Winter Moonlight's Vapor Shroud

The Code Black episode which ran last evening seemed to intentionally reference the Spanish Catholic motif that the unpleasantness of life is a dream from which we invariably wake, with varying degrees of courage or fortitude to follow suit, whether it's Dona Luz coping with a deceitful lover and becoming content to be a virtuous single mother thereafter, or the futuristic sensibility of Vanilla Sky rather unevenly adapted for Americana. It was an irritating cheap trick, whether or not there is a certain degree of commiseration for William Young as the compassionate patriarch who knows when to give in to the disruptions of the urban disenfranchised. Spastic has no particular affinity for current medical serials, however more sophisticated scripts, but Raza was at least a curiosity, whereas Rob Lowe is the manufactured, if seasoned veteran, who delivers line readings with new found square jawed machismo. To go from that to the silicon metrosexual tweaks of Pure Genius is insufferable. The public airways may be frambrosia next to what retarded and fed baby boomer narcissism, but it makes taking a backward glance at Cary Grant beat one's chest for glamour, and bourgeoisie style held in place by gleaming hair gel and aerosol. 
Grant was already a mausoleum plague in the Columbo era, but what appealed to our mothers, that vaudeville charm, holds the same magnetism now as then, whether tightly wound in Hitchcock, or more subversively timed in his comedies, which can be decoded along the same lines as Rock Hudson, if with more heartbreaking effect. To scroll a tawdry digital gallery and read that Grant was gay simply because he lived with another male friend was indeed shocking. We may not be able to read orientation on a whim, but Grant? It drew tears, when a more cautious intellect might have challenged the veracity of such claims. As a journalist, rebelling in despair at an encroaching twilight, blows having already broken her back, delving into this particular undercurrent would be akin to chasing Loch Ness: His grandchildren would disavow it, and there is no proof which can be confirmed. The reasons these rumors dog the star stem from the very things that made him one of the greatest celebrities. He toys with sexual secrets to keep his female admirers on the bait, even if we don't give much of a thought to poor Ingrid Bergman, the *gay bachelor's* patsy, as she was against Anthony Perkins in :Goodbye Again (though I would have fucked Perkins in that movie, and again in On The Beach). Bergman is not particularly sexual. She is a gracious elegance of poised need. And the idiot who cast her against Matheau in later years should have lost his job. It did not work. If you see her as the wife of Sartre, sacrificing all for such a great ego, that works. That is how women of her era derived standing, but there is culpability in that social form that shields the deviations of dandies which Proust exposes like a montage in the tide. Spastic cannot read it in Grant, however, the inclination toward sodomy. He might have been an empty vessel mimicking the upper echelon whose ranks he joined by virtue of his talent, but risking that for more roughshod homoerotic experimentation seems beyond where his attention to personal detail would take him. 

Artificial Insemination

the share of folks not in the labor force remains near all-time highs-- my former grant funder

I was partially in error about Clarity Media's automat. Whatever unfathomable, mysterious reason, after offering my former editorial team a foul berating, I'm still receiving mails from AXS, in the calamitous state of affairs with the economics of content. I am sorely beginning to miss three dimensional space; haven't been back to my Examiner page. If it still exists. Worth more than the arthritis of my ligaments have put into it, I believe I'm worth more, I mean, than penny generated content. Maybe Morris believes she is worth more too, and would like to claw out Spielberg's eyes in a Minority Report rendition. It was her best role, getting Tom Cruise out of deep freeze in a good movie with a silly second sight premise. Women like Penelope Cruz seem to exist to get Cruise out of deep freeze.

Motifs associated with Morris to some extent. With objections to Cold Case otherwise noted, what it does differently is pace itself at the slow speed of reminiscence. It's best propaganda tool was its third oldest puzzle, Best Friends, and Tessa Thompson makes the most of her time on camera. The writers were clever, making it a girl crush, perhaps a transplant from the Harlem Renaissance. Could such affairs of the heart have occurred in Philadelphia in 1932? Between a moon faced Rosie and a minority fedora dyke? (I have a fondness for this male fashion statement which must mean I am repressing the liberating aspects of finding good pencil thin clit; get me to a psychoanalyst to embrace my deeply repressed bisexuality! That is what the LBGT activist terrorists would allege.) I doubt it. Caucasian male and a black woman, yes, but in 32 lesbianism did not exist as a recognized classification. Tessa's Billie dies not because of white male intolerance, but because the screen writers guild indulged in a progressive fairy tale. Yes, the jilted male beau gangs up on the pretty "darkie" girl, so the audience is offered a less than 30 second consequence, but it is still a dream sequence.

We'd react differently if this was transposed on Showtime, elongated into a drama series of depression era lesbianism between a maid and a bootlegger's sister. The world is not in fact shaded in back and white overtones with soft or harsh studio lighting. The writers in fact end the episode almost as if Rosie was a Victorian heroine, compensated for repressing her fascination with the attraction to the forbidden by being granted affluence, burying her dalliance within the safety of fantasy. One can see why Morris is cast between the fantastical and the futurist. Her countenance has that zeitgeist of the alien about it, otherworldly, living in her own dreamscape, whether we scrutinize her biography, chasing after what year she left Temple University after the rest of us, or not.

Woodward, Widowhood

"I believe I had an accident; I think I wet myself a little. Isn't that awful?"-- Joanne Woodward to Martin Balsam, 1973


After supreme efforts like this, efforts that knock the wind out of me because I assumed facts not in evidence-- that this campaign could accommodate me by making the work part time, for instance, but opps, no, sorry, fidelity to Barack Obama as an occult demigod is not to be impinged upon by the punishing reality of lifelong abuse, a huge dose of bigotry swallowed daily in my own right, and a degrading lifelong struggle against poverty, yes, I grow angrier still, and wish I had the time and the ability to take young women like the zealous Catherine and her equally zealous Cairo counterpart and give them a reality check, not that I'll be granted the opportunity, but, whoever it is that needs to know, and whatever game theory I am deploying, know this: my opposition to equality on the basis of homosexual orientation is genuine, and if liberals need to think I am asserting this because of the abuse I received at the hands of the disabled community in PA, and that I am in denial of my own homoerotic sadomasochistic impulses, if that suits your fancy, and places me in a comfortable categorization for dismissal, nothing I post will change your mind in that regard, and I am, in the rhetorical sense, being drowned in our cultural *sea change,* in attitude, not so lacking in observation as you might suppose, but I will not, and indeed cannot, allow conservative Britons like Andrew to don themselves in pedestrian gnostic normalcy without putting up a fight, and Andy is not so pedestrian that he did not test HIV positive in 93, before my scar tissue had formed, before I knew what he was, and that is yet another dose of pretension on the American landscape. I am ailing, and no doubt soon to be dead, and Google will have to make its own decisions about my voice, as it wishes, but you have been warned. I am a clever woman, not typical in how I handle my honesty or exposures about bias, and I am declaring civil war without the benefit of biblical injunction.

Which makes Woodward's late century sociological pastiche a suitable and dated point of entry, Newman's less celebrated second half. I am straining to remember what Paul said about the differences between him and Joanne when they became their parts, on his big appearance on the actors studio series, and I cannot quite recall. He worked from inward to out, whereas she had an outward starting point. It does not make me respect her talent any more or less, and in the work of her prime years, she annoys me most of the time, not always, though I believe I see, a little, what made them more the sum of their parts for each other. Last I saw of her was those public service spots for recycling, before Paul died, and yet despite the contemporary mockery that Summer Wishes is prone to illicit, I like her in the role of Rita, and the struggle she and Balsam engage to negotiate their relationship in its seasoned reality. I am, however, understandably, battle fatigued, and fighting the fear of real, and actual, total failure, and can no more turn to the disabled community on the basis of my abused trust, than I can hope for progressive willingness to open your eyes, or that a rational conservative can see me, rescue me from the injustice of this paradigm, and allow me to breathe-- when my strength rebuilds, therefore.