Personal

I received a call from my mother today. My brother was in a horrific accident on a construction site. He slipped from his ladder and fell with a plate glass window landing on him. He came very close to losing his right arm and right eye. Fortunately, the fates were smiling and he sustained just serious cuts to his face and instead of severing a tendon it was the muscles in his arm that sustained all the damage. These will heal. The prognosis is good. I came very close to losing my brother today, it was so frightening. I can't be there with him and I want nothing more than to hug him and tell him I love him. He has a long road ahead of him as he has no insurance and faces many months of rehabilitation and a limited ability to work. It's funny that his first thought was for the woman whose house he was working on, that she is left without a window. He is a good person and never seems to catch a break. It is also hard that we can't just worry about him getting better and now have to worry about the thousands of dollars in hospital and doctors bills that he can't hope to ever repay. It is a hard world. I am posting this to ask my readers (if I have any) to send good thoughts into the universe for his full recovery. Also, tell those you love that you love them, you just never know when you could lose them. Those in Aurora would say that too.

Book Review

11/23/1963 by Stephen King

**SPOILER ALERT** Don’t read this review if you have not read the book! Unless you’re like me and don’t give a damn.

As I’ve said in this blog a few times, I love me some Stephen King. It is the banked love of a long time couple for whom the passion has since faded but for whom the affection and fondness is still strong due to a lifetime of shared experiences. When I first discovered him I was insatiable and couldn’t get enough, many times reading until late in the night, unable to stop. I would talk about him to anyone who would listen and search out interviews because I found his thoughts fascinating, plus reading his odes to “constant reader” made me feel so special like he was talking just to me. I read his entire back catalog and when new books came out, I’d try to be first to the book store to pick me up a copy in the days before Amazon. Any project with his name attached would capture my interest from short-lived series like Golden Years and Kingdom Hospital to the excellent graphic novel adaptions of his work to the mountain of movies (for the big and small screen) both good and bad. If anyone is listening and has some pull, IT would make a great graphic novel, get on that please!!! I enjoyed his later work but I felt that he lost some of his mojo after that terrible accident (for which I am grateful for his recovery) and when I wanted to remember our love when it was young and full of fire, I’d pull out his older work and reread it, like a forlorn wife reading the old and faded love letters that her husband no longer bothers to write. SK has had some clunkers and I was very disappointed by the Ouroboros conclusion of The Dark Tower series, but usually his writing was never dull, so when I tried to read Under the Dome, I was dismayed to find it was just that. I could only get through the first 5 chapters and then had to give it up as a lost cause. I feared the worst… had we become just friends?

When I heard he had a new book coming out, I ordered it from my book club, more out of loyalty than anything. The thought of reading it didn’t excite me and I found subject strange, and was turned off by the premise that Oswald was the only shooter the day JFK was assassinated (I am a conspiracy theorist here and believe Oswald was what he said he was, “a pasty”). Here is the description offered on Amazon:

On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King’s heart-stopping dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination—a thousand page tour de force.

Following his massively successful novel Under the Dome, King sweeps readers back in time to another moment—a real life moment—when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a character who has the power to change the course of history.

Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his two brothers with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.

Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

A tribute to a simpler era and a devastating exercise in escalating suspense, 11/22/63 is Stephen King at his epic best.

Knowing how I felt about Under the Dome, when the book arrived I put it in my night stand with the dozen or so other books I eventually planned to read but had not gotten to yet and went on with my life. Upon finding reviews nearly unanimous in praise for this latest opus, I decided to pull it out and just try a few chapters and test the waters. I settled into my bed one evening resting against my plumped pillows, a bed-hogging dog curled next to me, and cracked it open. What happened next was a shock, after reading the first paragraph I sat bolt upright in bed and said “holy shit”! It was like coming home one day to find that husband of yours had made you dinner and brought you flowers and then told you to get dolled up so he could show you off and take you dancing. I was being wooed again and it felt just fine. The fire was always there, it just needed some tending to come fully alight and when it is a fire built by the master it becomes a blaze visible from space. 

The story started like a shot from a gun. I liked Jake from the start, and he seemed so real as all of King’s best characters do. His life was fascinating and the concept of a portal to another specific time opened up so many possibilities. The book was very like an episode of Quantum Leap with Jake playing Sam trying to put right what once went wrong, his Al is portal guardians who are being driven slowly insane by their task. But, unlike in that show, here the past or AGO is almost a character in itself and it does not want to be changed or as SK says, “the past is obdurate.” It uses all the forces at its disposal to thwart Jake’s plans including insane stretches of “coincidence” and almost having him beaten to death. King’s protagonists never have it easy and it seemed that the last half of the book takes place in too many hospital rooms with first Sadie and then Jake, who is now George, becoming longtime residents. But, the heart of the book is the love affair between George/Jake and Sadie, the shy soon to be divorced school librarian, with a dark secret of her own. I’m not ashamed to say it, I grew to love her. Funny, charming, brave, clumsy (or as King says haunted, being this way myself that word fits perfectly), and sweet, it is easy to see why he fell for her. She is full of good qualities but she is not without her faults, a weakness for alcohol and cigarettes being some of them. For all of her wonderfulness, she is still recognizably human as we all are with both the good and the bad parts of our personalities. Sadie is no Mary Sue. She is a living breathing person although her physical body is made up of individual letters, a literary Frankenstein’s monster stitched together with words and given the breath of life by the lightening of Stephen King’s mind. 

Reflections on Season 5 of Mad Men

This season was amazing, so I thought I would share some of my thoughts about it. For such a quiet, nuanced show, it has the ability to throw you for a loop. It is a rare episode that I don’t gasp at least once. Each season has its own theme and this year was the dark side of the American dream. Working in advertising is appealing to our baser instincts, we always tire of what we have and crave the new, the bigger, the more exciting.  As Don so brilliantly said when he approached Dow Chemical to try and get their business, “Because even though success is a reality, its effects are temporary. You’re happy for now because you’re successful for now. But what is happiness? It’s the moment before you need more happiness.” It basically compares the illusory happiness that STUFF gives us with a drug, you always need more of it just to maintain. This was illustrated most beautifully by the Jaguar campaign that was so integral to this season around which evolved so many key incidents and the way the car was compared to a mistress. The whole season was about everyone wanting what they don’t have and not wanting what they do. I will delve in depth into a few of the journeys.

The Ballad of Don and Megan-

Don has been through the ringer this season. At the beginning of the season his marriage to Megan seemed to transform him in a deep way and he was truly happy. He wasn’t interested in cheating on her, she knew all about Dick Whitman, was good with his kids, and was mature and engaged with her feelings. She would not tolerate how Don had been with Betty and he seemed to want nothing more than to rectify the mistakes he had made and be a better husband. But as good as this may seem, it made his work suffer, the one area of his life that he was always KING. Marriage to Don meant that Megan moved from secretary to copywriter, a move which Peggy greeted with not unjustifiable anger. Her struggles to get where she was seemed to just be handed to Don’s chippy and worse, Megan was really good at it. In the end, the life of an ad man was not what she wanted and she quit to pursue her dream of becoming an actor. Don was supportive, if initially unhappy about this as he liked having Megan around the office. Theirs is a relationship that blows hot and cold, and privately they seemed to have a layer of kink thrown in but they seemed perfectly content with it. After Megan left, things started to come unraveled for Don. He purposely sabotaged Ginsberg to make sure his own idea was chosen for an ad campaign instead of letting his idea win on its own merit. His amazing pitch to Jaguar was sullied by Joan’s sacrifice to the company (more on that later), going after the big fish so that the employees wouldn’t have to forge his signature and could have Christmas bonuses, his finding out about Lane then firing him and having the consequences of that on his conscience (again, more on that later). But in the end, after all he had been through the final blow was that the bloom was off the Megan rose and it turned out she had some thorns. When she doesn’t get what she wants, she grows depressed and whiny and is not above stabbing her friends in the back to get it. Her acting career is not coming along as quickly as she likes. As Megan’s visiting mother Marie says to Don when he come home to find his wife drunk and spiteful , “I know it’s hard to watch, but this is what happens when you have an artistic temperament but you are not an artist.” And in her petulant need to get what she wants, she approaches Don to get her a commercial that one of their clients is shooting, a commercial she only knew about from a friend who wanted her to ask Don for her. Don is reluctant as he tells her, “you want to be somebody’s discovery, not somebody’s wife.” In the end, to her it doesn’t matter and Don starts to see her in a new way in that she was just someone’s wife and it didn’t matter to her and he believed it should. I think in a lot of ways, Megan represented for Don something purer than the path that he chose and that drove his love for her and imbued him with a deep admiration for who she was not only as his wife but as a person. Megan's begging Don for the part in the commercial (something that certainly isn’t art and didn’t she consider herself an artist?) shattered that illusion and lowered his opinion of her. Now she was no better than anyone else; no better than Lane or Pete or Don himself. On the commercial set in the final scene, we see Megan in her ridiculous "Beauty" costume so excited for this meaningless gig and that completed the destruction of this false picture he has constructed about who Megan actually was. This, I believe, allowed him to walk away from the fairy tale, quite literally, and into a bar. We don’t know yet it he will succumb and return to his old ways but the signs are there and that smoldering look he used on the beautiful blond who asked for a light is classic Don Draper, philanderer. If Megan is no better than Don, Don no longer has to attempt to live up to her in any way, he is off the hook. When the strains of You Only Live Twice filled the scene, and the montage started it was truly sublime. 

The Small Screen Keeps Getting Bigger

I love television. I think even more than movies, because I rarely go and see movies anymore. I will wait for them to come to VUDU or Netflix. And I won’t deny that over the years there has been some truly amazing television both of the weekly series and mini-series variety. But, it seems to me that in the last 5 to 8 years, I have noticed a Renaissance of sorts happening on the small screen. There seems to be a glut of excellent television the like I have never quite seen before. It started with HBO and Showtime realizing that they can do original programming as good if not better than its commercial counterparts, mainly because they didn’t have to watch their language or nudity. Out of this came shows like Deadwood, The Sopranos, Six-Feet Under, etc…This was only the beginning though once it was realized what this format could do.  I didn’t watch many of these shows when they were on, but they were universally praised and earned lots of awards. For me, the cable shows first grabbed my attention with the introduction in 2006 of the lovable serial killer Dexter on Showtime. Wow, I loved this show and never missed an episode. Then 2008 rolled around and I was enthralled all over again with the adventures of a telepathic waitress and the vampire who loved her in True Blood. For a while, I could not get enough of this series and would watch the DVD’s on loop. It is not as good as it once was but the first 2 seasons are fan-fucking-tastic!! So much so that I will continue to watch and find myself looking forward to the next season coming up here in just a couple of months. Then it seemed that everywhere I looked there were these amazing shows. Mad Men is one of the most compelling dramas I’ve ever had the good fortune to watch. This season has taken such a dark and discordant turn that watching it makes me feel off-kilter and uneasy although this show is not violent. It is just that well-written that it strikes these internal chords that can leave you breathless and thinking about it long after it is over. Network television threw in Fringe, who owes a serious debt to The X-Files, but has found its own voice and every season shocks and amazes me and seriously, somebody give John Noble an award already. 

This Time It's Personal...

I thought I would weigh in on the GOP’s “war on women”. Since I am a woman, it seems an appropriate topic for me to discuss and I can claim to be somewhat of an expert at being female. Pundits and our friendly neighborhood Congress and our lawmakers do not seem to agree and those of us that are weighted with the X-Chromosome are hardly heard from at all, relegated once again to the back of the galley to be seen and not heard by our “betters”. Time and again I have sat in stunned disbelief as the Right gets more and more radicalized and strives to throw us back to the disparity and callousness of the Victorian era, an idealized version of society that only favored white men, let me clarify that, it only favored white wealthy men and never really existed in the first place. It is a fairy tale that the wealthy warm themselves with at bedtime.

Poor? Too bad, send your lazy kids to work cleaning up the schools they attend and get your dinner from a garbage can. Oliver would feel right at home. Can’t pay your bills? We have for-profit prisons just dying to throw you behind bars. That’s right folks; it is the return of the debtor’s prison.  Lost your job and can’t pay your mortgage? The big banks will falsify your paperwork, throw you out and tell you to live in your car, if you have one, while handing themselves big bonuses. There are homeless camps springing up all over the country, almost as bad as the Great Depression. Sick and have no insurance? Treat yourself with a do it yourself guide to surgery, go deeply in debt to stay alive (or get harassed by bill collectors while in the hospital or refused treatment until you pay), or just hope for the best until it’s too late and you die. Want to get a college degree? Here are some student loans that will straddle you with massive debt that will take you your entire working life to repay, that you can never bankrupt away, and with a huge interest rate to boot. Have skin that is slightly darker than a St. Tropez tan? Show me your papers, don’t walk to the corner store, just accept that you will have less chance to get a job and are far more likely to be thrown in jail.

The idiocy of all of this is lost on the tea-partiers and the god, guns, and, gays tunnel vision that is their red meat. The radicalized right who are in our government has been growing increasingly insane by the year turning into some crazed Chicken Little who preys on the ignorance and base fears of the poor, racist, uneducated, and uninformed. All of this Kabuki Theater in front while their elected officials laugh at their base behind their back and pick their pocket at the same time, siphoning off our countries wealth to those that need it least. The corporations and their fat cats continue to be given free rein to do as they please and we all suffer as a result, from a polluted environment to draconian laws to keep us line. And oh soooo much more. 

Just some random rumblings...

I know I may be pilloried for it but I like manufactured groups, not all of them, and most of the groups I like are from England who seemed to have turned this particular band niche into an art form. But I can say with confidence that I like the music enough to know that the kind of poppy melodies and dancey tunes appeal to my sense of fun. I don’t need all my music to be deep; sometimes it’s enough to be entertained. It started with the Spice Girls, the penultimate manufactured group. I fell for their loony brand of Girl Power hook line and sinker. I have all of their music, which I still listen to and thoroughly enjoy, saw them in concert for their reunion tour and if they released any new music, I’d most likely buy it. Being a fan of Robbie Williams has turned me into a fan of his youthful boy band Take That. He is the UK’s Justin Timberlake and is a far bigger star there than here. Fairly recently after years apart, they reunited first without Robbie and later with and released some very good songs and several albums. Currently, I am loving another girl “band” called Girls Aloud. This band was put together from individual contestants from the British The X-Factor, which blows away its American counterpart. For these guys, I must pick and choose their songs but so many are so good that I can overlook the stinkers. 

Book Review -- Final in this series

The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare by Brenda James & William D. Rubenstein

I won’t pretend to be a Shakespeare expert. I’ve only seen a few of the plays and these would be in movie form, and I remember having to read some in English class while in High School. It is not easy for me to read or comprehend sometimes but since he is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the history of everything, I have to take it seriously. Although, I love his sonnets, especially #29 as it is so beautiful and sad, and who hasn’t felt this way at one time or another:

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
   I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
   And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
   Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
   With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
   Haply I think on thee,--and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
   From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
   That then I scorn to change my state with kings'.

I have a few books about the man from Avon, watched and enjoyed some movies that purport to portray him, and have seen some documentaries (especially good is Michael Woods In Search of Shakespeare [although all of Michael Woods documentaries are fabulous]) about his life because this period of English history is so fascinating to me and he is an intricate part of it. But as most people, I always assumed the accepted canon, that William Shakespeare from Stratford-Upon-Avon, the actor who made good, was the writer of these timeless tales. I had no reason to think otherwise. Funnily, it took a computer game to make me pursue an interest in those who don’t accept the party line and really take a look at their arguments. I enjoy playing hidden object games and I was playing one called Midnight Mysteries: Devil on the Mississippi. The whole plot of it is to help the ghost of Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) defeat a demon and uncover the truth about Shakespeare. So I started to do a little research and it seems that many of the elements and inconsistencies that the game featured were in actual fact correct. Apparently, there has been a growing movement of the authorship question since the middle of the 19^th century (actually the first question about his authorship was published in 1791) and has gained an incredibly diverse and impressive following including such luminaries as Charlie Chaplin, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, Sir John Gielgud, Henry James, Mark Twain, Orson Welles, and Walt Whitman. These are some of the brightest minds of this or any time and if they take this subject seriously, who am I to argue? Coincidentally, a big budget movie on just this subject came out recently called Anonymous, its plot follows one of the most prominent alternate authors and why he was not allowed to claim the works that flowed from his pen.