Author: Mindy Newell

Mindy Newell: Piggy

Get ready for some brouhaha. Actually, the brouhaha has already started.

As I was reading the Friday issue of The New York Times, my eyes fell upon this: “In ‘Lord of the Flies’ Remake, Girls Survive Instead.”

The film will be under Warner Bros.’ auspice and will be written and directed by Scott McGhee and David Siegel, who co-directed The Deep End (2001) and What Maisie Knew (2013). Two men. But that’s not what bothers me – although I’m sure others will certainly be bothered. On a business level, McGhee and Siegel were the ones who brought it to Warner Bros., so they certainly have the right to want to write and direct the film. (I don’t know whether or not the deal includes a clause in which Warner Bros. has the right to “exchange” (i.e. fire) them if the studio isn’t happy with their work, and even if it does, and Warner Bros. does so, it doesn’t mean that any women would be given the project.) And on a personal level, I’ve never believed that men aren’t capable of writing or directing a “woman’s story” if it is the right man with the right talent. And vice-versa, by the way.

What does bother me is apparently there are people, mostly women, who apparently think that women are not capable of cruelty and power mongering. For example, Roxanne Gay, author, essayist, journalist, professor, and comic book writer

(whose latest book, Hunger: A Memoir of My Body was the driving force behind ComicMix cohort Martha Thomases’ August 11th column tweeted this:

roxane gay@rgay, 6:30 PM – 30 Aug 2017

An all women remake of Lord of the Flies makes no sense because… the plot of that book wouldn’t happen with all women.

And this, from Clara Mae, a TV writer and contributor to WomenWriteAboutComics.com:

Clara Mae‏ @ubeempress, 3:58 PM – 30 Aug 2017

Lord of the Flies starring only girls: “Girls get marooned on an island. Band together to find food, shelter, rescue. Nobody dies. The end.”

William Golding also believed that “gender was also crucial to the larger point of the story (from the Times article):

“If you land with a group of little boys, they are more like scaled-down society than a group of little girls would be. Don’t ask me why, and this is a terrible thing to say, because I’m going to be chased from hell to breakfast by all the women who talk about equality. This has nothing to do with equality at all. I mean, I think women are foolish to pretend they’re equal to men – they’re far superior and always have been. But one thing you cannot do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilization, of society.’”

Fuck that!!, Roxanne and Clara Mae and William. I have some “in-your-face,” upfront and personal experience with the cruelty and power mongering of the sugar and spice set.

I was in eighth grade when my parents moved us to Bayonne Bew Jersey, 12 going on 13. For my parents, originally from Bayonne, it was a homecoming. For my brother – well, all he had to do was show that he could sink a basket, field a baseball, and go deep for the pass, and no problem with the boys. For me, it was quite a different experience.

A week before the move, the family went to the bar mitzvah of one of their friends’ children. On the other hand – one of my mom’s friends had asked her daughter to introduce me to her friends. “Sure, mom,” she said (or something like that). But she dumped me a.s.a.p, running to the bathroom (probably to giggle about the “new girl” who was about to move to Bayonne) with the rest of the gaggle. So there I was, standing by myself. That’s when the bar mitzvah kid, Paul, came over to me. My guess is, now, that his mom or father saw me standing by myself and told him to not leave me like that and to introduce me to his friends. So he did. All his “boy” friends. And suddenly I was inundated with boys. They huddled around me like I was Fran Tarkenton calling the play and they were my offensive team. They were curious, friendly, and even asked me to dance.

Well, the gaggle returned and watched the stranger become the “belle of the bar mitzvah.” I didn’t know it then, but I became Piggy that night.

A week later. First day at my new school. First recess. First day in hell.

I was loudly and openly made fun of for being flat chested. I was loudly and openly made fun of because I wore no makeup. I was loudly and openly made fun of because I didn’t have my period yet. My clothes were loudly and openly made fun of.

And then I was attacked for trying to “steal their boyfriends” at Paul’s bar mitzvah. (Even the girls who hadn’t been there joined in the attack – they had “heard.”)

And it didn’t get better as the school year progressed. I was made fun of for being a tomboy. (Yes, there were other girls who were good at sports, but they weren’t “open” about it.) I was openly snubbed whenever a teacher wasn’t around. I was the butt of jokes – and I distinctly remember one teacher joining in. A chair was pulled out from beneath me just as I was about to sit down, so that I landed on the floor, and ended up getting yelled at by the teacher for “fooling around.”

And it continued into high school.

Yeah, I was Piggy.

And being Piggy has continued into my professional life, in a field (nursing) that is rife with woman – to – woman cruelty. Hell, it’s so common that it’s been given a fancy name in nursing peer-review journals and studies: Lateral and Horizontal Violence in Nursing – Lateral being peer–to–peer, Horizontal being superior–to–subordinate. And it encompasses everything from bullying to sabotaging to actual physical violence. Google it. You’ll be stunned. It happens everywhere around the world, which I discovered when I wrote my college senior thesis on the phenomena – Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Great Britain, Peru. And yes, it still happens in this “post-feminist” era.

So don’t ever tell me that girls…and women…aren’t capable of being Lady(ies) of the Flies.

Mindy Newell: Feet Of Clay

I don’t carry a sign over my head announcing my feminism—I do it with a tote bag from Emily’s List, which I use to, uh, tote my lunch and papers and such back and forth from work.  Said bag is inscribed with the following:

feminism noun fem-i-nism ‘fe-ma-,ni-zam

The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities

—Merriam-Webster

I’ve always thought of “equal rights and opportunities” in terms of work and salary, but I suppose it can also be applied to the prerogative of making a total ass of yourself in public, regardless of gender.

I am referring to the “Whedon vs. Cole” controversy that my buddy John Ostrander talked about yesterday, and which has caused mucho uproar all over the web, including over at the Whedonverse fan site, which is supposedly shutting down over it, although I had no trouble opening the site when I tried today.

As I replied to John,

Struggling man succeeds, becomes rich and powerful and famous.  Man cheats on wife while spewing words about feminism and publicly praising wife.  Ex-wife chooses to feel herself empowered by publicly detailing events that happened while married to ex-husband.  Ex-husband, through a spokesman, says that allegations are misrepresented.

Old story.

Yes, I am saying that Ms. Cole made an ass of herself as much as Mr. Whedon (allegedly) did.  And no, I won’t be surprised to be hit with outcry and insults from individual women and attacks from feminist websites.  I get it, I do.  What I think is definitely a very unfeminist thing to think.

But sometimes the best thing to do is to walk away and not look back; there’s a Wiccan belief (yeah, I tend to think of myself as a “Jewiccan”) that whatever harm or ill wish you inflict on another will come back to you three-fold.  So allow the universe to take care of it.  Karma, as they say, is a bitch.

John also mentioned his GrimJack episode in which Gaunt shot someone in the back.  Which made me remember the two-part Magnum, P.I. story that opened Season 3 of that venerable and much-beloved series.

In Part One of  “Did You See The Sun Rise?”, a compatriot from their days in Vietnam visits [Thomas] Magnum (Tom Selleck) and his friend TC (Roger E. Mosley), telling them that all three are being pursued by a man named Ivan, a Russian agent who caught and tortured them during the war.  At first, neither believes Nuzo; they think he is suffering from PTSD.  But it turns out that Nuzo is right; Ivan is somewhere in Hawaii. But the Navy wants to keep Ivan alive (for their own reasons) and assigns Lieutenant “Mac” MacReynolds, another friend of Magnum’s, to make sure that he does—they are afraid that Magnum and TC will kill Ivan; in other words, find Ivan, but make sure Magnum does “nothing stupid.”  So Mac claims that he quit the Navy, and starts hanging around with the private eye, saying that he wants to “learn the biz” from Magnum.  After a night oat a bar, Mac says, “Let’s drive up to the lookout point, and watch the sunrise,” rushing ahead of Magnum to get into the Ferrari.  The car explodes.

In the second part, Magnum discovers that Nuzo is actually Ivan’s operative, and that TC was “brainwashed” while in captivity in Vietnam.  Nuzo triggers the brainwashing, which will cause TC to kill a visiting Japanese prince.   Magnum stops TC in time, but due to political immunity, Ivan is set free.  But Magnum captures him, and while Magnum holds a gun on Ivan, they have this conversation:

Magnum:  It was all planned, back at Duc Hue?

Ivan:  Not specifics, not even target.  Just trigger.

Magnum:  How many others are out there like TC?

Ivan:  You are still a schoolboy, Thomas, using schoolboy tricks.

Magnum:  No tricks.  Who’s next on your hit list?  Begin?  Thatcher?  Reagan?

Ivan:  I have a plane to catch.  If you are going to shoot me, do it now… You won’t.  You can’t.  I know you, Thomas.  I had you for three months at Doc Hue.  I know you better than your mother.  Your sense of… honor and fair play.  Oh, you could shoot me—if I was armed and coming after you.  But like this—Thomas…never.  Goodbye, Thomas. 

Ivan says Do svidaniya, turns, and walks away.  Magnum stops him.

Magnum:  Ivan?

Ivan stops, turns to face Magnum, saying, Yes?

Magnum:  Did you see the sun rise this morning?

Ivan:  Yes.  Why?

Magnum shoots him in cold blood.

One of the reasons this episode was so effective was that up to now, Thomas Magnum, P.I., was played as an extremely likable character.  He’s endearing, he’s comic, he’s vulnerable, and often insecure.  He’s faithful.  He makes mistakes.  He lives from hand-to-mouth.  He can be incredibly lazy.  So much like us, in fact, that we forget that he is a Navy SEAL, that he’s trained to kill, that he’s seen and done things that he would rather forget, that we would find horrific.

This episode is a slap in the face, a bucket of ice water sloshed over our bodies, a lightning bolt.  “Holy Shit!” we collectively said.  “I forgot that he’s a Navy SEAL, that he’s trained to kill, that he’s fought in and survived a brutal war, that he’s seen and done things that are really, really ugly, and can still do them.” 

Only children’s heroes are perfect.  As adults, we are bored by them.  Think of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first seasons.  Be honest…it was pretty damn boring, wasn’t it?  (Really, if it hadn’t been Star Trek, I’m convinced it would have quickly been cancelled.)

Gaunt and Magnum are the best kind of heroes.

Those with feet of clay.

And for those who worship Joss Whedon, think about that before sending him to the Hellmouth.  And do the same for Kai Cole, okay?

I want to extend my sincerest condolences to ComicMix’s Mike Gold and Adriane Nash, whose beloved sister and aunt died on Saturday.  May Hashem and the Goddess bring all of you peace. 

Mindy Newell: The Fox Is In The White House

“Use of the term ‘alt-left’ gained ground quickly online (according to Google Trends charts) when conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity used the term in a debate with BuzzFeed writer Rosie Gray over media coverage of the so-called ‘alt-right’. Searches for the term spiked again directly after Trump used it in his 14 August 2017 press conference. It is unclear if Hannity himself coined the term, but we could not find widespread use of the term on Reddit or 4chan, a web form popular with the

‘alt-right,’ prior to his 22 November 2016 use of it.” – Alex Kasprak & Kim LaCapria,

Snopes.com, August 17, 2017

Alt-left?

Is that a keyboard command?

What it is, is a load of horse manure. Crap. Same as anything else that comes out of the mouthpiece of Il Tweetci The Mad known as Sean Hannity. He is the modern-day version of Joseph Goebbels, head of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, the modern-day version of which is Fox News.

I sometimes wonder how many of those who work at the “fair and balanced” network – the bile rises in my throat as I type that – really believe what they spew, or are they just in it for the paycheck? I mean, why did it take so long for Megyn Kelly, Gretchen Carlson, Greta Van Susteren, Julie Roginsky, Michelle Fields, Andrea Tantaros and others to come forward about Fox being the personal harems of Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly?

Even Chris Wallace – of whom Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post said, after the third and final Presidential debate in October 2016, which Wallace moderated: “No one could watch the final debate and deny that Chris Wallace is among the best in the business.” – said, “it’s not my job” to fact-check candidates, but that it was the job of the opposing candidate. Really, Mr. Wallace? Given up journalism, have you? For a nice, fat paycheck and a steady gig on Fox on Sunday mornings?

Is there anyone at Fox with even an iota of integrity and self-respect?

After Charlottesville and on Saturday after Boston, I was switching between MSNBC, CNN, and Fox – because I was curious as to how the last was reporting it – which left me to wonder if those who work at Fox are given a manual of essays and quotes by Goebbels as part of their orientation packet:

  • If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
  • Arguments must, therefore, be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was [sic] unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.
  • Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.
  • This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.
  • The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitive. In the long run, basic results in influencing public opinion will be achieved only by the man who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form, despite the objections of the intellectuals.
  • What you want in a media system is ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity.
  • Not every item of news should be published. Rather must those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.

It’s not just Russia or Steve Bannon and his crew, folks.

The Fox is in the henhouse White House.

 

Mindy Newell: Migraines and Mel

This may turn out to be a short one, guys.

A lot of us here at ComicMix have written about the agonies of writer’s block, but I don’t think anyone has ever talked about the torture of trying to write when your head is trying to separate itself from the rest of your body.

That’s ‘cause I have the worst tension migraine right now. I’ve been having them all week, on and off. It’s probably because I’m starting to go nuts from being – mostly – stuck in the house. My vision is okay, but there’s a little man with a pick-ax standing on the right side of the crown of my head, and he’s swinging away and my right ear is ringing in response – I feel like Wile E. Coyote after a run-in with the Roadrunner. I’ve taken my Advil, but the only thing that really helps is standing in the shower and letting the hot water run over me – and I can’t stand in the shower all day.

Anyway, I finished the story for the ComicMix project – see my column from two weeks ago, Patience, Perfection, and Procrastination – and what I called “connecting the towers” worked. It’s now in the hands of artist Andrea Shockling. Check out her work at andreashockling.com, and you’ll understand why I’m thankful to ComicMixer Joe Corallo for telling me about Andrea. She and I spoke on the phone last week, and we discovered that we are kindred spirits; bottom line, I am super excited and happy to be working with her.

Still plugging away at my graphic novel proposal. Did I ever mention that I am the worst, absolutely the worst, proposal writer in the world? I have the hook, I have the concept, I have the story – my big problem is I start writing the outline, and all of a sudden I am deep into it; but when I stop to take a bathroom break or make a “cuppa tea” I come back and realize that it’s already eight or nine pages long. Which means I have to go back, and cut and paste and cut and paste and edit and keep editing, all in order to get to the place where the heart of it resides, while at the same time whittling it down to three or four pages, double-spaced. Oy.

As to what happened yesterday (Saturday, August 12) in Charlottesville, Virginia…

Il Tweetci The Mad can make inane remarks and have the White House staff rush in to “stem the fallout” – as the New York Times reported today – all he wants. He ain’t fooling anybody.

Here’s a conspiracy theory for you from a migrained mind: what happened was encouraged, nay, organized, by the “deconstructionists (read: destroyers) of the world order” and Nazis currently sitting at the right hand of Il Tweetci: Steve Bannon, Steve Minchin, and Sebastian Gorka. (Okay, I’m not sure if Minchin is a “deconstructionist of the world order” or a Nazi, but he, im-not-so-ho, sure is a self-hating Jew.) Not that anyone could prove it.

Today, this morning, I went on YouTube and watched Spike Jones’ “Der Fuehrer’s Face” and “Springtime for Hitler,” from Mel Brooks’ The Producers.

Then I read an interview that Mr. Brooks did with the late Mike Wallace on CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2001. The subject was Mr. Brooks’ obsession with his ethnicity and with Hitler:

“Hitler was part of this incredible idea that you could put Jews in concentration camps and kill them…How do you get even with the man? How do you get even with him?”

“You have to bring him down with ridicule because if you stand on a soapbox and you match him with rhetoric, you’re just as bad as he is, but if you can make people laugh at him, then you’re one up on him…It’s been one of my lifelong jobs – to make the world laugh at Adolf Hitler.”

And I thought, what if people had just stood and laughed at them?

Would that have worked?

I don’t know.

But what happened is enough to give anyone a permanent migraine.

 

Mindy Newell: Why D’ya Think?

From Martha Thomases’s column of August 4: Last week Heather Antos, an editor at Marvel, went out with a bunch of her colleagues for milkshakes at a nearby Ben & Jerry’s and posted a selfie on Twitter. She said “It’s the Marvel milkshake crew! #FabulousFlo.” The hashtag refers to Flo Steinberg, who had just died.

So, you know, a Friday after a long week, Heather and a group of her pals went out to remember a woman who was their friend and mentor. They didn’t go to a bar. They went for ice cream. They posted a photo on Twitter because that’s what the kids do these days. I don’t know what could be more wholesome.

Naturally, there was an upset. To some, this photo represented everything that was wrong with Marvel today. Women and people of color in editorial offices apparently is a menacing concept to them, and they menaced back. Ms. Antos received threats of rape and other kinds of physical violence. Others chimed in to say these women weren’t attractive enough to rape.

Fuck them.

Uh-oh. Mindy’s on a rant. Duck and cover.

Who the fuck gave these maggots permission to insult and threaten anyone who lives outside their minuscule, ignorant bubbles?

I’ll tell you who.

The liar. The bully. The malignant narcissist. The “Baby-Man.” Or, as I call him, Il Tweetci The Mad.

On June 29, Self magazine writer Nina Bahader listed 22 sexist comments made by the man who sits in the Oval Office. Here are some of them:

  • In tweets sent out earlier today, (June 29) Trump referred to Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski as “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and claimed she visited Mar-a-Lago while “bleeding badly from a face-lift.”
  • He tweeted that sexual assault in the military is simply what happens when men and women work together.
  • He wrote that women are inherently manipulative. In his book Trump: The Art of the Comeback (1997), he wrote: “Women have one of the great acts of all time. The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers. The person who came up with the expression ‘the weaker sex’ was either very naive or had to be kidding. I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body part.”
  • He referred to women as “pieces of ass.” In an interview with Esquire in 1991, he said: “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
  • He implied that unbelievably beautiful supermodel [and television host and entrepreneur] Heidi Klum was “no longer a 10” simply because she’d dared to age. During aNew York Times interview with Maureen Dowd, [he] mused: “Heidi Klum. Sadly, she’s no longer a 10.”
  • He said that women with small busts are not attractive. During an appearance on The Howard Stern Show, he told Stern: “A person who is very flat-chested is very hard to be a 10.”
  • He told a lawyer she was “disgusting” for pumping breast milk. In 2011, Trump was testifying in a lawsuit when lawyer Elizabeth Beck asked for a break from the proceedings so she could pump breast milk for her 3-month-old daughter. “He got up, his face got red, he shook his finger at me and he screamed, ‘You’re disgusting, you’re disgusting,’ and he ran out of there,” Beck told CNN. The New York Times reports that Trump’s lawyer does not dispute that he made this comment.
  • He credited women’s professional successes to their looks. “It’s certainly not groundbreaking news that the early victories by the women on The Apprentice were, to a very large extent, dependent on their sex appeal,” Trump wrote in his 2004 book, How to Get Rich.

A leopard doesn’t change his spots. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. During the campaign, he tweeted: “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” and said, “When she walked in front of me, believe me, I wasn’t impressed.” And he attacked her with this: “The only card [Hillary Clinton] has is the woman’s card,” he said in April 2016. “She’s got nothing else to offer and frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card, and the beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.” He said of Carly Fiorina, his opponent during the Republican primary season: “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that the face of our next president?!’ and “I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posedta say bad things, but really folks, come on. Are we serious?”

He called Megyn Kelley a “bimbo,” and then told CNN when asked about her questions during the debate, that “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.”

He has tweeted warnings to Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska about getting in step with the agenda.

He calls women he doesn’t like “fat pigs, dogs, slobs.”

His actions have led to abusive behavior by members of the Republican Party. The Washington Post reported that Representative Blake Farenthold of Texas said of Republican Susan Collins of Maine after her “No” vote in the health care debate that if she were a “guy from south Texas, I might ask him to step outside and settle this Aaron Burr-style.” In an interview with Ali Velshi of MSNBC, Georgia Representative Earl L. “Buddy” Carter said that “someone should go over there to that Senate and snatch a knot in their ass” a phrase that means to hit someone as punishment. And after Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska also voted “No” on the bill, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told the Senator that her vote had put Alaska’s future with the administration in jeopardy.

And you wonder why the maggots feel empowered?

 

Mindy Newell: Patience, Perfection, And Procrastination

I’m pretty much stuck at home these days because of the fractured ankle. Can’t go to my day job for six to eight weeks, per my orthopedic surgeon, and even with the walking boot, the orders are to stay off of it as much as possible. The first couple of weeks I probably walked and stood more than I should have, but as I will snarkily tell my doctor when I see him on August 10 that that’s what happens when your mom dies. Amazingly, there was barely any pain, though perhaps that was a function of the Advil and the Pinot Noir at dinner afterward. Yes, we had a Jewish version of a Christian repast at my mom and dad’s favorite Italian restaurant. (And perhaps my mom was intervening.)

But the other day, right after the almost week-long heat wave in the NYC metropolitan area broke, it was just gorgeous out, and I said to myself, “Self, I have just got to get out and enjoy this weather,” so instead of having my groceries delivered I walked down the block to the supermarket, but I forgot to figure in the walk around the store plus the walk back up the block to my apartment building, a walk hindered by the added burden of my food-laden tote bags – leave it to say that I hobbled my way back home. And once home, I remembered that I had clocked it once wearing a pedometer, and the total distance is actually close to ½ a mile. Oops.

I haven’t repeated that exercise.

So what have I been doing? As I mentioned two weeks ago, “I’m working on a story for a major project that ComicMix has put together that we’ll be announcing in a bit over a week. And I’m also putting together a proposal for a graphic novel,” and as it turns out, it’s a good thing that I do have lots of time, because I’m learning about myself as a writer, even at this late stage:

(1) I am not the most patient writer in the world;

(2) I am too much of a goddamn perfectionist; and

(3) I am terribly guilty of the most common illness found in the demographic known as writers – procrastination.

But I’m also learning “how to deal.”

Procrastination. I tend to wake up early without setting an alarm clock – 7:30 at the latest. And I am developing the habit of getting out of bed, going to the kitchen, making my “cuppa tea,” and sitting down to write. And it’s working! I write straight through to 11 or 12 and take a break. If I break at 11 I watch The Price is Right because I really like Drew Carey – if I break at 12 I usually eat a salad for lunch and then read or log on to Facebook to express my opinions on all things Il Tweetci the Mad, or do a crossword puzzle or stream something on the television or computer. The hard part is getting back to work. But I’m getting there. Even if the end result is only another paragraph or a bit of dialogue, I’m disciplining myself to get back to the job at hand.

Being too much of goddamn perfectionist. That means I can get stuck rewriting a sentence, a word, a paragraph more times than is good me. Literally, I can cut and paste for an hour. (Hell, I’m doing it right now.) I really have to discipline myself not to revise and rework sentences, words, and paragraphs left over from yesterday – or even an hour ago. That’s harder.

Patience. Patience, for me, is hard. Really hard, because I’ve never been a particularly patient person. When I want to know something, when I want to do something, I tend to want to know it, to do it, now – which is probably the reason I love spoilers, by the way. But writing demands patience; waiting for the right phrase, the right dialogue, the right action to come. It’s not a race, I keep having to tell myself. (Well, except for deadlines.)  And then there are the times when I just get stuck. And that’s the hardest time to have patience.

I have always tended to write straight through the story, i.e., begin at the beginning and keep going to the end. (Impatient.) But two days ago I decided to try something new.

The middle of my story for the ComicMix project isn’t entirely clear in my head – oh, it’s there, but it hasn’t yet worked its way down from my brain to my fingers and keyboard.  But the ending has been there right from the start – it was the flame that lit the fuse.

So instead of struggling with the portion that was being stubborn, I decided to write the climax. There’s not much I can do about my perfectionist streak – I need for it to be “just right,” so I am switching and shifting words and sentences and paragraphs – but to my delight, this method is also clearing the logjam. Here’s a metaphor:

When I was a kid growing up on Staten Island, my father would drive us over to Fort Wadsworth to watch the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge between the Island and Brooklyn. First, one tower went up, then the other. Then they strung the cables between the towers. With these pieces in place, they began the construction and placement of the roadway, the actual bridge between the “beginning” and the “end.”

Get it?

Many writers use this “connecting the towers” method, but it’s new for me. Is it making me a better writer? Will my story be more cogent and stronger because of it? Perhaps. I think so.

It’s a constant learning process.

Mindy Newell: July 18, 2017


When the father of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrodinger – he of Schrödinger’s Cat fame – told a Dublin audience in 1952 that “…his Nobel equations seemed to describe several different histories, these were ‘not alternatives, but all really happen simultaneously,’ it was the first time that the multiverse was addressed as a scientific theory and not just science fiction.

So Editor Mike texted me on Saturday to let me know that Adam Strange – I don’t mean an actor, I mean the DC character–is going to be a regular on the new Krypton series on SyFy sometime in 2018, if everything stays on track – and how often does that happen?

For those not in the know, and that’s all of you, because I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it here, Adam Strange was my first “comics crush” back in the day, and I continue to love him. And I don’t mean any modern interpretation of him, but the original science fiction personage created by Julius Schwartz, with a costume design by Murphy Anderson, and who first appeared in Showcase #17, cover-dated November 1958. (I was five years old.)

I texted him back:

“Adam Strange has nothing to do with Krypton.”

Mike: “Well, he does now. This series, which lives in a universe separate from the comics, the movies, and maybe even the other teevee [sic] serieses [sic], is set in both the deep past (on the planet Krypton, no longer extant) and in the present day. But let us remember that Superman does not exist on the teevee [sic] Earth where Flash, Green Arrow, and the Legends live.”

Me: “Part of the multiverse.”

Mike: “Sure. Aren’t we all?”

And then, I wrote this back to him:

“Maybe that’s what death is. I mean the ‘near death’ experiences that people talk about…that white light…some kind of “wormhole” event horizon connecting us to the next life in the next universe, the one that is ‘second star to the right and straight on to morning’…And that’s why people have reincarnation experiences and/or déjà vu…They are glimpses of the multiverse.”

Quantum leaping.

•     •     •     •     •

Not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it. So don’t be afraid… Matthew 10:29, 31

Driving down to Cherry Hill with Alixandra to see my mom last Sunday – somewhere in my heart I knew this would be the last time – we hit traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike. Not enough to slow down completely, but the speedometer was reading 45 or 50 mph. All of a sudden, a sparrow landed on the passenger side-view mirror. It just sat there for a few seconds, maybe five, looking at us through the window. And then it flew away.

As in an M. Knight Shaymalan movie, there are signs everywhere.

My favorite line in Ben-Hur:

“The world is more than we know.”

•     •     •     •     •

mom-and-dad-300x234-1084743mom-and-dad-1-300x378-3224083Today, as I write this, is Sunday, July 23, 2017.

It has been six days.

Four since the funeral.

Yet somehow it feels like forever.

And at the same time like it didn’t happen at all.

I guess that is as good as any definition of grief.

 

Mindy Newell: Of Storms And Sun

It feels like a month. Two months.

It has been only two weeks.

A dark and stormy two weeks.

The reason I wasn’t here last week was that my 91 (and a ½) year old mom has been suffering the frailties of old age, including a steadily increasing dementia secondary to a history of micro vascular cerebral bleeds and a thalamic stroke a week before my dad died. It’s a retrospective blessing, as I’m not sure she remembers that he is dead, always referring to him as being “away.” That either means that she has confused my brother, who is the spitting image of my father, with him (and at the time of that statement Glenn was in China in his capacity as physician for the Philadelphia Orchestra), or that her time sense is displaced and believes that he is still flying his beloved P-51 in the CBI Theater of Operations during WWII.

The only time she “awoke” to my father’s death was at the funeral – “Taps” had been played, the flag draping his coffin folded and handed to her – she thanked the officer, though it was clear that she didn’t really “get” what was going on – and then, just as the casket started to be moved to the graveside for internment, she wailed, a cry of the banshee that reverberates across the cemetery and which will echo in my heart for the rest of my life, sinking to her knees between the arms of my brother and myself, crying out, “No. Oh, no!… Don’t take him!” It was chilling and heartbreaking – and then she seemed to withdraw again, and for the rest of the day, she was quiet.

Anyway, on July 3rd in the late afternoon, my mom fell and broke her hip. All things considered, it was a “simple” break, and she spent Independence Day in the OR of Cooper University Medical Center in Camden – the “Coop,” as it is called, and it is one hell of a wonderful hospital. Of course I was there, and in the Recovery Room she knew I was there despite the anesthetic dream state, and I even got her to apologize to her nurse for making her come in on a holiday. So the operation was a success, as the saying goes, but…

No, she didn’t die. In fact, she was out of bed and in a chair the next morning and even walked a little bit. She was transferred back to her nursing home on Thursday evening, and… here comes the “wait”…

…became agitated and confused, climbed out of her “geri-chair,” (which looks like a Barco lounger or a Lazy-Boy), and fell on her face and head, resulting in a subarachnoid hemorrhage.

Immediately transferred back to the “Coop.”

My brother and I talked… she was in the Trauma Intensive Care Unit, but we treated her conservatively. Monitoring, yes, but nothing else. This means not even a feeding tube. It is what she wanted – both of my parents’ Advanced Directives were/are 10 pages of legalese that could be summed up in a single sentence: “Leave us alone.”

Over the next day or so, she stabilized. She knew I was there, able to give me a kiss and even took some ice cream, ice chips, and bacon from Glenn. We have now transferred her back to the nursing home, as there was/is no reason for her to be in the hospital. In fact, new orders: Do Not Admit to Hospital. She is on hospice and receiving comfort care.

And then, on Wednesday, I was walking into work, and…well, this is what I wrote on my Facebook page:

“So the klutz (me) is walking into work on Wednesday, and she trips on the irregular sidewalk and goes down… gets up, helped by a Good Samaritan, assuring him the klutz is all right. Start to walk…okay, it hurts, but I come from the school of “walk it out,” and thinking, eh, I sprained it…

“Fucking broke my ankle!!!!”

I actually went into work, changed into scrubs, got my assignment and tried to work. In my first room, the anesthesiologist noted my swelling-and-turning-colors ankle. I told him what happened; he said I’d better put some ice on it. I went into the post-anesthesia care unit and got ice. When I told the other nurses what happened, they said that since it happened on hospital grounds I’d better report it. I soon found myself in a wheelchair on the way to the ER and X-rays.

And that’s how I found out I fucking broke my ankle!!!!

All things considered, I was very lucky. Read that as: it could’ve been worse. For those of a medical nature or with anatomical interest, it’s an avulsion fracture of the distal tip of the left fibula. Which means that when my ankle twisted, the ligaments and tendons stretched and pulled the some of the bone off. As I said to my friend, Dr. Glenn Atlas, “strong ligaments and tendons.”

Like my brother and me deciding to treat my mom conservatively, my wonderful orthopedic surgeon said he could treat the fracture the same way. I was in a splint for two days, and now can use a walking boot, though I’m not running a marathon, or even a 5K, or even a mile, for that matter. Mostly I’m staying off of it as much as possible.

Oh, and I’m also out of work for at least six weeks.

Which means – and bringing this back to comics – I have plenty of time to write.

So, I’m working on a story for a major project that ComicMix has put together that we’ll be announcing in a bit over a week. And I’m also putting together a proposal for a graphic novel. It’s been a long time between comics work for me – gotta say I’m filled with a little bit of trepidation, but also feeling the blood of creation bubbling and roiling in my veins and my head is full of sequential panels and dialogue.

This has been some dark and stormy two weeks.

But maybe, just maybe…and “fer shur” eventually –

The sun will come out.

Mindy Newell: A Madman With A Box

I was going to get political again this week, but it’s too goddamn depressing. Here are some headlines just from yesterday, courtesy of that #FakeNews Enemy of the People publication, that “old Grey Lady,” the New York Times:

  • E.P.A. Chief Voids Obama-Era Rules In Blazing Start
  • Medicaid Plan Risks Changing Life For Millions
  • ‘I’m President And They’re Not’: Trump Attack Brings Crowd To Its Feet
  • Trump Administration Targets Parents In New Immigration Crackdown

And then there are the tweets. After Il Tweetci the Mad – formerly known as “Il Trumpci the Mad” – went on a rampage against Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough this past Thursday – what the fuck is with his obsession over women and blood? How the hell did Ivanka, Marla, and Melania ever get pregnant, much less get near enough to a “man” who is so phobic over natural functions to allow it to happen? It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s one of those guys who has to obsessively shower the minute the act is over – he again went after what is apparently his favorite news media target yesterday morning with this from the Washington Post, another #FakeNews Enemy of the People” publication:

 “A day after defending his use of social media as befitting a ‘modern day’

president, President Trump appeared to promote violence against CNN in a tweet.

“Trump, who is on vacation at his Bedminster golf resort, posted on Twitter an old video clip of him performing in a WWE professional wrestling match, but with a CNN logo superimposed on the head of his opponent. In the clip, Trump is shown slamming the CNN avatar to the ground and pounding him with simulated punches and elbows to the head. Trump added the hashtags #FraudNewsCNN and #FNN, for ‘fraud news network.’”

What the hell is with that “man” and CNN? Did Jane Fonda once laugh in his face, and then went on to marry CNN’s founder, Ted Turner? Is it a secret beef with Ted Turner himself, some kind of schoolboy rivalry?

And then there’s this, again from the Washington Post:

“This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked,” Brzezinski and Scarborough wrote in The Washington Post. “We ignored their desperate pleas.”

On their MSNBC show, Brzezinski and Scarborough elaborated.

Scarborough: They said if you call the president up and you apologize for your coverage, then he will pick up the phone and basically spike the story. I had, I will just say, three people at the very top of the administration calling me. And the response was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I don’t know what they have. Run a story. I’m not going to do it.

“The calls kept coming and kept coming, and they were like, “Call. You need to call. Please call. Come on, Joe, just pick up the phone and call him.”

Brzezinski: “And let me explain what they were threatening. They were calling my children. They were calling close friends of mine.”

Scarborough: “You’re talking about the National Enquirer, yeah.

Brzezinski: “And they were pinning the story on my ex-husband, who would absolutely never do that, so I knew immediately it was a lie and that they had nothing. And these calls persisted for some time, and then Joe had the conversations he had with the White House, where they said, “Oh, this could go away.”

Do you understand what is going on here? Do I need to spell it out for you? Okay then. E-X-T-O-R-T-I-O-N.

But I’m not going to get political this week, because it’s too goddamn depressing. So let’s talk about fun stuff.

Fun stuff like “The Doctor Falls,” the finale of the 10th series of Doctor Who, which aired on Saturday night. Continuing my spoiler-free zone from last week:

It was thrilling. It was hilarious. It was heartbreaking. There were easter eggs and callbacks galore. It was regenerating rejuvenating. (Hint! Hint!)

I’m going to change my mind and just give out two little spoilers…

The most chilling moment(s) for me: Bill looking in the mirror and seeing the face of a Cyberman; seeing her shadow, and seeing that it was the shadow of a Cyberman; and catching sight of her hand, the hand of a Cyberman.

And the second spoiler belongs to both Steven Moffat, as he heads towards the exit with a giant fuck you!!! to that “man,” and to the magnificent Peter Capaldi (he just nudged Tennant out of my “Number One Favorite Doctor” spot), who upped the ante once again…

The Doctor is preparing to make his final stand against the Cybermen, and is trying, pleading, with Missy and The Master to stand with him:

“Winning? Is that what you think it’s about? I’m not trying to win. I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone … or because I hate someone or because I want to blame someone. It’s not because it’s fun. God knows it’s not because it’s easy. It’s not even because it works because it hardly ever does. I do what I do because it’s right! Because it’s decent. And above all, it’s kind. It’s just that. Just kind. If I run away today, good people will die. If I stand and fight, some of them might live… maybe not many, maybe not for long. Hey, maybe there’s no point in any of this at all, but it’s the best I can do, and I will stand here doing it until it kills me. You’re going to die, too, someday. When will that be? Have you thought about it? What would you die for? Who I am is where I stand. Where I stand is where I fall.”

Tweet that.

 

Mindy Newell: Things In The Air And On The Air

Doctor Who:

…there’s only two episodes left this season—three, if you count the Christmas special—and there just seems to me to be an awful lot to be discovered yet.  I don’t want to think that Moffat is coasting his way to the end of his association with Doctor Who; he hasn’t yet disappointed me. I loved the denouement of last season, so I’m still crossing my fingers—but…

That’s from last week’s column, in which I bemoaned my disappointment in Doctor Who this season.  Then, on Saturday night, came the eleventh episode, “World Enough and Time.”

Wow!  And also Holy Cow!

I really, really don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, so do not expect any mention of the story.  I’m even struggling right now as to whether or not to include some of the dialogue…hmm…nope, not going to do it, too many hints in there. But I will say that once again director Rachel Talalay shows off her Mistressly–make that Masterly—skill and vision.  And that show runner Steven Moffat is delivering a swan song that is enough to get the fat lady at the opera to stop singing in a fit of total pique.

If you haven’t read it yet, check out my friend and fellow columnist’s Saturday column, the eponymous Marc Alan Fishman and the Rise of the Mennists. (Not to be confused with Mennonites, a branch of the Anabaptist Church often confused with the Amish, though if you change one letter to an “a” and make it “Mannonite, that could work, too, with apologies to ComicMix-er Adriane Nash)  And the answer to the question he asks (“Is there something in the water these days?”) is, im-not-so-ho, a simple “yes,” though I will qualify his question by changing one humor to another, so that it should ask, “Is there something in the air these days?”  Yes, Mark, it’s in the water and it’s in the air, and it’s everywhere.  The pundits call it “populism,” but that’s total Orwellian newspeak bullshit.   Professor Cas Mudde of the University of George told Uri Freidman of The Atlantic magazine that:

Populists are dividers, not uniters, They split society into two homogenous and antagonistic groups: the pure people on the one end and the corrupt elite on the other, and say they’re guided by the ‘will of the people.’  The United States is what political scientists call a ‘liberal democracy,’ a system ‘based on pluralism—on the idea that you have different groups with different interests and values, which are all legitimate.

Populists, in contrast, are not pluralist. They consider just one group—whatever they mean by ‘the people’—legitimate.

Populists don’t give a shit about “people”.  It’s all about “us”.  It’s all about standing against “them.”  And “them” can be anyone or any thing:  an ethnicity or a political philosophy or gender preference or a religion or a color or a lifestyle.

And it’s been nurtured and allowed, nay, encouraged, to come out from underneath the rocks into the sunshine by Il Trumpci.

So, given the political climate, all that crap that has been tweeted and spewed about a fucking movie and its star, Gal Gadot, given the political climate, shouldn’t be surprising.

It’s just sad.

I’ll leave you with two quotes.  The first is from the great Maya Angelou, American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist:

In the 16th century, Nicollò Machiavelli—in an attempt to get back in the good graces of the powerful—wrote a slim volume called The Prince.  In that book he showed the powers that be how to control the people.  That book is a statement:  separate and rule, divide and conquer.  That’s five hundred years ago, and it still works, because we allow ourselves to be led around with holes through our noses.

And the second is from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, American politician, diplomat, and civil rights activist:

Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice.  Divide and conquer.  We must not let that happen here!

           

 

           

           

           

 

 

 

 

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