Construct Reality

Death is an inevitable part of life.  I know this to the core of my being.  Easier said than experienced, however.

Not ten seconds ago, I learned that Wendy Wasserstein died at age 55.  I find myself crying. I am not sure why but I notice that a lot of my contemporaries who have mattered to me intellectually are dying.  

Call it survivor’s guilt, but I look around at people like Wasserstein who is 5 years younger than I, and who has left a young child an orphan, and I wonder why she and not me.  

It’s not fair.

The deaths of popular cultural icons of my youth come at a time when I am questioning my spiritual beliefs in a serious way.  I don’t know what to make of G-d or religion.  Note that my indecisiveness still adheres to the silly superstition of not including the “o” in the spelling of the deity.

I want to believe in an afterlife.  I want to see my parents again.  I’d like to sit down and discuss things with my father; and I’d like the adult me to meet my mother for the first time. I know so little about either of them or their life together that matters.  I’ve been an adult for longer than they were alive but not a day goes by, I don’t think of them.

A friend of mine is convinced that a psychic she consulted was in touch with her dead mother.  Whatever the psychic told her was enough to convince her that her mother is still with her.  My head tells me to be skeptical but my heart feels tremendous envy.  I miss my father and I ache for my mother, even in ectoplasmic form.

Religion is looking more and more arbitrary and silly as I ponder whether souls are palpable entitities or silly superstitious constructs invented by humans to ward off the fear of death.  

Though religion claims to instill altruism and morality, neither has anything to do with it.  That I have known for a long time. Yet I also know that the world is a wondrous place filled with goodness and beauty.  I choose to believe that the goodness and beauty part is innately human nature; though I am aware that the opposite nature exists in equal measure.

What more does religion do then, but promise eternal life?  

As I watch my contemporaries die and wait for the inevitable myself, I realize that life is to be lived and enjoyed.  Regrets are wasteful but hope never is. I still hope; I still dream; I still learn.  

I’d like to believe, I really would but athiests are making a helluva lot more sense than the rest.  

Movies As Metaphor

Movies are the metaphors for my life.  

This Sunday morning after breakfast, I dozed on the couch and woke to Reunion at Fairborough (1985), in which an aging Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr play wartime lovers reunited after 40 years.  Art imitates art because it also marked the screen reunion of the two actors, who had last appeared together in Heaven Knows Mr. Allison (1957).

Like a weird mental time capsule, movies freeze time permanently.  When I am watching, I too become whatever I was, wherever I was.

Watching Heaven, I am an 11 year old on a Saturday afternoon at the Globe Theatre on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, New York. Watching Fairborough, I am in Washington, D.C. watching television on the rust-colored velvet couch in my living room in Glover Park.

Of course, in actuality, I’m the same age that Mitchum and Kerr were supposed to be in the Fairborough movie and both of those actors have already been dead for years.  

Last night, while channel surfing, I glimpsed another Mitchum movie, Not As a Stranger, an overwrought Hollywood version of the A.J. Cronin novel that I was reading on the night in January 1962, when my father died. In the moments it took to surf to another channel, I was again a 15 year old high school girl who was convinced that reading about someone dying in the novel was a harbinger of my own father’s death.  

My sister’s birthday celebration this week was like that too. There was a cake and presents and each of the celebrants had known each other for several decades, since childhood and therefore knew what part the other was playing, what had gone before and what was coming next.

Yet as much as we laughed and talked and felt like we always had; despite the appearance of time frozen, if anything, time was entirely too fluid and changeable.  

For starters, this small celebration took place in a nursing home.  My sister’s multiple sclerosis has made her both paraplegic and ravaged by the medical complications wrought by kidneys that no longer function properly.

How can my thoughts still feel the same as they had when I was still a girl but be lodged in a mind that is thinking in a 60 year old body?  

I look down at my hands typing on my computer keyboard and I am again in junior high school learning how to type. I hate the classroom and the teacher who fails anyone looking down at their fingers.  Fat lot of good anyway.  The key letters are blanked out.  

Now when glance down, I see the loose skin of an old woman.  These are not my hands!  But of course they are mine.

Mount Oprah, Sorry Mount Olympus

In Oprah Winfrey’s own words, “The best revenge is success.” She ought to know.

When I lived in Washington, D.C., a weak signal from WBAL provided the first glimpse of a 20-something Oprah Winfrey.  Even then, she had an air of star quality about her.  It was obvious she was going places.

When she left Baltimore for Chicago and gave Phil Donahue a run for his money, she was admirably infectious presence, full of wit, inquiry, interest and eminently watchable.  She was smart, fearless, searching and compassionate.  She enjoyed her success and I enjoyed watching her enjoy it. I loved Oprah.  

Of late, that wonderfully real person has transmogrified into a self-righteous demagogue.  The problem is that where once she asked questions.  Now she has all the answers, from parenting to dieting; from finances to home decorating; from religion to addiction; there is nothing that Oprah doesn’t know.

Two things stand out: Phil McGraw and that birthday party.  

One of the most endearing things about Oprah had always been her lack of guile.  She may be rich, but she knows what it’s like to put things on layaway.  A throwaway line about hamburger set the cattle industry on her.  They sued.  It was unfair.  She was upset. We all rooted for her, me included.  

Someone had the bright idea to get her a life coach to get through that beef trial.  Voila! Phil McGraw, a jury consultant, with a penchant for folksy aphorisms was foisted on America.  Oprah’s imprimatur positioned him and his un-credentialed spouse and offspring into paid pitchmen for just about anything and everything.  The man does commercials for Match.Com for crissakes!

Which brings me to the birthday party.  Her 40th, which she felt compelled to televise over two, count ‘em, two days so that no tiny detail of her celebrity friends in frolic and preparation would be missed, left me speechless with disgust.  It was marked by so shallow and excessive displays of conspicuous consumption that the entire populations of some countries could have lived quite comfortably for a couple of years on the food and decorations left in the trash bins.  How grateful we peasants were to see the quality folk at their leisure.

As for Oprah’s book club, explorations of the darker sides of life seem to predominate her selections.  If a book has abuse, incest, or addiction, Oprah will gravitate towards it and make its author an overnight millionaire.  I have no doubt James Frey had that in mind while typing his manuscript.  

I also have no doubt that the first response on Larry King was Oprah’s “genuine” response. She’s so out-of-touch on the highest perch of Mount Olympus on which she’s placed herself these days that reading all the critics forced her into action.

How is not the problem. Doing is!

When I first retired, I had a bunch of nightmares about the job I just escaped.  Mostly, they were emotional rants at various people who had slighted me through the years.  Nothing complicated.  In them, I finally told off a few people whom I thought were my friends but who turned out to be worse than enemies.

In the last few weeks, my dreams have taken a more disturbing turn. I dream about going back to work.  

Here’s an example.  Two nights ago, I dreamt of a kid I knew in elementary school, Steven Fredericks.  Why him? I hardly knew him. We were never friends.  I don’t even know if he knew my name.  The only reason I knew his name is because he used to play Lady of Spain  on the accordian during school assemblies and once I overheard him telling another kid about some adult who had dragged him somewhere and told him if he ever told anyone what he’d just done, he’d kill him.  

I must’ve been only 9 or 10 years old when I overheard this and, at the time, had no idea what he was talking about or why he sounded so frightened, but the desperation in him deposited itself right into the permanent memory bank of my brian.

So in my dream, there was my 10-year old classmate sans accordian. He was some sort of mogul and I was pleading with him to let me work for him.  By the time I woke up, I was positively begging for a job. Huh?

There is the play.  I worked on it for over a year. The best part about it was how much fun it was to have a collaborator. So much better than than sitting alone in front of a blank computer screen waiting for inspiration which rarely comes, especially now when I finally have the resources to do what I’ve always said I would:  write.  The worst part is that the play is probably not very good.  

It’s not like I don’t have ideas.  Unfortunately, those ideas are mostly of how to do it.  I can’t seem to work out what.  The hows, though, are great distractions.  For instance, yesterday, I tried to urge podcasting on a shy young friend who is formulating a business plan for a web hosting business.  

In retrospect, selling his services in a podcast is a ridiculous suggestion for someone as shy as he.  Well then, I thought.  If it’s wrong for him, what about me? Ruminating for a while, I came up with: For the love of my pug.  Wow, what a great idea!  That’s as far as I got.  Try as I might, I couldn’t come up with any content for that brilliantly-named podcast.  

Like I said upfront.  I know how, but I don’t know what!

Malick's New World Is Fake

The New World – What’s Wrong With the Truth?

The New World represents the long-awaited return of Terrence Malick to the screen.  Writer and director Malick, whose hauntingly beautiful Days of Heaven introduced me to the likes of Richard Gere and Sam Shepard, is arguably one of the finest filmmakers this country has ever produced.

He missed the mark with this one and I wonder why.

As the story allegedly goes, during the spring of 1607, the dashing explorer John Smith was saved from certain death at the hands of her father by the beautiful Indian princess Pocahantas.  Nice story.  Made a great animated feature a few years back with pots of money generated through product placement and endorsements.  

Trouble is that the Pocahantas story was mostly made up.  

That does not mean that the true story is any less compelling.  

Told mostly in annoyingly whispered voiceovers of imagined thoughts and intentions, Malick weaves the tale of a 13 year old Pocahantas and a 27 year old John Smith falling madly in love and consummating their union during a variety of idyllic gambols in lush woods and riversides.  

Don’t get me wrong.  I think Colin Farrell is just about the most pleasant-looking, charming, charismatic actors around.  His scenes with the teenaged Q'orianka Kilcher were lovely to watch, but I wonder why Malick’s slavishly meticulous attention to the physical and cultural details did not extend to relationship between and among his protagonists.

Surely, even in those Elizabethan times, a match between a 27 year old and a 13 year old would be considered at the very least unseemly, if not downright wrong.  Indeed, according to his own written account of their meeting, Smith pegs her age at 10.  Enchanted by her beauty and her wit for sure, the real-life Smith never harbored anything more than a fatherly interest in the young princess. Was our dashing captain a bit of a pedophile? No way.  

It was a gunpowder explosion that sent John Smith back to England and the desire for the wealthy "exploration contracts" from King James, not noble concern for the love that could not be, as suggested by Malick's screenplay.  While true that the young princess was told that her friend, Captain Smith was killed by the explosion, it was hardly more life-altering than hearing that a favorite family friend had died.   She was sad. Death was no less tragic but certainly more an accepted fact of life.  

The very people she trusted, later captured and enslaved her.  That’s how she met her future husband, John Rolfe.  Theirs was probably the true love match.   Rolfe insisted that she convert to Christianity before he would marry her.  She was baptized in 1614.

In the meantime, in 1614, while Pocahantas was beginning her married life in the Tidewater of Virginia, John Smith had returned to the New World to claim New England for the crown.

In what amounts to a clever publicity stunt of the day, King James summoned Pocahantas and several of her tribesmen to court.  While in England, the princess stayed long enough for a tender reunion with John Smith, sit for that famous portrait of her in that silly pork pie hat, and contract some European germ to which she had no resistance. She died in 1617, at the tender age 22.

As for Smith, by this time a very wealthy man, he spent the rest of his life embroidering this legend until his death in 1631 at age 51.

Why didn’t Malick tell that story?

Back to Basics

A storm blew in while I slept and woke me before dawn banging on my windows.  Fully awake, the power went.  Rushing to the window, I saw that the traffic lights were out too. That meant the whole town was affected, or so I thought.

My telephones were working; I had plenty of batteries, a couple of flashlights, a radio.  The taps were running.  I had water and flushing toilets.  Though the middle of January, it was a freaky 60 degrees outside, so lack of heat was not an issue.

Luckily, I had an old-fashioned coffee pot.  I got a match to light the stove and proceeded to make my breakfast in the dark of the howling storm.  Watching the chaos of the rush-hour traffic below me, now without benefit of traffic signals, I saw several flashes of light.  Pop, pop, pop.  Then the awful smell.  

I learned later that a power line exploded.  The only power outage apparently, was the block on which I live.  

It lasted almost 12 hours.  

Ironic when you consider that the town in which I live is considered a strategic target for terrorists.

As a matter of fact, a couple of weeks ago, each resident received a gift in the mail from the local government.  It was a giant magnet detailing instructions in case of emergency: water, batteries, prescriptions and cash, etc. The magnet also noted a newly-created low bandwidth local radio station that allegedly broadcasts 24/7 to keep everyone informed.

My radio loaded with fresh batteries tuned in as instructed on the magnet.  So much for up-to-the minute information. It was just a prerecorded loop of someone reading aloud the same instructions that were printed on the magnet.

What did I miss most? The Internet, of course. It is astounding how dependent I’ve become on instant communication.  I actually considered using one of those free trial dialup ISP disks but realized it would cut off my telephone communication.  I turned on my laptop’s wireless button instead hoping against hope that someone somewhere nearby had power and an open wireless signal.  No such luck.

At least the battery on my laptop allowed me to keep my promise for 500 words a day.  

Passing of the Gold

I got a late start today.  I watched the Golden Globe awards last night.  Not that the ceremony was all that interesting enough to keep me awake until 3 a.m.  It’s just that I couldn’t sleep when it was all over.  I sat on the couch playing computer games on my Palm.  

All of these Hollywood award shows are just examples of the “popular kids” from high school congratulating each other for doing nothing particularly special and allowing the rest of us to look on.  

No that’s not why I couldn’t sleep.  

It’s the passing of the generations that disturbed my rest.  

Uncharacteristically, I actually saw the nominated performances of both Rachel Weisz and Shirley MacLaine this year.  Rachel, pregnant at the moment, and luminously beautiful, gave a good performance in The Constant Gardener but Shirley MacLaine, saddled with a turkey of a movie, In Her Shoes, was the best thing in her movie.

Shirley deserved to win, hands down!  She didn’t.

There were Candice Bergen and Burt Reynolds, the “It” girl and boy of my generation.  They were nominated, but passed over.  A noticeably botoxed Melanie Griffith, the daughter of my generation’s quintessential ice queen, Tippi Hedren, introduced her daughter, Tippi Hedren’s grandchild, the starlet assigned Miss Golden Globe for this year.  

It’s not possible!  Melanie Griffith?  Old enough to have a grown daughter?  Nah.  Yup.  

There was a Golden Globe tribute to Shelley Winters who just died this weekend.  The obituaries said she was in her mid-80s.  It can’t be but must’ve been over 20 years ago that the perpetually dieting but overly corpulent Shelley trilled on Johnny Carson’s couch about her passionate love trysts with William Holden and Burt Lancaster?

Each of them: dead as is Sandra Dee.  Sandra Dee, the ideal of my generation; died an alcoholic, anorexic recluse.  She’s only a couple of years older than me.  Hell, Troy Donahue, her Summer Place co-star has been dead for years.  

So that’s that kept me awake and left me with little energy to find these words.  All these memories of people I admired, aspired to be, and longed to know.  They were the familiar faces Golden Globes ceremonies I used to read about in movie magazines.  No one knows or cares about them anymore.  

Attempting to make peace with making room for the next generation, I still wonder how it happened without my noticing?  I’m still waiting to achieve my potential.  I’m still waiting for that big break that will give me a secure future.  Oh well.

Does this mean it’s all over for me?  I guess it does.  

It’s all yours Keira Knightly!  

Robbie and His German Stalker

My bedroom was still dark when I switched on the computer. The first thing I noticed was an old email that I had missed somehow.  

It was from a German woman with whom I had barely spoken in a now-defunct chatroom devoted to the British superstar, Robbie Williams.  

The German woman’s face and name had been in  tabloids all over Europe lately.  Williams filed a restraining order against her claiming that she was stalking him to warn him against an imminent abduction by aliens from outerspace.  

The stories made her look like a complete whack job.  

But there’s a lot that the tabloids left out or never knew.

At age 16, an impressionable Williams joined a boy band.  In spite of the odds, Take That became hugely successful.  Unfortunately, by the time the band broke up, Williams was also an addict and alcoholic.  

With extraordinary courage and determination, Williams sobered up, wrote some songs, and started a solo career.  One of those songs, Angels, catapulted him into the stratosphere of superstardom wished by most, but known by only a few.  Still virtually unknown in the United States, he is arguably, the biggest entertainer in the world right now.

During one of his tours, he noticed a blond woman and had one of his minions ask if she’d like to visit his hotel room.  She obliged.  Their meeting is memorialized in a video documentary, Nobody Someday.  

She is the German woman from whom I received the email.

During this period, Williams had a website in which he sponsored a chatroom and let it be known that he chatted regularly.  The German woman was a regular there.  

At first it was all carefree and fun.  Williams even gave his private cellphone number to one or two chatters who said they too were recovering addicts or alcoholics.

Then it all got ugly.  

First there were the fakers who pretended to be Williams to take advantage of his younger female fans. Then it became common knowledge that if the German woman were in the chatroom, he would not show up. People began to pick fights, make accusations.  Finally, someone declared that Williams had died and the superstar, very much alive, killed off his chatroom.  

Funnily enough, as ugly as it got, it was a strangely closeknit community. Three years later, many of the original chatters are still in some sort of contact, in spite of having been spurned by Williams.  That’s why when the stories broke about the German stalker and the restraining order, most of us knew who she was.

I suppose the only two people who know the truth are Williams and the German woman.  

The Geeks Are Restless

Geeks are restless. It’s probable that you have have no idea what a podcast is, let alone have heard of either Steve Gibson or Leo Laporte, but hundreds of thousands of geeks and wannabe geeks are up in arms.

Leo Laporte, a radio broadcaster from Northern California who specializes in technology and computers, helms several programs each week that are heard only online.  That is what a podcast is:  a radio program broadcast online.  

Among his weekly broadcasts is one devoted to computer security:  Security Now. His co-host is a former computer programmer, public relations expert and self-described “security expert” who earns most of his income from a program he wrote to retrieve damaged computer drives.

Laporte, an avowed cheerleader for Macintosh over Windows operating systems because of  the spyware, malware, and viruses that have become inevitable among PC users, spends the better part of each of his Security Now broadcasts detailing the various horrors uncovered each week by Gibson.

Last week, Laporte and Gibson wrung their hands and hyperventilated about a brand-new Windows security flaw that only a geek could love.  Laporte had a new opportunity to exhort his listeners to switch to Macintosh while Gibson lamented about yet another dastardly intentional crime against computer users and warned of dire consequences to one and all within the next hours.

Gibson’s a latter-day version of Emily Lutella. You remember, Lutella was the sweet Gilda Radner character who got everything slightly wrong. Gibson is Chicken Little redux. The sky is always falling in his world. He rants and pants in breathless hysteria while Leo ooos and aahs over him.

In the end, it was all to naught. There was no intentional crime and hardly any danger.  As it turned out, it was just an outdated program that needed fixing.  No nefarious plot; just inattention to detail.  As soon as it was noticed, it was fixed.

The geeks are up in arms though.  Gibson, who had little credibility to begin with apart from his friendship with Laporte, is being crucified for his characterization of the problem.  His website was bombarded after his information turned out to be false.  There were so many people trying to reach his website, Gibson’s site crashed.

You have to hand it to Gibson though.  He has real entertainment value.  The world in which Gibson inhabits is so full of danger that he’s posted elsewhere that he was intentionally hacked by Microsoft to bring down his site. Laughable really when you consider that he posted his belief on the very website that first broke the news that his original rant was much ado about nothing.  

He should be so lucky that Microsoft wanted to silence him.  I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.  He might actually believe what he says.

I’ve always told myself that if I had the time and the means, I’d write.  

The fact is, I must’ve been lying.  

I retired November 2005.  It’s already January 2006 and I’ve collaborated on just one measly play, which still needs work. Who’s kidding whom?  Finally, I have the time, the means and the wherewithtal.  Where’s the output?  

Laying on my bed thinking about it all last night, I came to one sobering conclusion. Despite years of posturing on a variety of subjects about which I have lots of opinions and very little else , I probably have nothing to say.  

Here’s the evidence.

In this Internet-driven era, anyone with a computer can blog away on just about anything; add a microphone and there’s a voice to the blather.  At last count, I have three, or is it four blogs?  They bore even me to read them and I wrote them.  As for recording my thoughts and posting them to the world, no way!  

Which brings me to my New Year’s resolution: write at least 500 words every day. (In case you’re interested, that was 188 words right there.)  

Surely, I must have something to say.  I am a mature, educated, thoughtful adult.  Hmmmm, let me think.  I had a thought the other day.  What was it?  Oh yes.  It occurred to me that movies are much too long!  Too late, however.  The New York Times opined the same this morning.

I suppose I could talk about the friends I’ve made online.  Because my generation has yet to embrace computer technology in the same way I have, most of these friends are younger.  I talk regularly on Skype to a 23-year old man who lives in England. At the moment he is touring South America, but thanks to Internet cafes, we still chat once or twice a week.  

My young friend is at the most exciting and most daunting stage of life: when all things are possible. The latest, is that a friend of his father’s who works for an international superstar, has offered him the chance to go on tour all over Europe and Australia. My friend isn’t certain he wants to go.  I don’t understand.  If it were me at his age, I would have my bags packed.

It’s his decision, but I really wish he’d go.  I view his adventure as my last fling in a way.  It’s something I would love to do, but can’t.  I have responsibilites to a sister who lives in a nursing home, not to mention responsibilities to my bladder which needs relieving every two hours.  Ah to be able to hold it in again!