Elusive Hotspot Mastery

There isn't going to be a next time!-- Ryan O'Neal, against his romantic inclinations in an unhappy monastic focus.

There is something off kilter about Los Angles which, succinctly, is integral to its geography, integral to California’s veneer about its own progressive sensibilities. The dowager may no longer offer regressive members of ADAPT the tolerance she once doled on the teaspoon, but Jimmi Shrode was not in error when he warned me about the state’s cosmetic fraudulence, after a fashion. James Ellroy seems to pick it apart in his novels, gets at its essence through rather brutal citrus peels, terrible phantasms, grotesque, obsessive drives, like Harry Bosch going flintly in the face of a threat. Welliver’s character is an unabashed liberal, playing off a hip sidekick of a partner and a lesbian lieutenant who has parity with the title character when it comes to testosterone and an honorable pair of testicles, but he is also a frightening vigilante, and this behavior stems not from liberalism, but from cowboy culture, easily superimposed on Walter Hill’s exposition of the sprawling metropolis as a location. Just as Ellroy’s literary LA has a very dark undercurrent, one that is not comparable to Austin but might run parallel to tortured white male psyches. Walter Hill’s LA is a function of the underground. Though The Driver has scenes shot in sunlight and even pastel-light backgrounds, it is a movie about what happens after dark, beneath the surface, by those who have no desire for Bruce Dern’s zealous attention. Ostensible reality cop shows too though, illustrate LA’s bizarre bicameral indigestion with cultural appropriation. Only in LA does a patrol officer allow bygones to be bygones, counseling a crippled white gimp about a twenty dollar fuck with a toothless black ho whose gaunt frame was claimed by narcotics long ago, sad, but just as much Hollywood kitsch as real, and rather fragile, glamor. Entertainment’s intersection with the street is only a part of the whole, a synecdoche distinct from other cities with stark impersonal landscapes, like Tokyo, part sprawl, part superhighway, part architecture which looks like pastry boxes. Somehow, we don’t all get along, in this desert of 4 million, iuterlaced with a nearly predominant Mexican culture and so much sometimes tragic, sometimes braced, tension, by disaster or design.

He died of a heart attack in a swimming pool; so much for igniting headlines like an earthquake, coast to coast.

Re (Assignment)

"It is people like you, William, who are destroying the moral fabric of the country."-- Patrick McGoohan, Anglicized reactionary

Outland's cultural interplay  operates on levels with a number of tranches. It is an obvious homage by Hyams to High Noon, which in itself isn't really a western, but a question about what kind of country America is, but the narrative is also about Connery's frustration with the Fleming formula. It has its weak spot, the worshipful wife doing an early version of Skype. Kira projects Carol O'Niel as little more than a moon child who wants to be dominated by self-made virility. Don't we all. Beyond this, it offers a fulfilling neo-realism which makes the difficulty of transliterating science fiction all the more rewarding, posited in a plausible futurist technocratic frailty. Walter Hill may not have had a direct influence on Hyams's work, but someone was paying attention.

Methink's Hill's protestations out forced gender switching are disingenuous, but I am not ready to challenge an entertainment icon on his understated political consciousness,  and prefer to go through O'Neal first, and know I have to move: the man is sick, seemingly in need of money-- but I am also barely holding it together. My "essay-ish" piece on The Driver is not slated for Rolling Stone, as its cultural insulation makes me queasy: Wenner switched sides, thus not invalidating arguments about sexuality and choice-- but in recent searches, debated pitching the entertainment icon a slant. It would not hurt. Freelancers get ignored hundreds of times a day-- but I am staying my hand, as they seem to already eat Hill like ice cream. I am trying to probe a little more deeply, much as the juxtapositions in The Prisoner keep the viewer off balance. It too is science fiction dressed up like a primitive comic book (much like The Good Place, which sends up smugness rather cheaply and isn't enough).

For now, this is all I can manage. If I haven't broken the law and assaulted Trudy Richardson, at week's end, perhaps I will have crept through my own physiological torments enhanced by corruption.

Bleached Bone to the Left

something in the wind that knows my name-- karen carpenter

I do not want my readers to infer I had an adversarial relationship with Terri Way during her three year employment with Presby. I didn't. We weren't exactly friends, but friendly, in contrast to relations with Trudy Richardson, who trills like a capon with a broken neck, frantically running around the chicken coup, cunning, but vapid, nonetheless morally despicable. Terri was more astute, more adept, and while I am not going to say she was traumatized by the fact that I was attacked by the grandson of a monosyllabic woman of Martin Luther King's era, she was impacted, and transferred out of Diamond Park in 1993, due to how bad it was. Both of us working, I treated her to a beer off City Line while we were both on the clock, regretted it, leaning toward the florid, even back then. I saw her on television for a Blue Cross Blue Shield commercial with Dick Vermeil, subsequent to her departure. That was that, but I let the girl hoodwink me. I know adjudicating Presby for negligence after I was assaulted, while not a mental health panacea, would have given me justice . Tenants of rapes sue their rental agents in civil courts and usually get awarded settlements. What have I gotten? Blatant and hostile discrimination, attacked relentlessly since Trudy was hired, and ableism wonders why it fears my livid bulimic anger, however much caught in a time capsule, like Ryan O'Neal.

O'Neal hasn't responded to my inquiries about The Driver. No reason why he should, and he may not have even seen them. I also promised to go through proper channels, and had best get to his publicist before the embittered actor up and croaks, but if he knew where my analysis of his work with Walter Hill was going, he'd probably be perplexed. Hill was simply positing western values in the burgeoning analogue age of the Me decade, and if references I've read hold, O'Neal wasn't the first casting choice, and yet, this enigmatic fable, distributed in the dawn of Jimmy Carter's measly leadership, is a rebuke to boomers, just as Bryan Fuller rebukes the passive indifference of Muth's generation. Dead Like Me, though it is the most intriguing free broadcast available to me, has its own time capsule quality, endearing, but flawed. Aside from its latter day production problems, one of the reasons Showtime may have cancelled it was its occasional weightiness on modern alienation. It takes a certain amount of bravado, which Mandy Patinkin has in his scene boiling penne, to invite your superior to dinner, and have the gesture all but vanish in a vacuum. Like Muth's Georgia, the only mitigating social extensions I ever had were from my career, and those were wrenched from me. Spending some of my money on the Rosenbach made me feel like an appendage. I grafted more cheaply onto local libertarians and like that better, which illustrates brawn and pretensions mix with volatility, but it's not enough.

When I give my notice to Riverside, I'm rolling away. I'm not coming back, even at the cost  of abandoning kimmy, my library, my soiled linens. It will not change my indifference to domestic cleanliness, nor my aging limits, my unfairness to my father. I'll regret it, and maybe I am damning myself, but Richardson's evil is too much for me to carry without it becoming a criminal  liability. I have no supports I can count on, and know better than to expect intervention. I'd in fact be astonished, but once I'm on the bus, I'm not turning around.