Littoral Membranes

 People believe they're self-important!--  Jason Statham smashing his skull through a car window. Revolver

Instead of paying tribute to Ray Liotta by revisiting the seminal Good Fellas, which takes a significant amount of energy, I selected Revolver, where Jason Statham undergoes some queer double indemnity; Ray Liotta’s role as D, however, is essentially the same allegorical switch hitter as in Identity, which is a year earlier, a much better construct, and perhaps Guy Ritchie should spend some time in an actual jail cell before he mashes up such a soporific effort again with such talented players.

I do not feel the same absence of presence in Liotta’s death that I may have felt about others, like Peter Falk. I never enjoyed what Liotta projected, most of the time, that skeevy New Jersey mendacity, not his corrupt cops, not his tough guys with soft paunch centers of gravity. Not everything about Italian ethnicity deserves celebration, and his voice peels off like a scab not willing to heal, although I softened for his support role as the dying father in Powder Blue, where maudlin is Forest Whitaker’s middle name. It is this fake death, in LA made snow, with Liotta’s baby blue eyes, against Jessica Biel, which leaves the man most poignant. It is excessive to suggest a movie like Powder Blue is a type of precursor to this rotten second decade in which I die, but sometimes, the fabric of the universe has a malignant tap when we troublesome creatures push past the envelope, and Powder Blue contains elements of malevolence embedded therein. Bui exacts a heavy toll on his viewers.

Not Too Many of These

 "A must see oddity--" Rotten Tomatoes

I subscribed to Topic in May solely to see The Returned, and as to the series, I cannot add anything that spry and paid reviewers haven't written about it. I saw a similar variation on the theme on HBO called The Departed, which was a majestic reconciliation in the way the US handles evangelical oscillations, but The Returned is unabashedly a Catholic French liberal horror story which has no apologies to make. Writing about it escaped me  in the immediacy of viewing due to daily nigger care, and my foray into Substack, which has been slow, but all I am here to do this morning, even if I am back logging into my archive, is to endorse Topic itself. 40% of the series are innovative concept, worth the six dollars a month.. I may not be able to afford it daily for too much longer, but if I don't simply give up and die of Pennsylvania's nursing home death march, I will certainly return to this channel in an economy marginally easier. Since I am on this do as I say kick, don't ever move to this state. I know Texas has its own sagebrush poverty and Texas Ranger powder residues, and Miami has areas of Liberty City that make Philadelphia seem like Kenya, but don't come here, to this state of my birth. It functions like static electricity.

Tertium Quid

"Do you know the difference between capitalism and socialism?"> "No"> "In capitalism, man exploits man. With socialism it's the other way around."-- dialogue from The Alienist

 When I was on the verge of leaving prepubescence, not much older, or younger, than Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier were in 2014, I never saw cable channels such as Home Box Office through a particularly polemical perspective; if anything, the august movement of its logo across my neighbor’s television screen was intimidating, for in the beginning of the cable era I watched it while my mother’s peer was minding me in her duplex. The network was simply the package you subscribed to in order to have daily content available, movies all of the time, even at five in the morning, the new constant distraction, a gratification stimulant which would lead to an ever growing demand for content, not that the naiveite of childhood could foresee all of this, not like Sidney Lumet did with Network. If you ask, or even if I search those diaphanous memory triggers, what content I saw on these fledging subscription providers, my introspection thickens with milky white blanks, the foamy textures of oblivion, but it certainly wasn’t Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, or Coppola’s The Conversation, which, although inimical in it’s encroaching build up toward a frothy climax, was tame enough for commercial projection. Weier’s father sounding off to Brodsky about iPad content isn’t new, in her careful probing of these distraught families. What is new, and almost beyond organic cognition, is the interface between hydraulic generated power, micro circuitry, mass media, mobility, the pressures of collectivization on it, and any subsequent reaction to that pressure.

To a certain extent, all documentary films are forensic excavations, and Brodsky and her crew excavate aplenty over this autonomic perniciousness which assails boomers in this new age manufacture of killer children, and this writer would argue that this feral niche culture resists the comforting grasp of categorization, in terms of oh yes mental illness and schizophrenia are the trial balloon floating at this altitude while a debased society floats at the other, and well, fuck, parents can’t export kids out to the colonies to apprentice a trade anymore, and why is it still so hard? Beneath all this is a woman’s pain in not catching the monstrosity in their otherwise angelic baby, but Angie Geyser, if she had been aware of her husband Michael's schizophrenia prior to Morgan's birth, might have had her daughter periodically evaluated by behavioral specialists. It may not have prevented the attempted murder, which, when scaled down to size, might have involved 'best friend spite', which roiled over in viciousness, but it may have made the judge hesitate before trying two girls barely out of childhood, as adults. This was absurd, regardless of the level of premeditation. The heart rends itself for Morgan, still a young woman, because regardless of how successful her pharmaceutical cocktail might be, her life ended the day she adjudicated her apology to Payton Leutner, and there is something even still more invidious in that.

Mise en Scene Buona Serata

 

Observing James Gandolfini bring Tony Soprano to life is analogous to becoming the prophet Jeremiah, sacrificing the droll life of whatever a Bedouin does, say, shaving his pubic hair with carving knife, in order to chastise Israel into whatever the rewards an aesthete lifestyle was supposed to bring to the first nation to recognize the divine as other dimensional and without limit. My Roman blood sang the song of going home, the very DNA I fled for Nigger City USA, an impulse of heart for which I’ve never forgiven myself: David Chase kept me sane just a little while longer, while perhaps some of you can imagine how much I regret not being able to stay concurrent with it due to an antiseptic barrenness of my own. That Jimmy faded to black in Italy in parallel circumstances to his title character creates the same dissonance in me that Eugene Robinson felt about Cosby. Can I offer perspectives about the series which established critics cannot? Perhaps in micro fragments, but not this evening, bone weary as granite, as cool and unforgiving as marble to our rubbery fingertips, but I do have to write about it, rerun it for the rest of the miserable ferocity of my life.

Earring in the Naval

 

Antonio Brown: The Inception of Black Dysfunction onto The Mainframe

 Perhaps this should be the last time. --Al Michaels

How far have we forwarded from the days when George Will could praise the late Hank Aaron's athleticism on the diamond with appreciative poise? Fairly far, if Antonio Brown’s antics on the field against the Jets this evening was any indication, and no, I am not present at the curtain call to compete with swaggering dicks on field stats. Wouldn’t dream of it, but as per my link to Jason Owen's synopsis article for Yahoo Sports, I am indeed here to stir the pot with my own ladle toward a real time future pitch, attempting to get back in the saddle in my fifty-ninth year of humiliating and now sometimes painful jeopardy. One thing you will never read my complaining about is an editor dropping me because incontinence prevented me from meeting a deadline, and I have lost opportunities with periodicals to which I am reluctant to return because my topics fell apart, without regard to what form of colitis plagues my colon, even if it isn’t colitis as opposed to other forms of inflammation. Arains was within his rights to release Brown immediately, nothing illegal about it. Brown had a fiduciary obligation to the contract he signed, just like every other league player of privilege who pay their dues, and that’s the point. Being in the league because one is a great wide receiver or quarter back is a privilege, not a right, especially when men like Gleason of the Saints has sacrificed, and any inequities that existed in the 1950’s have been corrected, even over-corrected. Brady, and those who worship said demi-god want to draw out the violins and look for a suitable bipolar inhibitor? There is more to Brown’s melodrama than that, and it has a fairly lengthy tradition in Black American culture, an exaggerated servility designed to distract observers. Nothing is perfect, and for every Junior Seau and other instances of dark domestic violence some managers have to contain, there are the Donovan McNabbs and Dak Prescotts who become household names, and Dak is all grace under fire with his own emotional skeletons. Whatever else our pandemic cultural shifts contains, there is an element of insouciant superfluidity about it, like Lil Nas X Old Town Road video embedded in sarcasm and the female street dancer’s nearly automated gestures of defiance in a song which is nothing more than studio broadcast sugar for those who’ve lost moral centers to bling. This is one disabled woman aging out, on the precarious slope of vanishing, who’s had enough. I loathe the NFL, but Antonio’s rip cord isn’t a corrective measure in which to create a better league. He deserves social ostracization, considering how many millions of people simply cannot take his place on the field.

 

Competing Transformations

 "I am not the person I was. Everybody fades Martha."-- Tcheky Karyo

Just before the nearly non-advent of the winter holidays, as I violently convulse myself into the new year of 22, one of my followers liked a younger woman’s request, raven-haired if my scant view of her thumbnail was accurate, for depressing movies, and the usual pop culture cohesion thread began on video Twitter verse. Lars von Trier's Melancholia made the rounds, and although I am not going to scroll back through weeks worth of tweets to indicate a correction on my part in the stagnate world of my social media interactions, I do indeed stand corrected. Von Trier conceived the idea for the end of the world as metaphor in a therapy session. I streamed it on Prime once, and X-ray cued me in on important allusions made to painters active when German Romanticism was at its height, and I know a majestic homage to Stanislaw Lem is involved in Trier’s dense compression of emotional fatalism, but haven’t we digressed enough already? Melancholia has at best a tangential relationship to cloning as a way of life in the Western Hemisphere, and another one of my followers whom I’ve mentioned before on this account, (gee, don’t you want to know who he is?)  brought up his distaste for the very British Never Let Me Go,  a film faithfully based on the very British Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. The film’s stark reality about knowing how the end of your life is going to go, just as I know how the end of mine is coming along, is very comforting, and rather neo-imperialist, which is comprehensible. Britain was one of the last modern empires civilization could recognize  in the 20^th century, and so was Japan. Hence Ishiguro’s rather dynamic, brilliant, at times, immersion into Western sympathies. It is also interesting to note The Island came out as a box office disappointment around 2005, on or about the year Ishiguro went to press, and this latter film takes the Rip Van Winkle approach: knowledge is power, and by dint of sheer luck, the American clones destroy the institutional harvesting built around them, deceiving them with notions of paradise, when in reality, they were no more than livestock for their wealthy hosts. Ishiguro’s plot takes a more egalitarian approach, with only hints about why the students brought up in these schools didn’t rebel, like the V-chips inserted in their wrists. It amazes me that Romanek creates the culture shock of an alternate universe far superior to that of Michael Bay, simply by placing the doomed in a recognizable landscape long imprinted on our visual cortex as familiar, like Masterpiece theater,