Cringe

Levels of vengeance are coded comparatively. Delight in Ray Liotta's machinations as Wozniak and distaste for Warren Kole's agent Stahl as overly self-righteous still falls within the parameters of a revenge fantasy, even if we weigh how far we're willing to see a world weary lieutenant go. So far Adi is letting Wozniak hold his own, seasoned enough to process rationalizations and methodology, not quite a full sociopath. Invariably, NBC will have an entertaining antagonist fall. Woz will go too far and even wicked delight will turn against him; J-lo will be scathed but left with the possibility of redemption, because this is still television land. Though it is fair to say dirty cops usually get exposed in the real world. This is why beat reporters exist. The Wilkins case, however, is irreparable, and seems to hinge on some bizarre evolutionary throwback. Stealing newborns occurs in the wild, but cases like this, along with aggression in the elderly, and the gruesome microwaved baby case, veer toward unimaginable unease with the inexorable pressures of primate domestication. 

Images of that litigation were never forgotten: the mother testifying on video so as to be shielded from public outrage. Killing a newborn is one thing. Cooking it to death invites bile to rise in the back of our throats. How does an incident like that even happen? Lane's alleged attack is as equally visceral and unfathomable and if found guilty she should be executed, on either a material or metaphysical basis. If we're just a smart bit of meat, the meat doesn't need that mitochondrial DNA perpetuating itself, and if humans indeed have souls, Lane fed hers into a psychosis which is better off dead. Even in the dark side of Mario Puzo's world, the author's intimations about why Vito kills an infant stays within tolerable limits, rather than mere sensational butchery. How poor Michelle Wilkins ever truly recovers from this is beyond anyone's capacity to actualize, even within a world view poisoned by lifelong medical, regulatory regimentation. It would be rather a highbrow solace if NBC allows Wozniak to emerge victorious, the cult hero with blood on his hands, still a Brooklyn capo.

A dowager's bitterness is also in part about her own naivete, so invested in intellectual authority, in literary journal submissions, in independent living paradigms, as a way of life. I was a hot property as a student, and beyond, and now I'm sick of it, an advocate of giving idealists brutishly short lives.

Peachy Keen

It is difficult to hold within our grasp that not all historical undercurrents have closure. Tuberculosis was a fungal epidemic effectively beaten back in the 1950's with derivatives of the breakthrough antibiotic of the 20th century, and hygiene campaigns which followed in its wake, but AIDS saw the condition make a comeback. As a terminal illness, it manufactured at least one serial killer in Doc Holliday. Stacy Keach portrays the gambler as an embittered existentialist against Faye Dunaway, in yet another revisionist Western. As a bio pic, in this part, Keach manages to transcend his composite swash buckler who pretends. It might have something to do with necessarily being as large as an embittered legend, liberated in having nothing to lose. Why Dunaway challenges her glamorous hauteur by enveloping herself in a wardrobe of slutty trash remains an unconvincing perplexity, but her Katie Elder is suitable playing off of Keach's manic undercurrent, bumbling their way about the set like paper cut outs, doomed by corruption and conspiracy. The Doc Keach adorns is naive in small ways, able to be taken in by the Mexican inn keeper for a pricey sum, or sold a house incautiously, and yet remains a man of leonine ruthlessness, calling a bluff, or aiming to kill.

To wit, though I am patently indifferent to national politics as having any bearing on Philadelphia as a cesspool of incompetent depreciation, I may rally around Ben Carson. Not to make too much of the contradiction in terms. Certain kinds of experience cuts across identity, and I comprehend, as a life long recipient of institutional stricture, why a black neurosurgeon would become a reactionary defining zones of exclusion. Can he win the nomination? Can he beat Hillary? What the fuck do I know?

But the possibility of igniting a third world war is exciting, so I'll wait in the wings with the fiery torches glaring from my pupils. Maybe I'll send his campaign a few dollars, Joan d'Arc in search of a sword and zeal, the thirst for cleansing purity. I had a difficult Wednesday on 10/14.

The devil is in the nose

It's all part of an effort to bring attention to "Red Nose Day," which started in Britain in 1988 to raise money for poverty-stricken children in the UK and Africa.-- Todd Leopold

Part of what makes the career arc of Price interesting, aside from Tim Burton's panache in utilizing how an old man would die from emphysema, is the dramaturgic hints of truly great acting beneath the surface, which forms the irony of his later horror comedies, although he did try to play Richard the III seriously in an old black and white, and it was a bad performance. Yet, in The Song of Bernadette, Price was the Grand Inquisitor, and he wasn't a joke; he was frightening, as anyone would be in threatening prison to a future saint, borderline savant, persecuted for not towing the line. How well researched the screen play for Saint Bernadette was remains beyond my purview, but the film respects its audience, and has interesting things to say about caste, about chronic illness, disruption, and the criminalization of poverty, long before it became vogue to a modern progressive sensibility.

If actors become typecast due to their range limits, need for money, the impetus to keep working, Vincent Price leaves room for doubt, the possibilities of richer interpretation only occasionally realized. The meta-fictional Madhouse (1974) toys with hamming it. Peter Cushing also had minimal straight screen roles before he started killing vampires and dying as the mad scientist, but the realism beneath the camp genre is not quite edgy enough, and Pinewood Studios dropped an egg, perhaps because Vincent wouldn't quite be pushed. Cushing had moments of true stark menace here, but this was 74. Watergate, and radicalism opted to get a bit puffy, losing its way in the stuff of being a fashion statement. There is a great deal of this in Vincent's 70's films. Spoofing the textures, the hair, the rich cuisine. Only in The Whales of August, up against Bette Davis in tenacious infirmity does he tone down this mercurial quality. This was his true swan song to those whom he became endeared to over the years-- not Burton's fantasy about human nature, but as an aging ladies' man too emotionally brittle for constancy, a sweet and vulnerable dilettante. He certainly wasn't my generation, and skirted the edges of my grandparents time, but he is irreplaceable, however thick the melodrama.

If you'd like me to surprise you  with a positive diachronic movement in time, one of the members of Liberty on the Rocks was involuntarily kind to me at the last meeting. I have forgotten what that is like, to be offered attention, friendship, without an ulterior motive, without throwing myself at the man, without pushing any buttons, without using digital space to push limits. It won't save a hair on my dry and peeling scalp, but I suppose it is why we cling to life.

Fish, Chips, Tuberculous Hip

"Al Pacino was successful playing Richard the Third because he understood the nature of power." --Jerry McGuire, approximately

In the annals of local color, politics can still provide fonts of amusement, the representatives and constituents colliding like asteroids in the void. I am watching the auteur of the effeminate reconstructions implode Truman Capote, so I am typing slowly, still a student when I viewed his last television appearance--the actual person-- in 1984, obviously in the grip of alcoholic dementia, as is not quite the case with  Dick Cavett. We applaud Hoffman for his talent, and that seared underbelly he captures in relation to the wicked under bite of the homosexual male, one which provides theorists with their relentless apologias, yet if I assert how punishing LGBT interactions have been for me as a disabled woman trying to do the right thing on progressive rails, getting damaged, that is all of freak flag reactionism. In the end, it's all about the scaffold, how we build our towers. Weeping old woman, political aides. If I really do launch myself as a crusader in this twilight of my life, what will it amount to? Cripples will still sit discarded in lobbies, victims created on finer and finer threads of discrimination. Monogamy will still find its way into curiosity shops

Comfort food. Herring, hash browns, diced onion, oysters, olive oil. It took me two days to convince myself to prepare my favorite entree, to swallow my 1200 milligrams of salmon over it, and now I need my shower, to go buy tins of ground offal for my substitute feline children. The condition of my edition of To The Lighthouse is worse than the sweat of indifferent hygiene, however, a problem which seems to plague Jon Avnet's direction of 88 Minutes. The narrative is a world weary affect of an old man who pissed off his brand due to economic necessity. My heart still throbs when I look at Al Pacino on camera, but if you'd like me to strum it simply, I could kick him for being a mule. The opening rape scene is an exercise in graphic lack of tact, Pacino seems to wander around on location waiting for Hades to make up his mind about where the famous Italiano will spend eternity, and yet there is a sleazy subtext that someone like me recognizes, all the triggers that go off in superlative fucking of the mentor, or maintaining chastity in the sexual tension. I grew up with Mario Puzo. But his dramatic conceits which ossified the Sicilian stereotype was a love letter. Al seems determined to make us regret those dried petals in the scrap book, with that ridiculous bouffant. McDonough's first instincts to give up on acting were the correct ones.

I am beginning to learn that no one really knows what they're doing, and thus the exposure of the reporter will always be valid. I intend to keep going; if Google wants to shut me down when I hit hard, that is up to them. It is their service. I may obfuscate my agenda from time to time, but I do believe in my conviction that if I fight back, the next spastic may be spared the wicked corruption and trauma to which I have been subjected. Raising my voice has risks.

I am taking them.