2016 - annus horribilis

[BoSoxGal]

Back on track:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2016/1 ... story.html

I can't read this but expect it's a good article - gonna check it out on my cousin's random IP tomorrow.

[Guinevere]

there's a very good chance she's going to be going to UC Santa Cruz

You might win the award for the most scenic drive taking a kid to college, go to the ocean and take a left, stunning views all the way.

Wow. No way your hippie vegan communist daughter is that old. I remember vividly when the Warrior Princess was born!

Can't get her to consider UVA?

[BoSoxGal]

Seriously? What sane teen/young adult would choose Charlottesville over Santa Cruz? Ok sanity isn't the issue, but if she's that progressive I think she'd be happier in Santa Cruz - I found Charlottesville to be a very conservative college town.

[BoSoxGal]

And now it's official; Carrie Frances Fisher dead at 60, may she RIP.

[Long Run]

That is a shame. She did great service in promoting awareness of mental health issues, in addition to being an iconic movie star.

[BoSoxGal]

Just stumbled on this Rolling Stone interview with her from 1983; the last bits are so insightful. She was a tortured soul - by both mental illness & life circumstances - but that's what made her exceptional.

There are a lot of people who don't like my character in these movies; they think I'm some kind of space bitch.
Meet Princess Leia Organa, nee Skywalker: Space Bitch.
She has no friends, no family; her planet was blown up in seconds – along with her hairdresser – so all she has is a cause. From the first film [Star Wars], she was just a soldier, front line and center. The only way they knew to make the character strong was to make her angry. In Return of the Jedi, she gets to be more feminine, more supportive, more affectionate. But let's not forget that these movies are basically boys' fantasies. So the other way they made her more female in this one was to have her take off her clothes.
What was it like growing up as a princess?
Leia's real father left her mother when she was pregnant, so her mother married this King Organa. I was adopted and grew up set apart from other people because I was a princess. In terms of the character, I don't know my real father . . . until. . . .
It would have been a nice touch for Darth Vader to lift up that visor and reveal Eddie Fisher underneath, singing ''Oh, My Papa.''
A lot of parallels, me and Leia. Dad goes off to the dark side, and Mom marries a millionaire. My brother and I went in different directions on the Debbie and Eddie issue. He's gotten involved with Jesus, and I do active work on myself, trying to make myself better and better. It's funny.
Who's more famous than Debbie and Eddie? C-3PO and Darth Vader, and Jesus Christ and God. There's a whole lot of freight that goes with being movie stars' kids – on the cover of Life when you're two minutes old. I remember the press diving through trees to get pictures of me, my brother and my mother. Poor Debbie; that bastard Eddie; and Liz. We've been public domain all our lives. I was trained in celebrity, so I did the only thing I knew. I went into the family business.
So, being second-generation celebrity, you should be used to all this media attention.
I don't like it. The only time I was ever hit in my life was by my nanny. Someone took a picture of me with a flashbulb, and I screamed. I had some cellular fear, some-where, which I don't wish to recall. I saw what the media did to my parents, particularly to my father, and how seriously they took it. They weren't really parents, you know, they were copy. After a point, it becomes your only validation. You begin to think if everyone accepts you – the public, the press – then you'll be acceptable to yourself.
Walker Percy says that people can't believe they're real unless they've seen themselves on TV or in the movies.
Everybody wants to be a celebrity. But you know what happens to old celebrities? They die or go to Vegas. Star life duration is getting shorter and shorter. It could be me at the Tropicana Lounge any minute.
Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you. . . .
You're not allowed to grow up with parents who are famous and then get into one of the biggest movies of all time and run around with famous people – it's resented after a while. And I would always try to emphasize something really wrong with me, so that people wouldn't be put off. There are a lot of epiphanies before you get to the satori, you know. And once it was proposed to me that it was all right to be like I am, I finally quit apologizing for it.
For what?
For being something different. For being strong. Strength is a style. But this happens in acting a lot. If you pretend something over and over, sometimes it comes true.
Leia is a strong woman figure, but she's a myth. She doesn't operate in real life. And when they try to show real-life women in the movies. . . .
It doesn't work, even in the Forties movies where it works the best, for me anyway. In stories like Adam's Rib and His Girl Friday, you've got two people competing as equals, but they love each other. It's the classic Forties relationship, and the conflict is what makes it passionate. And no matter how much the woman might avoid the man in the beginning, she always softens up and marries him in the end. You don't ever see what happens after the thrill of the chase is gone. I'm interested in what happens in the day-today business of living relationships, and that isn't what movies are cut out to do.
I think films work best as either documentary or all-out fantasy.
Movies are dreams! And they work on you subliminally. You can play Leia as capable, independent, sensible, a soldier, a fighter, a woman in control – control being, of course, a lesser word than master. But you can portray a woman who's a master and get through all the female prejudice if you have her travel in time, if you add a magical quality, if you're dealing in fairy-tale terms. People need these bigger-than-life projections. Wait! Listen to this –
Uh, oh. She's getting out her Bruno Bettelheim now. She's turning the pages of The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales and finding a footnote – a quote from Mircea Eliade. Any minute now. . . .
Ah, here! ''This amounts to saying that initiatory scenarios – even camouflaged, as they are in fairy tales – are the expression of a psychodrama that answers a deep need in the human being. Every man wants to experience certain perilous situations, to confront exceptional ordeals, to make his way into the Other World – and he experiences all this, on the level of his imaginative life, by hearing or reading fairy tales.'' There you go. That's why Star Wars is appealing. You watch someone fight the perilous monster. All of us are looking for an outside ordeal that will internally change us.
A cause?
Yes, a cause. Or a person to play out the psychodrama with. We replace the fairy-tale monster with a human being. We find a human monster to live with.
Someone that suits your particular set of neuroses?
Yes. Rather than doing it alone, you engage with somebody else to resolve your need for psychodrama.
And you try to overcome them in the conflict rather than trying to overcome that thing in yourself?
That's right. You forget you picked these people to work out your own conflicts. Chance, as you know…
. . . is the fool's word for fate.
You picked these people, or this person, or that monster because you had something to resolve. And if you recognize that, it gets easier and easier. You get to choose what monsters you want to slay. I'm sorry to say this again, but let's face it – the Force is with you.
This story is from the July 21st, 1983 issue of Rolling Stone.

[Big RR]

That is sad; I saw her a number of years back in a one woman show on Broadway and she was both funny and poignant--I was actually surprised (this was part of a subscription series we had, otherwise I would have missed it (and I'm glad I did not). If only a fifth of what she talked about really happened to her, she was a hell of a survivor.

[Long Run]

[MGMcAnick]

A month ago she was fine.

Here is a late November interview with Terry Gross of NPR's fresh air.

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript ... =503580112

I heard most of it on my way home from work one evening, but will listen to the whole thing as soon as I have time.

[Lord Jim]

This really surprised me; it seemed from the news reports that she was getting better...

Can't get her to consider UVA?

Though she wont come out and say it, I don't think she's really ready to move that far away at this point...

[Gob]

The author of Watership Down, Richard Adams, has died aged 96, his daughter has said.

Juliet Johnson said her father had been "ailing for some time" but "died peacefully" on Christmas Eve.

Watership Down, a children's classic about a group of rabbits in search of a new home after their warren was destroyed, was first published in 1972.

Adams was 52 when he wrote it, after first telling the story to his two daughters on a long car journey.

It went on to become a best-seller, with tens of millions of copies bought around the world.

[BoSoxGal]

Just watched that again recently, it was one of the first big books I read as a young kid and I really liked the movie adaption as well.

At least he lived a long life; a good thing, I suppose?

Recently I've been working hospice and dementia care and I have to say, I'm hoping to die more like Carrie Fisher and not so much to get so old I can't remember shit and strangers are providing my care. I'm 46 and while I suppose it's partly due to bad luck, I've already lost (to early or timely death) nearly all the people I've ever loved best in the world. I can't imagine watching nearly everyone I know pass away and still being around. It's true that getting really old isn't for sissies.

[MajGenl.Meade]

The author of Watership Down, Richard Adams, has died aged 96, his daughter has said.

Juliet Johnson said her father had been "ailing for some time" but "died peacefully" on Christmas Eve.

Watership Down, a children's classic about a group of rabbits in search of a new home after their warren was destroyed, was first published in 1972.

Adams was 52 when he wrote it, after first telling the story to his two daughters on a long car journey.

It went on to become a best-seller, with tens of millions of copies bought around the world.

A great book - I enjoyed his two later books, Shardik and Maia, rather more perhaps.

[Econoline]

I just found this on Vox.com

On Tuesday, December 27, legendary actress Carrie Fisher, 60, was found dead, drowned in silver moonlight and strangled by her own brassiere.

That’s what Carrie Fisher wanted her obituary to say.

Fisher will always be known for playing Star Wars’ Princess Leia — now known as General Leia, as of the film franchise’s latest crop of movies. But that role paled in comparison to the person Fisher was offscreen: a fearless advocate for mental health, someone with a supernatural ability to make us smile, a gifted writer brimming with honesty and wit, and someone who wanted to be known for dying via underwear strangulation.

Star Wars was lucky to have Leia, and the world was lucky to have Fisher.

In her 2009 memoir Wishful Drinking, Fisher wrote about her difficult relationship with the Star Wars franchise. More specifically, she detailed Star Wars director George Lucas’s strange and perhaps sexist world building. Apparently in galaxies far, far, away, there was no such thing as female underwear:

• George comes up to me the first day of filming and he takes one look at the dress and says, "You can't wear a bra under that dress."
  
  So, I say, "Okay, I'll bite. Why?"
  
  And he says, "Because ... there's no underwear in space."
  
  I promise you this is true, and he says it with such conviction too! Like he had been to space and looked around and didn’t see any bras or panties or briefs.

Lucas, she continues, eventually expanded on the idea (though it remains unclear why, if there’s no underwear in space, Leia only wears underwear when she’s on Tatooine, where she’s seen in the infamous “Slave Leia” gold bikini).

• What happens is you go to space and you become weightless. So far so good, right? But then your body expands??? But your bra doesn't — so you get strangled by your own bra.

Lucas’s justification gave Fisher her own gleeful glorious idea, and the rest was history.

• Now I think that this would make for a fantastic obit — so I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.

So fuck this heart attack. Here lies legendary actress, writer, and feminist Carrie Fisher, drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra.

[Big RR]

that "no underwear in space" story was one she told in her Broadway show; it sounds like something Lucas would say.

[Guinevere]

She was a legend, indeed:

[RayThom]

And here is Gary and Carrie about a month before her final appearance.

[RayThom]

And then there's this:

[Bicycle Bill]

And that above pretty much sums up 2016.

-"BB"-

[BoSoxGal]

Debbie Reynolds suffered a stroke today at her son's home, while planning Carrie's funeral.

You fucker, 2016!