Matters of Life and Death in an Aide de Camp

It's not your business -- a nursing aide in his degree of over-involvement

David Niven would decease just shy of a decade after starring in Vampira, a mindless piece of camp the dowager took solace from despite Prime's superfluous generosity, her bad leg an unremitting source of discomfort. Not a matinee idol of my time, he nevertheless radiates the humanism of the British Empire at its finest, cheapening himself in the decade of me, the decade of youth, with herein a breast and curvature patriarchal fantasy quite worthy of Hugh Hefner, who lasted with remarkable tnacity into the digital era. Beneath its superficiality, however, Vampira does for Niven what Assassination Tango does for Duvall with its much weightier center of gravity, allowing old dogs the assurance of relevance. Whatever feminine critics might say of the opening kill shot of the babette while the tourists wade in on the joke, Duvall plays the same game with December-male trophy status as Niven's handlers do 28 years before, scoring a few bimbo points on cross-ethnic sexual intimacy to boot, while the dowager misses making her own coffee, being alone and sleeping until six pm if she wishes, her surly breast desirous of making her male paraprofessional go away. Right now I don't feel like characterizing him through a pseudonym. I just want him to find another job and get the fuck out of my life, despite his sensitivity to my humiliation and my constant inquiry about my feelings and even unanticipated sparring matches. I can eject myself, at considerable inconvenience, as I've written, but it will be more for the worse.

I did an idiotic thing, and told him about Tassoni, buried in my archives, the instances of my Tassoni episodes, and to my utter chagrin, Galahad friended John on my phone, and more bloody awful still, John friended me back. Who wants the past tense of bittersweet losses to of a sudden have contemporary currency? I've posted things here about my undergraduate life which would undoubtedly antagonize the man I never got over, in this half-quasi sing song space with a minority who went one or two quarters with me towards the finish line of a turbulent spring. As I've also written, I am not huge on Facebook virtues, don't do selfies or announce events or floral arrangements, instead grilling my way into a fabulous family annihilator, but nevertheless, John and I are in feed, because I let a hip hop minstrel tap dance on my memories of the deepest longing for another Italian American I ever had. What the fuck is it with men? Act, don't reflect, never mind mortification, a way of stating you're saying fuck you and help me at the same time, remember? I epigrammed his 2002 email, and suggested he and Galahad could bromance on their respective tie-in, namely me. Yes, I am furious, and said I love you, now a second time, to a man passionately insisting he isn't my boyfriend.
You must remember this, a kiss is but a kiss. Judy Dench may offer up the inference that it's all in the incipient detail of domestic charms. God save the Queen.

Order of the Coif

when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie

Robert Bierman insists New York City's congested skyline contributes as much an atmosphere of corrupted Gothic in the 1989 Vampire's Kiss, given his opening pan of the Big Apple's skyline, the dome of the Empire State building glistening with golden portents, as does Transylvania in Stoker's original horror story of subservience to evil's insatiable appetite. In the most reducible terms, this is vampirism, its enslaved withering before an all consuming gluttony which can only be triumphed over by the life force of sunlight and the power of faith to flare against it, recycling old atavistic animism like a forest fire, upon which we've layer innumerable interpretations   Despite the fact that in some ways it is a better extended metaphor than its younger cousin, Wolf, the dowager never particularly liked the film, not necessarily due to what Cage has to shoulder. He does well enough, after his more ebullient gambit with Cher, evoking the melodramatic gestures of Max Schreck for ironic gratification, but what Bierman seems to aim for in suggesting that humanity's most efficient ecological environment, the metropolis, creates its own graphic malevolence, just as the vast space of the west does in expertly paced thrillers like Breakdown, with Kurt Russell, is belied by the fact that his ensemble cast function like fashion accessories, against which Loew slowly loses his smooth, wearied of being rolled in aesthetic refinement, as if it was analogous to a lifelong coating of garlic powder. There are a few really interesting scenes, capture shots, which, with a little more verve and daring, Bierman might have done a homage to The Day of the Locust, with New Yorker's actually turning against our celebrity thoroughbreds, intrepid matinee idols like Cage, when he's running out of the nightclub, taunted. Staying with that might have given the narrative juxtaposition greater impact. What drew me into a third viewing, however, wasn't Elizabeth Ashley's prima donna superficiality, more exaggerated as the delusion and irritability grow more insulating, or the made for television appearance, so much as the city's nearly sinister innocence twenty years before Osama's operatives created their indelible image of civilization and its discontents.

Is it a no life factor? Possibly, but it may also be that I live in Pennsylvania, and knew people who witnessed the downing of flight 93, and also lived in Manhattan before Giuliani, a correspondence to what Nicholas and Bierman are conveying in my citation. I was irrevocably altered by the great blow of 9/11, without, however, deriving any sacrament from the great piss hole of NGO's, Kabul, and GW's stupid war of misdirection in Iraq. Saddam had nothing to do with Saudi Arabia's disreputable passing the buck of Hadi extremism, while the EU just sits and takes it. If we do go to war, eventually, we need a really defined objective, even if the Middle East and parts of Africa get redrawn. Bill Maher too was impacted in the aftermath. As a challenging observer to manners of reserve, he once stated, on air, that nothing had changed in the aftermath of this country's greatest shock. He is right in the sense we're still a shallow, material world, too glib in some ways, like Bierman's gilded script, with how many other dead alives waiting around to provoke their own ludicrous cessation. It would be overreach to assert Vampire's Kiss is a predicate illustrative of why the agrarian mindset recoils from meta-cities, but simply reading what Bierman does with exteriors, you can see with the Taliban's eyes why Semitic bedouins hate our hedonism. We answered with the ultimate embodiment of  "this is New York," as Trump's election attests. 

Searching for a link, Google suggested flight to avoid apprehension. If they wanted to amuse me, rare as that is, they succeeded.

Lack Thereof

If any of my viewers are wondering about my hubris, over the last couple of days I believed a stroke or heart attack to be imminent, because I know I'm giving my notice, maybe even over this weekend, and I know this is huge and I'm probably headed for exactly what I wish to avoid, only worse, feeling faint and mildly nauseous, my intestines refuse to leave me in peace, and perhaps I've lost stability due to cheap calorie intake.

An event may still occur, as I have all the symptoms women my age develop, and I basically cannot access a doctor unless I drive myself to the internal medicine clinic I abandoned two years ago, but it appears to be I am being punished for tortellini and finger snacks. It is almost a musical score. Management puts out inspection notices and the dowager's internal combustion goes bouillabaisse. I could make light of it, but now have to redirect a good portion of my weekend. A paraprofessional from the state would simply leave me bedridden. It might be fine for my mother's sister to say we all fail, and she took care of me once with a portable commode, but for me a half century of this might as well be the brothers from The Vampire Diaries starting in the antebellum South. All I want is to leave Philadelphia, while Thiel can play musical chairs with venture capital.

Black Jack Darwin

There are things to be said about Blade's life and biography that serve as a stand-in for seediness in an urban environment, I just don't like the films as they have been adapted from the graphic form, and do not really see how Snipes used the role as anything more than a thug camp throw away. There are a number of threads within vampirism, of course, and the Blade saga weaves them together in a somewhat crass fashion that smashes together with the subtlety of bumper cars, with jump cuts into the hyper-stylized martial arts choreography.

The Stoker Gothic/Romantic tradition is one, though I tend to find the Nosferatu meme of fevered consumption and insatiable appetite leading to eco-devastation more compelling, but there is also another motif, not exactly distinct, but more carnivorous and animistic, in films like 30 Days of Night. Here the horror is just the feeding impetus, and little else, with Goth incorporation almost quaint.

The fact that Blade is black may evoke Richard Matheson, at least for enthusiasts, but there is not much allusion or irony in the films. Then there is Let The Right One In.
I enjoyed this film, but remain as perplexed by it as the early TNR reviewer was upon its initial release, and its meaning is something of a mystery. I believe I mentioned this in 2010, when I was still part of LitNet, and some future revisions may be in order.

I saw Wolf again this morning, and Nichols does devolve the storyline, which is very nearly an early Prada on steroids, but I'd like to sit on what I am thinking for a day or two, because I do not think Nichols was attempting a short sell. I think the literal half of the film was a compliment to the clever weave of the mythology and totem in the first part. Does James Spader turn being despicable into high art, as Janet Maslin suggests?