Month: February 2011

The World is Full of Married Men

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

No, that’s NOT what Blacklight says to me when I’m jumping up and down on Mr Couch shrieking like a mad thing because my movie boyfriends Colin Firth and Christian Bale are now Academy Award winners. For that little stunt, Blacklight muttered something about “married” and “who cares” and “not in a million years”. Whatever…

However, Blacklight’s meanness aside, The World is Full of Married Men! Well, at least that’s what the late 1980s reissue of Jackie Collins first novel proclaims. Remember this is out feline goddess taking her first baby steps as a big bad writer. It’s 1968 and the Jackie rocking the book charts is Susann not Collins. The Santangelo clan is light years away. What we have is a morsel of a novel, all big print and simple themes. Married men aren’t faithful, Even the best wife can stray and girls called Claudia are sluts! And girls called Shirley…well, can you say ho-ho-ho children?

Our tale starts off with a bang…well the first paragraph is “When I was fifteen I was amazing, absolutely amazing! Dear Mummy was terrified to let me out on my own; she felt I was bound to come home pregnant, or something silly like that.” The actual banging is a few pages away. Our amazing girl? One Miss Claudia Parker, possible face of Beauty Maid soap. Will she get the job? Will she boink the ad agency guy David until he begs for mercy? This is a Jackie Collins novel what do you think? Honestly…

While David is romping with the luscious and loose Claudia, his wife Linda is going through her own adventures. The perfect wife and mother has an affair with a younger man which goes so very wrong. And then she catches David with our Beauty Maid Claudia on a terrace. And the next thing you know, change the locks and D-I-V-O-R-C-E (side note: had to sing the Tammy Wynette song to myself to make sure I spelled that particular word correctly).

Does David notice or care? Hard to tell because he’s living a glamorous life with Claudia in a penthouse. Only Claudia has more on her plate than David, she wants more including a film career and will do anything to get it. David gets tired of the parties and leaves. Claudia stays on the ho stroll. David boinks his very plain secretary. David and Linda’s divorce goes through. Linda starts seeing an old friend of David’s. Claudia’s ho stroll takes a dangerous turn while Linda finds happiness and David finds himself trapped in a web of his own making.

It’s a quick read. People get theirs. Secrets are revealed (pssst Claudia’s done PORN! I know, clutch the pearls child! Blacklight “You might wanna cut back on the RuPaul Drag Race thing a little honey! NEVER I SAY NEVER! Team Raja 4EVER!). There’s no roman a clef. it’s a a tale that can play out anywhere at any time. Cheating husband, neglected wife, slutty side piece, secretary in love with her boss. For a first effort it’s not too bad and compared to certain later works…a gem! How many best selling novels from 43 years ago can you say THAT about?

The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women: A Memoir

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

Right now I’m writing this on a ginger ale and Hershey Kisses high, holed up in my apartment watching people venturing in the ice storm wasteland, grooving to the tunes in my head, from Mr Computer, from YouTube while innocent Blacklight lies sleeping. Duran Duran is singing about “entering the atmosphere” but my mind is in the zone, a rat-a-tat-tat land straight out of James Ellroy.

Okay, the ginger ale and Hershey Kisses stuff is true. So is the Duran Duran (“Big Bang Generation” y’all…”greetings from the Big Bang Generation”). But the James Ellroy thing? Don’t get me wrong. I love me the hell outta some James Ellroy. Still regret not being able to get my paws on the signed hardcover copy of My Dark Places his publisher sent to Big Box Books back in the day. I can recite bits of LA Confidential (movie) and wish it had been a trilogy because the book was even more twenty kinds of awesome. I can remember Lloyd Hopkins almost being the hooker’s perfect man because he almost fit the sweater she bought for the perfect man. Heck I can even remember Cathy’s Court.

But slight and wee hardcover staring at me from the ottoman? Well…

Let’s pretend you’re Blacklight and the only exposure you’ve had to James Ellroy is being forced to watch LA Confidential by a girlfriend or wife. Do not pick up The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women: A Memoir. Let’s say you’ve read every single of scrap of Ellroy you can get your hands and know what libraries have which Ellroy books. Stay away from The Hilliker Curse. If you have a time machine and can go back a few years and prevent James Ellroy from writing The Hilliker Curse, please do so.

Okay, maybe The Hilliker Curse isn’t throw into the Marinas Trench bad (okay it is) but we’ve been to this rodeo before. Gigolo/Dad. Whore/Mother/Murder. Junkie/Freak/Writing/Redemption. Ellroy is Lloyd Hopkins minus the looks, the badge and the daughters. Woe to any woman who tangles with him. It’s almost as exhausting to read Ellroy’s tale of loves lost and regained as it is to be an Ellroy love. If only shedding Ellroy could be as easy as closing the covers of the book.

Bye-Bye Borders

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

On the side table next to Mr Couch. Diet ginger ale, Kleenex, Hershey’s Kisses, Lovecraft revision collection The Horror in the Museum, and a mug of Lady Grey Tea…in a Borders.com mug.

Before you race off to the closing Borders near you to snap up your own giant Borders mug, hold on a second. To get my Borders.com mug you’re going to have to hop into a time machine to the late 1990s and a lovely winter day when a certain Gwendy came home from a long day of work at Company X to find a package waiting for her on the kitchen counter. A lovely package from Borders.com but did Gwendy order something? This was pre-Blacklight so there was all the monies to spend on books. Inside the mystery package? A gift from Borders.com to their loyal customers, a huge coffee mug and Post-It notes with the Borders.com logo. Score!

Now fast forward over ten years. I’m dragging poor Blacklight to Borders to use up the gift certificate lurking in his wallet and half-horrified/half laughing my butt off/half wondering if the staffers are tempted to do the same thing when Blacklight directs my attention to a search he’s plugged into closest customer service terminal. “BANKRUPTCY”.

The next day at work, the list of doomed stores in Connecticut is on the list. Six stores. Some aren’t a huge surprise. Because every time I went to the Borders in the Dadster’s town it was ghost city. But the Danbury Borders? Really? An image of the Danbury Barnes & Noble staff popping open bottles of champagne and giving high fives comes to mind. Who knew that in the great Danbury bookstore chain war, the tiny superstore without a cafe, music or video section in plaza next to the mall would be the victor?Because, full disclosure I’ve worked for both. And the best Christmas working retail ever? Borders hands down.

But just because a company is awesome to work for doesn’t mean they always make the most sensible business decisions.

Exhibit A: the alliance with Amazon.com for their online presence. As much as I love Amazon.com (check my bank statements!), what companies came out for the better after joining the Amazon empire? Not many.

Exhibit B: the great e-book reader wars. Can you name the Borders chosen e-book? Blacklight says Nabooo. I say “that’s Queen Dingbat’s planet from the Does Not Exist Star Wars movies!” Blacklight tries again. Nook Book? I sigh. And look it up online. Well there is the Kobo, a couple of different Sony and Velocity readers…dang… just gimme a single platform…choosing an e-reader shouldn’t be more difficult than picking the perfect Droid phone!

Exhibit: The Borders Rewards card. Original Recipe Borders rewards card? Heaven! Awesome program to accumulate points to blow at the holidays, tons of coupons. Heck, get a 40% off coupon and forget Amazon.com for that special graphic novel! Then the changes started, switch to the Waldenbooks type of points rewards (what if you don’t have a particular book you want to buy within that 30 day window? GRRR) still great coupons. Still able to resist the Barnes & Noble “do you have our Membership Card?”. Then the pay for play card option appears. no desire to upgrade.

So bye-bye Borders. Thanks for the great memories of Christmas 2001, the discounts, the hours browsing the shelves. I hope all my former coworkers still in Danbury find new jobs. And I hope the six stores closing in CT are the only ones to fall.

 

Cult TV: The Comedies

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When people in the office talk about oh….American Idol or The Bachelor or The Big Bang Theory I’m the person mentally rolling their eyes and cranking up Mr iPod so high that the International Space Station is all “Hey, mind knocking up the Duran Duran fest? Got any Beastie Boys or something?” And no, it’s NOT because my co-workers have dubbed me “Girl Sheldon”…yes as in Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory….sighhh…

I do watch TV. Honestly, my Twitter feed for the last week has been ranting about The Brittas Empire on You-Tube….and yeah, okay so maybe that wasn’t the best example. I do watch Hoarders and Intervention and their ilk. But my fictional/scripted TV preferences aren’t on available with my Comcast cable package. So Jon E. Lewis and Penny Stempel’s Cult TV: The Comedies seemed like a good bet when I spied it on the library shelf. Notice the seemed? Good!

Photos of Rowan Atkinson as the Elizabethan Blackadder and a lovely shot of Red Dwarf crew circa Series 4 (so heart Chris Barrie!) aside, a large part of the entries just didn’t hit my cult tv radar. I grew up in the 1970s/1980s. I watched A LOT of television (network and PBS). I loved television. But perhaps my definition of cult tv is defective like so many other things in my life. Because have you ever heard of this tiny, barely known show called….The Cosby Show? Or The Andy Griffith Show? Golden Girls? Cheer? Green Acres? Happy Days? Barney Miller? The Simpsons? The Mary Tyler Moore Show? Bewitched? Family Ties? Night Court? The Bob Newhart Show? FRIENDS? SEINFIELD!!?!?!?! Freaking Nancy Sinatra admitted to staying home to watch the end of FREAKING SEINFIELD the night her father Frank died!

<cue Gwen’s head exploding all over 14 foot high living room walls leaving Blacklight to puzzle out how to clean them…>

How can a giant or classic hit be considered a cult? Cult because the masses adored them? That’s a major religion! Why not cull these hit entries and create a companion volume TV LAND Presents: Classic Hits or some such nonsense? Seriously? The Beverly Freaking Hillbillies? A show that had an episode that was one of the most watched television episodes until the mid-freaking 1980s? What’s next?  The inclusion of such hits totally takes away from reading about things that like Spitting Image or Dad’s Army or The Good Life that might have only hit our side of the pond thanks to public television.

The idea of a book devoted to cult television comedies is a good one, don’t get me wrong. But come up with strict guidelines (American cult television classics or British cult television classics) and then tell me all about them. Break down the shows season by season, get me to want to hunt down the DVDs on Netflix or scour the libraries ancient VHS collections or even YouTube to see what I missed. Don’t hand me something that dominated an era (am looking at YOU Cosby Show and Cheers and The Simpsons) and tell me it’s a cult thing. Turn me onto to something I’ve missed/longed for or don’t even bother. As the site tag line says “There is just NOT enough time for books…” especially when the book is a disappointment..

The Hollywood Book of Love

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

Either Blacklight is total genius or had a moment of blinding clarity from the gods. What else would prompt an”Oh God, you’re going to watch tons of stupid old movies with your dead boyfriends right?” as he poked through the stack of library books spread on the dining room table? I swear I know NOTHING about none Vincent Prices and Basil Rathbone movies in my Netflix queue…nothing! Someone must have hacked my Netflix account and put Blacklight’s longed for Eagle Eye at the very bottom of the DVD queue!

Don’t believe me? Neither did Blacklight gosh darn it! (Eagle Eye is back to the next DVD on the queue after I return Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown!) Now given Valentine’s Day is breathing down our necks, chances I would have decided to watch say….Leave Her to Heaven or Robin Hood (the Errol Flynn version of course!) were good. It didn’t take James Robert Parish’s The Hollywood Book of Love: An Irreverent Guide To The Films That Raised Our Romantic Expectations to push me over the edge.But it sure eased the path! 🙂

Divided into categories (The Lure of Bad Boys, Till Death Do Us Part, Young Love, etc) Parish cherry picks movies from the 1930s to 2003 giving a brief synopsis, a few stills and a nibble or two of gossip. Not everything is say Gone With The Wind or Camille or ughhhhh Pretty Woman or double ugghhhh Sleepless in Seattle. There’s a few clunkers in the bunch (hello The Sandpiper!).

If you already love classic Hollywood movies, chances are you’ve seen the bulk of the films Parish selected. But sometimes re-watching an old favorite can give you new perspective. Or you might discovered a new favorite in the making. Either way, The Hollywood Book of Love is worth a read, even when you’re the girl who turns her husband during a Kay’s commercial and says “if you waste your money on that crap you’re a dead man!”…

The Terrible Axe-Man of New Orleans

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It’s no secret I adore graphic novels and true crime (ask the staff at the local Borders and Barnes & Noble). And it’s also no secret that upon spying another installment of Rick Geary’s A Treasury of Victorian & 20th Century Murder series I let out a little yelp of excitement and stuffed the slender tome in my book bag so quick I almost ended up wearing my Whole Foods small hot chocolate no whip. By now the local librarians are used my antics and didn’t even turn their heads. Now, the good people of West Hartford on the other hand…oh well…at least crazy girl read books right? Whatever…

Telling the true story of axe murders that rocked New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century, The Terrible Axe-Man of New Orleans hits all the classic Geary highlights. A true, unsolved crime, meticulous research, and the spare yet compelling drawings that both make the people almost real and draw you right into the story no matter the time or place.

A hundred years later and the Axe-Man’s crimes are still unsolved. Geary’s treatment doesn’t sensationalize the murders but lays out the known facts, giving an almost forgotten true story a much deserved exposure. At the end you’re left wanting to know more and what case will be brought back to life by Geary’s pen.

Living Large: From SUVS to Double Ds, Why Going Bigger Isn’t Always Better

~ Wendy-Marie ~ Leave a comment

Whenever Blacklight and I trek down to see my family we end up in McMansion Land with my battered Honda Civic looking like a child’s toy left out on the street. And when we see Clan Blacklight, we pass by a church so huge it looks more like an office building for Company X versus a house of worship. And when Blacklight asks me “why?” I can stop the lecture on Modern America and hand him Sarah Z. Wexler’s Living Large: From SUVs to Double Ds, Why Going Bigger Isn’t Always Better.

Child of green parents, Sarah Wexler explores the world of mega-churches, big box shopping, SUVs, plastic surgery, houses and more. You can’t step out the door and go about your daily business without encountering something oversized. Heck, every day on the way back and forth to work I’m stuck behind at least one SUV. And the last time I looked, the Tiffany’s at the mall didn’t have tiny little diamond chips in their display windows.

As she explores each facet of the living large American life, Wexler goes from being reserved to almost being sucked into the hype. A 2 plus carat diamond transforms her fingers into something from a advertisement. Fitting a sports bra with D cup implants changes her mirror image into something riper yet sleeker.

But the living large life comes with a downside. The young man going on a $3,000 shopping spree at Best Buy isn’t running around wildly happy but trying to transform his bedroom from a virtual prison into something welcoming as he slowly dies from cancer. Friends are going into debt to fills their bodies with sacs of fluid to try and fill holes in their lives. Churches are so big that unless you connect with a group you’ll most likely leave the fold.

To live large in America is like being on the set of an old Hollywood film. The facades are big, bright, shiny and lovely, but looking out on the street from the back is a whole other story.