Before The Chancel

"What did we do? Burn a few heretics, sell some indulgences? That was in the days when the Church was a ruling body, we let governments do those things today." -- Anne Bancroft, Agnes of God


Obviously, if you speak ill of a suddenly dead dead body guard for stereotypical reinforcing, you can wreak havoc with viruses on one end, and infection flamed genitalia, not knowing which end is which, playing a glass bead game within a fevered intellect, forcing yourself to move, to sit up on your busted mattress using a three dimensional point on a graph of space time, vision unable to be replicated, lost insight into points and reference to location, we last left The Brothers Rico with Larry Gates as a mildly trenchant, deceptively civil sociopath, appealing to his bond with Eddie's mother for taking the bullet meant for him, and then he sends Eddie off, like a bloodhound, while we are cued into this family doom with the near nicety of a deus ex machina, nothing graphic. Paul Picerni bound in a chair, taking a punch, gasping last words, his gel lock flopping. Then Karlson does something interesting with the scene cut to Mrs. Rico's apartment in New York. This is the clash of Old World Europe into the new, and Argentina Brunetti was obviously typecast for culture shock, for her juxtaposition against the American groomed Kubik and Hollywood sugar boy Conte, her English heavily accented, her personal iconography with the madonna captured with no small degree of emphasis, the little bit of Roman hierarchy she needs for her own solace, wary of what her middle child is wresting out of her. This portent is Eddie's second warning, and what does he do with it? Persuading his mother or himself that Kubik is only looking out for the family's best interests?

There are hints, before Conte heads into his central conflict with Lamotta, that he is anxious about the consequences of his actions, not that Karlson takes much opportunity to examine the willful blindness of self-interest, a charge which I doubt can be laid at Simenon's door.

The cream cheese on bread I managed to get to this morning was the best breakfast I had in my life, which is either spelling out mortality's signature, or signifying the extraordinary persistence of will, I intend to pay a visit to the woman's clinic, at least to explore the possibility that this is more than hormonal stress, early next week, as I doubt my ability to flag down a gynecologist any sooner than that.