Author: Mindy Newell

Mindy Newell: It’s A Wonderful Life 2 – The Feds Awaken!

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George Bailey: I’m shakin’ the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m gonna see the world. Italy, Greece, the Parthenon, the Coliseum. Then, I’m comin’ back here to go to college and see what they know. And then I’m gonna build things. I’m gonna build airfields, I’m gonna build skyscrapers a hundred stories high, I’m gonna build bridges a mile long…

Uncle Billy: They did, they did it, George, they voted Potter down. And they only had one condition, and that’s the best part. They want you to run the Building and Loan.

George Bailey: No, no, this is my last chance to get away from here. Harry Bailey is your man, he will run the Building and Loan.

Uncle Billy: But George, they’ll vote with Potter otherwise…

Mary Bailey: George Bailey lassos stork.

George Bailey: Mary…you…you…you…Mary, are you on the nest?

George Bailey: Why’d we have all these kids?

— It’s A Wonderful Life, Directed by Frank Capra

There’s a moment in It’s A Wonderful Life that always nails the character of George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart).

George is at the train station, eagerly awaiting return of his brother Harry from college. Harry is supposed to take over the running of the Bailey Bros. Building and Loan Association so that George, who sacrificed his own college education to take over running the family business after the death of the boys’ father, can finally get his chance to leave the “crummy little town” of Bedford Falls, NY and change his dreams into reality. But Harry arrives with a surprise – a wife.

George Bailey: What’s a pretty girl like you doing marrying this two-headed brother of mine?

Ruth Dakin Bailey: Well, I’ll tell you. It’s purely mercenary.

Ruth: My father offered him a job.

George: Oh, he gets you and a job? Well, Harry’s cup runneth over.

Harry: Uh, George, about that job, Ruth spoke out of turn.

The newlyweds walk off stage and the camera zooms in on George. It’s maybe three seconds of screen time, and yet it’s all there. Rage and jealousy, personal dreams vs. responsibility and familial duty, recognition and realization and resignation.

I watched It’s A Wonderful Life for the thousandth time on Christmas Day. Well, due to the standard of truth in this column to which I hold myself: I started watching the film at my daughter’s mother-in-law’s house after a scrumptious dinner, but I finished it on my DVR when I got home. And yeah, I got weepy for the thousandth time when Clarence got his wings.

But today, for some reason, Cynical Mindy took over, or maybe it was just me being the writer thinking “what happened next?” I started wondering if George would have gone to jail anyway. Yes, thanks to the townspeople emptying out their piggybanks, he could, in theory, cover the loss. But the original money is still missing – and it’s the money that was held in escrow by the Bailey Bros. Building and Loan Association for the company’s investees and mortgagees and debtors, i.e., the very people who gave George more money.

So, in effect, didn’t they just double their loss? In other words, my landlord has my security deposit in an escrow account. That money, plus whatever interest it has earned, is supposed to be returned to me when I move. But what if my landlord lost that escrow account. If I gave him the equivalent amount of cash to keep him out of jail for embezzlement and misappropriation of funds, then he would still owe me at least my original security deposit plus interest, right? (It could be argued that the second amount of cash was a gift.) Or would the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which was created by F.D.R. under the Banking Act of 1933, cover the losses of the citizens of Bedford Falls. Perhaps this is a question for Bob Ingersoll, ComicMix’s intrepid interpreter of law.

And wouldn’t Ernie the cop and the Bedford Falls Police Department still be under the obligation of investigating just what the hell happened to the $8,000 that Uncle Billy lost? Or would it be the New York Treasury Department, or the FDIC? Hey, maybe they would, and the trail would lead to Mr. Potter, and the bastard would be the one to go to jail.

But, Cynical Mindy thinks, Potter would probably pay off the judge, or threaten him with the political consequences of the judge bringing Potter to trial – I’m sure Potter has a million politicians in his pockets – and walk away clean… or set it up so that Uncle Billy went to jail.

And then maybe Mary would get tired of George talking about angels and ringing bells and leave him – and George would try to commit suicide again, only this time everybody “up there” already has their wings and the townspeople think he’s nuts or fed up that he never paid them back for that time they pulled his ass out of the fire, or decide that George is a scam artist after all, so they would turn their backs on him, too… so George dies.

Or maybe Mary, convinced that her husband has gone off the deep end talking about an alternate reality in which he never existed and in which she ended up a spinster librarian – “Really, George, that’s what you think would happen to me if I had never met you? Have you forgotten Sam Wainwright?” – would commit him to a mental institution.

And there George would sit, talking about an angel named Clarence and rereading, over and over, an old, battered copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Merry Christmas, everybody!!!!

Mindy Newell: Two Reviews

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I loved it.

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Melissa Benoist, whom I first saw on Glee, packed up her beautiful singing voice to play Kara Danvers, nee Kara Zor-el, bears no blame for the general snorrrrre that is the hallmark of the show. Neither do any of the following: Chyler Leigh as kick-ass secret government agent-who-also-happens-to-be-Kara’s-Earth born sister, Alex; Mehcad Brooks as no-longer-cub-reporter-now-Pulitzer-Prize-winning photographer Jimmy Olsen, David Harewood as Hank Henshaw-Director-of-same-secret-government-agency-which-makes-him Alex’s boss-and-who-also-happens-to-be-J’on J’onzz the Martian Manhunter; Jeremy Jordan as lovelorn-for-Kara-and-not-yet-revealed-to-be-son-of-supervillain-The Toyman techie Winslow “Winn” Scholl, Jr., or Calista Flockhart as Ally McBeal-all-growed-up-and-head-of-her-own-media-empire Catherine (Cat) Grant.

No, the cast is fine. Especially Flockhart, whose Grant started out as a total caricature of Miranda Priestly (who herself was a caricature, albeit a sophisticated one, of Vogue’s Anna Wintour), but now is the only one demonstrating any of that all important ingredient for a successful television series recipe: character growth. But this isn’t the Ally-McBeal-All-Growed-Up show. It’s supposed to be about an alien millennial woman finding her adult footing with the albatross of an older, famed celebrity cousin slung around her neck. And, oh, yeah, she’s got super-powers.

As to the star of Supergirl: I watched her performance as Marley Rose, the anorexic and bulimic transfer student in the 5th and 6th seasons of Glee – and I say that poor Melissa Benoist is, im-not-so-ho, is being extremely short-changed.

By whom, you ask?

It’s the writers.

Ali Adler (Chuck, Family Guy), Greg Bertlanti (Arrow, Flash, Dawson’s Creek), and Andrew Kreisberg (Arrow, Flash, Fringe, The Simpsons, DC’s Green Arrow and Batman Confidential comics, and his own Helen Killer for Arcane Comics) certainly have the credentials and the writing chops, at least on paper. But what they’re doing with my childhood idol – oy!

Seriously, guys, just what the hell are you doing? Your Kara Zor-el Danvers is just the perkiest thing to occupy the small screen since Gidget. No, strike that. She’s just the sprightliest young woman to take up an hour on the boob tube since The Flying Nun. (The fact that both characters were played by the young Sally Field is just coincidental and absolutely not meant to be detrimental to Ms. Field – only to say that it could just be possible, who knows, that young Melissa goes on to mature into the outstanding actress that is Sally Field.) It’s like watching a living, breathing Barbie doll come to life. There is no Kara Danvers – just a one-dimensional mock-up, a fashion illustration in the New York Times, a walkway model at the Paris fashion shows. Nice to look at – but where are the guts?

Holy shit! The Giants are tied with the Panthers, 35 – 35, and there’s 5 seconds left!… 43 yard field goal attempt by the Panthers. Time out called… back in play… Shit! Fuck! Goddamn It!

Okay, I’m back.

Here’re my problems, in no particular order, just as they came to me while eating dinner and jotting them down. Although the first one is a big, big, big one, and from which all the others flow:

  • Everything is given to us on a plate. There’s no mystery, there’s no buried treasure, there’s no smoking gun. There’s absolutely nothing to hook the viewer into caring about Kara’s story now that we’ve seen her in the costume, which is what everybody was waiting for in the premiere.
  • How many times and in how many ways can Kara talk about proving herself? This fast became a one-trick pony that quickly wore out its welcome and became a whine that is repeated in each and every episode as expository statements to her sister, to Jimmy, to Winn, to Hank…hey, Kara, take a tip from Yoda: “Did not you see Strikes Back the Empire Does? Do, or do not. There is no try.” Seriously, I’m waiting for somebody to tell her to just shut the fuck up already.
  • We met Aunt Astra and we know right away that she’s evil. She might as well have had a mustache to twirl. We shouldn’t even have known who she was – tease us, fool us. Mix us up. Maybe sometimes she’s good, sometimes she’s bad, maybe she’s somewhere in the middle. What’s her relationship with Kara? And since we’re supposed to be identifying with Kara, that should have been her deal as well.
  • Kara was stuck in the Phantom Zone for years. And this hasn’t had any lasting affects? No emotional or psychological hang-ups? No anger issues at her cousin for dumping her in some strangers’ laps and flying off? No PTSD from seeing her parents, her civilization, her planet from being blown to kingdom come? Did the Danvers even attempt some sort of therapy? She should have trouble forming relationships, she should have trust issues, jeez, let’s see some anger.
  • What is Supergirl’s mission? Why should we watch it? Arrow is dark, fully noir and chiaroscuro. Flash is honorable, open, fantastical and rococo. Both shows dive into their characters’ lives; neither are afraid to explore the depths of the human experience while staying within (or despite) the parameters of their genre. Both are slowly building universes, borrowing from their comics’ origins and inventing new ones. Both shows know what they’re about. What the fuck is Supergirl about?

I could go on. And on. And on. But most of all it seems to me that the writers, or the suits behind them (which is probably the more likely scenario) are afraid, like they’re gingerly walking on a bed of nails, or handling a hot potato. They want Supergirl to be a role model, but they are afraid to let her be one. The most popular, the strongest, and the best role model young girls and women have had on television was another young woman with super-powers whose job it was to slay the evil dark things, and whose friends ranged from gay witches to werewolves to vampires to demons. She killed a god and had a sister made from her own blood. And her best friend flayed a man alive. Oh, and she had an adult male hanging around her all the time. Her name was Buffy Summers and the show was Buffy the Vampire Slayer and it became the hit of the 90s, winning critical acclaim and fans who will never let it go.

So why Adler, Bertlanti, and Kreisberg seem to be afraid of doing the same with Supergirl is beyond me. I suggest they sit down and watch all seven seasons of Buffy, then sit down again and take notes. Maybe call up Marti Noxon or Jane Espenson or Drew Goddard or Joss Whedon, get some advice, ask them to go over the scripts, maybe even have them do some ghosting.

Jeezus. Call me. Or Gail Simone. Or Kelly Sue DeConnick. Because the show needs help.

And not just the kind that Jimmy can signal for on his wristwatch.

Mindy Newell: May The Force Be With Us

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Hans Solo: C’mon, baby, don’t let me down. • Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Five days and counting down.

Unless you live in France, where all new movies must open on Wednesdays. Or unless you live in the United Kingdom, where it premieres on Thursday, December 17. Or unless you live in Bayonne, NJ, where my local theater, Franks Cinema, is starting showings also on Thursday at 7 P.M. Which is weird because I haven’t seen anything, either on television or on the web, about the U.S. release date being moved up by one day.

Not that I’m complaining.

Of course I’m talking about Star Wars: The Force Awakens, J.J. Abrams’ newest baby, which he “adopted” from George Lucas when Disney bought Lucasfilm. To tell you the truth, I’m very nervous about the film, the saga having been tainted by the prequel trilogy – although Return of the Sith was somewhat saved by the final light saber duel between Obi-Wan and Annakin. Still, Lawrence Kasdan is part of the writing team, and he is responsible, along with the late Leigh Brackett, for what I consider the best of the Star Wars saga, The Empire Strikes Back.

Aside: Once upon a time I sent Marvel editor Louise Simonson a story treatment for What If? – it was an alternate version of Empire’s ending, in which the twist was that Darth Vader got to Luke, hanging on that weather vane or radar apparatus or whatever it was, before the Millennium Falcon. She called me and told me that she loved it, but since Marvel’s Star Wars was a licensed property, I couldn’t do anything that reworked the canon. That was my first experience dealing with licensed properties. And by the way, I think it is a major sin that ComicMix’s own John Ostrander and his work on Star Wars for Dark Horse, who inherited the license from Marvel, was cut out of the “new, official” history.

Anyway, like many of us I have been bemused by what it seems to me to be an overdosed marketing campaign launched by Disney, although in an online story dated December 8 by Robert Hackett for Fortune magazine, he quotes Disney CEO Bob Eiger calling the publicity machine “extremely deliberate” and “carefully constructed” and specifically saying “We are managing this with great care.” The article goes on to say that Disney has spent only $17 million on public relations, against the usual $50 million that movie studios typically spend on “blockbuster” movies.

Of course that $17 million doesn’t count the seven marketing partners that are flooding the airwaves, including Fiat Chrysler. To be honest, I do find some of these ads very clever and amusing. I just saw an ad for Dodge, which the company titled “The Force Gathers.” With “The Imperial March” ominously playing, a black Dodge Viper – a stand-in for Darth Vader – leads an army of white Dodge Chargers, Challengers, and Durangos, i.e., “Stormtroopers,” down a major metropolitan street, passing scared pedestrians and heading towards two very nervous parking valets standing in front of a theatre playing The Force Awakens. The fun twist is the homage to another major film that changed movies forever, as one valet paraphrases to the other, “We’re gonna need more valets.”

Still, part of me is sad and misses those halcyon days when a sci-fi fantasy space opera made on the cheap exploded onto the world through simple word-of-mouth. Those days, I think, are pretty much gone forever.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens carries a huge monkey on its back.

I really hope it doesn’t let us down.

Thanks and a tip of the Dark Helmut to Nerdist.com for the awesome hunk of art atop this column.

Mindy Newell: On Being Fucked Up

new-york-108The President: What’s his plan? Ohila: I think he is finishing his soup. • Hell Bent, Doctor Who Season Finale, Series 9

“Sometimes I think about what my mom told me. How I was really, really sick when I was first born and the doctors thought I was going to die. But there was this one doctor who wouldn’t give up. And sometimes, when things are really bad and fucked up, and I’m just so fucking tired of hauling myself out of the abyss one more goddamn time, I wish he had.” • Mindy Newell, On Her Depression

18 October 1990

Dear Ms. Newell,

Thanks for the letter and the story, which I liked enormously. I’m glad you liked my little book and that it may have helped in some way.  I’m sure you’ll avoid your Jack the Ripper and pull through with grand success; remember that most people do. I did. So will you.

Sincerely,

William Styron

Postcard I received from William Styron after I sent him a copy of “Chalk Drawing” along with a personal note after reading his “Darkness Visible.” I treasure it.

I recently had the fun experience at my day job of assisting with ECT – electro-convulsive therapy. While the procedure has come a long, long way from the days of One Flew Over The Cuckoo Nest, it ain’t – to put it mildly – pleasant.

Oh, the patient is put under general anesthesia with a hit of succinylcholine to control tonic-clonic activity, so it’s not exactly Torquemada’s House of Medieval Torture, but there’s still something ugly and uncomfortably sadistic about purposely sending an electrical charge through a brain, isn’t there? Even if it has proven to be a successful intercession against intractable depression. And something profoundly impersonal that disturbs me, too, in the way a human being is treated like a slab of meat on the grill. “How would you like that, sir?” asked the waiter. “Well done,” said the diner, to twist W. C. Fields.

Or is that I feel it more deeply because of my own acquaintance with the Darkness Visible, as Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Styron titled his memoir of his own battle with the disease.

At any rate, as I stood looking down at the patient as the doctor was about to go to Defcon 5, I couldn’t help thinking…

There but for the grace of God go I.

At the time I co-wrote “Chalk Drawings” (Wonder Woman #46, September 1990) with George Pérez, I hadn’t told anyone about the depression since I hadn’t been officially diagnosed with it; in fact, I didn’t even know that I had it, only that something was “off” and “wrong” and had been for a long time…a very long time, actually. IIRC, the only one I had ever even mentioned my anxiety episodes to – which are frequently symptomatic of the condition, though they can stand “alone” – was my editor Karen Berger, and even that discussion was on a friend-to-friend basis one night over dinner in a restaurant on Columbus Avenue (I think) in Manhattan, and only because I was in the midst of having a giant panic attack over my plate. So the story of teenage depression and suicide was a bit – well, the word serendipitous comes to mind, but I usually use that word connoting something good happening, as in good karma.

So I can’t say that the depression made the story easy to write – I only know that it came pouring out of me like milk from a carton. At the time I guess I thought it was because of my empathetic ability – not in the way of Betazoid Deanna Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation, of course – to get inside the head of my characters. At least, that was what everybody (editors, fellow writers, and so forth) was telling me.

It’s well known that many creative people have suffered from depression, and you can Google “creativity and depression,” or “writers/artists and depression” and get a zillion hits. While the psychiatric community is still out on the actual conclusive evidence, i.e., the biological/genetic/chemical linkage, there is a lot of subjective support out there. And while by no means am I putting myself in the category of writers like David Foster Wallace or Virginia Woolf or F. Scott Fitzgerald or William Styron, I do somehow just know that my illness, while certainly fucking up my life in so many god-awful, totally horrible ways, has also led me to that oft-touted “empathetic ability” to get inside my character’s heads

But can I get into my head?

I have a dream, a dream to write a “personal memoir” in the form of a graphic novel (of course, I can’t draw worth a damn so I’ll have to find an artist) about my experiences with the “darkness visible” of depression.  It won’t be a “my mommy and daddy fucked me up” account, as in Prozac Nation or in Girl, Interrupted, although, dearest family, you’ll be in there; you’ll have to be. I think, rather, that it will be more along the lines of Carrie Fisher’s Postcards From The Edge, vignettes or short-short stories.

Like the time, way, way back in 1976 (I told you it’s been around me for a long, long time) when I ran from my dorm room at nursing school through the streets of the Lower East Side of Manhattan to the L train subway station because I thought the clouds were falling down on me. And if you know the L train subway line, you’ll understand just how crazy I was, that the L train subway station at 14th St. and 1st Avenue could be a sanctuary.

That’s a great visual, isn’t it?

•     •     •     •     •

Holy Shit! Holy, Holy, Holy Shit!

Awesomely Amazing!

Abso-fucking-lutely Brilliant!

That’s my review of Hell Bent, the Season 9 finale of Doctor Who.*

SPOILER ALERT! As I told editor Mike Gold on the phone last night after the broadcast, I though that Stephen Moffat was about to pull some time-winey stuff when the Doctor and Clara stole the TARDIS – taking us back to the very beginning of the story, with Clara “renaming” herself Susan, i.e., the Doctor’s “granddaughter.”

Mindy Newell: Run, You Clever Boy. And Remember

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Clara: I don’t know where I am. It’s like I’m breaking into a million pieces and there is only one thing I remember: I have to save the Doctor. He always looks different. I always know it’s him. Sometimes I think I’m everywhere at once, running every second just to find him. Just to save him. But he never hears me. Almost never. I blew into this world on a leaf. I’m still blowing. I don’t think I’ll ever land. I’m Clara Oswald. I’m the impossible girl. I was born to save the Doctor. • The Name of the Doctor, Doctor Who, Series 7

Last week’s column (Paul Is Dead) was my bitchfest against the suits of the BBC and their relentless “wink-wink” interviews and spoiler-y “previews” of what’s to come on this season of Doctor Who. That it’s gotten so bad that “I’m expecting any moment to see an announcement… that Peter Capaldi wiped his ass after taking a shit.”

At least I’m not alone. Here’s what Simon Brew said in his review of Doctor Who’s Season 9’s penultimate episode, Heaven Sent:

“Doctor Who is a globally enjoyed TV show that continues to make serious and heavy inroads around the planet. It’s also a programme that therefore has to – even though it’s a BBC show – dance to the ratings game a little. As a consequence of that, the decision has been made somewhere along the line to release what I’d class as fairly significant spoilers in the build up to this episode, a few weeks ahead.

“I think – and it’s easy for me to say this from my perspective – that’s a mistake. Worse: I think it hurt the ending of Heaven Sent for those who had read what should have been a more spoiler-light synopsis – or at least a more time sensitive one – for Hell Bent, the series finale.

“Appreciating that Steven Moffat, a year ago, already began teasing the cliffhanger of this episode, for those of us who were exposed to spoilers ahead of time – and this wasn’t Internet chitter-chatter, they were formally released in a piece of publicity by the BBC – the reveal at the end of the episode lost a good chunk of its impact. Because we knew the Doctor was going to end up on Gallifrey. A big, geeky, nerdbump-generating moment had been sacrificed for many at the altar of the publicity machine, and that’s a real pity.”

Anyway, having experienced Clara’s death last week as an anti-climatic fallen soufflé, I stayed away from the Whovian universe – okay, I did read reviews and comments about Face the Raven at my favorite sites, which include Forbes, Vulture, Den of Geek, and Entertainment Weekly – and watched Heaven Sent with very little foreknowledge.

It made a huge difference, as I was able to not only simply watch Peter Capaldi’s amazing solo act, but also figure out what was going on, instead of waiting for the fait accompli.

SPOILER ALERT. In no order at all:

Not just the castle, but also the Doctor’s life is being continuously reset; those billions of skulls at the bottom of the sea are his.

Room 12 is his room, the twelfth Doctor (purists can shut up right now about Capaldi being the 13th reincarnation), which is why Clara’s portrait hung there.

The portrait is so old that the paint is cracked and flaking away. (This was actually when I realized that the Doctor had already been in that castle for centuries, if not thousands, of years.)

The Veiled “Thing” was something born of the Doctor’s own nightmares and fears and guilt and lies, which was why telling the truth stopped it. (Here I was expecting the Doctor to admit that he was ultimately the cause of Clara’s death, since her arrogance and recklessness was patterned on the Doctor’s own behavior.)

The word “Home” written on the “impenetrable” wall – I knew what that meant: Gallifrey.

But I didn’t expect to see the TARDIS, nor did I expect to see Jenna Coleman in the flesh.

That was the best part of the episode for me, as (perhaps?) for one last time, the “Impossible Girl” who has been there at every crisis in all the Doctor’s numerous lives pointed him in the right direction and told him to “get up off your arse and win.”

Why was it the best part of the episode for me?

“Don’t it always seem to go,

“That you don’t know what you’ve got

“’Til it’s gone”

Though I loved her incarnations as a Dalek and as a Victorian barmaid/governess, I never really “got” the modern-day Clara. She never felt truly defined for me – though now that I think of it, perhaps that was the point. Clara the individual stopped existing the moment she stepped into the Time Vortex – and because of all that “time-winey stuff,” she had done it before and would do it again – so that even the Clara we saw through Matt Smith’s time as the Doctor, and even now with Peter Capaldi, is still only a shade, a shadow, a piece of shattered personality. Which is why we saw modern-day Clara as a babysitter, then a teacher, then a lover and would-be wife and mother, a “member” of UNIT, and, then, finally, as an adventurer and “Time Lord.” It was as if Clara was trying on and discarding clothes in a department store fitting room, or walking through a funhouse Hall of Mirrors looking at all her distorted reflections. She seemed to be constantly asking herself, “Which one is the real me?”

I don’t know. Maybe I’m overthinking it.

But I finally felt Clara’s death.

One more thing I believe I have figured out…

“The hybrid is me.”

Or is that….

“The hybrid is Me.”

Mindy Newell: Paul Is Dead

DR WHO ABBEY ROAD

Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman): Let me be brave. Let me be brave. • “Face the Raven” • Episode 10, Series 9 • Doctor Who

Well, that was… uh… umm…

Kinda flat.

It’s because it was all over the Internet, including an interview with Doctor Who show runner Stephen Moffat, that Jenna Coleman, a.k.a. Clara Oswald, a.k.a. The Impossible Girl, was leaving the series and that her exit would be horrible, dramatic, terrifying, and final – or words to that effect, anyway.

And it really wasn’t.

I don’t blame Peter Capaldi or Jenna Coleman for this; both of them turned in their usual brilliant performances. I don’t even blame Stephen Moffat all that much; he has to answer to the higher-up-the food-chain suits.

Those are the ones I blame – the suits who are obviously so frightened that Doctor Who will lose its “worldwide phenomenon” (as the New York Times called it around the time of the 50th anniversary) status and return to where it belongs – the little show that could, the ½ century-old cult that, like a Time Lord, regenerates itself every so often to become an obsession with a new generation of fans.

Seriously, guys, your obsession with keeping the media spotlight on Doctor Who since the 50th anniversary and The Day of The Doctor has become so relentless that I’m expecting any moment to see an announcement from you that Peter Capaldi wiped his ass after taking a shit.

Memo to the Doctor Who marketing department:

Relax!

Let it go!

Let it be, already.

 

Mindy Newell: Eat, Drink, And Be Merry, For Tomorrow…

Isis ParisThis is the real world, and it will take more than Peter Capaldi’s breathtaking performance and a great, great episode of Doctor Who to change the minds of radical splinter groups bent on war to realize that the box – both of them – is empty.

That’s what I wrote in my column last week. And my words proved too Goddamned prophetic just four days later, when Paris was attacked by ISIS.

The official death toll as I write this on Sunday afternoon at 3:39 is reported as “129, with 352 injured and 99 in critical condition.”

But that doesn’t take into account the psychological and emotional injuries suffered by the parents and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and fiancées and boyfriends and girlfriends and college pals and the citizens of Paris, France, and the world.

Like clockwork, some of the Repugnantican politicians jumped in to take advantage of the carnage.

Ben Carson: “If we’re going to be bringing 200,000 people over her from that region – if I were one of the leaders of the global jihadist movement and I didn’t infiltrate that group of people with my people that would be almost malpractice.”

Rick Santorum: “ISIS is a creation of a political decision by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to abandon Iraq – against all of our generals’ recommendations, against all of the policy recommendations…Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, on her watch, decided to put politics above the security of our country…and from that was born ISIS.”

Donald Trump: “When you look at Paris  –  you know the toughest gun laws in the world, Paris  –  nobody had guns but the bad guys. Nobody had guns. Nobody,” Trump said at a rally here. “They were just shooting them one by one and then they (security forces) broke in and had a big shootout and ultimately killed the terrorists…You can say what you want, but if they had guns, if our people had guns, if they were allowed to carry, it would’ve been a much, much different situation.”

Chris Christie: He [sic] called ISIS the JV and just hours, just hours, yesterday before they struck in Paris he told ABC News that his strategy was containing ISIS…All of these statements were a lie…He sees the world as he likes to see it; as a fantasy…I see the world as it really is, and it’s time to have a president who sees the world as it really is, not how he wishes it would be.”

Carly Fiorina: “I am angry that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton declared victory in Iraq in 2011, abandoned all our hard-won gains for political expediency and contract to the advice of our generals, thus leaving vast swaths of territory and too much weaponry to be gobbled up by ISIS,”

And former Republican Governor of Ohio John Kaisch proved that he doesn’t have a chance in hell of becoming President, when he said, “Today is a much different day. It’s a somber day. It’s a tougher day. And for me it’s really not a day of politics or promoting a candidacy,” as was Carlos Lopez-Canteria (Lieutenant-Governor of Florida) who said it was “not the day” for criticism.

Okay, you can accuse me of being a major hypocrite here, as I am certainly full of slanted political criticism today. But I am just so sick and tired, so absolutely fed up, just so fucking pissed off about the total inability of this country’s so-called leaders to sit down together and figure out what the fuck! we are going to do? about the biggest threat to sanity and civilization since Adolf Hitler and World War II engulfed the world.

Yesterday, John Ostrander mirrored my emotional reaction to Paris in his column. And the only thing I will add to his brief history of how we got here is that none of this started with President George W. Bush and his “Project for a New American Century” administration cronies. It started after World War I, with the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the division of its territory into make-believe countries by the winners without regard to the social, political, or religious needs of the indigent peoples of those regions.

I said this same thing 14 years ago, a day or two after 9/11, to my father, essentially calling out the West.  “We’re paying now for what they did,” I said to him.

He said, “You’re right, but keep your mouth shut.”

I can’t, Dad. Never could.

I wish I didn’t think so much. I wish I didn’t have a mind that constantly plays “connect-the-dots.” But I do.

And I keep thinking about how it is said that the “final battle” will start in Syria, and end on the plains of Megiddo (from whence the word “Armageddon”), which is in modern-day Israel.

And, like John, I too keep singing “it’s the end of the world as we know it.”

Only we don’t feel fine.

Mindy Newell: Peace Killing

zygoninversion

The Doctor: “How are you going to protect your glorious revolution from the next one?” • The Zygon Inversion • Doctor Who, Season 9, Episode 8 • Written by Peter Harkness and Steven Moffat

What the fuck is with all these fucking commercials!

I mean, seriously, I get that BBCAmerica wants its money’s worth out of Doctor Who, but c’mon, are you fucking kidding me? Ever since the passing of the TARDIS to Peter Capaldi, the commercial breaks have gotten absolutely fucking ridiculous – what is it down to now, every five minutes? And the breaks seem to be longer than the actual story in between the damn commercials!!!! How the hell can anyone actually enjoy the show?

Because of the stupid commercials, I missed so much of the nuances of both The Zygon Invasion (which first aired last week on October 31) and Saturday’s The Zygon Inversion that I watched them at one sitting today, Sunday, November 8, on Amazon Prime. Yeah, I paid $2.99 for each, because Season 9 is (not yet) part of my Amazon Prime membership, but it was worth every penny.

I loved it.

No, more than that…

I adored it.

In fact, im-absolu-fuckin-lutely-not-so-ho, this two-hour story will be the one that definitely defines Peter Capaldi’s ownership of the Doctor. His delivery on the futility of war was brilliant, combining pathos, hope, desperation, and even bits of humor. I was riveted, I couldn’t take my eyes off of him – and, in fact, I “rewound” those ten climatic minutes three times just so I could watch and listen to him again. Now, I do have to say that I was a bit “quibbled” last week when the show hit us all on the head with a very, very heavy hammer:

The Doctor: “This is a splinter group. The rest of the Zygons  –  the vast majority  –  they want to live in peace. You start bombing them, you’ll radicalize the lot. That’s exactly what the splinter group wants.”

Yes, yes, Steven Moffat and Peter Harness, we got the analogy – and if you didn’t get the analogy then I’m not talking to you – and perhaps you didn’t have to swing Mjolnir again when the “normalized” Zygon pleaded that he just wanted to live in peace before he killed himself. The best part of any science fiction, whether it be in book or television or movie form, imho, is when it addresses and/or attacks our real concerns, assumptions, and prejudices and, hopefully, makes us actually think about them.

The Doctor: “Listen, I just want you to think. Do you know what thinking is? It’s just a fancy word for changing your mind.”

But this is the real world, and it will take more than Peter Capaldi’s breathtaking performance and a great, great episode of Doctor Who to change the minds of radical “splinter groups” bent on war to realize that the box – both of them – is empty.

Even the Doctor has been through this 14 times before.

Mindy Newell: Dick and Me     

the-man-in-the-high-castle

“Don’t believe everything you read or hear, remember a large part of our world is made up of fiction!!” • Victoria Addino

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” • Albert Einstein

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” • George Orwell,1984

“Am I the only one who knows? I’ll bet I am; nobody else really understands Grasshopper but me – they just imagine they do.” • Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

I haven’t read The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick, for many years, not since my “Introduction to Science Fiction” class in my freshman year at Quinnipiac University.

I didn’t love it, even if it had won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963, and even though it was one of those books during the 1960s that was blowing everybody’s mind in Haight-Ashbury and anywhere else where people were tuning in, turning on and dropping, and even though my professor waxed on and on about its brilliance. (BTW, I started college in the fall of 1971, the tail end of the social revolution was coming to an end – im-not-so-ho – since the spring of 1970 with the killing of college students at Kent State by the National Guard, and eventually lead to “Dance Fever with Deney Terrio,” “Disco Duck,” and polyester jumpsuits.)

That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate it, or I didn’t understand it. I just find Dick to be very depressing. Okay, okay, you can all guffaw and snicker at that, so let me rephrase: I find reading Dick’s works to be heavy going; his themes are overall incredibly morose… y’know: life sucks, and then you die.

No matter what life you perceive as yours.

The Man in the High Castle professed to be an alternate history – what if the Axis powers, i.e., Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire, less Mussolini’s Italy, had won World War II? – with what I guess you can call a twist ending (I won’t give away any spoilers here), but what it’s really about, and what is at its heart, is its questions on the nature of reality and the human response to what is a perceived reality.

This afternoon I watched the first two episodes of The Man in the High Castle on Amazon Prime, produced by its eponymous studio. Produced and co-written by Frank Sponitz (The X-Files), it’s a beautifully crafted series, obviously done with love, and is a “triumph of world-building,” as Entertainment Weekly put it. It captures the darkness, dreariness, and depressiveness of the book; more disturbingly, it also reveals the psychological acceptance of a “it-is-what-it-is” acceptance of life under the Reich and the Japanese Empire by the American public, with very little display of “heroic Resistance fighters” to be seen. But there is resistance; and that is what drives the story, at least on the surface.

My one complaint is that it’s very slow going; just like the book, you really have to pay attention. No bathroom breaks allowed!

Though I’m interested to see how Sponitz and his fellow writers handle what is a very complicated ending that asks very existentialist questions, I don’t think I’m going to be rereading the book any time soon. To paraphrase Sex and The City:

I’m still not that into Dick.

Mindy Newell: Are You Typing?

Bradbury Snoopy

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” • Dorothy Parker

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.” • George R. R. Martin

“Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done, they’re done.” • Kurt Vonnegut

“Are you typing?” • My mom, when she would call me up in the middle of the day when I was writing for DC and other comics companies.

Who are the people who tell us our stories?

And how do they do it?

Some like to plot everything out, down to the last word, using what I call the “shuffling cards” method in which important plot developments or character moments are written out on index cards, and then mixed and jumbled and rearranged until the writer holds a royal flush. Some writers start at the end of the story and then figure out how it got there. Others get a scene or situation in their head; it could be the middle, it could be the end, it could be the opening paragraph, or somewhere in between. Then that scene or situation plays over and over again, like a needle skipping on a vinyl record in the middle of a song, and. like that skip, doesn’t stop until the writer does something about it.

There are writers who get up in the morning and eat a proper breakfast and take a proper shower and get dressed as if they are going to the office or meeting up with friends and walk to their study or their den and work a proper eight-hour day, writing. There are other writers who get up and squeeze their story-telling in the hours between the time the kids go off to school and the spouse leaves the house to join the 9-to-5 rat race to when it’s time to pick the kids up to take them to their play dates or swim team practice or religious school – not to mention cleaning the house and going grocery shopping and doing the laundry and making dinner for the husband or wife who will soon be home.

Then there are the writers whose beds never get made, their carpet never gets vacuumed, and everyone is picking their clothes out of the laundry hamper because mom or dad is “in the zone.” Or, perhaps, the only time the beds get made and the carpets get vacuumed and the laundry gets done is when the writer is having a particularly bad day and everything that works so beautifully in the brain comes out on paper or the computer screen reads like it was written by some ignorant schmuck of a troll in a Twitter feed.

There are writers who live in their bathrobes and there are writers who can only work in the middle of the night when everyone else in the house is fast asleep. There are writers who live alone but have the TV on as “white noise” as they write. There are writers who play classical orchestral symphonies while they are “at it,” and writers who play specific music that matches rhythms of their words, their characters’ lives, their plot, their story. And there are writers who must shut out all the sounds of the outside world, who must listen only to the noise, the racket, the voice of their individual muse demanding to be heard.

There are other writers who demand feedback, who meet a trusted friend or editor and over lunch or long walks or over a beer or a Guinness or a Scotch, and work out the voices in his or her head, like a neurotic going to see his or her shrink.

There are writers who are incredibly prolific, churning out story after story after story, as if they are not individuals, but simply shells of flesh occupied by hundreds, if not thousands, of “others” who wait on a line that stretches out into infinity until at last they reach the front of the line and it is their turn to tell their yarn. There are writers who have but one tale to tell, and when “the end” is reached, they are no longer writers; they are finished, they are done.

There are writers who drink too much wine and smoke too much tobacco. There are writers who need a doobie or a blunt to get the juices roiling. There are writers who can only write on deadline and writers who are masters of procrastination.

There are writers who get to the gym every day; there are writers who think walking to the stoop to pick up the daily newspaper is exercise. There are writers who withdraw from the world, and there are writers who are at every A-list party and every movie premiere. There are writers who are constantly on the phone to their agents or their publishers’ marketing departments demanding more publicity, there are writers who let their words speak for themselves.

There are writers who would never option their story to Hollywood. There are writers who tell their agents that they won’t finish the story until it is optioned by Hollywood.

There are writers who are braggarts; there are writers who are shy. There are writers who are savvy with the Internet; there are writers who still use pencil and yellow legal pads.

There are writers who write instant classics, there are writers who never see success until long after their bodies have rotted away and the maggots have eaten what’s left.

Those are the people who tell us our stories.

And that’s how they do it.

Editor’s Note: The graphic atop this column is of Ray Bradbury and Snoopy. Yes, we know you knew that, but that person sitting over there did not. It was cribbed from The Atlantic from about three years ago, and it is damned brilliant.

 

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