This is a brief edition. C.I. posted the following at THE COMMON ILLS:
Putting this up here so everyone knows ahead of time -- community
members and Jim who doesn't seem to believe me on this. THIRD will post
tonight. It may just post Ava and my piece, but it will post tonight.
a number of e-mails are aksing if i'm going to review barbra streisand's autobiography?
probably not and surely not this weekend. it's very long and i'm not a speed reader.
you know who should review it?
c.i.
we
were talking on the phone and she has read it and she offered the best
critique and i told her she should review it. she doesn't want to but
i'm going to stay on her. i think i can sell her on doing it with just
one decade. her remarks on what barbra included from the 70s and what
she ignored from the 70s.
I didn't want to write about it.
Ava
and I went over topics late last night for our piece at THIRD. That
book wasn't one of them. But Jim begged us to write it. So we agreed.
And we've finished it. It took a little over six hours and that
includes editing. We didn't edit out A STAR IS BORN but we may go back
in and link to Frank Pierson's article about directing Barbra in that
film -- that awful film. I've shared that before here, my opinion that
it's an awful film. It was a popular film in its day but that doesn't
mean it was worth anything. TITANIC starring Barbara Stanwyck was a
popular film of its day and today most people don't even know the
film.
Ava and I focused on the lack of honesty and the lack of fairness.
If
we were going to add anything to the piece -- and we're not other than
link to Frank's article -- we'd address Barbra's portrayal of her
mother. Oh, no, she didn't want to spend New Year's Eve watching you
perform in Las Vegas!!! Oh, the horror!!! Get over your damn self.
Diana Ross is doing the farewell performance with the Supremes in Las
Vegas and they're introducing everyone's mother and Ernestine Ross was
not present. Diana has never turned that into a sob story or tried to
use it to create sympathy for her and turn herself into 'poor Diana.'
But Barbra can't stop trying to be 'poor Barbra.' It's really too damn
much for a whole book but that is her theme.
You're
elderly mother, in a motorized wheelchair, with bladder problems didn't
want to sit through a concert. Stop being surprised and stop acting
like it was a tragedy -- and, honestly, shame on the person who told you
while you were working on the book. There was no reason to share that
with you.
Did Barbra's mother do bad things as a
mother? Absolutely. But that whine, which opens her chapter on her
mother, is just beyond stupid. Her mother was needing a bathroom every
thirty or forty minutes at that point in her life. No, spending New
Years at your concert -- when she knew you wouldn't know she wasn't
there (and you wouldn't have if the busybody bitch 'friend' hadn't told
you) -- and having to go to the ladies' room in a wheel chair repeatedly
during the concert was asking too much of her and it was not her trying
to be mean. If she wanted to be mean, she would've told you, "I'm not
going to your concert."
There are real injuries and real hurts in Barbra's life. She doesn't need to go looking for more.
And what a sad and pathetic life it is.
We focus on that and we focus on the book that should have been written instead.
It's 3,610 words.
We've
written it, we've edited it. It's way too much for my eyes, I'm going
to take nap because everything's so blurry. (I've already put videos in
the queue to go up regularly over the next few hours.)
So,
to recap, I didn't want to write about the book (I do know Barbra and
we do greet each other -- in fact, I once greeted her when it was Sally
Kellerman -- Sally dropped by unexpectedly one night and it was really
dark and I was convinced she was Barbra before she spoke). Ava and I
didn't want to write about the book. But we did and we worked forever
on it -- and called a number of people to verify a few things (these are
not things about Barbra, when it posts, you'll see we were trying to
clarify credits on film producing -- I'll leave it at that). It is
done. It took way too much time. It should be posted now. I'm not
regrouping for any more on THIRD again this week. Not tonight, not
Monday, not Tuesday.
Maybe Jim [will] believe it since I'm posting this note here.
I read the note and I do see the point -- Ava and C.I. didn't want to write it but did do it and now there's a lag between when it goes up?
I could round out the edition but I'm just posting what we've got done that's ready to go up. So it's a short edition.
I could pad it out with C.I. scraps. We do that sometimes when certain pieces aren't working.
C.I.. dictates the Iraq snapshots that run Monday through Friday at THE COMMON ILLS. And there are always some things that get edited out -- C.I. thinks they distract or that the snapshot is too long or whatever.
And we'll go through and pick up the scraps sometimes. We might add to it or we might just grab the idea. There's a thing about one person on a college campus (a professor) that we might swipe in the next edition and there's also a thing about reading and libraries that we might swipe as well.
But I wanted to note that this is a short edition and why.