Shards and fissures

I used to believe I'd automatically get myself excluded from the established press if I told the truth about inherent bias, but it is something of which most readers are suspicious of already, not without justification. Let me give a for instance. Eugene Robinson yesterday faults the administration's liberal self-righteousness in villainizing Putin's provocation in the Crimea, and indeed, Eugene's voice sates progressive outrage with the Bush Administration's 9/11 overreach. Nothing wrong with pandering to a liberal base trying to shore up a fading promise Barack Obama represented. If candidate Obama had not aspired to the presidency, one can speculate what he might have done as an inspirational leader on a more nuanced platform.

Like Robinson, I actually remember Grenada. I can neither affirm nor deny that it was an appropriate domino effect for Reagan era spheres of influence, but citing the US incursion on the petite Caribbean paradise doesn't explain Ukrainian turmoil. Neither does citing America's systemic destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. There is a minority viewpoint which doesn't equate Putin with Mussolini, which is not to be blind to modern Russian brutality. I am not unaware of ugly brute force in Russian penal systems, but this doesn't preclude Vladimir from acting out of legitimate national interests.

In that vein, plagiarism is not quite the crime journalists make it out to be, and that was what I was driving at in my column about fraud in my Examiner piece on Glass's inability to acquire a legal license. The editorial chicks who deign to approve or reject my pieces for a certain degree of promotional status didn't like it as newsworthy commentary. Certainly their prerogative, though I stayed up all night researching it, debating a call to the bar association contact. I am on to a thesis which matters, at least in relation to veracity. I do not believe my finished product, as such, does all that badly getting me where I want to go.  

I have to watch a very young Peter Falk play a spree killer for Hitchcock again; it was an interesting rationalization. Past informing the present; Falk did not mind spoofing himself, but he never played his audience false. I miss him. He loved life, tumbling with adversity and coming out of it with a twinkle in his eye. Tassoni had the same propensity toward sardonic affection in his gaze.

Cruel Seas, Clef

As seems to be the norm for this project, the British have their own peculiar variations, though Esther Costello feels like an American brand because of the standard tilt by Joan Crawford. Lousy performer, the camera loves her despite this, and yet in this muck raking narrative, she seems to struggle in a way that Nicholson's skill would not readily reveal to a viewer, to dim her alpha status for the sake of the story. Heather Sears is far less titanic than Patty Duke as the famous mute, yet there is also more realism, oddly, despite the fact that we're familiar with the prescriptive patterns the studio system followed in the fifties.

I am bewildered, Roger Ebert is dead, and I would have to make the time, or will have to if this really interests me, to discover why Monsarrat wrote this novel, and I do not mean it simply as a question of money, but as a question of Keller's fame conflicted with the issue of exploitation. I would not know where to begin, but it has thrown me a curve. Purchasing the novel is neither here nor there; I do not really wish to buy it. Looking at it can wait until I make space to browse in library, but I keep asking myself if the naval officer was fair to the iconic heroine, and I'm entirely in the dark; in addition, the wiki entry suggests the script substantially reversed the book. The movie, however, covers all the bases I've covered. Sexual development and abuse, chicanery, compliance over tyranny, rebellion, the angel demon dichotomy.

Beneath the film we have, there seems to be a counter narrative, one that was not followed through but would have been more intriguing, though we've seen this motif many times as well: abject poverty creating a banshee devoid of normal human intercourse. It opens the film after Esther's accident unique for its era. I'll see what I can do in terms of further inquiry, at least in a future tense.

Canadian Trumpets

It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, kindle location 9-17

Lena Canada's triumphant tale is dated, but nothing has changed in the United States since its conversion. I lasted five minutes with the film, and the once magnetic John Amos filling the time honored role as the minority domestic touched by God to tend the angelic birds with broken wings. Absolutely nothing has changed, but this was my life, and I was that girl and my idol was not Elvis Presley, but my plot points were exactly the same, just as they are for the disabled victims of rape whom are goaded into fighting back by Mariska Hargitay. Abuse victims crawl out of the woodwork to connect with this actress; never mind case management, cannibalizing celebrity empathy is more rewarding, orgasmic and aspirational for both sexes, but Hargitay has made the most of a casting limitation, and she projects living within Olivia Benson, making her fictional part more interesting than she is herself.

If you want a taste of my authentic self (and what is that?), I think both theism and atheism is a waste of time, but consider Kuhn a fortunate metaphysician, since he is in a select and dwindling minority of thinkers who worry about veracity and evidently makes a living doing it. I agree with him on one of his main contentions, which I will frame thus: If religious doctrine makes no sense, neither does the narrative language of theoretical physics. Quantum mechanics may have valid proofs, as does the big bang, and impaction which leads to the birth of new voids, but these are mathematical equations that have no end, and just move on to the next mechanism. Human mind is not capable of processing it.

If I can inhabit the space of logic, what is it then that makes me retract from radical progressive equality? The censorship of experience, primarily. Friendships with homosexuals, the kind of gay people who are only filmed for POV, has not been good for me, filled with dark back stabbings, equal to the macabre histrionics of John Webster. Even when it comes to my late editor Alexandra Grilikhes, and her etiology, the silence of willful blindness was a gulf upon which I could not presume a platonic attachment. The further the tent expands, the more bewildering it shall become. We are the only species with an argument, but a species nevertheless, one that should acknowledge its primate evolutionary triggers more often, even while acknowledging that the revolutionary act in Genesis, that of naming, is essentially what created humanity.