a body to be exploited, and that is just the way it is. Liberals may have felt it was their duty to lift up your potential toward inclusion, and your failure is on your own head for giving the socialist paradigm the finger.

The real truth of the matter lies in self-hatred, what I am, the hell I've seen, like the surgeon detective in Anno 1790, and that too, is insoluble. Quadriplegia is a bitch. I've lived it over a half century, and want to stop living it now, and in disability culture, that is heresy, grumbling. If I want to attend, then attend already. Sigh.

Arcs of Recreation

Become a Chimp Guardian-- a primatology motto

Gertrude Lintz is a period figure footnote, and the film based on her captive apes plays itself out like a comical footnote. Alan Cummings might as well have written a skit about getting his balls twisted, given his hyper manic throw away as the assistant. So much video footage is a form of trivial pursuit, and then there are auteurs, like Thomas McCarthy, whose work is so much more; then there is my annoying identification with Massa, the dead Massa, the movie puppet Massa who was evidently not Massa but another lowland gorilla who died in a circus, an attractive anadiplosis; not quite what I'm after.

Do socialites still exist? Our ape cousins only rate slightly higher on the commiseration scale than we do ourselves. They aren't quite human, and I was not entirely unmoved by Jane Goodall's life death and empathy in chimpanzee groups documentaries, but how often do we need to see agitated juveniles act out? Bush hunters poach them or slaughter them for food, and Europeans are still engaged in a jazz quartet with Darwin. Twinge with rebuff.

My post student interlude with Tom Reid was an important lull in my life, because Tom and I had shared sensibility and education in common, and maybe this is what my heart thought it might have relocated in fag boy Jesse, why his lurch off behavior hurts a little more. Marie said I would have made a pass at him, but I do not do forced conversions.

It did matter however, the hope of new relation, discovery of the other. He made me realize the extraordinary weight of the loneliness I carry, with his Google plus hockey mask image, and my Andrew Sullivan screen shot of the darkly overcast Amazon tower. Amy Purdy is the next generation; Sarah Kaufman's writing is of a caliber I once believed myself capable. I cannot enter into what resilience this young woman needed to come back from the devastation of meningitis, but the abyss she confronted, for me, is coming down to a stark choice: endure constraint and more indignity, or convince Final Exit to help me euthanize myself. 

Trail Mix

I wanted to discuss the Gilliam box set in depth, but the very nature of his direction makes this an arduous proposition, and The Fisher King, despite its humor towards social stratification and disruption, is too much Hollywood shellac on The Big Apple. This leads me to recycle Robin Williams and my wrestling match with his talent and sentimentality, his concealed diagnosis, and his interesting ambiguity in maturity, probably not a good idea to continue on in this vein, a bit puss weary from the radiator vapor, and good for me, I caught my drop in the toilet, but if not an accident, neither was it a clean run. IBS and Crohn’s disease doesn’t quite fit my issues with impaction; ulcerative colitis might be closer, and hence, I may not be able to struggle with Septa to go back to daddy until later tomorrow, or very early Thursday. Have I fucked myself royally? Should I take kimmy? I can’t really carry the carrier, meeting up with the wry Johnathan Pryce in the nuisance of Brazil’s blue dyed dystopia. Pryce was the best cast, and Brazil had the best doomed aspirational appeal of all four films, with its conclusion suggestive of clinical torture escaped through mythos with Kim Greist as nihilistic as it gets, gift wrapped in the fantastical, unless it’s Twelve Monkeys, with its muzzle flash panache. Willis and Pitt do a good job in this narrative puzzle, with its sinister subplot, but in terms of aesthetic criteria, this member of the box set pleases me least. Perhaps I will return for kimmy, but this opens more worms with futurist bag ladies and cats. If Brazil is midnight blue in its tenor, Monkeys is a garish yellow, a tilt toward Ra and the Earth’s inevitable roast in a nova, a proclivity toward human error doomed to repeat cycles of destruction. Both Monkeys and The Zero Theorem link mental affect to social disease, with mixed results, as any delusional state is a reflection of its place and time, like the rise of autism as an evolutionary subroutine. In terms of Gilliam’s legacy and his signature, a unique imprimatur in the marketplace of intellectual angst and our defeat by our own processes, this isn’t enough for my digestion, but I am disengaging my anchor at an age no one should, wondering how Robin’s hesitation marks apply. Brazil has a particular significance, of course, a shadow over my own aspiration, as fun as it was on the cinematic screen. It was not the last movie I’d experience in the traditional method of projector technology, but it was one of the best of the last, rivaled only by AI, with AI’s bummer of an end.