Your Elusive Creative Genius
TED Talk: Elizabeth Gilbert
Post Created by jk the secret keeper
Created 04.21.13
Posted 04.24.13

jean miro – harlequin’s carnival c. 1924-5

“Eat, Pray, Love” Author Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius. It’s a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.

All people who are creative should listen to this TED Talk. Elizabeth Gilbert gives a most brilliant talk about creativity in a most humourous way. You will hear yourself in what she is saying. What she says will also give you some perspective to your life. jk the secret keeper

Elizabeth Gilbert — Your Elusive Creative Genius — TED Talk

QUOTATIONS on CREATIVE/CONFIDENCE:

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.” ― Henry David Thoreau

“Believe in yourself and there will come a day when others will have no choice but to believe with you.” ― Cynthia Kersey

“To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.” ― Osho

“The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas. — Terrance McKenna

“Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest.” ― Mike Norton, White Mountain

“When walking alone in a jungle of true darkness, there are three things that can show you the way: instinct to survive, the knowledge of navigation, creative imagination. Without them, you are lost.” ― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Writers do not have the privilege of sleep. There is always a story coming alive in their heads, constantly composing. Whether they choose it or not.” ― Coco J. Ginger

“Remember to delight yourself first, then others can be truly delighted.” This was my mantra when I published my first book in 1990, and still holds true. When we focus on the song of our soul and heart, then others will be touched similarly. Sometimes people wonder or worry whether people will like or approve of their creative expression. It’s none of your business. It’s your business to stay present and focused for the work of your deepest dreams. It might look crooked or strange, or be very odd-but if it delights you, then it is yours, and will find it’s way into other hearts.” ― S.A.R.K.

“All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.” ― Stephanie Lennox

“In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.” ― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search For Ultimate Meaning

“Here’s Looking At You Kid.”
Film: Casablanca
Starring Humphrey Bogart & Ingrid Bergman
Playing Roles of Rick Blaine & Ilsa Lund
Created by jk the secret keeper
Posted 04.28.13

Casablanca: Rick Blaine & Ilsa Lund “Here’s Looking At You Kid.”

Rick: Last night we said a great many things. You said I was to do the thinking for both of us. Well, I’ve done a lot of it since then, and it all adds up to one thing: you’re getting on that plane with Victor where you belong.

Ilsa: But, Richard, no, I… I…

Rick: Now, you’ve got to listen to me! You have any idea what you’d have to look forward to if you stayed here? Nine chances out of ten, we’d both wind up in a concentration camp. Isn’t that true, Louie?

Captain Renault: I’m afraid Major Strasser would insist.

Ilsa: You’re saying this only to make me go.

Rick: I’m saying it because it’s true. Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.

Ilsa: But what about us?

Rick: We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have, we, we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.

Ilsa: When I said I would never leave you.

Rick: And you never will. But I’ve got a job to do, too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that.

[Ilsa lowers her head and begins to cry]

Rick: Now, now…

[Rick gently places his hand under her chin and raises it so their eyes meet]

Rick: Here’s looking at you kid.

casablanca 1947

casablanca: rick blaine & ilsa lund in paris cafe 680×540

casablanca: rick hanging out with sam

casablanca: ilsa role played by ingrid berman

FILM REVIEW of CASABLANCA

“Here’s looking at you kid.”

There are so many memorable lines and scenes in the film “Casablanca.”
Casablanca (1942) Directed by Michael Curtiz: Starring Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine; Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund; Peter Lorre as Ugarte; Claude Raines as Louie (Head of Police/Rick’s Friend); Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo; Sydney Greenstreet as Ferrari, proprietor of the night club The Blue Parrot.

Just one of the fifty films a studio would make each year back in the day. Casablanca was just one of those films thrown into that collection. Who knew it would spring forth and become the success that it is. Today, it is considered one of the top romantic films of all time.

Won for Best Picture 1942 Oscar. One of the most universally admired films ever made. On most lists of the greatest films of all times. Even people who don’t like old films or black and white films love Casablanca. Roger Ebert said he doesn’t think he’s heard of any negative reviews of this film ever. All the characters are all good except the Nazis. Vichy are the French who collaborate with the Nazis.

Rick’s Cafe Americain in Casablanca in French Morocco, where everyone went for entertainment or to hang out for a drink or to go to the back room where there is gambling going on. Here, in Casablanca, some may obtain exit visas but others may wait and wait and wait. At the beginning of the film, you find out that some couriers were killed in the desert and robbed of exit visas. Officials wanting to see a man’s papers, causes the man to freak out, his papers are not in order, so he runs and is shot and killed because he didn’t halt when ordered to. Life is meaningless.

When Louie, the head of the police, is asked by Major Strasser, what is being done about the murder of the couriers, his answer is: “We’ve rounded up the usual suspects.” No one likes Nazis and the head of the Nazis in this movie doesn’t make them any more popular and maybe makes them even less popular. The Marseillaise is the present day French National Anthem. Remember that when you watch Casablanca.

Ugarte shows up and talks to Rick. Wants to have a drink with Rick but as a rule he doesn’t drink with any of the guests of his night club. Ugarte likes to brag to Rick. He just is looking for Rick’s approval but knows that Rick despises him but he is the only person that Ugarte trusts. Rick does finally seem impressed with him. You’ll have to watch the movie to find out why.

Ferrari wants Rick’s place. He is always trying to buy it. It’s the best place in town. Sasha hangs out there and is sort of Rick’s girl friend and is a bit of an alcoholic. It’s understandable she wants to drink the times are during the 2nd World War and it is making everyone edgy and the French are being ruled by the Germans.

Louie and Rick get involved in a conversation and Louie asks why Rick came to such a God Forsaken place like Casablanca. Rick’s a smart ass and says: “It’s for the water.” But, of course, it is a desert. Rick’s is permitted to stay open because he just doesn’t want to get involved. But he has in his hands something that a lot of people are looking for but no one has any idea what that is. Louie tells Rick there is a famous patriot of the war headed for Casablanca. A member of the Gestapo, Major Strasser, is expected at the club. He is a thoroughly disagreeable Nazis but then what Nazi isn’t. That I may say often.

A major happening occurs at Rick’s but he reassures everyone to settle down and get back into enjoying themselves. Rick actually sits down with the Nazis. The Nazis make mention about invading New York. Rick warns them about staying away from certain sections of New York. They may not be safe. They start in talking about Victor Lazslo being on his way. Rick assuring them that he doesn’t plan on getting involved.

Victor Laszlo and Ilsa Lund eventually show up as expected and walk through the cafe and take a seat in the night club. Expect that many will be approaching Victor fairly often because of his importance and how nervous they make the Nazis. Ilsa starts asking about the piano player and who owns the Night Club. Louie tells her it is a man named Rick. Major Strasser is introduced and acts like the ass that he is. Starts applying his power over Laszlo.

It is evident that Ilsa and Victor are close but at this time we know nothing of their relationship other then they are traveling together. Victor leaves her at table to meet a man at the bar and finds out about Ugarte.

Ilsa wants to speak to the piano player. His name is Sam and she asks him to play some of the old songs. There is a sadness between Sam regarding Rick. She wants him to play a the song “As Time Goes By.” Sam sings the song for her. Out comes Rick telling Sam he’s not suppose to play that song. Rick sees Ilsa sitting at her table. The last time Rick saw Ilsa was in Paris when the Germans marched in to take over the city. He was unnerved seeing her again. He was so not himself that he actually had a drink with all at the table breaking his precedent of not drinking with guests of the night club The Americain.

Later back in his rooms, Rick has a bottle, and tells Sam he is not planning on going to bed. He thinks Ilsa is going to show up. Sam isn’t going to leave his boss alone. He starts getting maudlin. “Of all the gin joints in all the world, she walks into mine.” He wants Sam to play “As Time Goes By.” Sam doesn’t want to open the wounds.

Flashback: Paris with Rick and Ilsa driving around in a convertible. then down by the Seine. In the hotel drinking champagne. “Who are you really and what were you before and what did you think?” Ricks asks. Ilsa’s response: “We said no questions.” All the best lines in these scenes. So many to write down and remember. She reveals an answer without the question. Watch the movie to find out what she told Rick.

Outside, newspapers are being passed around. The Germans are coming I believe are the headlines and what they are saying in French over the microphones. There is a lot of action going on out in the streets.

The most famous line is spoken by Rick toasting champagne with Sam and Ilsa: “Here’s looking at you kid.” Everything is falling apart. “Where were you ten years ago?” Rick said he was looking for a job. For some reason there is a price on Rick’s head but no one knows why. It’s time for everyone to leave Paris. Their suppose to meet at the train station from where they will be leaving. Ilsa loves him so much and the war, she hates that in just the opposite emotion. She thinks that they will be taken apart. “Kiss me as if it is the last time.”

It’s raining at the train station. With three minutes until last train leaves. No Ilsa but Sam and Rick are waiting. There is a note from the Hotel. Fade Out Paris Train Station as you watch the rain wash the ink off of the note in Rick’s hand.

Fade In: Rick’s Rooms enter Ilsa. She wants to talk to him, to tell him a story. It’s about a girl who meets a man, a very courageous man. She looked up to him. She thought it was love. Who did she leave him for? Laszlo or others in between?

Victor and Ilsa meet Strasser at Police station. Strasser guarantees Laszlo will never receive an exit visa. His only way to leave is to be a traitor to his people. Do you really think he is the type of man to be a traitor. Nazis have no sense of integrity so they do not understand an enigma like Victor Laszlo. An important person to their leaving has been reported to be dead.

Rick visits The Blue Parrot and talks with Ferrari, who wants the letters of transit. He tells Rick he thinks he knows where the letters are. Rick purposely left his club so the police would have a chance to ransack it. Louie’s men were impressively destructive at Rick’s Place in order to win points with Major Strasser. Louie blows with the wind. He is with the Vichy. The Vichy being the French who go along and reluctantly support the French. The French who are loyal to their own country feel betrayed by the Vichy.

A young woman comes to Rick to plead for some help. She will have to sleep with Louie if her husband doesn’t win enough money so they can afford a visa. If they use only the money they have there would be nothing left. Louise fully expects her to have sex with him if the money isn’t won. Louie sees that the young woman and Rick are being obvious about conspiring. They are all in the backroom where the gambling goes on. Louie is an odd duck. Louie accuses Rick of being a rank sentimentalist.

Victor has a visit with Rick. The Underground tell Victor all sorts of very impressive things about activities that Rick was involved in during the war.

In Rick’s Cafe, the Nazis are singing about the Fatherland. It is so despicable to the French in the club that they have a singing competition. Guess who wins. Strasser is not very satisfied. He tells Louie to find an excuse to close Rick’s. He tells Rick the reason is because he is shocked that gambling is going on in his club.

Strasser just keeps getting creepier. Threatens Ilsa.

Later Ilsa and Victor speak about the letters of transit and what Rick said about asking his wife why he won’t give up the letters.

Ilsa goes to Rick’s rooms and tries to get letters from him. She wants to tell him what really happened in Paris. The feelings between them, have they been buried or are they gone? The truth comes out. She had no hope that Victor was alive when she was in Paris with Rick.

Victor and Rick talk. They are not that far apart in what they believe.

Louie and Rick talk about letters. Louie doesn’t like Strasser.

Approaching the final few scenes of the film. Cafe Americain is still closed by order of the Prefect of Police. Ferrari has taken over the Cafe. Louie thinks he is at Cafe to arrest Laszlo but Rick surprises him and makes him call the airport to tell them that there is to be no trouble about two letters of transit. Everything is building up to the excitement of what is all going to culminate in some of the biggest surprises yet in the film.

Best closing scenes in any movie and best closing lines. Memorable til the final line.

For the rest of the film and to fill in all the spaces that I have left out, you will need to find a copy of this film on DVD or streaming from online or whatever source you are able to find to watch the whole thing and to see how it ends. It is a thoroughly amazing film to watch. It seems the perfect film in detail, dialogue, scenes, settings, storyline, acting and durability. It has all the perfect elements and the best acting. Filled with sentiment and sacrifice. I first saw this film when I was in my 20s. It was such a surprise that I did not see it when I was a kid. It is understandable for older children and a fascinating film for all adults.

The following videos do have SPOILERS so watch them if you have seen the film already or if you don’t mind seeing scenes before seeing the film. I am sure a great many of you have watched this film. But if you haven’t, it should be on everyone’s’ film list as a must see. The sheer acting alone and the love story and the screenplay is brilliant. The cast is to die for. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman play the leads. They are two of the finest actors of all times. Worthy of anyone’s time to find out how great they are in Casablanca. No one had any idea what a remarkable film this was going to turn out to be. The special benefit if this film is you get to hate the Nazis and you get to curse them out without impunity. It has the most classic lines of almost any film ever made. Enjoy the videos and seriously consider locating this film if you haven’t seen it and find it so you can watch it again. “Here’s Looking At You Kid.” jk the SK

Tribute To Casablanca
Filled With Spoilers

Casablanca La Marseillaise

All About the Film “Casablanca”

The relationship between Rick and Ilsa was filled with Desire. I am going to write a poem about Desire in my new form of Haiku. I refer to it as X-treme Haiku. I use an altered form of Haiku with the onji (lines) in the 5 – 7 – 7. I do as few or as many verses as I feel will tell the story that I am writing. Sometimes the story will more often be a touch abstract and other times it may be a philosophical exploration, or a story that may have the appearance of something that may b close in resemblance to a fable. With X-treme Haiku I want to allow myself the freedom to write about what I want but to also include restriction which will encourage restraint on my part so that I will write more concisely with the use of fewer words that will contain an understanding and a discipline toward accuracy. I have been using this style of X-treme Haiku for a short while now and find it makes me more disciplined. It involves research and a greater understanding of the words I use. Being precise about definitions of the language I am using. There is a cleanness to the design. The other rules are for myself and they include the use of words. I do not or try not to repeat a word within the same verse or if possible within the same poem unless absolutely necessary. I like mystery in my poems so I do have the tendency to be a touch cryptic and/or abstract. I like analyzing what it is I am writing about. I am honest about whatever it is I have chosen to write about. I believe in going into the depths of what I mean in what I write. Truth is essential. Directness is essential. Abstraction is often essential. I believe in creating a puzzle that must be deciphered. I do not often hand out the simplicity of a matter. A specific reason for that is when I am writing I am also trying to interpret and examine in depth what subject is I am writing on and usually for the purpose of trying to understand what is within or what it is about that I am writing. Now to the poem.

x-treme haiku: “desire” by j. kiley © jennifer kiley 2013

Play It, Sam — As Time Goes By

QUOTATIONS on FILM & DESIRE:

FILM:

“The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.” ― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

“It starts so young, and I’m angry about that. The garbage we’re taught. About love, about what’s “romantic.” Look at so many of the so-called romantic figures in books and movies. Do we ever stop and think how many of them would cause serious and drastic unhappiness after The End? Why are sick and dangerous personality types so often shown a passionate and tragic and something to be longed for when those are the very ones you should run for your life from? Think about it. Heathcliff. Romeo. Don Juan. Jay Gatsby. Rochester. Mr. Darcy. From the rigid control freak in The Sound of Music to all the bad boys some woman goes running to the airport to catch in the last minute of every romantic comedy. She should let him leave. Your time is so valuable, and look at these guys–depressive and moody and violent and immature and self-centered. And what about the big daddy of them all, Prince Charming? What was his secret life? We dont know anything about him, other then he looks good and comes to the rescue.” ― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“Only the gentle are ever really strong.” ― James Dean

“Certain things leave you in your life and certain things stay with you. And that’s why we’re all interested in movies- those ones that make you feel, you still think about. Because it gave you such an emotional response, it’s actually part of your emotional make-up, in a way.” ― Tim Burton, Burton on Burton

“Ezekiel 25:17. “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.” I been sayin’ that shit for years. And if you ever heard it, it meant your ass. I never really questioned what it meant. I thought it was just a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before you popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this mornin’ made me think twice. Now I’m thinkin’: it could mean you’re the evil man. And I’m the righteous man. And Mr. .45 here, he’s the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could be you’re the righteous man and I’m the shepherd and it’s the world that’s evil and selfish. I’d like that. But that shit ain’t the truth. The truth is you’re the weak. And I’m the tyranny of evil men. But I’m tryin, Ringo. I’m tryin’ real hard to be the shepherd. — he became the shepherd instead of the vengeance.” ― Quentin Tarantino

“A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.” ― Pauline Kael, For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies

“Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life.” ― Arlaina Tibensky

DESIRE:

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” ― Epicurus

“Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know–because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.” ― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“She leaned forward and caught at his hand, pressing it between her own. The touch was like white fire through his veins. He could not feel her skin only the cloth of her gloves, and yet it did not matter. You kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire. He had wondered once why love was always phrased in terms of burning. The conflagration in his own veins, now, gave the answer.” ― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“I desire to be with you. I miss you. I feel lonely when I can’t see you. I am obsessed with you, fascinated by you, infatuated with you. I hunger for your taste, your smell, the feel of your soul touching mine.” ― Jack Llawayllynn, Indulgence

“Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone.” ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

Silver Linings Playbook & The Stigma of Bipolar
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Film Review taken from Salon
Post Created with a short comment at the end
by jk the secret keeper
Posted 05.01.13

Bradley Cooper, star of Silver Linings Playbook, an Oscar-nominated film about a man living with bipolar disorder. His recent film is making progress toward removing the stigma of mental illness. I am changing the two words to Mentally Creative or Mentally Interesting. The medical community is trying to move away from diagnosing Bipolar or other issues with the brain as “Mental Illness.” They are Brain illnesses or diseases. They are not behavior problems or mental problems. Not should they be stigmatized. When you have the flu you treat it in order to get better. When you have Bipolar you treat it so that you have a better control of what is causing the patient to exhibit the brain illness. There are a variety of ways to treat bipolar as there are people that have that brain dis-ease. I don’t use medications with the exception of one. My thoughts are that you treat bipolar the way that is best for you. I try to work on what helps me keep it under better control. I am still new at it and not very good at following the ways that work the best. But bipolar tends to make you stubborn sometimes. That I have to work on, also. But to stigmatize anyone for having something they were born with or inherited or just woke up one day and there it is bipolar or any other brain illness. You don’t back away from someone with cancer or Parkinson’s or any other physical ailment. Well, bipolar is a physical part of you that is not functioning in a manner in which makes your life easier to live. by jk the SK

Silver Linings Playbook is a film that is a personal movie for David O’Russell and when the group all came together to do the film, it became a personal movie for all of them. Tiffany, played by Jennifer Lawrence, serves as a catalyst and she’s the first person who actually sees who Pat is. Pat is played by Bradley Cooper. That’s the thing that this film has done, people around this country who have seen this film say “this film actually sees who I am” because bipolar is heavily stigmatized, its not a very treatable disease and it’s a condition that is diagnosed way too late. So hopefully, a movie like this will help it become less stigmatized in the onset. The best thing about this movie is that it will be able to reach out and make people feel included. ~ Bradley Cooper

“Silver Linings Playbook” with Bradley Copper

I watched the film last night. My reaction immediately was to think of a way to make a film, write the script for a film, where instead of the mentally creative or mentally interesting being the center and the ones stigmatized, that it wouldn’t be that way at all, instead those that are stigmatized are the folks we consider “normal,” they are the ones we feel uncomfortable around and they are the ones who are put in the outskirts of society and the ones who are stigmatized. If you think about it, those who have bipolar feel uncomfortable around people who are “normal,” those who think they are above those who have problems with the brain. Bipolar isn’t a behavior problem or a mental illness, which I find to be an offensive term. Those with bipolar have the fortunate or unfortunate DNA or the brain misfirings that cause some of the “bipolar reactions” the world has toward bipolar or any other person who is mentally interesting or mentally challenged. Why do “normal” people feel that they have any better a grasp on the truth of life on how to live it than someone who has been “blessed” with the gift of bipolar.

Bipolar is something that is extremely difficult to live with, where every moment or split second could change in your reaction to your world and the way you relate to the people around you. You can fly off the handle and lose your temper from a slight change in your environment. Is that really something to be afraid of? I don’t think so. “Normal” people have moods, also. Yes, bipolar, there are mood changes, the thoughts race around your mind because you have so many ideas firing off in your brain at any given time. Life is exciting. Creating art is a major benefit that can be quite satisfying and comes at one in a rapid firing sort of way. It can be exhilarating. But in that same split second you may find yourself triggered by something you are unaware of that pushes you close to the edge of falling into a dark hole. And most times, you aren’t going to be able to catch a hold of something that will keep you from falling in. It’s an endless fall, like in Alice In Wonderland, except she eventually reaches the bottom and there usually is light there. Bipolar, the lights have gone out.

Finding your way in the dark, when you are feeling nothing but pure tortuous emotional, physical, psychological and spiritual pain, is overwhelming and blinding. Eventually, bipolar will take you to the edge that starts the voices up that make you want to kill yourself or harm yourself. If you have found a discipline when you reach this bottom level like writing or creating art, you usually start that up immediately. And you keep writing or doing your visual arts until you create something that satisfies your opinion that you have succeeded. This may be enough to level you out temporarily and you then may be able to sleep. But even then, you turn on the Walkman with the ear buds in, so not to disturb anyone else with the loudness of your music. The loudness is so that you can only hear the sound of the music and nothing else. It doesn’t usually shut out the death march. That goes on. The thoughts haunt you but you must think them. Bipolar takes you on a journey until you fall asleep.

Hopefully by morning the feelings are under control. Of course, that sleep may take you to 15 or more hours from when you close your eyes. It’s the only way to get back on track. Most likely you haven’t had any sleep in the past day or two. The benefits are that you may not go down that road of bipolar. If you are fortunate you may go down the high one where what you create makes you feel giddy and everything is delightful and light and the demons are sleeping, which means they are leaving you alone. In that bipolar world everything is happy and you laugh and you want the classical or light music to play and you want to create the uplifting poems or stories or art. You want to keep doing projects, to keep creating. So why is the world so afraid of that.

Being mentally creative or interesting isn’t contagious and bipolar people as a rule could care less about harming anyone else except maybe themselves depending on the mood. The mentally creative have been given a stigmatic bum’s rap for the violence of those who take guns and go off on the innocent of the world. Those people are not doing that because they have a brain disease, they are doing that because they are violent individuals or groups that hate themselves and the people that are in their world. Bipolar tends to want to just take care of themselves and stay away from people that judge them. They may yell suddenly and then settle down and forget about it and may want to throw things when they get frustrated but mostly they don’t have any thoughts of hurting anyone and if they get into a down spiral it is usually themselves they are wanting to harm.

So stigma is all in the mind of those who are afraid of people being real and usually afraid of themselves being real. The “normal” people don’t want their reality being touched by anything that might resemble the actual behavior of someone who is alive in any way that might make them have to have a real thought or feeling. I don’t think “normal” people know what they are. Aren’t they usually following the latest dogmatic leader that tells them how to think and how to feel about someone they don’t like. And what about all those people that don’t want to make the rich pay their fair share of taxes because in their “normal” brains they think that it might be them someday who is rich and when they get there they don’t want to have to pay high taxes. I would say the “normal” are the ones who are a bit deluded and can’t think for themselves. And the ones who are bipolar or any other mentally creative individual are the free thinkers and the ones who don’t judge and the ones who want to help support the world and all the people in it.

Maybe it is about time to take a closer look at who the good guys are and who are the ones fucking up the world. And it’s about time to stop stigmatizing and showing people with mentally creative brains as a threat to the safety of society and to see them as contributors in the way of artists and those with original ideas who will move the society and culture forward. Yes, we may get off the path every so often but doesn’t everyone need to do a walk about now and again. Stop judging everyone and start co-existing in peace. Accept difference don’t try to make everyone identical to who you are.
by Jennifer Kiley

Silver Linings Playbook – EXTENDED FEATURETTE HD (2013)Special Features

HERE IS A REVIEW FROM SALON FOR THE FILM: SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK

Friday, Nov 16, 2012 01:01 PM EST
“Silver Linings Playbook” is gold
Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence face love and mental illness in the rich, manic new romantic comedy
By Andrew O’Hehir

We get thrown right into the middle of Pat Solitano Jr.’s troubled life story, without any of the usual context or background. Played by Bradley Cooper in a major departure from his customary sleek pretty-boy roles, Pat is the unhinged, overly intense and not always likable protagonist of David O. Russell’s manic, inventive and rewarding “Silver Linings Playbook.” When we first meet him, he’s standing in the corner of his spartan room in a Baltimore mental hospital, talking to himself. His mom, played by the terrific Australian actress Jacki Weaver, has shown up from Philadelphia to sign him out, against doctor’s orders and without having consulted her husband. What did Pat do that got him locked up in the first place? What’s going on with this family? Why do Pat’s wife and the school where he used to teach have restraining orders against him?

Answers to those questions won’t come into focus for a while, although you may rapidly reach the conclusion that the doctors were right and Pat would be better off heavily medicated and under psychiatric care. Back in the family’s Philly neighborhood, with its slightly desperate upper-fringe-of-the-working-class feeling, Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro) has no idea his younger son is returning home. One of the best and unarguably funniest roles of De Niro’s recent oddball supporting career, Pat Sr. fronts as an Italian-American tough guy but is more like a barely glued together mass of neuroses, a failing bookie with a penchant for disastrous side bets and an intense OCD relationship with the Philadelphia Eagles. (His wardrobe gets better and better as the movie progresses; I can’t stand football, but I want Pat Sr.’s Eagles-green cardigan.)

As for Pat Jr., whose apparel frequently involves a shapeless gray track suit topped with a black garbage bag – so he can sweat off weight as he runs – his first item of business is studying up on the high-school English syllabus his estranged wife, Nikki, is teaching, in hopes of impressing her at some unspecified future date. (Nikki plays an important role in Pat’s story, but almost entirely through her absence.) This leads, however, to Pat flinging a copy of “A Farewell to Arms” through a closed window at 4 o’clock in the morning, and awakening his parents with a maniacal rant against Ernest Hemingway. (He refuses to apologize, blaming Hemingway. Pat Sr. says, rather mildly, “Tell Ernest Hemingway to come down here and apologize to us in person.”) I can’t help detecting a genre commentary of sorts here, whether it originates with Russell (who also wrote the script) or Matthew Quick, author of the original novel: Hemingway was writing one kind of story, which purports to depict the tragedies of the real world in the 20th century and does not demand a happy ending. This is the other kind of story.

In fact, “Silver Linings Playbook” is a romantic comedy, even if it doesn’t feel like one at first. Furthermore, it’s a rom-com that succeeds in revitalizing that discredited genre where so many others have failed, injecting it with the grit and emotion of realist drama rather than with amped-up whimsy or social satire or montages of people walking on the beach while whiny emo-pop plays on the soundtrack. As he did with the boxing movie in “The Fighter,” Russell proves that you can breathe new life into one of the hoariest forms in the Hollywood lexicon. He takes a movie where everyone in the audience knows how it will end and makes us suspend our disbelief and fall in love all over again. (After an entire decade in the indie-film wilderness following his 1999 breakthrough with “Three Kings,” Russell seems to have found himself a niche reinventing classic movie genres.)

It helps, of course, that we’ve got a dynamite couple to fall in love with. Russell has long had a flair for unexpected casting combinations, but I really didn’t expect Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence to be such a combustible duo. (Yes, in real life, there’s a significant age spread between these two: Cooper is 37 and Lawrence 22. At the risk of sounding like a total sexist pig, it doesn’t play that way on-screen.) Finally getting unleashed from his immensely lucrative “Hangover” roles and a series of tepid leading-man movies, Cooper gives a twitchy, physical, marvelously alive performance as Pat Jr., who’s barely aware how poor his impulse control is and doesn’t seem to notice that his face is often marred with mysterious scars and bruises. As for Lawrence, she’s been in so many movies lately that she’s in danger of being overexposed but I only wish her chaste and cautious performance as Katniss Everdeen had one-third of the fire she shows here as Tiffany, a grieving widow going through a spectacular meltdown of her own.

There have been dozens if not hundreds of other movies about two damaged people who find each other, and quite a few that try to wring bittersweet laughs out of the painful struggle with mental illness. But it’s always wonderfully satisfying to see a conventional or archetypal story structure handled with this level of craft and enthusiasm. “Silver Linings Playbook” never feels like a movie you’ve seen before, even if Pat and Tiffany’s ultimate destination is clear the moment they meet. It seems clear to us, of course, but not to them; Tiffany assumes he’ll just be another entry on her long list of recent sexual partners, while Pat clings like a drowning man to the idea that his marriage to the invisible Nikki – which ended in an act of disturbing violence, as we eventually learn – can still be redeemed.

During Tiffany and Pat’s disastrous first date (which Pat insists isn’t a date, because he’s getting back together with Nikki any day now) they eat Raisin Bran at a diner while she regales him with steamy tales about sleeping with all her co-workers (male and female) at her last job. Pat isn’t literally wearing his garbage bag in that scene, but he might as well be. All the crockery ends up on the floor, along with the remnants of Raisin Bran, and we’re left with the realization that these two people are falling in love but may be too screwed-up to deal with it – a phenomenon that afflicts many of us at one time or another, from you and me to David Petraeus and that lady with the upper arms.

There’s no point denying that “Silver Linings Playbook” is shameless cornpone, given that the bumpy course of Pat and Tiffany’s romance includes such elements as a ballroom dancing competition, a crucial showdown between the Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys and a parlay bet orchestrated by Pat Sr. that links the two. Not to mention a deceptive epistolary exchange straight out of classic French theater. But where most American romantic comedies are either made by talentless hacks or by Hollywood pros who can barely conceal their contempt for the material and the audience, this one was made by a leading American director at the height of his powers who’s paying attention to every emotional beat, every cut and every frame. Great cinema? Hell, I don’t know. But one of the most satisfying movies, that much is for sure.

ADDED NOTE BY jk the secret keeper: I need to watch the film again. Somewhere in the middle I thought the film was over and dropped off and came back before the film was over. So I watched the beginning and the end but missed the middle. My partner, Shawn, thought the film was great. What I saw I agree with her. Make a lot of noise in the middle of the night. So you get woken up by someone yelling and he happens to be bipolar. I don’t think that’s enough to threaten to someone that their behavior is going to get them thrown back into the institution. Only in America does one live under that threat if one is not strictly staying in between the lines. Freedom is another word for nothing left to shout about. SINCE WHEN. THERE ARE LOTS OF THINGS TO SHOUT ABOUT. Why do we have to be quiet to keep ourselves from being locked away. I do realize, and I am not going to give away a spoiler, that the main character has done something that makes the law question his behavior more carefully but the extreme I think everyone takes it seems too extreme to me and especially in society those who are different in their brain and act differently. These are not the dark ages and those with brain problems don’t deserve to be treated as lesser citizens. GO RENT THIS FILM. IT IS A QUIRKY ROMANTIC COMEDY. THE ACTORS ARE BRILLIANT. JENNIFER LAWRENCE DESERVED HER ACADEMY AWARD AND IT DESERVED TO BE NOMINATED FOR BEST PICTURE AT THE ACADEMY AWARDS. jk the secret keeper

Whitney Houston — I Look To You
QUOTATIONS on BIPOLAR:

“If I can’t feel, if I can’t move, if I can’t think, and I can’t care, then what conceivable point is there in living?” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“When you are mad, mad like this, you don’t know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else’s reality, it’s still reality to you.” ― Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life

“Creativity is closely associated with bipolar disorder. This condition is unique . Many famous historical figures and artists have had this. Yet they have led a full life and contributed so much to the society and world at large. See, you have a gift. People with bipolar disorder are very very sensitive. Much more than ordinary people. They are able to experience emotions in a very deep and intense way. It gives them a very different perspective of the world. It is not that they lose touch with reality. But the feelings of extreme intensity are manifested in creative things. They pour their emotions into either writing or whatever field they have chosen” ― Preeti Shenoy, Life is What You Make It

“It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth. My mother taught me to gentle it; gave me the discipline and love to break it; and- as Alexander had known so intuitively with Bucephalus- she understood, and taught me, that the beast was best handled by turning it toward the sun.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It’s fun and it’s frightening as hell. Some patients – bipolar type I – experience both extremes; other – bipolar type II – suffer depression almost exclusively. But the “mixed state,” the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression’s paranoid self-loathing.” ― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“Compared to bipolar’s magic, reality seems a raw deal. It’s not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it’s the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity – the realization of illnesss, the humiliating scenes, the blown money and friendships and confidence. Depression seems almost inevitable. The pendulum swings back from transcendence in shards, a bloody, dangerous mess. Crazy high is better than crazy low. So we gamble, dump the pills, and stick it to the control freaks and doctors. They don’t understand, we say. They just don’t get it. They’ll never be artists.” ― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“Crazy isn’t a condition it’s a place and it exists somewhere between Love and Oblivion” ― Stanley Victor Paskavich

The Great Gatsby
Film Review
Character Analysis
Film Trailer
Post Created by j.kiley
Posted May 10th 2013
Passages
“When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more of the riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction–Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life…This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of “creative temperament”–it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such that I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No–Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elation’s of men” (Fitzgerald 6-7).

This passage, located in the first chapter, is a reflection of Nick’s feelings after the summer of 1922. The unique organization of the book placed this reflection before the actual events, so that it serves to foreshadow what will come. After his summer of parties, decadence and intrigue Nick is disgusted by the modern culture and society. After only one summer, he is prepared to return to the comfort of routine and familiarity that he associates with his home. The only person who has not diminished in his sight is Jay Gatsby, because, in spite of Gatsby’s lavish lifestyle, there was a vitality and enthusiasm about him that impressed Nick. This passage summarizes the final phase of Nick’s emotional and intellectual transformation. Nick experienced interest, involvement and finally disgust. This feeling of disgust and disillusionment with the roaring twenties is a strong sentiment throughout the book.
“They had forgotten me but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn’t know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together” (Fitzgerald 101-102).

This passage presents a scene in which Nick visits with Gatsby and Daisy, but is completely eclipsed by their love for each other. They see nothing beyond themselves and their own love. Nick leaves unnoticed and un-missed. This self-absorption is apparent in many of the characters throughout the book and contributes to the confusion and sorrow that ultimately occurs. Everyone is working for themselves, with little to no consideration for the feelings or needs of others. In this scene, Nick notes the vitality of the two lovers. It is Gatsby’s passion and enthusiasm for life that particularly impresses Nick, but it is this vitality that ultimately destroys his relationship with Daisy. Both these elements of passion and selfishness create an atmosphere that allows for the careless destruction of lives and people.Characters
Nick
The narrator of the story, Nick Carraway, is a self-described “tolerant” and “open-minded” man. From a wealthy and long-established midwestern family, Nick was educated at Yale and is an astute and perceptive individual. Quiet and a good listener, Nick frequently plays the role of confidante, and unwilling witness to the secrets and ambitions of his acquaintances. His own actions and ambitions are insignificant when contrasted with the observations of Gatsby and the Buchanan’s. The reader’s sense and understanding of Nick’s character comes largely from his reactions to the actions of his friends. He is not an impartial judge, and makes his sentiments known. Like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, Nick’s experiences alter his perspective on the world. He observes the actions of those around him, and is not unmoved by them. Like Scout, he finds much to repulse him and disappoint him in his fellow humans. Where Scout was repulsed by racism, Nick is sickened by the vices and excesses of the Roaring Twenties. Nick, unlike Scout, is an educated adult, but this does little to prepare him for the atmosphere of wild abandon he finds in New York society.

Daisy
Daisy Buchanan is a distant cousin of Nick’s, who enchants and attracts people with her sensual personality as well as her beauty. On the exterior, Daisy seems to have achieved complete success with her marriage to the wealthy Tom Buchanan, and her popularity within the higher social circles. In reality, Daisy is stuck in a faltering marriage with an adulterous husband, and little true enjoyment. With the arrival of Gatsby, her former love, Daisy experiences a short period of passionate happiness and feeling. This only serves to heighten her internal confusion, as she struggles to determine what type of life she wants to lead and with whom she wishes to spend that life. This struggle demonstrates Daisy’s weakness of character and her malleability. Daisy is supposedly based on Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda. Like Zelda Daisy is a winsome and attractive woman, but she has a love for the material things of life. She is fairly superficial, and her outward graces cover a love of money and position.

Tom
Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, is a domineering and determined fellow. Defined by strong and stubborn opinions and feelings that are often ill-founded, Tom’s character is a destructive one. He marches recklessly and heedlessly forward without consideration to the trouble he causes for others. Engaged in an affair, he is unfaithful in marriage and makes Daisy’s life terribly unhappy. He shares many characteristics with Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire. Both men demonstrate primitive qualities and a propensity for anger and aggression. They are physical and bestial men. Unconcerned with the destruction they create, both hurt the women that they love and offend those with whom they interact.

Gatsby
Jay Gatsby is the mysterious and wealthy neighbor who becomes the subject of Nick’s attention all summer. A self-made man from a poor background, Gatsby is brimming with life and enthusiasm. His passion and energy amaze Nick as well as his other acquaintances. He is the constant subject of speculation and gossip because of his intense nature, odd habits, and lack of established history. As Nick discovers, the driving force behind Gatsby’s actions is his love for Daisy. In his mind Gatsby has transformed Daisy into an angel, and his love for her has fueled his drive to be successful. Gatsby is much like the Rhett Butler figure in Gone with the Wind, because like Rhett, he is mysterious and constantly confounding convention. He has worked hard to establish his fortune, and his reputation has grown to extreme proportions. His love of Daisy motivates him, in much the same way that Rhett’s love of Scarlet dictates his actions. By admitting this love, both of these characters are demonstrating a vulnerability uncharacteristic of them, or at least of their reputation. Gatsby, the tragic lover, remains a mystery throughout, even when confiding in Nick.

Carey Mulligan & Leonardo Dicaprio

As Nick Carraway, the mild-mannered but eagle-eyed narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, observes in the book’s early pages, “Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.” So it was with a Zen mind that I tried to approach Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of the book, which, intelligent debunkings aside, I really do regard as one of the great American novels of the 20th century—and probably inherently unfilmable. Literary adaptations of books in which the language is all—particularly the work of high-modern prose stylists like Fitzgerald, Proust, Nabokov, Woolf—seem doomed to either plodding literalism or airy insubstantiality. (Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita had a nasty sense of humor all its own, but the script, written by Nabokov himself, dispensed almost entirely with the narrative voice that makes the novel so perversely seductive.)

Then there was the fact that Baz Luhrmann, the Australian director of such grand-scale entertainments as Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge, and Australia, was the one who would be turning Fitzgerald’s economic tone poem of a novel into a big, glitzy 3-D spectacle. I’ve never been fond of Luhrmann’s films, and have only been able to tolerate a couple. (I think I walked out of Moulin Rouge, back when I wasn’t a film critic and could indulge in such luxuries.) His mania for heaping one visual excess atop another—look at this! No, look at this!— strikes me as a form of directorial ADD, an inability to let himself or the audience rest. And as a member of that winded audience, I sense an implicit condescension in Luhrmann’s tendency to flag and then re-flag a film’s major themes as his films go on—themes that were not introduced subtly the first time around. In Baz Luhrmann movies, ideas arrive with an ensemble.

But of course, The Great Gatsby is the story of a supremely unsubtle man given to bold gestures and flashy set pieces, so maybe Luhrmann was born to adapt it. At any rate, his Great Gatsby was nowhere near as terrible as I feared. It is, as I suspected, a gargantuan hunk of over-art-directed kitsch, but it makes for a grandiose, colorful, pleasure-drenched night at the movies. And far from betraying the spirit of Fitzgerald’s novel, Luhrmann (along with his co-screenwriter Craig Pearce) treats the book with a loving mix of straight-ahead reverence and postmodern playfulness. During the huge, highly choreographed party sequences that structure the story (this isn’t a musical, but the recurring music- and dance-heavy sequences make it feel like one), you’re more likely to hear Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Lana Del Rey than you are a tinny vintage recording of “Ain’t We Got Fun?”, the flapper-age standard that figures in a scene in the novel and that played at the end of the stillborn 1974 Robert Redford version. Luhrmann’s use of contemporary pop may spring mainly from a desire to sell soundtrack albums, but the notion of using hip-hop as a backdrop for Jazz Age euphoria makes sense: With his new wealth, loud pink suit, and impossibly sweet crib, Gatsby is a rap star before his time.
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Dance-floor playlists aside, this Gatsby unfolds in a fairly conventional period setting (though this is the ’20s as seen through a distorting kaleidoscope, everything a little bigger and louder and lusher than life). In a klutzy frame story that’s absent from the novel, we meet Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) at a sanatorium where he’s recovering from “morbid alcoholism” and assorted mental maladies. He begins to tell his story to a benevolent, Santa Claus-like shrink, who provides him with a pen and paper with which to write it down. Later Nick will trade these tools in for a typewriter; whatever writing tool he uses, the words will occasionally drift up around him on the screen, then break apart and drift around him in a cloud of floating 3-D letters. It’s a hokey device, but the Nick-as-author conceit gives us an excuse to listen some choice passages of Fitzgerald’s prose, which Maguire, giving a surprisingly quiet performance at this chaotic movie’s heart, delivers beautifully. Thematically, though, it does seem a mistake to turn The Great Gatsby into a self-referential bildungsroman about a young man’s journey to healing through authorship. When Nick finally pens in “The Great” over his manuscript’s original title Gatsby, we don’t so much feel pride in his accomplishment as annoyance at his smugness—he’s supposed to be telling us this story out of necessity, not ambition.

The story Nick has to tell is one that anyone who’s graduated high school in the United States surely knows, at least in Cliffs Notes form: The mysterious tycoon Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) owns a gaudy estate next door to Nick’s rented cottage in the fictional Long Island village of West Egg. At one of his extravagant all-night flapper blowouts, Gatsby asks Nick to arrange a meeting with Nick’s cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan), a dazzling former debutante whom Gatsby once loved and lost as a younger, poorer man. Daisy lives directly across the sound in old-money East Egg with her rich brute of a husband, Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), and is constantly flanked by her best friend Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), an icy-cool golf champion. Over the course of a summer, Nick is drawn into the orbit of these wealthy, powerful, lost people, whom he recognizes as a “rotten crowd” only after their unthinking cruelty has already caused irreparable harm.

Every image and set piece you remember from the novel—the crumbling oculist’s billboard that looms over the action with judging eyes; Gatsby flinging his collection of custom-made shirts at an overcome, weeping Daisy (and, thanks to the 3-D format, directly at us); the hot afternoon at the Plaza Hotel when the rivalry for Daisy’s affections comes to a head—is rendered in broad, operatic gestures. There were many moments when that broadness made me cringe: Does the CGI-aided camera always have to race at jet-ski speed across the water toward the symbolic green light on Daisy’s dock? Must Gatsby’s face really be seen for the first time against a backdrop of fireworks, as the climax of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” surges on the soundtrack? And yet for every slab of processed cheese, there’s another moment whose visual inventiveness pays off. In an early scene, Luhrmann turns one image in the novel—Nick looking out the window at a party, “simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life”—into a clever Rear Window-style tableau of a Manhattan apartment building bursting with untold stories.

Leonardo DiCaprio makes as good a Jay Gatsby as any living actor I can think of—he captures the character’s fixed-in-time boyishness as well as his innocent hucksterism, and he looks like a (dubiously ethical) million bucks in the splendiferous costumes by Catherine Martin, the director’s wife (who also designed the dizzyingly lavish, champagne-and-confetti-drenched production—she must have been one tired woman by the time shooting ended). But DiCaprio’s physical presence seems almost superfluous in some key scenes, as Maguire’s voice-over narrates the idealistic striver’s actions faster than he can complete them. Our first glimpse of Gatsby, before even the Gershwin-accompanied debut described above, is a shot of his be-ringed hand reaching toward that oft-revisited green light as Nick describes watching his enigmatic neighbor … reach for a green light off a dock. Luhrmann doesn’t just gild the lily, he spray-paints it with glow-in-the-dark sparkles.

Somehow the connection that’s established between Gatsby and Nick—the charismatic gangster and the shy young banker he dubs “old sport”—feels more vital and convincing than the illicit love between Daisy and Gatsby, which, despite Carey Mulligan’s sensitive performance, remains more of a narrative conceit. Perhaps the sweet-faced Mulligan is a little too sensitive for this part—there’s a hard, narcissistic edge to Daisy that we don’t glimpse until very late in the film (which also, disappointingly given Luhrmann’s literalness, misses the chance to work in Gatsby’s observation that “her voice is full of money”). Many of the actors in smaller roles—especially Isla Fisher and Jason Clarke as Tom Buchanan’s working-class mistress and her duped mechanic husband—seem to be straining to fill their limited screen time with the most theatrical, Punch-and-Judy style performances possible. If there’s a discovery in the cast, it’s the Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki, who plays Daisy’s enabling pal Jordan. In the novel, Nick describes the implacable Jordan as looking “like a good illustration, her chin raised a little jauntily, her hair the color of an autumn leaf.” Debicki’s cool, reserved performance captures the stillness of that description—when she’s onscreen there’s a moment of respite from the noise, a sigh of relief that there’s someone in this feverishly over-self-explaining movie we may never understand.

The Great Gatsby — Leonardo DeCaprio and Carey MulliganQUOTATIONS on CLASS:

“Class is an aura of confidence that is being sure without being cocky. Class has nothing to do with money. Class never runs scared. It is self-discipline and self-knowledge. It’s the sure-footedness that comes with having proved you can meet life.” ― Ann Landers

“It’s okay. We aren’t in the same class. Just don’t forget that some of us watch the sunset too.” ― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all … The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands – the ownership and control of their livelihoods – are set at naught, we can have neither men’s rights nor women’s rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.” ― Helen Keller, Rebel Lives: Helen Keller

“History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything.” ― Jeffrey D. Sachs

The Sessions
Film Review
Written By Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
Created May 19th 2013
Posted May 19th 2013

poster for the film ‘the sessions’ leading roles: helen hunt – william h. macy – john hawkes

william h. macy as father brendan – john hawkes as mark o’brien confessing

william h. macy in “the sessions”

The Sessions Movie CLIP – Poem (2012) – Helen Hunt Movie HD

love poem by mark o’brien – poster by j. kiley © jennifer kiley 2013

If you want to see a film, where the characters are real, and you feel their reality as they are living it out on the screen, this is the film for you. You need to check any moralistic judgement at the door. That wasn’t a problem for me. I felt what was happening was essential, human, caring, loving and a necessary sharing for all those directly involved.

THE SESSIONS Trailer 2012 Movie – Official [HD]I don’t want to give any of the film away but it is brilliant, intimate, humourous, makes you want to cry and smile all at once. You really aren’t sure who or what you should be encouraging. You feel their feelings so tenderly. I have now seen this film, The Sessions, and took from it a feeling that one can be healed. I am not talking about his polio, but his inner being. I will not say what happens but I will recommend this film. As Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel use to say: “Two Thumbs Up.” Get this film. Buy It. Rent It. Stream It. Watch It On Demand. If you haven’t seen it in a theatre or if you have, see it again. Sometime in the near future it will become part of our collection. It is a film that has great value in seeing it more than once.

I will add it teaches you something about your own body, that if you didn’t already know, it deserves to be honoured and loved as part of your whole self. How to reach that union is something that I think many of us would like to do that have not really experienced that complete connection. I’m not saying that in the case of this film, what happens, but it does teach as well as gives the viewer a magnificent experience of looking inward. It is delightful that you get to share the joys, discussions, fears, anxieties, hopes, rejection, being ignored, having no power, being human and frail and tough and fighting to survive every minute of your life.

helen hunt as cheryl a sexual surrogate in bed with mark in ‘the sessions’

After watching this film, I would say he attained so much more than most people would expect. If for just sheer curiosity, to see a film that has the issue of sex right out there on the table, that alone should peek your cat like instinctual drive, this film is AMAZING. It is more than it could be and nothing less than it should be.

helen hunt and john hawkes in ‘the sessions’

We stood there, afraid to move from that spot. Until we decided we would count to three and go to our own houses. One. Two. Three. We tore to the kitchen doors of our houses, screaming the entire way and rushed into our houses slamming the doors behind us. Both having been too young and terrified to watch such a film as PSYCHO, alone, in the dark, watching bloody murders being committed. I still cannot watch that damned shower scene or pretty much most of the rest of the film after Janet Leigh arrives at the Bates Motel.

Helen Mirren played the role of Alfred Hitchcock’s wife opposite, the unidentifiable, Anthony Hopkins. She deserved the Oscar and I do believe she won the BAFTA, will have to check. But she played the second in command, who without her I firmly believe that Hitchcock’s genius would not have been held so firmly. She deserved credit in the film CREDITS but now everyone knows who have seen HITCHCOCK and THE GIRL. “The Girl” was made for HBO. The very British, Sienna Miller played Tippi Hedren, the actress who starred in Hitchcock’s “The Birds” and “Marnie.” Read my post on Tippi Hedren to find out more on that subject and the post, “Alfred Hitchcock: Man or Beast.” Do feel free to use the search box to locate anything related to all and anything located on “the secret keeper.”

the elements of power

Anyway, back on track, do see THE SESSIONS. You will never know what you have missed if you do not. And you would have missed TOO MUCH. 5 * * * * * Review by Jennifer Kiley with the Help of Jk the secret keeper

Maksim Mrvica – Tonci Huljic: PassionataQUOTATIONS on INTIMACY/TOUCHING/FEELINGS:

“Fall off the edge of the earth and crash into euphoria.” — Unknown

“I mean you can leave it at love and attraction, or can you can make it complicated, like most people do” — “The Sessions”

“The meaning of love. Love is a journey.” — “The Sessions”

“I never expected it. Nor did she. But that’s often how things turn out” — “The Sessions”

“Let me touch you with my words
For my hands lie limp as empty gloves
Let my words stroke your hair
Slide down your back and tickle your belly
For my hands, light and free-flying as bricks
Ignore my wishes and stubbornly refuse to carry out my quietest desires.
Let my words enter your mind, bearing torches
Admit them willingly into your being
So they may caress you gently within.”
— “The Sessions” by Mark O’Brien

“Sex makes everything complicated. As much as people want to believe sex can be carefree and casual, someone always gets attached. It’s inevitable.” — unknown

Identity Is Not Just Who You Are
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Post Created June 2nd 2013
Posted June 5th 2013

Josh Whedon ’87 Delivers 181st Commencement Address @ Wesleyan University

May 26th 2013

Award-winning writer, director, and producer Joss Whedon ’87 delivered the Commencement Address during the 181st Commencement Ceremony. Watch a video of his address or read the text just below video of this speech. He created Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. Serenity. Angel. Firefly. The Avengers. Much To Do About Nothing. Dollhouse. The Cabin In the Wood. Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. And much more…

Joss Whedon ’87 – Wesleyan University Commencement Speech – Official

Joss Whedon ’87 Delivered the Wesleyan Commencement Address

I actually sat through many graduations. When I was siting where you guys were sitting, the speaker was Bill Cosby—funny man Bill Cosby, he was very funny and he was very brief, and I thanked him for that. He gave us a message that I really took with me, that a lot of us never forgot, about changing the world. He said, “you’re not going to change the world, so don’t try.”

That was it. He didn’t buy that back at all. And then he complained about buying his daughter a car and we left. I remember thinking, “I think I can do better. I think I can be a little more inspiring than that.”

And so, what I’d like to say to all of you is that you are all going to die.

This is a good commencement speech because I’m figuring it’s only going to go up from here. It can only get better, so this is good. It can’t get more depressing. You have, in fact, already begun to die. You look great. Don’t get me wrong. And you are youth and beauty. You are at the physical peak. Your bodies have just gotten off the ski slope on the peak of growth, potential, and now comes the black diamond mogul run to the grave. And the weird thing is your body wants to die. On a cellular level, that’s what it wants. And that’s probably not what you want.

I’m confronted by a great deal of grand and worthy ambition from this student body. You want to be a politician, a social worker. You want to be an artist. Your body’s ambition: Mulch. Your body wants to make some babies and then go in the ground and fertilize things. That’s it. And that seems like a bit of a contradiction. It doesn’t seem fair. For one thing, we’re telling you, “Go out into the world!” exactly when your body is saying, “Hey, let’s bring it down a notch. Let’s take it down.”

And it is a contradiction. And that’s actually what I’d like to talk to you about. The contradiction between your body and your mind, between your mind and itself. I believe these contradictions and these tensions are the greatest gift that we have, and hopefully, I can explain that.

josh whedon received honorary degree from wesleyan university 2013

Let’s just say, hypothetically, that two roads diverged in the woods and you took the path less traveled. Part of you is just going, “Look at that path! Over there, it’s much better. Everyone is traveling on it. It’s paved, and there’s like a Starbucks every 40 yards. This is wrong. In this one, there’s nettles and Robert Frost’s body—somebody should have moved that—it just feels weird. And not only does your mind tell you this, it is on that other path, it is behaving as though it is on that path. It is doing the opposite of what you are doing. And for your entire life, you will be doing, on some level, the opposite—not only of what you were doing—but of what you think you are. That is just going to go on. What you do with all your heart, you will do the opposite of. And what you need to do is to honor that, to understand it, to unearth it, to listen to this other voice.

You have, which is a rare thing, that ability and the responsibility to listen to the dissent in yourself, to at least give it the floor, because it is the key—not only to consciousness-but to real growth. To accept duality is to earn identity. And identity is something that you are constantly earning. It is not just who you are. It is a process that you must be active in. It’s not just parroting your parents or the thoughts of your learned teachers. It is now more than ever about understanding yourself so you can become yourself.

I talk about this contradiction, and this tension, there’s two things I want to say about it. One, it never goes away. And if you think that achieving something, if you think that solving something, if you think a career or a relationship will quiet that voice, it will not. If you think that happiness means total peace, you will never be happy. Peace comes from the acceptance of the part of you that can never be at peace. It will always be in conflict. If you accept that, everything gets a lot better.

The other reason is because you are establishing your identities and your beliefs, you need to argue yourself down, because somebody else will. Somebody’s going to come at you, and whatever your belief, your idea, your ambition, somebody’s going to question it. And unless you have first, you won’t be able to answer back, you won’t be able to hold your ground. You don’t believe me, try taking a stand on just one leg. You need to see both sides.

Now, if you do, does this mean that you get to change the world? Well, I’m getting to that, so just chill. All I can say to this point is I think we can all agree that the world could use a little changing. I don’t know if your parents have explained this to you about the world but… we broke it. I’m sorry… it’s a bit of a mess. It’s a hard time to go out there. And it’s a weird time in our country.

The thing about our country is—oh, it’s nice, I like it—it’s not long on contradiction or ambiguity. It’s not long on these kinds of things. It likes things to be simple, it likes things to be pigeonholed—good or bad, black or white, blue or red. And we’re not that. We’re more interesting than that. And the way that we go into the world understanding is to have these contradictions in ourselves and see them in other people and not judge them for it. To know that, in a world where debate has kind of fallen away and given way to shouting and bullying, that the best thing is not just the idea of honest debate, the best thing is losing the debate, because it means that you learn something and you changed your position. The only way really to understand your position and its worth is to understand the opposite. That doesn’t mean the crazy guy on the radio who is spewing hate, it means the decent human truths of all the people who feel the need to listen to that guy. You are connected to those people. They’re connected to him. You can’t get away from it.

This connection is part of contradiction. It is the tension I was talking about. This tension isn’t about two opposite points, it’s about the line in between them, and it’s being stretched by them. We need to acknowledge and honor that tension, and the connection that that tension is a part of. Our connection not just to the people we love, but to everybody, including people we can’t stand and wish weren’t around. The connection we have is part of what defines us on such a basic level.

Freedom is not freedom from connection. Serial killing is freedom from connection. Certain large investment firms have established freedom from connection. But we as people never do, and we’re not supposed to, and we shouldn’t want to. We are individuals, obviously, but we are more than that.

So here’s the thing about changing the world. It turns out that’s not even the question, because you don’t have a choice. You are going to change the world, because that is actually what the world is. You do not pass through this life, it passes through you. You experience it, you interpret it, you act, and then it is different. That happens constantly. You are changing the world. You always have been, and now, it becomes real on a level that it hasn’t been before.

And that’s why I’ve been talking only about you and the tension within you, because you are—not in a clichéd sense, but in a weirdly literal sense—the future. After you walk up here and walk back down, you’re going to be the present. You will be the broken world and the act of changing it, in a way that you haven’t been before. You will be so many things, and the one thing that I wish I’d known and want to say is, don’t just be yourself. Be all of yourselves. Don’t just live. Be that other thing connected to death. Be life. Live all of your life. Understand it, see it, appreciate it. And have fun.

Original Graduation Song

QUOTATIONS on COMMENCEMENT:

“Develop and protect a moral sensibility and demonstrate the character to apply it. Dream big. Work hard. Think for yourself. Love everything you love, everyone you love, with all your might. And do so, please, with a sense of urgency, for every tick of the clock subtracts from fewer and fewer.” ― David McCullough Jr.

“Read. Read all the time. Read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.” ― David McCullough

“Unlike any other creature on this planet, human beings can learn and understand without having experienced. They can think themselves into other peoples’ places. Of course, this is a power like my brand of fictional magic that is morally neutral. One might use such a power to manipulate or control, just as much as to understand or sympathize. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or peer inside cages. They can close their hearts and minds to any suffering that does not touch them personally. They can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think that they have any fewer nightmares than I do.” ― J.K. Rowling

Woody Allen’s Latest: “Blue Jasmine”
Watch First Trailer Released June 7th 2013
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Post Created June 7th 2013
Posted June 8th 2013It has been a year. We all know after a year passes a new Woody Allen film appears on the horizon. Without any hesitation, I announce that the film is on the way. Woody Allen’s new film is “Blue Jasmine” and has an outstanding cast. At the top of the list is one of my favorite female actors who has been magnificent in all her films. Playing Jasmine is the Oscar-winning actor Cate Blanchett. Playing her sister is Sally Hawkins (of “Happy-Go-Lucky” fame), and the man in the trailer who seems to have broken her heart and everything else is played by Alec Baldwin.

cate blanchett as jasmine in woody allen’s new film “blue jasmine

cate blanchett with alec baldwin in “blue jasmine” woody allen’s latest film

Woody Allen has surrounded himself with a quality cast with such great talents as Alec Baldwin, Jasmine’s paramour (who I am assuming has broken her heart and her spirit), Bobby Cannavale, a friend of the sister, Peter Sarsgaard, Louis C.K., and Andrew Dice Clay. Several of the characters are out to protect Hawkins’ character from Blanchett, who they strongly believe is out to use her.

cate blanchett in “blue jasmine” in woody allen’s latest film

Woody Allen has demonstrated an excellence in telling stories about siblings, for example “Hannah & Her Sisters,” “September,” and “Interiors.” So I am very optimistic about this endeavor.

“Blue Jasmine” arrives in movie theatres on July 26, 2013. Watch the trailer near the bottom of post. It will give you further insight into Woody Allen’s newest gift to his fans, of which, I am an avid one.Blue Jasmine
Written and Directed by Woody Allen
Rated PG-13 | 98 minutes | Release Date 07/26/2013 (NY/LA)

BLUE JASMINE
Starring
(in alphabetical order)

Hal ALEC BALDWIN

Jasmine CATE BLANCHETT

Al LOUIS C.K.

Chili BOBBY CANNAVALE

Augie ANDREW DICE CLAY

Ginger SALLY HAWKINS

Dwight PETER SARSGAARD

Dr. Flicker MICHAEL STUHLBARG

Co-starring
(in alphabetical order)

Jasmine’s Friend Jane TAMMY BLANCHARD

Eddie MAX CASELLA

Danny ALDEN EHRENREICH

I discovered a treasure after I finished this post which I would like to share but only in small amounts. This is just a flavor of some of what “Blue Jasmine” is about under the surface. It also is a brief understanding of the workings of Woody Allen as a film maker, writer and director. I will be bringing you more from this source each week just to build up your suspense for wanting to see the film “Blue Jasmine” and to help in understanding what is unfolding in the minds of the actor Cate Blanchett and the director Woody Allen as the motivation for what he has written in his screenplay. He has the utmost respect for Ms. Blanchett and feels that she is one of the finest actors in the world. READ ON. THERE WILL BE MORE. A POST A WEEK WITH MORE REVEALED. MORE INSIGHTFUL THAN SPOILER. IT WILL JUST AID IN THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE FILM “BLUE JASMINE,” A HIGHLY COMPLEX FILM.

BLUE JASMINE
About the Production

Throughout his career, Woody Allen has created many indelible female characters portrayed by some of the world’s greatest actresses, including Diane Keaton, Geraldine Page, Mariel Hemingway, Charlotte Rampling, Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, Gena Rowlands, Dianne Wiest, Mira Sorvino, Judy Davis, Samantha Morton, Scarlett Johansson, and Penelope Cruz, to mention only a few. Whether they appear in light comedies, dark dramas or anything in between, these complex female characters resonate in our memories as the focal points of his movies. Certain to take her place in this gallery of multifaceted, complex, and richly observed women is Jasmine, the troubled heroine of Allen’s new drama BLUE JASMINE, portrayed by another one of the world’s most extraordinary actresses, Cate Blanchett.

We first meet New York socialite Jasmine shortly after she has suffered a breakdown, triggered by the cataclysmic collapse of her marriage to wealthy financier Hal (Alec Baldwin). Up until that point Jasmine’s entire identity was wrapped up in being an elegant, well dressed, culturally sophisticated woman living the Manhattan high life, but now that life is over, and her mental and emotional state is rapidly veering off course. “We know from the minute the movie opens that Jasmine is lost,” says Allen. “She’s already someone who has been found talking to herself and has had real problems.” Hitting rock bottom both financially and psychologically, and having nowhere else to go, Jasmine turns to her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), a grocery store cashier in San Francisco. “Jasmine has really been through the mill,” says Allen. “In a fit of anger she did something that caused dire consequences she never anticipated, and she brought on herself an extremely potent series of traumas.” Says Blanchett: “Jasmine is in freefall and has to leave behind everything she knows and has expected. She’s entering the realm of absolute unknown, moving from one coast to the other, from one social set to the other, one class to another.”

THAT IS ALL FOR THIS POST. CHECK BACK NEXT WEEK FOR MORE. Jk the secret keeperAn added dimension to the film “Blue Jasmine” and Cate Blanchett’s role. A direct quote from Richard Friedman’s column Showbiz411: “Yes, the 2013 Academy Awards won’t be decided until March 2, 2014, but the buzz for Best Actress is the loudest and earliest it’s been in years. People are raving – raving – about Cate Blanchett in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine.” I mean, they are loving her and saying the movie is on a par with Woody’s classics like “Match Point” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” This is great news for Cate.Actors Cate might be up against for the 2013 year of Oscar hopefuls start with Oprah Winfrey in Lee Daniels’s “The Butler,” based on a true story. It takes a look at the life of Cecil Gaines, played by Forest Whitaker, who served eight presidents as the White House’s head butler from 1952 to 1986, and had a unique front-row seat as political and racial history was made. An extensive cast of some rather prominent actors playing presidents and their wives. Oprah plays Gloria Gaines. She is the proud wife to the lead character Cecil Gaines. Release date is August 16, 2013. Oprah received an Oscar nomination for supporting actor in “The Color Purple.” Her portrayal of Sophia was brilliant and the entire film was robbed of winning any of its 13 nominations, including Whoopi Goldberg playing the lead of Miss Celie.

I must add this amazing poster for the film “The Butler.” I discovered it while doing my investigating. It is a truly amazing poster and only released today, June 7, 2013. Please indulge me. I have an addiction to the poster art form. This one, to me, I feel is quite moving. I do hope you are able to experience the time warp this image has traveled through to come alive today. What a mind altering and thought provoking experience it makes one feel. The gesture in the poster may remind some of the Olympics in Mexico. It is powerful to see it in this image.Nicole Kidman in “Grace of Monaco,” a film about the story of former Hollywood star Grace Kelly’s crisis of marriage and identity, during a political dispute between Monaco’s Prince Rainier III and France’s Charles De Gaulle, and a looming French invasion of Monaco in the early 1960s. I was a fan and was too young to understand why such a talented actor as Grace Kelly would give up such a brilliant career. I was too young to remember that Monaco was going to be invaded by the French. De Gaulle must have been mad or an egomaniac. Nicole Kidman won the Oscar playing Virginia Woolf in “The Hours,” Her portrayal was a painful but brilliant performance of a true artist and writer slowly losing her battle with sanity slipping gradually in and out of madness. In the end, her life became too much for her. Nicole is one of todays amazing actors, who like Meryl Streep is usually recognized for her quality work and finds herself often nominated for the Oscars.Three question marks in the competition begin with Julia Roberts, a win in “Erin Brockovich” and Meryl Streep, a multiple Oscar nominee with two wins, they both portray roles in “August: Osage County.” This film looks at the lives of the strong-willed women of the Weston family, whose paths have diverged until a family crisis brings them back to the Oklahoma house they grew up in, and to the dysfunctional woman who raised them. Release date is set for November 8, 2013 in the U.S. It’s possible they will each be nominated for lead actors, with Meryl Streep being the stronger choice to win.Lastly, Naomi Watts for her portrayal of Princess Diana in the film “Diana.” This film covers the last two years of Princess Diana’s life: her campaign against land mines and her relationship with surgeon Dr Hasnat Khan, played by Naveen Andrews of “Lost” fame. It’s release date in the UK is September 20, 2013.All of these films sound like films I will want to see. I shall follow them to see how they develop and if I am able I will feature them with a post for each as they become available with further information. At present, they are all in post production and there is a great deal of secrecy surrounding the nature of their development. Soon I will learn more and then I will share.And now for the newly released first trailer to Woody Allen’s newest film “Blue Jasmine” starring Cate Blanchett in the lead role. It feels like a 5 star***** and two thumbs up film to me. ENJOY ! Jk the secret keeper

Blue Jasmine — Woody Allen’s Latest 2013QUOTATIONS on LOSING IT:

“THE EDGE, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” ― Hunter S. Thompson

“One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded…” ― Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings

Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
Miss Seeing You-Difficult 13
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
First Published March 19th 2013
Published Early Tuesday AM
Thirteenth Posted June 11th 2013Tuesday, December 25th, 2007
Christmas Day

Dear Annie,

Not seeing you today was so painfully difficult. I realize it is Christmas day and you are with your family and I am, of course, with mine. Our furry kitties, Patrick, Toker and Little Sparky and our feathery Amazon Parrot, V Woolf. At present, we are all spread out together in the family room. Scottie is looking for a great book to read for the holiday week. She likes to choose a special book every year. She starts it out and when her voice begins to crack, it becomes my turn. I love this part. When I was in school, I prided myself on being able to read without a mistake or tripping over a word for the greatest length of anyone in my class. It was a feat that I still hold the record to. It’s a good habit to have if you ever have to do a book reading. Which as you may know, I do fairly often. More locally, then in the past, when I use to travel all over the states and sometimes even over in Europe, particularly in England.

I know this is suppose to be a joyful time of the year. Scottie and I have a good time together. We have a special Christmas Eve dinner, which was delicious last night, and there are always leftovers. We started the Christmas Eve feast our first Christmas together, before we were actually together. But that story is for another time. Something has been running through my mind, which I cannot talk about in therapy, private or group, but I need to get it out of my system. It has to do with crying. All the films we watch at Christmas should make me tear up or cry, especially at the end of Alastair Sims’s Scrooge, A Christmas Carol. His is the all time best film on Dicken’s story. I’ve watched it every year since I was a child. That is what I want to talk about. When I was a child, I remember I would swallow my tears in the lump that formed in my throat. I was too afraid to cry or for anyone to see the tears in my eyes. I better explain why. It is not a pleasant story.

I don’t cry. It is something I cannot do. Only when something so traumatic happens can I cry and then I can’t seem to stop. Everything sets me off. But only in private can I show my tears. I shut down completely around everyone, even Scottie, and during a sad film where crying is completely acceptable behavior. As I said, Tiny Tim always gives me a lump in my throat. It is my body trying to protect me by holding back the tears. It’s probably because I really want to scream. There is so much rage pent up inside of me. I want to let go of it but I’m afraid.

It’s shame. I am ashamed of my tears. There is a really good reason. When I was really young I use to cry all the time. It really drove my mother insane. My brothers would tease me and call me a cry baby. I hate that term. It made me cry even more. My mother use to tell my brothers to leave me alone. She left me alone to. But then suddenly, I must have reached a certain age when my mother didn’t find it acceptable any longer for me to cry. She flipped out and became some dark creature and mean as Hell. It started. She turned into a Demon. When ever she found me alone, she turned on me, like some cornered animal and started to beat me, all the while screaming at me. I became terrified and of course I would start to cry. This made her even more angry. Her seeing the tears in my eyes and falling down my cheeks enraged her. That’s when I discovered that tears were dangerous. They ignited a full blown rage in my mother. That was when I started thinking of her as evil and in therapy I came up with the name for her of The Shadow Mother. That’s what I called her in my mind. I cannot use the other word alone. It disturbs me.

My tears from that point on caused me to be physically, emotionally, psychologically, sexually and spiritually abused in the most vicious ways imaginable. The depth of abuse crossed the lines of any kind of abuse in ones childhood. The Shadow Mother wasn’t my only abuser but the things she did to me were so harsh. One would not expect a mother to do these things to their young child. Now that I am older and understand more I can describe what she did to me. She was into bondage and dominance mixed in with sadomasochism. In her beatings there were not any safe words to make it stop. That’s when I felt it brought the abuse into a questionably sexual realm with The Shadow Mother. The word No and Stop in her mind meant to keep abusing. Crying only doubled and tripled the intensity of the beatings. She started out by striking me through my clothing at first but as the frequency of the abuse increased eventually she would not get enough satisfaction with striking cloth, she wanted to beat my body on my flesh where she could see the effect of her brutality. She wanted to see the bruises and the tears in my skin. She used various weapons. Usually what ever was near at hand but she had a favorite switch taken from the branches of a tree from our yard that she liked the most.

Silence and no movement were the only things when combined that worked to stop her. I needed to be dead or show the appearance of someone dead for the abuse to stop. Maybe not technically but physically without sound or motion. That was the first part. When that was over there was one more phase to the abuse. It wasn’t over until I, the child and one abused, went to her closed bedroom door and groveled at the door with The Shadow Mother inside. She was always dead silent. I was always on my knees pleading with her to forgive me. I had to ask my abuser to forgive me. I’d ask her multiple times to forgive me. I was trained well into being submissive but even with all the pleading there was no forgiveness. Not ever. The door never opened. There was never a sound made from inside those walls behind that damned door. I was left there till oblivion escorted me away. Memory blanked from that point on. Rewind tape and repeat performance at a future but unknown time. Just her performance was the only thing that was repeated over and over again in all its brutality and my submission and pleas for forgiveness were echoed in those halls and bedrooms.

I am sorry that I am telling you this now but Christmas is about family and I have no family. I left them all behind when I became brave enough and my first therapist managed to convince me I needed to leave that place of unbalanced confusion, madness and inequity. There are no blood family I want anything to do with except a niece and her family. We are close and keep in touch but I have never met her. My agoraphobia has prevented us getting together. Her family want to meet Scottie and me. It’s just I have a terrible time being around people. I relate to them from a distance, through cyberspace. With the few exceptions. Physical contact is not something I am very good at except with my animals and Scottie. I do group and private therapy but do not relate well in my private sessions. As far as group goes, I can handle the people in group as long as it’s in a therapy room. Now, it seems to be developing into something impossible and uncomfortable to handle. If you weren’t there Annie, I wouldn’t return. Your entering my life when you did has saved me. I hope in the near future you will come to my rescue even further. You becoming my psychoanalyst is my Christmas wish and those wishes always should be answered.

Merry Christmas Annie. And thank you for entering my life when you did. It means more to me than I am able to express to you in person at the moment. Oh, by the way, Scottie finally settled on her choice of books to read over the holidays. It’s Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited.” We loved the series and have watched it several times. I seem to recall that the opening line of the series was spoken by Charles Rider, played by the actor Jeremy Irons (one had no idea of who he was at the time in the states) saying off camera, “I knew Sebastian by sight long before I met him. That was unavoidable for, from his first week, he was the most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of behaviour, which seemed to know no bounds… I was struck less by his looks than by the fact that he was carrying a large teddy-bear”.” It should be fun hearing Sebastian talk about his teddy bear Aloysius, “If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper…” Love both of these lines but I wish the second one could be true most of the time. I, also, love all the adventures Sebastian had with Charles at Cambridge together. Then there is Sebastian’s family, the mother was almost impossible to take to heart and overly pompous in her religiosity and the same of brother Bridie, what a bore.

It was easy to love Sebastian’s sisters Cordelia and Julia, and spending time at Brideshead, the Flyte homestead, that was mostly marvelous in the beginning. And Sebastian’s father was a free spirit, who was accepting and had found love away from England in Italy, away from his wife and the mother of his children. When all starts going wrong, that I don’t like. Sebastian is my favorite and I don’t like that Waugh gives him such a bad turn. It should still be exciting to have Scottie reading to us as I rest my head in her lap and stretch out the rest of my body on the sofa with a throw over me, our cats Patrick, Toker and Sparky curled up on top of the sofa with us, and a fire roaring in the fireplace. Quite the romantic and cozy scene. Add to that some Schubert or Rachmaninoff playing in the background or Michael Hoppe and the sweetness of the spiritually uplifting flute and the peaceful serenity the music induces inside one’s soul.

I’d say thanks for listening. In a way you are, at least in my head. Annie, that does help me make it through, believing that you are there for me. Maybe after this letter you might not want to deal with someone who has been so damaged. It isn’t easy to be around that shit I wrote about. It’s in my psyche and I hate having to remember. I don’t often. My defense mechanisms are like iron vaults. They lock up the darkness as best they can but there is always the sneakiness of memories. They don’t like being trapped in any containment. They have no idea they are so destructive to me. All they want is their freedom. Being creative helps to release them in a way that I have more control over them but one doesn’t have control over one’s nightmares unfortunately. They sneak out through all those symbols in the unconscious, thank you Carl Jung, that collective unconscious that manifests its self by bringing back the dead to haunt me, so that I will be forced to remember, even if it is in code. Eventually, the code is broken and the symbols are understood. They must be. It is the only way to work things out and be rid of their hold on me. Out, out damned nightmares. I may joke but I want my dignity back and my honour and innocence.

Annie, this is what you would have to look forward to if you decide to accept the challenge to be my analyst. I so hope you will. Please don’t turn away from me now. I can feel my insecurities are already starting to grow. There is nobody I am able to turn to who will help me. I’ve tried so many therapists and analysts. I need help. There isn’t much time. My strength is weakening. I feel suicidal so often. Holding back the dam from breaking just won’t work much longer. With all my heart, I am asking you sincerely to please help me.

Sorry for such intensity. I am not able to help myself. It is part of who I am. All I want to say now in finishing this letter is to wish you a great holiday vacation. I hope it’s wonderful spending time with your family. I look forward to seeing you after the first of the year. It will be hard to make it through that long. I will work on being creative. My new screenplay needs working on for Scottie to begin setting up her method of attack. She’s beginning casting after the New Year. The casting department at the studio have lined up actors for auditions after the holidays. So I am under pressure to have something decent for them to read in their try-outs. Plus I want to work are some of my computer art. That should capture my full attention.

I look forward to seeing you the second Tuesday of the New Year. Bye for now. Next week is New Year’s Day. I hope I haven’t totally freaked you out as much as I have myself. “Like madness is the glory of this life.” — Shakespeare-The Timon of Athens

Quite Fondly,
MadisonTo Annie,

I write these letters in the strictest of confidence. I am not trying to be a coward, but I feel if I don’t hold back now and never send these letters to you, then I am freeing myself up to write whatever I need without any censorship. There will be secrecy to protect you, Annie, and to protect myself. But I also want to record the development of our relationship as it truly happens. At least, in the way it appears in my own mind.

I want you to trust me, Annie. I am freer writing to you this way. If I know I will not be sending these letters to you. I will be more honest with what words I use and feelings I express. I will know I am not hiding anything from coming to the surface. It frees up my libido. I will keep my letters confidential. On my honour, no others shall see these pages, I promise you that.

Fondly,
Madison

Madison Tayler’s Fantasy of Annie Haskell’s Office as a Psychoanalyst. Not real.

Maksim — Somewhere In Time — Theme Song For “Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst”

No healing but time.
Even that is a projected hallucination.
Feeling a hold on what is real.
Moments creep in and change things up.
Waiting for time to pass so the pain will stop.
Losing control.
Not able to control the intensity
hurting the flesh
corrupting the instrument of the mind
controls the dam from overflowing.
Tear everything apart
to stop the insanity of waiting
from circling the brain.
The madness takes over
rips it all apart so it becomes bearable.
Eventually, the torture subsides
is replaced with a more acceptable level.
The waiting feels less maddening
the feelings brought down
to a more manageable level.
But the waiting still exists.
The pain remains.
The intensity is spread out
to a bearable diversion of acceptance.
There still exists time between the madness
and the satisfaction
the pain will be subdued
to a reasonable state bearable
to only the divinely mad.
Losing control sometimes
is the only acceptable answer
to certain situations.
Healing needs to be done
only in a way that allows
for all possibilities of acceptance.

© madison taylor 2007

Queen — Who Wants To Live Forever — Theme Song #13 For “Letters of Import: Miss Seeing You-Difficult 13

the labyrinth called “wandering wonderland.” it is where madison, scottie and their cats loves to escape to

madison’s “woods of imagination” where she takes long walks to reflect. it is starts just past the labyrinth

le chateau de rocher is the home of madison and scottie & their three cats sparky toker & patrick

madison’s study/library

scottie’s study library

front foyer and staircase

Maksim — Somewhere In Time (A New Version-with Quotations-of the Theme Song for “Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst”QUOTATIONS from: LETTERS of IMPORT: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst

“A Dream

The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor

“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)

“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”

“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist

“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan PoeQUOTATIONS on MISSING YOU-DIFFICULT:

“I like to see people reunited, maybe that’s a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.” ― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“I had my chance.’ He said it, retiring from a lifetime of wanting. ‘I had my chance, and sometimes in life, there are no second chances. You look at what you have, not what you miss, and you move forward.” ― Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

“All I can think about is what she must be doing, and how I wish she were still here.” ― Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four

“Tamani smiled softly and lifted a hand to her face, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and letting his thumb rest on her cheek. ‘Trust me, it’s no picnic missing you. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.” ― Aprilynne Pike, Spells

“He tried to tell me week after week to accept things as they were and move on with my life. But if there was one man who had put his life on hold to wait for something or someone, it was him.” ― Cecelia Ahern, A Place Called Here

“Didn’t I say I’d always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.” ― Anne Rivers Siddons, Fault Lines

“Usually time alters and affects everything, but when someone you love dies time cannot change that, no amount of time will ever change that, so time stops having any meaning.” ― Rosamund Lupton, Sister

“I won’t let you have it. I won’t give you this moment. I won’t let you fill up this valuable organ…I own it. I won’t do it. I can’t think, I won’t think about it.” ― Coco J. Ginger

“…there remained a strange formality between them, and her pleasure in his presence felt too much like missing him had felt during the last week.” ― Robin McKinley, Pegasus

“The Words”
A Film About a Writer
Post Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
Trailer of “The Words” with Bradley Cooper
Created June 18th 2013
Posted June 19th 2013

POSTER 1

Movie Synopsis

Starring Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Irons, Dennis Quaid, Olivia Wilde and Zoë Saldana, the layered romantic drama The Words follows young writer Rory Jansen who finally achieves long sought after literary success after publishing the next great American novel. There’s only one catch – he didn’t write it. As the past comes back to haunt him and his literary star continues to rise, Jansen is forced to confront the steep price that must be paid for stealing another man’s work, and for placing ambition and success above life’s most fundamental three words.

The Word —- Official Trailer [HD] with Bradley Cooper (2012)

THE WORDS

SYNOPSIS:
After a couple of demoralising rejections, young writer Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper) finally achieves long sought literary success with his latest novel and enjoys the change from poverty to glittering awards, in the company of his beautiful and adoring wife Dora (Zoe Saldana). The fact that he didn’t write it only becomes problematic when an old man (Jeremy Irons) in Central Park sits next to him on a bench and tells him the sad but true story behind the manuscript.

Review by Louise Keller:
The Words is a gripping film that plays mercilessly with the mind as it explores the precipice that divides the world of real life and fiction. Directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal have written a wonderful screenplay in which three stories are skilfully interwoven to deliver a rich and satisfying film that questions integrity above all else. A successful author, an old man and a university graduate are the key players in this intriguing story with themes about choices, truths and deceits and whose elements of drama, mystery and romance are played out in beguiling fashion. There are struggles, choices, highs and lows and the inevitable consequences.

The film’s structure is interesting in that there is a story within a story and yet another story within. It is credit to the screenwriters that the transition from one to the other is seamless; we are never confused or unsure as to which story is which. The narrative begins in the present with the acclaim of lauded author Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid, excellent), who is reading excerpts of his latest book The Words to a receptive audience.

We are then taken into the world of Hammond’s fictional character, a struggling writer named Rory (Bradley Cooper at his best) who is eager to make his mark. His wife Dora (Zoe Saldana, lovely) believes in him even though Rory is infected by self-doubt. It is on their honeymoon when Dora buys Rory an old briefcase, that fate plays its hand. When Rory finds the anonymous manuscript hidden in the briefcase, he devours the words of the story, wishing that he had written them himself. It starts innocently enough – he wants his fingers to feel the impact of the words as he retypes them…. The essence of the story, set in war-time Paris resonates to such an extent, he accepts a deal with the devil – and claims it as his own work.

Just like Ralph Fiennes in Quiz Show (1994) who cheats his way to success, so too does Rory, as his novel The Window Tears is acclaimed. Cooper is physically reminiscent of Fiennes and ably conveys the journey of the ambitious writer whose love affair with words challenges his moral compass. But it is Jeremy Irons, impeccably cast as the old man, who steals the film, bring real pathos. Irons is devastatingly good and he imparts the pain and anger of a stranger taking ownership of an integral part of his life involving the people who matter most. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up in the scene when The Old Man approaches Rory in the park, sits on the bench beside him and as he feeds the birds, tells some home truths.

Then, with Iron’s rich, distinctive voice as narrator, The Old Man’s story is subsequently told in flashback: a young man (Ben Barnes) falls in love with beautiful French girl Celia (Nora Arnezeder) in 1940s Paris. Devoured by the pain of the events that transpire, the young man types the manuscript when he is at his most vulnerable: it represents the essence of who he is.

Klugman and Sternthal play with time frames most effectively and by the time we return to the present in which the aspiring writer grad student (Olivia Wilde) flirts outrageously with Hammond, it is clear that real life and fiction have become inexorably intertwined beyond redemption. Or has it? This is top drawer story telling for those who like their films to challenge the mind as well as the heart. My kind of film.

Remember, Remember — Dario Marianelli (V for Vendetta)

COMMENT FROM Jk the secret keeper: “Here is the following note I left for my partner in an email I am about to send her. She gets up when I am sound asleep. And she is sleeping now. It will tell you that I am so taken by what I have found out about this film that I am so desperate and patient at the same time. I feel like I am going to lose my mind from the excitement. I should add that I recently had surgery and I haven’t been able to drive for a whole month. Now I don’t think one can forget after just a month of not doing it but it is a new car and I have actually only driven it a few times since we got it. It is my partner’s car. Soon to be mine. I have named him “Andrew.” I like naming my cars. Last one was named “Annie” long before I named the character in my book. Annie is a significant name in my life that goes back into my childhood. Very personal. Anyway, here is the note. In caps. Not shouting. Just for emphasis. It is also multi-coloured so I need to put it on a framed poster. Here it is:

they have the words poster by j. kiley written by Jk…m

QUOTATIONS on STEALING:

“Man is not, by nature, deserving of all that he wants. When we think that we are automatically entitled to something, that is when we start walking all over others to get it.” ― Criss Jami

“Steal not this book for fear of shame
For on it is the owners name
And when you die the Lord will say
Where is the book you stole away
And when you say you do not know
The Lord will say go down below.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

Funeral Blues
W.H. Auden
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Post Created June 16th 2013
Posted June 20th 2013

a magical forest landscape reflected in water sprinkled in faery dust

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Funeral Blues — W.H. AudenJohn Hannah, playing Matthew, reads WH Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues.” The poem was first published by Auden in 1936 and became famous after it was featured in the film “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

Amy Winehouse — Back To BlackAmy Winehouse’s death had a profound effect on me. Not only did she die on my birthday but I discovered the real her after her death, not before. She has a remarkable voice and talent. Life came down upon her and destroyed her. Her attempts and struggles with holding back death ended in a scream of not wanting or feeling ready to let go but death took her on July 23rd 2011. She was alone when she died. Where was everyone to protect her and to keep her alive? You are loved and missed Amy Winehouse. Will Love her Always and Her Music Will Go On.

dark clouds with light coming through from above

“Every angel is terrifying.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
Duino Elegies

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My Mind was going numb –

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –”
― Emily Dickinson
The Complete Poems

“Loneliness Ends With Love” ― Al Lerner

“but at the Lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.”
― Winston Churchill

“We pass and leave you lying. No need for rhetoric, for funeral music, for melancholy bugle-calls. No need for tears now, no need for regret.
We took our risk with you; you died and we live. We take your noble gift, salute for the last time those lines of pitiable crosses, those solitary mounds, those unknown graves, and turn to live our lives out as we may.
Which of us were fortunate–who can tell? For you there is silence and cold twilight drooping in awful desolation over those motionless lands. For us sunlight and the sound of women’s voices, song and hope and laughter, despair, gaiety, love–life.
Lost terrible silent comrades, we, who might have died, salute you.” ― Richard Aldington, Roads To Glory

“The splendors of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Major Works

The Butler
Movie Trailer
Commentary by Jennifer Kiley
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Created Post June 28th 2013
Posted June 28th 2013

The Butler is an upcoming historical drama based on a true story. The film was directed by Lee Daniels (“Precious”) and featuring an ensemble cast. The film stars Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines, an African-American who eyewitnesses notable events of the 20th century during his tenure as a White House butler. His wife’s role is portrayed by Oprah Winfrey. The film is based on the real-life account of Eugene Allen, who served as a White House butler during eight American presidencies from 1952 to 1986.

Its theatrical release will be through The Weinstein Company on August 16, 2013.

Premise: Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) works as a White House butler during eight presidential terms from 1952 to 1986. He had a unique front-row seat as political and racial history was made. His son was a Freedom Rider where he came in direct contact with the KKK, the White Supremacists of the day who were ruthless, brutal and murdered Black People and White people alike who tried to interfere with White People, particularly in the South, to try to establish Civil Rights, Equality and Integration.

In the White House, during Cecil Gaines process of being hired, he was asked, “Are you political Mr. Gaines?” His answer was, “No, sir,.” The person asking the question, who himself was Black countered with the response, “We have a no tolerance for politics at the White House.”

“You hear nothing. You see nothing. You only serve.”

There are protests flying about all over on this film, The Butler. And there are many people who really are looking forward to seeing this film unfold for its historically unprecedented portrayal of someone who lived through such a monumental history while being part of the White House for such a long stretch of time and serving under so many presidents. The list follows of the Presidents and First Ladies and those actors names that portray these historical First Families of the U.S.

The protests I mentioned came out in my research in trying to discover anything I could about the film, The Butler. There is not much information available regarding reviews from legitimate critics. None actually. Not even “Rotten Tomatoes” my favorite site for a variety of reviews both from legitimate critics affiliated with the media, newspaper, internet or other forms of entertainment and, also, from viewers of the films themselves. They have a tomatometer that gauges the percentage critics and audiences rate the films. The Butler did get a 92% Viewers who want to see the film. That is a great sign. The cast is incredible. Once you watch the trailers, you will understand why I am so fired up about this film.

Getting back to the protests. I watched a YouTube video that trashed the whole concept of the film as once again when a movie is being made that is filled with Black People, it means they are portrayed in what some would consider demeaning roles. The last film was “The Help.” I read the book “The Help” long before I saw the film. It was written by a Southern White Woman. It was brilliant. The film that was made from it was also Brilliant. But as you can gather from the title and if you have seen the film, the Black People were mostly women and worked as Maids.

There is a theme developing here. On the two videos I listened to, one was a single Black Man speaking against the film for this specific reason, asking, “Why is it every time a film is made for the mainstream audience the Black People in the film have to be servants or drug dealers or any other demeaning profession that comes to mind.” I listened with an open mind and totally understood what point he was trying to make. Several of the comments below the video were half supporting what the speaker was saying and the other felt it was showing the history of what Black People had to live through to get to where Black People are now.

Keep listening. The other film had two speakers you saw on the screen. One woman and one man, both Black. The woman wanted to see the film but the man was telling her why he didn’t want to see it and why she shouldn’t see it either. His points were quite valid and so were hers. She wanted to see it for its historical value and she said the cast of Black Actors was incredible. Not to mention that those who the Black characters had to serve or interact with were an incredible cast of White Actors, some even British.

The man’s point, though, came around to something quite valid. He felt that the director Lee Daniels sold out Black People. Well, the woman fired back that she was rather tired of the Madea type films that Tyler Perry made. She felt he didn’t exactly portray Black People in an encouraging light. At least in the film The Butler, it was a high quality film.

Rebound to this very direct and extremely valid point made by the man. If Lee Daniel’s, a Black Man himself, walked into a studio office and pitched a film about the Black Panthers, he would have been rejected immediately. He further went on to say that White America do not want to see the Black Person in a position of power. It would probably scare the shit out of a great many white people who already feel their government are at any moment going to break their doors down and shot them while they sleep. So those White People are armed and quite dangerous.

White America can accept integration only where all races and nationalities can blend, with the few unfavoured exceptions. And I am not going to mention here what those are. If you don’t know already it is better not to think about it. I do not agree but do not want to start a racial or nationalistic debate. That would take us way off course.

Next on the protest list will annoy some still but I thought most have grown up in the U.S. and have gotten passed Jane Fonda epithets. Well, I accidentally came on a page that I don’t often see on the internet. Mainly, because they are not the people that I want to know. Simply put. Call me Prejudice and I will accept that term under these circumstances. Jane Fonda to them should not only still be referred to as Hanoi Jane but she should have all sorts of gruesome things happen to her in the name of justice. The fact that she is portraying in The Butler, the sainted Nancy Reagan, has them all in a frenzied uproar. Let it go already. She was young and she was protesting the killing of innocent people and the destruction of a country that should have never been divided in the first place. Blame it on the French and if not them, there are some people in the U.S. that would say Blame It On Canada. I think Trey Parker and Matt Stone plus Cartman and South Park got that Shit Storm started in their flick, “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.”

So more to the point, this blog site called “Virtual *Bleep*” who feel worried that every morning when they wake up the government is going to have taken more away from them but they aren’t sure what. Taxes—WRONG. Liberals—Blame It On The Liberals and lots more. I felt so dirty after reading their post. I was stunned at some of the things they felt should happen to Jane Fonda. Her poor father, how disappointing that he raised two bad seeds in Jane and Peter Fonda.

What kind of shit is this. Only in America. They are going to boycott the film The Butler because Jane Fonda the Liberal Hanoi Treasonous Should Be Hung Traitor is playing their beloved Conservative Nancy Reagan and desecrating her memory. So any theatre showing this film The Butler, be prepared to be invaded.

Frankly, I just want to see a historical film about someone who lived through such a Shit Storm of Historical Events. You have the Eisenhower’s through to the Reagan’s.

The 50s: Eisenhower president. When Black People could not drink from a water fountain where White People drank. Sitting at the Back of the Bus. No Voting. Crosses Burning on Your Front Lawn. Lynching. Segregation.

The 60s: Vietnam. JFK wanting to get us out of Vietnam. JFK and Marilyn and Bobby too but the public had no Idea. Marilyn dies suddenly. Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy. Oswald captured Killed Blamed as a Lone Gun Man. THE BEATLES: JOHN. GEORGE. PAUL. RINGO. Chicago Riots—Police Brutality against Innocent Demonstrators at the Democratic Presidential Convention. MARIJUANA. Flower Power. HAIR. AGE of AQUARIUS. Long Hair On Men. HIPPIES. The Chicago 7. SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Free Love. The Draft. Protesting the War. Black Panthers. Black Power.

The 70s: Patty Hearst (grand daughter of Hearst empire—Film “Citizen Cane” based on) Kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (Call Me Tonya). Patty Hearst Put on Trial because while still kidnapped Was Forced to Do a Bank Robbery. Patty Hearst Found Guilty for Bank Robbery and Sent to Prison. Woodstock. Vietnam War Escalating. Draft dodgers Fleeing to Canada. Burning Bras. Burning Draft Cards. LSD. Tripping. Turn On. Tune In. Drop Out. Timothy Leary. TM. Nixon. Watergate. Watergate Hearings. Peace Demonstrations. Daniel Ellsberg—Pentagon Papers. Impeachment Threatened. Watergate Hearings. Daytime TV Interrupted. Woodward and Bernstein. Deep Throat. Nixon Ends Vietnam War. Pulls out Troops. Troops Are Not Treated Well By Public. Nixon Resigns. Watergate Plumbers go to prison. AIDS(Not named yet).

The 80s: Patty Hearst was imprisoned for almost two years. Sentence Commuted by President Carter. Later in distant future—granted presidential pardon by President Clinton as last official act before leaving office. Carter president when Iranian Radicals Took Over U.S. Embassy in Iran. Kidnap All Remaining In Embassy. Carter Tries But Failed Rescue Attempt. Reagan Makes Deal With Iran If He Wins Election against Carter Will Trade Arms for Those Being Held in Iran Embassy Kidnapping. Ted Kennedy challenges Carter to run in his Place for President but Carter will not defer. Reagan wins Election. Hostages Released shortly Thereafter. Iran/Contra Supporting the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua backed secretly by Reagan Administration. Sandinistas win. Oliver North tried in Iran Arms Trade.

Still the 80s:—Monumental Event for me personally was when JOHN LENNON WAS ASSASSINATED. ROCK HUDSON Announces He Has AIDS. ROCK HUDSON DIES from the AIDS VIRUS. Reagan Does Nothing About AIDS. It Continues to Spread and Gay Men Are Blamed for Causing AIDS. People Won’t Touch People With AIDS. Conspiracy Theorists believe U.S. Government Scientists created AIDS virus and introduced in Africa. Spread through contact with a specific Monkey that lived in Africa. Origin of AIDS Virus was Africa. Then Spread to Patient “0″ who came to the U.S. as a probable Flight Attendant. Trickle Down Economics. Bull Shit. Nancy Reagan consults with Psychic. Reagan probably had Alzheimer’s while in Office. The Berlin Wall Falls. The End. (How much of this will be in the film—who knows. How much more will be in the film—who knows that either. These are the important points that I recall strictly from within my own memory). Commentary by Jennifer Kiley

This is the marvelous group of actors to look forward to seeing in The Butler. I do hope it is a Great Film. I know that Lee Daniel’s was the director on the film “Precious” and that was an excellent film. Notice One Thing In Particular About the Poster for The Butler, the Black Power Fist Held High as Black Athletes did at the Mexico Olympics After Receiving Their Medals on the Medal Stands. It was an extremely moving moment.

Cast

Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines
Oprah Winfrey as Gloria Gaines
Cuba Gooding, Jr. as Carter Wilson
Terrence Howard as Howard
David Oyelowo as Louis Gaines
Vanessa Redgrave as Annabeth Westfall
Alex Pettyfer as Thomas Westfall
Mariah Carey as Hattie Pearl
Yaya DaCosta as Carol Hammie
Colman Domingo as Freddie Fallows
Aml Ameen as Young Cecil Gaines

Historical figures

Robin Williams as President Dwight D. Eisenhower
Melissa Leo as First Lady Mamie Eisenhower
James Marsden as President John F. Kennedy
Minka Kelly as First Lady Jackie Kennedy
Liev Schreiber as President Lyndon B. Johnson
Wanda Leigh as First Lady Lady Bird Johnson
John Cusack as President Richard Nixon
Alan Rickman as President Ronald Reagan
Jane Fonda as First Lady Nancy Reagan
Orlando Eric Street as President Barack Obama
Nelsan Ellis as Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ray Gaspard as Senior Advisor Pat Buchanan
Alex Manette as White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman
Lenny Kravitz as James Holloway
Jesse Williams as civil rights activist James Lawson
Kay Smith as civil rights activist Diane Nash
Judith Wagner as the mayor of Lewisburg

The Butler — Movie Trailer 2 (2013) – Forest Whitaker, Robin Williams Movie HD

Gives Me The CHILLS Watching The Footage In The Movie Trailer Of “The Butler.” Brilliant. Intense. History. True Story. Moving. Chilling. Shows You How Bad The Good Old Days Really Were. And Certain People Want To Go Back To That. To WHAT? HATRED. RACISM. KKK. ASSASSINATIONS. J. EDGAR HOOVER SPYING ON AND BLACKMAILING MEMBERS OF OUR GOVERNMENT.

Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
Aggravating Behavior 16
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
First Published March 19th 2013
Published Early Tuesday AM
Sixteenth Posted July 2nd 2013
WARNING: SOME MATERIAL MAY NOT BE APPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Dear Annie,

I think Annie, I know why I wrote such an emotionally intense letter last week. It is Alison. Her joining the therapy group last week really disarmed me. There was no notice or warning of a new member starting the first of the year. Our glorious leader, Dr. George, yes, I am using his given name, fuck Mr. Xxx, he deserves to be identified. He failed to ask whether we wanted someone new.

Seems the Doctor wants full control or he would have mentioned her and not made the decision on his own. This group has full rights to decide if someone joins at any time. Writing this is not to complain about Alison. She mesmerizes me. It is Dr. George’s lack of inquiry with us. To late, it’s done. Not appropriately, but déjà fait. He bloody displeases me, not Alison.

Alison triggers memories of Tosh. Their resemblance is beyond uncanny. And her boldness is refreshing. No hesitation to proclaim herself a lesbian. But I saw her depth of attraction and knew. Sensed it in her gaze when her eyes caught mine, in a timeless moment. Her eyes were steady. All I knew was the feeling from Alison felt as though Tosh’s eyes were loving me. The time portal opened to the past.

Who is Alison? Where did she come from? And why now? The pressure is building up inside of me. Not sure I’m hadling it well. I feel like my world is about to explode. Flashing on Tosh’s murder. Getting attached to you. Not knowing if I will lose you if this all crash and burns. Now Alison, a ghost, a practical joke, Dr. George, the bastard, is fucking with me. He knows what Tosh looks like, and magically Alison springs up.

I’m sure you’ve notices the group is in disaster mode. Dying and almost dead as Jacob Marley’s Ghost. It’s in a retrograde of self-destruction. Hold it together, Annie, please, just long enough, or it will disintegrate by the hand of Machiavelli, himself, Dr. George. Maybe it should self-destruct. Solves one major problem. Poof! Dr. George disappears. So does everyone else in this miserable group. Exceptions are Alison and Kristina. Soon, I will tell you about Kristina. Right now, I’m just waiting for Mount Vesuvius to erupt. That would be Brad, my totally rad alter. He’s not afraid of anyone. Plus he promised me Dr. George is going down. Soon. The time is near.

He sucks as a analyst. He’s not deserving of the honour of calling him a psychoanalyst or doctor. What a joke. He’s so out of touch, I don’t think he knows he’s treating clients. But, it’s his job to listen. Instead, he monopolizes a session by telling his own stories. It’s negligennce and even worse, his stories are sexually perverse, going into detail about gay male sex. Please do not misunderstand, I am not homophobic. That’s not it, it’s that he tells these stories to me, when we are alone. I am a lesbian client, I emphasize, and an abuse survivor . His other clients, some share similar backgrounds. I, certainly, have no desire to hear about balls, or a man’s prick. Who the fuck wants to hear that kind of bull shit.

His sense of protocol is fucking aggravating. It’s inappropriate. Clearly sexual harassment, he thrusts upon female sexual abuse survivors. Having my analyst compound his ignorance with the subject at all is disgusting and depraved. The only appropriate time would be if I were talking about an abuser raping me. Enough with the perverse humour. Dr. George’s list of disgusting behavior grows longer, probably unlike his dick. It’s not my thing. Being raped by pricks do not make lesbians appreciate the existence of dicks, nor do they fantasize hearing about them or seeing them. Does he forget or not understand that element of our experiences?

I just need to end my therapy with him completely. His relationship with me is a travesty. He’s outrageous, obnoxious and destructive in our private sessions. Plainly, he is just a disappointment. He doesn’t even pretend any longer not to support me. He sides with his pets in the group, particularly Angie, who gets on my last nerve. I dread seeing them both. And God forbid I should question her intentions or prejudices or anyone elses.

In a private session, only recently, when I accused Angie, his precious fucking pet snake of being a homophobe and racist, he came down on me, accusing me of being cruel and unfeeling. His evil seethed through his teeth as he tried destroying me with his words. Turning me in on myself, made me out to be the insensitive one. Every fiber and muscle in my body struggled with my mind, trying to walk out in the middle of his vicious outbreak of rage, but instead stillness set in. His verbal abuse caused such extreme fright, I became catatonic.

That was the final time I ever intend to allow him to rape my mind again. Next time, instead of facing me down, he will meet Brad, in his fully engaged rage. Dr. George will finally be laid out. Don’t worry, no one is going to do violence. But I would definitely make a grand exit, quite Gloria Swanson, but with a male flair and the burst of a fiery rage. And it truly would be the last one. You will know it and you will hear it, when it is over.

A word of encouragement from you, Annie, would help push me over that line to find my courage. His condescension in our private sessions should be enough. But I am too insecure to terminate without feeling support to catch me. An abusive relationship has gradually been created with him and I did not stop it when I realized what was happening. I let it take over my world. He makes me feel like the abusers did. I float on the ceiling to escape him and become powerless.

It always bothered me that he reminded me of an abuser. He used transference in place of accepting his role in creating my feelings of insecurity and making me feel I wasn’t seeing what I felt as being accurate. He was being abusive, constantly undermining my sense of identity and confidence. My belief in trusting my own feelings. My writing came to almost a stand still after starting to see him. My soul felt strangled. My muse abandoned me for an indefinite length of time. I fell into the deepest depression. Started having increasingly stronger panic and anxiety attacks and the depression led to feeling suicidal most of the time. How many times I felt so close to the edge, were far too many.

Just the thought that the next day I would have to see him freaked me out. I would start to shake and found it hard to breathe. He would rationalize it by saying I was afraid of therapy and what disturbing memories might come up. Bull shit. He is such a fuck head and liar. He wanted to have power over me. Sound familiar, it is exactly what abusers do to the children they abuse. Win their confidence and then slowly undermine their sense of self as an independent person, until the abuser can do anything they want with their prize possessions. Does he get his kicks having power over his clients, controlling them and how they feel inside. Making them want to kill themselves. Life and death. What an ultimate power trip.

Somehow, Scottie broke through the barrier.It was built up high and strong to protect myself. She fought with me to see reality. That I was having delusional thinking. For years she has driven me insane with her persistent urges to get me to stop seeing him. Deep inside I knew she was trying to protect me, but I was too frightened to walk away. I felt too crazy and feared leaving him would cause me to completely lose my mind. Talk about control or confusion. What was I letting him do to me? What was I doing to myself staying with him? Fear is my only excuse or reason. Terror. I was too terrified to live or to leave. Life was too frightening. I trembled at the thought of being part of the world. Going out. Being around people. Pure panic.

Now I want to make him disappear and group to end. Working with you, Annie, would be a great alternative. There is only one thing that would be fucked up if this all collapsed, which it will. Alison, if it all ends, she would be gone. How will I be able to get to know her. There has got to be a way to make some kind of personal connection before it happens. Everything will crumble when I confront him. Not sure exactly when and how I’m going to do it. But it will happen and I’ve got to be lethal.

I don’t want Alison to go away. It may seem odd. I met her last week, I’ve seen her twice. Yet, there is an intense need to know her. Jennie Fields, a character I love from the John Irving book, The World According to Garp, says this two word phrase. It cracks me up. She would look someone straight in the eyes and seriously state, “It’s lust.” As simple as that. “It’s lust.” I am in lust with Alison. It’s a really strong attraction. Not something I have any way of explaining but say I am attracted to her.

Well, fuck it if I am. Alison rocks my world at this very moment. Nothing wrong with those feelings. But, seriously, it feels more meaningful than an orgasmic connection. She reminds me of Tosh. I can’t let that go. There is something between us. I’m not letting her walk into my life so fucking briefly and not have a say as she walks back out again.

Don’t you think she’s awesome. She has me awestruck. I am numb in the brain. My feelings are all muttled around her. I can’t think or speak in a complete sentence without tangling up the words. You noticed that, I’m sure. It’s embarrassing, especially in front of that group from the vicious circle.

We need to figure this all out. I need your help, Annie. Please, let me assure you, do not worry about Scottie. She understands my bipolar. I have attractions but I can’t do anything about them. In due time, I will explain what Scottie fully knows about me. I don’t share with many this secret. That’s why Scottie trusts me.

Before I end my letter, I want to remind you of the secret from a few letters ago. Lets end this letter on a mysterious but still high note. It involves Scottie’s new film. Mine, too. Still working on finalizing the title. I don’t know what the problem is with making a decision. I liked my choice but can’t tell you yet. Maybe next time I’ll have a go.

But that’s not what I want to tell you. I, actually, want to tell you a bit more about the film. I’d like to sound it out on you further. See if it sounds like a good script. Would love the feedback. How about if I write a touch about it each week. A sneak preview when I remember. That would benefit me too. I would hear what it is that I have created. Bounce it off of you. Maybe I will feel more confident about my work.

In review, I remember telling you the lead character is a novelist, the character’s name, I will tell in a future letter. She is quite the brilliant writer. What else did I tell you. I lost it. Sorry. That’s all I remember from the other letter. Have a terrible memory, even for what I write.

Well, let me continue. She is a literary novelist, mixed with a touch of the psychological element and a dabble of mystery. Her problem is she can’t find a publisher. Just finds rejection notices in her mailbox but doesn’t give up. She keeps sending out her novels. She’s accumulated several manuscripts already. If it weren’t for the Estate her Grandmother left her after she died, our author wouldn’t be able to afford the luxury of being a full time writer. The wonderful home she lives in, with her three babies, was her grandmother’s home. You’ll meet the babies later. She spent many weeks there, every summer, when growing up. It was her favorite place on the planet.

One weekend, she goes to an Estate Sale. While rummaging around, she finds a briefcase. It’s an old leather one with a broken lock, jammed shut, with no way to look inside. She made the decision, it looked mysterious. Her thought was, it would be a great place to store her latest manuscript. She purchased it, not even sure she will ever be able to open it, ever. But she thought, if she was unsuccessful, it would make a great decoration, plus an uncanny inspiration for her writing room. It would add to the old English decor. But, she was certain, being quite a stubborn woman herself, she wouldn’t give up without a real attempt to break it open. It wasn’t her intention to give up trying that easily.

After returning home from a long drive, once in the house, she placed her new find on the dining room table while she went to feed the cats. The three, of them, practically knocked her down, when she came in the front door. Once Jasper, Jax and James were fed, the three young neutered male Savannah cats, spotted like leopards, enormous in size, all settled down in the family room. Snuggling, each in their special place, taking up most of the stuffed, soft, velvet sofa. They waiting for their Mum, while she fixed herself a quick bite to eat, for her own early dinner.

She was hurrying. Her curiosity wanted to get cracking on breaking inside her new acquisition. It may be old, but it was heavy, and definitely felt the weight of being filled with something, maybe a treasure of unknown value, so she fantasized. “Why would someone just abandon this briefcase? It gave off the vibe of containing something of value”

The answer would be found out soon enough. Carrying the briefcase under her left arm, and a plate, with a simple meal of salad and cheese, in her right hand, she joined her babies, Jasper, Jax and James, in the family room. She got cozy, finding her spot on the sofa, snuggling amongst her soft, sweet babies.

She studied the briefcase on the coffee table as she ate, and shared treats with her brood. Her imagination began to wander. It filled up with all sorts of magical imagery. What would she find? What should she wish for? Money or something more imaginative?

That’s where I’ll end it for this week. I want to keep you wondering.

Until next time.

Fondly,
Madison

Madison Tayler’s Fantasy of Annie Haskell’s Office as a Psychoanalyst.

Maksim — Somewhere In Time — Theme Song #1 For “Letters of Import”

Reaching Out
Written by Madison Taylor
January 14th 2008

Reaching out a hand with a flower in it
Is not verging upon hysteria waiting for a sign
Has life frightened away wanting tenderness
Or the fragile one who is patiently waiting
Will a response be returned in recognition
Of a genuine gesture of love and friendship
Or does the heart identify with one of those characters
Wanting and needing attention who will be lost without it
In the wilderness of lost dreams and nightmares
Forever wandering wondering what was missed
What path was it meant to take but turned the other way

Reaching for the stars shining high up in the darkness
The farthest thing away from reaching a heart desired
Turning around and going deep inside the soul
There is where the heart will find a resting place
Part of all in the world have turned away
Losing all sense of day or night or play
Talk for a moment about all the dreams
Seeking them takes the mind away from finding them
They are before the eyes right here inside the soul
Inside of every thought and feeling the heart possesses
Out there is only the illusion of what will not be found

© madison taylor 2008

CREAM: WHITE ROOM — Theme Song #16 For “Letters of Import: Aggravating Behavior 16

le chateau de rocher is the home of madison and scottie & their three cats mikey, toker and patrick

the white room

Maksim — Somewhere In Time (A New Version-with Quotations by Rumi-of the Theme Song for “Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst”

QUOTATIONS from: LETTERS of IMPORT: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst

“A Dream

The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor

“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)

“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”

“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist

“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan Poe

QUOTATIONS on AGGRAVATING BEHAVIOR:

“Never hide things from hardcore thinkers. They get more aggravated, more provoked by confusion than the most painful truths.” ― Criss Jami

“He is being nibbled to death by ducks. –More Later, Less the Same” ― James Tate, Selected Poems

“I suppose an analyst not getting that you are the client and he should be listening to you, not telling his own stories and being sexually perverse talking about gay sex with a lesbian who has not desire to hear about balls, and not the kind you find being tossed about on a playground, but the kind that go with the package of junk men have. Don’t misunderstand, a cliche, but one of my best friends is a gay male. This is aggravating and if I thought about, it also borders on inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment. Michael Fassbender can show his junk. It is actually quite lovely, but I don’t want my analyst going anywhere near that subject unless I am talking about an abuser raping me. Enough said.” — Madison Taylor, Letters of Import: Aggravating Behavior 16

“I suppose I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.” — Tennessee Williams

“When you reach for the stars, you are reaching for the farthest thing out there. When you reach deep into yourself, it is the same thing, but in the opposite direction. If you reach in both directions, you will have spanned the universe.” — ― Vera Nazarian

Noble In Reason
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Collage by j. kiley
Post Created 2nd Tuesday July 2013
Posted 3rd Wednesday July 2013

Aria from Diva – Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez

Fernandez sings the aria “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana“, from Act I of Catalani’s opera “La Wally.” Catalani died at 39. The piece is a haunting reverie on the theme of traveling alone and far from home.

This performance plays a prominent role in the 1981 French romantic thriller, “Diva” – and is an excerpt from the DVD. Roger Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun Times, rates the movie 5 stars out of 5.

The opera, based on a German novel, tells of a wild, headstrong Swiss mountain girl who loves one local huntsman and is loved by another. Eventually she wins her true love, the pair embraces high in the Alps, an avalanche entombs the hero and she leaps after him to her snowy death.

QUOTATIONS on REASON:

“Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars, points of light and reason. …And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn’t see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason, for anything.” ― Stephenie Meyer, New Moon

“Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.

For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;

And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own
daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.

And since you are a breath in God’s sphere, and a leaf in God’s forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.” ― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

DIVA
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Film Review of Diva by Roger Ebert
Retrieved From The Archives
Post Created Wednesday 3rd July 2013
Posted Friday 5th July 2013
FILM FRIDAY
Starting Friday 5th July 2013

Cast

Frederic Andrei as Jules
Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez as Cynthia
Thuy An Luu as Alba
Dominique Pinon as Le Cure
Richard Bohringer as Gorodish

Directed by
Jean-Jacques Beineix

Written by
Jean Van Hamme
Jean-Jacques Annaud

Based on the novel by
Daniel Odier

Action, Drama, Foreign, Music, Thriller

Rated R
117 minutes

Film Review: DIVA
By Roger Ebert
January 10, 2008

Peering into obscure corners of Paris, Jean-Jacques Beineix emerged with an assembly of unlikely, even impossible, characters to populate his “Diva” (1981), a thriller that is more about how it looks than what happens in it. Here is an exhilarating film made for no better purpose than to surprise and fascinate. I remember it at Toronto 1981, where it arrived unknown and unsung and won, as I recall, the festival’s first audience award. Now released in a restored print, it glistens in its original magnificence.

The plot is both preposterous and delightful, put together out of elements that seem chosen for their audacity. The central character is a young postman named Jules (Frederic Andrei), who races the streets on his moped, delivering special delivery mail and pausing at an opera recital to secretly record a performance by a tall, black, gorgeous American soprano named Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez). He has a professional-quality Nagra recorder hidden in his bag. After the performance, he enters her dressing room with a crowd of well-wishers and steals her elegant white silk gown.

Hawkins is famous for never having entered a recording studio, and we later learn she has never heard her own voice. Now Jules has the only existing tape of her singing; it is priceless, but he wants it only for himself. Unfortunately, he was seen making the recording by two Taiwanese bootleggers, who want to steal it from him. And his problems grow more complex when two gangsters murder a prostitute on a street where he is making a delivery. She has a tape incriminating the chief of police in a sex-slavery ring, and before she dies, she slips the tape into the carrier bag of his moped. Now four deadly crooks are looking for him.

Jules lives in his own way, in his own shadowy industrial space, which is filled with crashed cars and wall paintings of automobiles. Here he listens to the sublime voice. (Fernandez, an established opera diva, did her own singing and created an early-1980s boom for Catalani’s opera “La Wally” and its first-act aria.) One day at a record store, Jules spots a Vietnamese nymphet named Alba (Thuy An Luu) shoplifting a 33 rpm record with a cleverly designed art portfolio, which seems to contain only nude photographs of herself.

He follows her, asks her how she did it, they discover they share a love of opera, and he lets her listen to his recording. She supplies it to a mysterious, cigar-smoking, handsome older man named Gorodish (Richard Bohringer), who lives in an industrial loft of vast size, furnished mostly by a chair, a bed, a bathtub and an aquarium. Is this man her lover? Her guru? Why does he seem to possess unlimited wealth and power?

Now all the pieces are in place, and what remains is only for the film to spin them in a dazzling kaleidoscope of sex, action and startling images. “Diva” has been referred to as the first French film in the post-New Wave cinema du look, defined by Wikipedia as a group of films “that had a slick visual style and a focus on young, alienated characters that were said to represent the marginalized youth of Francois Mitterrand’s France.” It was the look itself, rather than the content, that defined the films, and sometimes the plots seemed almost designed to create photographic opportunities.

The films were drawn to untamed non-bourgeois spaces such as industrial wastelands and the Paris Metro rather than tidy indoor spaces. “Subway,” a famous 1985 cinema du look by Luc Besson, has a crime plot that takes place largely in the Metro, where a rock concert is even staged. And in “Diva,” the most sensational sequence involves Jules being pursued by the cops and actually racing his moped down the Metro stairs, onto a train, off again and up another flight of stairs. The photography of this shot helps explain why Philippe Rousselot won the Cesar, or French Oscar, for his cinematography (the film won three more Cesars, for best first work, best music and best sound).

Not the least of the film’s attractions is the unexpected casting. You could say many characters were typecast, but they were largely unknown at the time of the film’s release. This was Andrei’s first significant role, for example, Fernandez’s first and only film, and the first feature of Dominique Pinon, called “Le cure,” (“the treatment”). A short young man hiding behind mirrored glasses, an earplug always in his ear, his head shaved, he performs his treatments with a heavy awl, which he throws into the backs of his victims, killing them. He likes to pose with the point of the awl tickling his chin. He doesn’t smile.

The presence of Fernandez is awesome; the filmmakers discovered her at a performance of “Carmen” in Paris and found her sufficiently awesome to justify the young postman’s obsession with her. The moments when he returns her gown, and then the tape, are handled by her with a subtle balance of astonishment and amusement.

The most mysterious characters in the film are, of course, the rich recluse Gorodish and his bold young friend Alba (this was the first of five films made by Thuy An Luu). The characters are found in a series of popular French thrillers by Delacorta, including Diva, where we can learn that he is a musician, she is a 14-year-old wise beyond her years, their relationship is unconsummated, and she has a knack for bringing trouble home for him to solve, just as a cat will bring home a mouse, and just as she brings Jules to his lair. In a sense, you could say that Delacorta (real name Daniel Odier) was a co-inventor of the cinema du look, since his prose emphasizes slick surfaces, neon colors, unorthodox settings and characters from the shadows.

Here is an idea of his prose, from his 1990 novel Alba: “… he noticed on the white table a piece of paper adorned with Alba’s lovely handwriting. Her practice of the Tao mysteries had made it as deliciously fluid as one of her inspired kisses, the one she called a dawn ottoman.”

One peculiarity of the plot is that Beineix withholds much from the characters, but almost nothing from the audience. We know what both sides know, and the result is to focus our attention on the how rather than the why. The film is an “exercise in style,” yes, but that need not be a criticism. We go to different films for different reasons, and “Diva” gives us such a sensuous flow of images that we enjoy the characters moving through them. Rousselot’s camera itself sometimes seems governed by the images, rather than controlling hem.

As the critic David Edelstein observes, “when the bicycle-messenger hero listens to Wilhelmenia Fernandez sing the aria from ‘La Wally’ … at that first sublime high note, the camera lifts off and begins to sway. Every time the aria is replayed, the camera moves at the same instant. It has to. This is style as a force of nature.”

For Beineix (born 1946), “Diva” was a sensational start to what turned out to be a rather anticlimactic career.

MOVIE TRAILER FOR “DIVA”

Movie Trailer for Film: DIVA

FILM CLIP WILHELMENIA WIGGINS FERNANDEZ SINGING FROM OPERA “LA WALLY”
TWO VERSIONS. SPECTACULAR PIECE OF MUSIC. READ BELOW THE BACKGROUND AND STORY OF THE STORY OF “LA WALLY.”

Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez – the aria from “La Wally” from “Diva” (’81)

Aria from Diva – Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez

Fernandez sings the aria “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana“, from Act I of Catalani’s opera “La Wally.” Catalani died at 39. The piece is a haunting reverie on the theme of traveling alone and far from home.

This performance plays a prominent role in the 1981 French romantic thriller, “Diva” – and is an excerpt from the DVD. Roger Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun Times, rates the movie 5 stars out of 5.

The opera, based on a German novel, tells of a wild, headstrong Swiss mountain girl who loves one local huntsman and is loved by another. Eventually she wins her true love, the pair embraces high in the Alps, an avalanche entombs the hero and she leaps after him to her snowy death.

Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
Infatuation to Fantasy 17
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
Intro and First Letter Published March 19th 2013
Published Early Tuesday AM
Seventeenth Posted Tuesday July 9th 2013
WARNING: ADULT LANGUAGE AND CONTENT NOT MEANT FOR CHILDREN

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Dear Annie,

Tales of my history has been greatly exaggerated. Not really. I never talk about it. Once I made the mistake of making a list of sex partners. I do not include abusers, pedophiles. That wasn’t sex. It had nothing to do with sex. They were all about abuse, power and control. Overpowering a child, what the fuck is that. You really are showing your sexual prowess. Not really. More like your sexual impotency and powerlessness. There is nothing in me feeling empathy for a pedophile. They are are lower than the scum on scum of the scum of the earth.

I made the list. Don’t we all. If not on paper, at least in our heads. Mine, I needed to write down, otherwise, I would lose count. The length or number of partners is created by a mix of sexual abuse and bipolar hyper-sexuality. Which when I look back and compare behavior with symptoms I am aware of today, match up perfectly with a combination of complex-PTSD and Bipolar competing in a challenge. Results are, who can create the most havoc, do the most damage and instill the most shame.

I am a card carrying lesbian. It has nothing to do with my abuse, bipolar or not getting love from my mother, father or anyone in my family except one. So when sex officially starts for me, on the record, my earlier male sex partners, I promise this could be a long story, but right to the point, I will state, all turned out to be gay. It is funny if you think about it. My abusers were from both sexes, all qualify as pedophiles but I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of considering or registering them as gay or lesbian. Being gay or lesbian is an honour. I would include in this group, transsexuals, bisexuals, asexuals, pansexuals, and even our friendly heterosexuals.

Excluded are homophobic-sexuals, fundamentalist-sexuals, evangelical-sexuals, westboro southern baptist-hatred-sexuals, tea bagger-sexuals, homophobic-homosexuals-in-the-closet-sexuals-who-hate-homosexuals & pass-laws-to-make- homosexuality-or-any-sexuality-illegal-hate-women’s-rights-sexuals, and chicken-shit-republicans-who-haven’t-the-guts-or-balls-to-stand-up-to-the-mother-fuckers. This may not cover all of them but touches on some of the basic haters of anything sexual. Ah, one more inclusive group, those-who-think & feel-they-have-the-rights-over-womens-bodies & can-do-what-they-want-including-mutilation-murder-&-honour-killing-mother-fuckers.

Now back to something pleasant. My first gay bar, I ran into a guy I went to college with and yes we did the euphemism of sleeping together. We had sex. We worked on the college paper. He was my top editor when I was editor-in-chief. Now, back to the present. Here comes the stupid question. “What are you doing here?” He laughed, with his shit eating grin. “Are you kidding?” was his reply. “The same thing you are.”

Now how stupid am I. We were both there. It was a gay and lesbian bar. Dancing and booze, drugs on the down-low. Pretty much everyone was stoned out of their fucking minds on weed, poppers, hallucinogens, anything available. It was floating around the room or outside, you could find clusters smoking grass or hash. Before crack, thank you very much. All we wanted was a safe place to enjoy our major attractions, the same sex.

My buddy from college talked with me a long time that night. Found out the strangest things in our conversation. Turned out, he slept with the same guy I called my toker smoker sex buddy. With him I had a basic arrangement. He supplied the music, the smoke, the place and I would supply the sex. Not knowing about the bipolar proclivity to hyper-sexuality back then, I would safely say now I fell deeply into the category of someone who was hyper-sexual. It may have been the wrong sex but it was a need I had to satisfy. Never liked it, but did it anyway. Felt nothing. That’s not totally honest. Once, when I had the top, I got a major surprise. That was the first and only time ever. When you’ve being raped that position isn’t something rapists use. When he is fucking you he wants to see the damage he is causing and the power he is wielding.

I need a good, no, a great psychoanalyst. You, Annie. Dr. George is not long for my world. When he’s gone, I need you. He needs to disappear. Gone. Cleansed from my brain. Then I start new with you. You need to come through for me. Please.

Maybe a change of subject is needed. I don’t want to think about him or his fucking prick. I want to talk about something else. Someone else. Alison. Her presence almost gave me a heart attack. What the fuck was he thinking springing her on the group. Don’t misunderstand. I want her there, Oh, most definitely. When she started talking, I could barely breath. My eyes were on her. Her voice, her hair, the colour of her eyes, so blue, every feature. I time traveled. Then those words she spoke. Nearly fell on the floor. She announced, “I am a lesbian.” At that very moment I fell in love. It’s not like she wasn’t looking at me with something special in her own eyes. I would swear she was flirting with me like she knew me.

What the fuck came over me. She’s so familiar. I know her. I’m sure of it. But my brain has amnesia. Why is she so fucking familiar? And another thing, I can’t seem to stop swearing. My anger is seething through every pore. I want to punch someone, I am so angry. I think it’s this film we’re working on. Scottie’s always away. I hate that.

I’m going to change the subject for a moment. I think it’s time to tell you the title of our film. I came up it one night. It just floated from my subconscious when I was talking with Scottie. I just said, “Stop! I got it. The film’s name is “Brief Sacrifice.” Tell me that isn’t cool, Scottie.” She liked it. Then she fell in love with the title. But, damn it, it’s taking Scottie away all the time now. There have been some weird problems. I think there’s a curse on the film. That damned briefcase.

You will never guess how the main character got it open. Before I tell you part of the secret, I think you need to know the main character’s name. I told you the title, I might as well fill you in on some other details, Her name, which I feel is quite brilliant of me and Scottie did help. In fact, she helped a lot. She said, she liked the name I decided on. After throwing out names I found online for hours. I found it. Her name is Carter McLeod. She’s British and simply divine. The films takes place in London, mostly, and a few other places. But not going there yet. Now isn’t that the coolest name. I see a future for her. Carter McLeod. I just love the sound of it. And now, I know you will want to know who’s playing Carter McLeod. Scottie decided on one of my favorite new British actors. Try to guess. I’ll give you a hint. She was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Actress in 2007. Yes, she was. She should have won. I think she was robbed. I can’t even remember who beat her. Let me put you out of your misery. My all time favorite actor right now. It’s Natalie Stephens. I just dream about her. Beautiful, androgynous and sexy. Knowing she is playing the character I wrote is such a satisfying feeling. It’s sure to draw a huge audience. But back to what’s going on with that damned briefcase.

There is a secret pocket hidden on the surface of the leather. Undetectable. But Carter just kept running her hands over the surface, feeling for anything unusual. It’s like she were psychic. She found a thin line, like an old scar. It didn’t happen right away. Finding it, you would think was the difficult part. No, it wasn’t. How to get underneath the surface of the skin of the case, that was a whole other nightmare. That’s for next time I write.

I gave you the character’s name, and told you who the actor is playing the part. She really is great. Whenever I was on the set during the filming, I couldn’t believe Scottie got her to sign the contract. But Scottie can charm anyone, she’s so gorgeous and radiant, such a subtle quiet charm. Plus Scottie Andrews has the director’s touch, and everyone knows it, and wants to work with her. She melts everybody who meets, female and male, but hands off, she’s mine. I’ll scratch anyone’s eyes out that try to come between us.

It just came to me. I must be losing my mind. I just realized who Alison is. Damned idiot, I am. She’s Alison Porter. She made at least two films with Scottie. She’s acted the words I’ve written. Oh, my god, how the hell could I forget who she is. She looks so much like Tosh. Like they were twins. You do know who Alison Porter is, right? No one breathed a word. I know they were recent films. My short term memory is too fucked up. The films haven’t been released yet. That’s why. Post-production. Scottie works on so many films. I can’t keep track. Even if I’m the one writing them. Once in her hands, I only check in when rewrites are needed. I do like some of the sets but not great about being around people. And when they’re famous, the crowds gather and that really freaks me out. Usually stay home and Skype or email the changes. Talk on Skype with Scottie all the time that way. Holy, shit. Alison Porter. I am in love with her.

You did know who Tosh was. Alison is so much like her. Tosh was a singer. She composed her own music. It was so poetic. The lyrics crushed your heart. Where she found that pain. I only knew her such a short time. I never mentioned why we met or how. At least, I don’t think I did. Scottie approached her about using some of her music in one of her films. I keep saying her films. I feel they are our films. If she didn’t have my story and words, there wouldn’t be a film. I digress. Sorry. Scottie contacted Tosh’s manager or one of her people did. But Scottie talked directly with Tosh. They hit it off. She liked Scottie’s films. Anyway, Scottie invited her to our home for dinner. Over champagne, tokes of smoke, and great Italian cuisine, we both fell in love with her. Now, don’t worry about Scottie. Tosh was someone special but I wasn’t going to ever leave Scottie for anyone, no matter what I felt. Tosh, though, she tore my heart out. I was so in love. It was so special. She didn’t want sex. She wanted to show me what love was. Scottie is shy and she loves me but it wasn’t the same thing.

How do I explain when you meet a soul mate that you’ve known through a hundred lifetimes. That was Tosh. Scottie and I are new in our life times. We debated in past lives. Like great philosophers who could never convince the other of their conclusions as being the one that had the right answers or at least, the most accurate of conclusions. We were philosophers together. Tosh was Sappho. She was the lover of women. She knew the melody, the poetry, how to tenderly touch inside your soul, without ever touching any part of your flesh. She respected my restrictions. Her sensitivity picked up my reluctance to have physical contact. Scottie, also, understood that restriction. We did make love, Scottie and I, but I always had to stop. It just freaked me out. Scottie promised she could accept that from me. She would never force me to do anything I didn’t want to do. It’s just that, I can’t do anything.

Tosh reached me in other ways. I wrote about her kiss. It was light as a butterfly on your naked skin. It didn’t threaten. It was as far away from forceful as one could find. She wrote music for me. I listen to it all the time. It is part of the memory that I have left of her.

I am tired. This is all I can write this week. I will add one thing. Seeing Alison makes me feel like there is promise for the future. Not everything is about loss.

Now you just have to stay on my side and help me heal. I need deep healing from someone who can reach inside of me the way your feelings do. I trust you Annie. Don’t ever go away.

That is all I have to give for now. Wow. How amazing is life.

Fondly,
Madison

Fantasy Sets for Film: BRIEF SACRIFICE with Lead Character CARTER MCLEOD. {played by BAFTA Nominated Actor NATALIE STEPHENS} Savannah Cats are Carter’s. Screenplay: MADISON TAYLOR. Director: SCOTTIE ANDREWS

“brief sacrifice” mansion film set

“brief sacrifice” rustic den film set

“brief sacrifice” jasper-jax & james in foreground savannah kittens when they were 4 weeks old – grown up in film

MUSIC THEME FOR FILM: BRIEF SACRIFICE— Mysterious. Suspenseful.

Peter Illyich Tchaikovsky – Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32 (Fedoseyev) 25 min.

Peter Illyich Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 6 “Pathetique”, Op. 74 (Fedoseyev) 50 min.

Madison Tayler’s Fantasy of Annie Haskell’s Office as a Psychoanalyst

Maksim — Somewhere In Time — Theme Song #1 For “Letters of Import”

it’s flowing liquid gold

a world in tree green

Infatuation To Fantasy
By Madison Taylor
January 21st 2008

A star sparkling in my presence
Heat and fire escape from her eyes
Wildness – courage and strength
Pour from her soul
Calling out to me
Noticing me as I notice her
Feeling her touch
Caressing softly-a feather’s down

A bird sits on my shoulder
Speaking her language
Whispering into my ear
Translating her messages
As she meant them for me
Such personal meanings
Making me blush
A hue of pale cardinal
The quickness of blood
Rushing the surface of my flesh
So secret in meaning
Attempts to comprehend the crypticism
Expressing my shyness
As she mimics my spirit

My hesitancy to approach
The newness inside of us
Though powerful in character
Certain reservations necessary
Need not rush
No need to overwhelm
Subtlety is more sensuous
Building to a slow crescendo
Oh-so much more enticing
The intrigue has time to grow
Developing in slow motion

Sensations growing inside
Building outward
Climbing higher
Touching the center
My body’s restrictions releasing
Allowing entrance to secrets
Releasing dreams
Creating meaning

My throat’s breathing
In shallow motions
Sounds effecting my senses
Opening the pathway
Wanting to scream
Holding back
Becoming too restrictive
Overtaking control
Release happens
Pleasure surrendered
Now falling backwards
Overcome by falling
Relaxation overwhelming
The awakened state slipping away
Morpheus calling out for dreams
Eyes close in the darkness
Unconsciousness drifting
Lifting floating body
Awareness liberated
Sleep thoroughly attained

© madison taylor 2008

orange sunset clouds by wolken

Maksim Mrvica — Still Water — Theme Song #17 For “Letters of Import: Infatuation To Fantasy 17

le chateau de rocher is the home of madison and scottie and their three cats mikey toker and patrick

le chateau de rocher art gallery

Maksim — Somewhere In Time Theme Song for “Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst”

QUOTATIONS from: LETTERS of IMPORT: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst

“A Dream

The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor

“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)

“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”

“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist

“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan Poe

QUOTATIONS on INFATUATION:

“The world was collapsing, and the only thing that really mattered to me was that she was alive.” ― Rick Riordan, The Last Olympian

“Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those.” ― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes” ― Vladimir Nabokov

“What she had realised was that love was that moment when your heart was about to burst.” ― Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

“When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love.” ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“I feel intensely about the physical form of the female body. The smooth caressing line of the breasts. Followed by all parts of a woman are so soft and touchable. The heights one can take the sensations when making love. With a therapist who is male, they do not have this form that causes desire to bloom. It is just plain out inappropriate behavior and throw in a touch of sexual harassment to boot. I don’t want to see any man’s junk unless it is on screen and only if it is actually quite lovely. But I do not want my analyst going anywhere near that subject matter unless I am talking about an abuser raping me. Enough said.” — Madison Taylor, Letters of Import: Infatuation To Fantasy 17

FIRST ART ACQUISITION OUTSIDE OF INHERITANCE

entering the soul connection — artist anonymous

“Diana” — The People’s Princess
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Wednesday 10th July 2013
Illustrated by j. kiley
Movie trailer & Interview
Posted on Friday 12th July 2013
FILM FRIDAY

Diana Princess of Wales

“A whole younger generation never experienced the shock of the news of Diana’s death. It is strange remembering how sensational her death was? 9/11 now being the biggest thing imaginable. Diana’s death existed before Twitter and Facebook, before social media made everything common knowledge instantaneously, when it was still possible to tell people, face-to-face, about important news.” [Edited from an Offensive Article being Dismissive of Princess Diana. The part above which is edited in its content, was the only salvageable decent material that existed in the complete article. Otherwise, the rest was complete TRASH.]

I was shocked by her death. I was up late and a news report broke into the show I was watching saying that Princess Diana had been in a car crash in Paris, France.

There was so much speculation and disbelief. It wasn’t possible. But I felt that it couldn’t happen that she would die. I held out hope in my state of shock. I woke up Shawn, my partner, and told her what had happened. She got up and watched the report coming in directly from Paris, just outside that tunnel.

For all we knew Diana was still alive. She spoke. Why didn’t they take her right to the hospital? They waited so long. She needed blood transfusions.

I hoped and watched. Shawn went back to bed after a while but I watched and waited to hear the news that she was going to be alright. That news never came. The news that came put me into a further state of shock and a deep feeling of mourning.

Diana in Angola Landmine Halo Trust Photo by Tim Graham

I had loved Diana and admired her. The one thing that she did that amazed me the most was when she publicly touched and hugged someone with AIDS. Before that moment, people just were not doing that. After Diana showed everyone that it was alright, it made such a major difference to those who had AIDS. They had become the new lepers of our society.

I think Diana brought a humanity into the world. She was beautiful. She loved her children. She surrendered her life to satisfy the ghoulish cravings of a media out of control. They were like hyenas seeking their prey. Her openness taught people they didn’t need to be perfect.

The way the royals treated her is not forgotten. Charles may have won the hearts of his royals but he fucked Diana over. She was an innocent when he thrust her into his life and rebuffed her when he got his two heirs. He was awful to her.

First Look at Naomi Watts as Princess Diana

Let’s face it, there are a great many people who haven’t forgotten what he did to her. His insensitivity and use of her as a baby breeder and rejecting her once he got what he wanted. He was a shit. He may be a good father now. But he threw out his sons beloved mother. He trashed her in public. Yes, it was a public battle but she didn’t deserve anything that the royal family put her through.

Hello Magazine: Naomi Shines in New Role of Diana

Diana’s death was a tragedy. The way she affected the world produced such positive energy. Her causes received attention. She may have had some emotional problems but if you had to live through what the Windsor’s put her through you would have some deep emotional issues to deal with. Plus she was hounded everywhere she went.

I don’t like to be around people and if I have to, then only one or two at a time. Can you imagine being thrust into the middle of a mob scene of flashing light bulbs and insensitive hustlers wanting the best photo so they could earn the bucks off of Diana’s soul. The Native Americans believed that your soul was robbed if a photograph was taken of you. How many souls did Diana have and lose to stay alive as long as she did.

Lady Diana

I believe on the night of her death she was killed, murdered by vultures who circled her until she was dead and they could pick from her carcass at long last. Photographers wanted to get death shots. How horrible is that to be that insensitive and inhuman. They stalked her to death. The people she chose to love fucked her over every way that they could for most of her life.

Naomi Watts and Naveen Andrews as doctor 642×832

Even as a child she was left, abandoned by the people who professed they would love her. And Charles, he was the worst of all. He paraded her in front of the public as his Cinderella. Diana was being offered the Fairy Tale Dream every child wants. To be rescued by your Prince. She thought and believed Charles’s sincerity. He was going to be her Prince and love her, and they would live happily-ever-after.

Naomi Watts as Diana

Well, Charles had his Camilla. How fucked up was that to be fucking around while casting off casual comments about, well, what exactly is love, after all. This film of “Diana” with Naomi Watts brings up my anger. And to write a story in the mainstream media that no one cares any longer. They won’t even remember.

Naomi Watts as Diana Running from Paparazzi

Well, I am not most people and Diana is still alive in spirit for me. How callous can someone be to degrade her memory to say she is gone and who cares. Well, I do hope that people still remember. I know her sons William and Harry remember. They needed her there to love them and they needed to love her, also.

Naomi Watts and Naveen Andrews in Character in “Diana”

To cast away someone’s life so easily and turn to the celebrities of today as having any kind of importance in comparison to what Diana did for the world. She was trying to love everyone. To help stop Landmines. To help those who accidentally stepped on them and lost limbs and needed help to become whole again.

Naomi Watts as Princess Diana

Personally, I believe deep inside the theories that she was a hindrance to certain people and needed to be dealt with and it needed to be done quickly. She was too powerful and her presence in the world was something that had to be taken care of and it had to be done soon. I do not believe for one minute that they needed to take so long to get her to a hospital. Hours passed and they waited. WHY?

Naomi Watts as Princess Diana First Look

When the news came out live to announce that Princess Diana was dead. I broke out in tears. I woke up my partner to tell her the awful news. She got up to sit with me. It was unbelievable that any of this was happening. I cried for weeks. I watched the funeral and listened to the service. I was so upset. I felt inconsolable. Tears rolled down my face. When I heard Elton John sing the song he originally wrote for Marilyn Monroe and adapted it for Diana, there was a certain symmetry to that as I think of it now.

Naomi Watts as Princess Diana First Official Still

They both were hounded to death by the press and treated like shit by men who tried to use them and control them but because they were too much themselves and much more popular than the men they were with they were thrown away. They were also made to look mentally unstable when I would say in all reality it wasn’t instability but plain sensitivity and abandonment and being used. And the lies that were created and spread to make them appear less than the royalty they both truly were.

Naomi Watts as Princess Diana in Director Oliver Herschbergels “Diana”

Marilyn and Diana both died under the strangest of circumstances. I do not believe either died necessarily. Their deaths were well planned and carried out according to plan. Now you will probably think I am just a bit over the edge on this one. But think about the world we live in. Think of all the evil that exists in this world. Evil just gets good PR.

Naomi Watts “Diana” Naveen Andrews getting into car

Goodness makes people think you are weak and they can do with you what they want because who are they going to believe. The Prince and heir to the throne or the Princess that only earned that title by marrying the Prince with all the power. Don’t doubt that the Royal Family has power and connections and can have anything accomplished if they order it to be so.

Naomi Watts “Diana” with Naveen Andrews

The intrigue in this world and what we are told to what actually happens. I would say there are more lies told than any truth that we have ever heard. The truth is buried. What is represented is what those in power want us to hear. They make up the stories and they spread them all over the media so effectively that we believe what we hear are the facts, the truthful facts. There is no such thing. Look at what they are doing with Trayvon Martin’s murder.

Naomi Watts films “Diana” 879×1120

The media and courtroom coverage and the way the case is being played out makes me sick that they are pushing the falsehood that Trayvon was the pretended villain here. When he was stalked by a bully who just wanted to kill Trayvon because George Zimmerman said: “They always get away with it.” He was out that night to prove his point with the intent of murdering Trayvon Martin so he could put down the black man and show what a hero he was. You don’t think that jury isn’t lapping that all up.

Naomi Watts with Naveen Andrews “Diana”

Those in power make up the truth. Anything could have proven Princess Diana was murdered but the facts are twisted by those who want the story to go a certain way. What better way to cover your complicity then to go and retrieve her body. All the deaths of famous people who are young and so suddenly die are always so questionable.

Naomi Watts on set as Princess Diana walking with Naveen Andrews

And most of the time the comeback is suicide or accidental death. How many times do we have to hear that as the claim of how they died? When are we going to stop believing it. Facts are controlled and twisted and fixed to show the results that the powers that be want as their conclusions.

Naomi Watts as Princess Di

So do you really think that Diana couldn’t have been saved if she were taken straight to the hospital? Why did they wait so long? Diana didn’t die accidentally any more than Marilyn did or that Marilyn committed suicide. It was the intent on those fateful evenings that both Diana and Marilyn died the way they did.

Naomi Watts as Princess Diana

It was good for all involved that it happened the way it did and the results of their deaths turn out in the final report to read the way they did. Due to accidental causes. Nothing could have been done to save them. BS. All was wrong about the way both of them died. They were where they were when they died because it was set up that way. You don’t know who you can trust. Anyone is suspect.

Naomi Watts as Princess Diana getting out of car into paparazzi 734×1093

I hope some truth comes out in this film “Diana.” They are going to deal with a story that is not known by the public. Diana was involved with Dr. Hasnat Khan. And from the reports the relationship was extremely painful for Diana. Is that why she turned to Dodi? She wanted to play. To forget about who the world wanted her to be. To really let go and get away from her stalkers. What is it that makes someone draw the evil to her like a powerful magnet? They swallowed her up by it.

Naveen Andrews as Dr. Hasnat Khan in “Diana”

A fictional example is like the children did Sebastian in the Tennessee Williams play “Suddenly, Last Summer.” It starred Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Cliff in the film version. The children were starving and poor and Sebastian was Gay and wealthy. He would offer money to the children but they kept on wanting more. They started to chase Sebastian. He ran from them and they kept up the pursuit. He ended up at the top of a hill with no place to go. The children surrounded him. The nightmare ended by the children devouring him.

Naomi Watts playing Princess Diana on her last night

That is what happened with Diana and that is what happened to Marilyn. Everyone wanted a piece of them. They hadn’t a chance to survive all those vultures. It was their destiny. They were murdered for their innocence, their generosity and their true spirit of life.

Princess Diana in pale blue jacket

Diana’s funeral was given to her begrudgingly by the Crown. The people demanded it. It was an unusual spectacle but the people who truly loved Diana needed to say goodbye to what she once was and the memory she would become. She is not forgotten. No matter what the media says.

Diana is the mother to the future King of England. And her grandchild is about to be born. If the baby hasn’t been born already. Oh, I do hope that the heir is named Alexandra. It’s a Girl. Diana would be pleased. I can feel her smiling now no matter what but I think a granddaughter would make her truly delighted.

Princess Diana with quote from Antoine St. Exupery

I hope the film “Diana” with Naomi Watts and Naveen Andrews (“Lost” & “The English Patient”) will portray Princess Diana in a light that glows. If people really need to be reminded of who Diana really was, I hope they do her justice here. She was a blessing to the world that only knew her as their savior. The children she helped and the AIDS victims who felt like the untouchables until Diana came along and made them feel what a hug felt like again.

Princess Diana practically a kid

That is what won me to Diana. When she showed the world they could have compassion for those in need. She wanted the ones who needed love to receive it. She wanted the broken to feel they were not forgotten. Her work wasn’t for photo opportunities. She had all that. She used her fame to help others be noticed and receive the help they needed.

Princess Diana with baby William

She was killed to stop her from campaigning against Landmines, for loving a Muslim, for embarrassing the Crown. For just being more popular and noticed and cared about while the Crown was being rejected and people were beginning to talk about why the hell do we need a Monarchy anyway.

Princess Diana working on Landmine Project

She truly was the people’s Princess but not just of Great Britain but of the World. And I miss her.

I was so surprised when I saw the Movie Teaser Trailer. Naomi looks enough like her one can escape into the story of the film, I believe. It will be voyeuristic to see this private side of Diana’s life that people do not know anything about.

Once again we will be looking from behind the closed doors and peering into Diana’s inside world. I hope she doesn’t mind if we want to take another look. They are going to show the side where she goes all out for the Landmine cause.

I do hope it is a Great film and not something that is filled full with gossip. That would really bother me. I want more from seeing “Diana” than that. Written by Jennifer Kiley

Princess Diana unique images of a Diva

Diana — Official Teaser Trailer 2013 [HD] Naomi Watts

Naomi Watts on playing Princess Diana

“Diana” film on location in the Mediterranean

Princess Diana Funeral – Elton John – Candle In The Wind (Goodbye England’s Rose)

Princess Diana

QUOTATION by MARCEL PROUST:

“People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling broad.” ― Marcel Proust

Princess Diana

Side Effects
Film Reviewed By Jennifer Kiley
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Post Created
Posted Friday 19th July 2013
Film Friday
Every Friday Since Friday 5th July 2013

“side effects” poster

rooney mara in “side effects” feeling depressed

Side Effects
Film Review
By Jennifer Kiley
Written 18th July 2013

HEART OF THE REVIEW

So, on topic. The film review for “Side Effects.” A depressed wife, whose husband is in prison, soon to be released. She decides to use her car for other purposes than going for a drive out of the city into the wilds of nature. “Things that go bump in the night.” Ah, that is her perspective on reality at the beginning of the film. Emily Taylor, with prospect of a homecoming husband, her depression seems to escalate. First night, watch her eyes, while the sex maybe something long awaited by her husband, the viewer is not getting the same vibe. Is it her ongoing depression or something we need to figure out as the film progresses.

This is to be Steven Soderbergh’s last adventure in the film world. I certainly hope not. I’ve seen his work, somehow I’ve always mistaken Memento as one of his films. It seems like it should be. Films I have seen are just as brilliant. I do recommend Memento, even if Steven didn’t direct it. It’s on my top ten. It doesn’t go backwards in time, but feels like it does. The main character cannot remember anything longer than approximately five minutes. To keep track, he tattoos his memory on his body. Chris Nolan was the director of Memento. He, also, did Heath Ledger’s Batman film “Dark Knight” and he did “Inception” – “Insomnia” with Al Pacino as the cop and Robin Williams, the bad guy. The sun never sets.

Now back to Side Effects. Steven has directed such films as: “sex, lies, and videotapes” – “Erin Brockovich” – “Traffic” – “Oceans 11-12-13″ – others films and TV, but not so familiar.

In “Side Effects,” would you rather live with depression or take pills with side effects that have a high level of danger involved. Promise No Spoilers but do recommend you pay close attention to all details, putting them together like a puzzle, as you enter deeper and deeper into the storyline of the film. The film isn’t called Side Effects for no reason. What do you suppose they are?

The lead female character, played by Rooney Mara [Girl With The Dragon Tattoo], Tattoo is so violent, I have been warned against seeing it. Too traumatizing for some, but a great film. I was given the same warning about [Silence of the Lambs] and I didn’t see that for decades. Some parts still make my stomach turn and a certain queasiness sets in. But Jodie Foster as Clarice and Sir Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter with a side order of some Fava Beans and a nice Chianti. “Tss-tss-tss-tss-tss.” Use a lot of tongue saying this creepy gesture to Clarice. It is a brilliant film.

Trying desperately, not to divulge any plot, I would classify the “Side Effects” as being more than a returning husband from prison for insider trading. Or a psychiatrist, who by ill fortune or not, happens to be in the ER the night Emily happens to need some assistance. It doesn’t take her long to coerce the Doctor/Psychiatrist, played by Jude Law, to support her psychological troubles. He is overworked, yet highly compassionate and, seriously, wants to help his patients in any way possible. Emily, seemingly, to have been moved to the top of his priorities. He, also, helps the pharmaceuticals.

This films keeps you on edge throughout, just trying to put together all the mixed up characters. Here enters a former therapist of Emily’s, from which her new shrink seeks advice. She is masterfully played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. All the main actors are pretty amazing in their parts. Tension continues to grow. Events occur, causing lives to start falling apart.

Watching “Side Effects” set off a rant in me, which has become the hugest cliché in any film where one character, in particular, finds there life disintegrating and out of control. At this juncture, fully expect the other spouse with a child, to feel it is necessary to abandon her partner, when he most needs her. Whether same sex or the man leaving the woman, which if you think about it, the woman rarely is the one in the destroyed life syndrome. It’s always the man who seems to have his life be the one that is fucking up. Please tell me why that is? Women fuck up their lives, too. So, how come they don’t get those story lines. What happened to the vow on either side? If it gets rough, you are supposed to run away. What exactly does that teach anyone, anyway?

All around, lives are falling apart. The police are strongly involved but they are rarely seen. Everyone including the cop he thinks he can trust, tells him to forget about it. Everyone is telling him to back off.

Watch as the film unfolds and clarity will be your reward. I’d classify this as a real thriller, psychological and a bit of love thrown in.

I highly recommend this film. I’ve watched “Side Effects” at least five times. The screenplay by Scott Z. Burns is ornately constructed, with twists that tangle you up, confound you and generally make you yell and shout at the screen, “WTF!!!”

It is the film to see if you enjoy a Great, Smart Mystery.

Written by Jennifer Kiley

Side Effects Trailer #3 — Movie Trailer [HD]

Side Effects Interviews: Rooney Mara-Jude Law-Catherine Zeta Jone-Steven Soderbergh-Channing Tatum-Beyond the Trailer

Check Reality at the Door
Letter of Import: The Story of Writing the Book
Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
Post Created 16th Tuesday July 2013
Posted On Tuesday 23rd July 2013 [I Was Born.]

Dear Fantasy & Imagination & Belief,

Now I Am Reborn Into Myself. As I Write This Book I Am Building My Life As I Am Building This Book. It Is An Adventure. It Is An Experiment I Am Taking To It’s Conclusion. At The End There Is A Screenplay That Is Waiting To Be Finished Once We See How This Turns Out. The Screenplay I Speak Of Has Been Completely Written. It Went Down With The Double Crash Of My Hard Drive. It Now Lives In My Head And Some Index Cards On A Screenwriting Program. The Ghosts Of That Screenplay Are Waiting Patiently. They Want To Know How Their Futures Are Going To Grow And Into What.

I Have Written Two Endings To That Screenplay. One: Is It Real? Two: Did Everything That Happen Really Happen? All Is A Secret. It Is All Opened Up To Any Possibilities Of Reality Or Fantasy. The Original Screenplay And Now This Book. An Adaptation Of A Manuscript That I Kept Diligent And Daily Entries. Now It Is Being Converted Into A Fiction With An Edge. No Restrictions Attached To This Creative Endeavor. There Is One Major Requirement: To Keep On Creating Where Ever It Leads. Into Darkness Or Into Light All Will Be Revealed. That Is A Guaranteed Eventuality.

Madison Taylor’s study-library with Toker and Mikey sleeping the soft-smooth settee.

“This is fun, Annie, teasing you this way. I know you are not getting to appreciate my tale so far but maybe I will start to send my letters to you once we have established a working relationship.

It feels so near. Dr. George is losing it rather quickly…”
— Madison Taylor [Screenwriter: Brief Sacrifice due out end of 2008]

Dr. Annie Haskell’s Psychoanalyst’s Office

http://thesecretkeeper.net/2013/07/16/letter-of-import-mystery-clawed-open-18/

From the Book— Letters of Import: Private Writings of a Psychoanalyst
Written by Jennifer Kiley

Chateau de Rocher is where Scottie Andrews & Madison Taylor & their three cats Toker, Mikey & Patrick live.

A Project with Writing Letters/Poetry/Illustrations/Music/It is a Process of Writing through the Editing of a Manuscript and posting every Tuesday in the Early AM at the link for “the secret keeper” blog. It’s an Adventure. A Mystery. The Unfolding Story of the Screenplay, Brief Sacrifice, within a Collection of Letters. They are telling a story of a relationship being built within the secret writings of a client in a Therapy Group on the way to Self-Destruction.

English Garden at Chateau de Rocher estate

The writer of the Letters, Madison Taylor, so badly wants the new therapist, Dr. Annie Haskell, who started monitoring the Group the same day Madison returned, after undergoing Cancer Treatments. She wants Annie, as she is referred to in Madison’s letters, to take her on as a client. Her present Therapist and Leader of the Therapy Group, Dr. George is on his way out of his mind and on his way to a future that is looking like it is heading into a territory in Hell.

family gathering place at chateau de rocher

The Screenplay Brief Sacrifice has already been made into a film, at the time this story takes place, it is in Post-Production. It was written by Madison Taylor. Her partner, Scottie Andrews, is the director. She is in the process of finishing edits and is under pressure to leave town fairly often. This is stressful for Madison who has great difficulty with being left alone for long stretches of time.

bedroom with perfect high windows lots of light. scottie and madison share this room with their cats mikey-toker-patrick

Madison does use the time efficiently. It gives her a great amount of time she uses to write and create her graphic paintings. When she writes, she focuses particularly on screenplays and poetry. This is all contained in the book. It will keep progressing. There is an undercurrent of a story, some of it true to Madison’s life and some of it is only a fantasy contained in the film, Brief Sacrifice, she worked on creating with Scottie.

A set piece from Brief Sacrifice which Carter McLeod, the main character of the film, inherited her grandmother’s estate.

Carter’s grandmother provided for her well, with investments that would carry her through to be a full time writer for the entirety of her, a hopefully long life. The rest of her family got a write off of a check for 1,000 pounds a piece. Her grandmother felt they had not accomplished a thing in their lives, and expected an inheritance, but supporting her creative granddaughter, who actually expressed her genuine love for her, and lived with her, is why she received the bulk of her grandmother’s estate, including with it, the mansion and all of the extensive grounds.

Carter’s grandmother was a generous patron to the arts, and she prepared for her dying, making sure her granddaughter Carter would be well provided for when she was gone. While she was alive and after she died only a few years back, she always provided for Carter, the only relative she loved. So the pain was still closely present in Carter’s heart and she missed her grandmother Emma McLeod very much. The Savannah cats, Jasper, Jax and James, they both shared the three of them, of course, they were well provided for in the will. Carter was given their full custody. They loved each other, all of them.

The film contains this massive secret, that as the Letters are being written, a small amount of the film’s story is revealed, as told to Annie, about the character of Carter McLeod, her three Savannah cats, Jasper, Jax and James. Carter is a frustrated but great writer of literature, with a flavour of a touch of mystery blended with some psychological unraveling. Her major problem is, her books are going unnoticed by the Corporate Publishing Houses, who are only looking for trash to publish, that will make them millions, with as little investment in creativity as possible.

Carter must write, no matter the rejection notices, she believes in her creative talent but the frustration comes from the doubts these constant rejections bring to her self confidence. One can only build one’s self-esteem for just so long without feedback of a positive nature.

Carter McLeod’s Study and library. A cozy space where many a mind-bending word had been entered into her laptop.

So she starts the beginning of the film, going out on adventures. Looking for something magical to inspire her. To keep her beliefs alive. One day she stumbles on an Estate Sale she thinks might be fun. Thinking, maybe she will come upon a treasure no one realizes they possess. Without fail, her mental projections are satisfied, when she comes upon a most unusual looking briefcase, of the old school kind. It looks rather beat up, as though it has been through a tumble or two. It intrigued Carter, especially after she picked it up and discovered its weight was surprisingly heavy. Also, when she tried to open it, not a give at all with the lock, which in all appearances looked like it would just pop right open. Well, from here you need to read from the archives and future letters to discover the mystery of the briefcase and just who was this Carter McLeod.

James-a neutered male Savannah Cat lounging on his favorite throne of a sofa. He thinks he is a Prince with many fantasies of glorious adventures.

It contains a mystery that will blow a hole in the fabric of the world. Or at least bend minds to see a cleared focus of what exactly it is, this world we live in and how certain truths are concealed or covered continuously by the powers, the masters of the marionettes, that control everything that happens.

Brief Sacrifice library- living room-fireplace-cozy for Jasper-Jax-James & Carter to hang together.

The mystery of the briefcase, hold a power that has been passed down through the history of time. What is real needs to be checked at the door and disbelief needs to be reexamined. — Jennifer Kiley – author of Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst

Awesome lighted tree-house on the estate of Chateau de Rocher.

The tree was a place of escape for Madison. She liked to run away when she was a kid. Climbing trees were her favorite places to hide. Scottie had this built for Madison as their 10th Anniversary present. She wanted Madison to be able to escape whenever she felt the need to run. Scottie felt this would be a safe place for her to run to. She would know that Madison was safe.

So this is what this letter writing and poetry, illustrations and music is all about. It is an adventure and a growing process. Mine and yours, an adventure and growth I hope others might find some enjoyment, insight and awareness from, within or from without, that will bring a moment of escape through the music, illustrations, poetry and storytelling. Two stories intertwining into an intriguing manifestation and an escape from reality. Truths might be reveal what is not know or thought of before. Where this is headed, only the muse knows with any certainty and she isn’t revealing it all to me, in anyway. We will all find out when we arrive at any destination, what is going to happen or what will happen. So lets be surprised together. There is quite the tale to be told and mysteries to unfurl.

Until next time.

Fondly,
Madison Taylor

Maksim — Somewhere In Time: Theme Song For Letters of Import

‘Practically Perfect In Every Way’
Making of Mary Poppins
In Sixth Part
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Created on 25th July 2013
Posted On 26th July 2013 BLAKE EDWARDS BIRTHDAY TODAY
DEDICATED TO BLAKE EDWARDS & HIS LIFE WITH JULIE ANDREWS
FILM FRIDAY

I love the story that Blake Edwards would tell that they, Julie Andrews and Blake, met in passing cars both either on the way or just leaving their analysts offices. Happy Birthday Blake. He would be 91 today, born 26th July 1922. I am doing this tribute for Julie and Blake. Wednesday was a post on Mary Poppins and other Julie related stories in my Lightness of Being Wednesday. Film Friday, I am recalling Julie going through her life, the majority of which was spent sharing her life with Blake.

And the second part of this post is devoted to a Six Part ‘The Making of Mary Poppins,’ Julie Andrews introduction into the world of film and entering the world that her husband Blake Edwards was well a part of before their worlds crossed. So enjoy the story I am about to tell and photographs of love and film characters. And learn how Julie’s first film ever was build up from the bottom and became the success that it did and made Julie Andrews the movie star that dominated the film world for many decades.

I am not the only one who fell in love with her. She was the most popular actress of all time throughout the 60s and 70s. She was a grand dame. She remains so today. A truly gifted and giving individual, especially in the world of children as a children’s author and an advocate for them throughout the world.

Blake and Julie really loved each other. It is so comforting to live your life with someone who gets who you are and loves you for it. Blake got to live with Julie and Julie got to live with Blake. A great feeling to have their kind of love. The ups and downs of moods but love always at the foundation. It must be a strange day for Julie without Blake, for all the many years they celebrated this day. Who knows what kind of special plans they would share together and with the rest of the family. Wish you well Julie and to the rest of the Edwards family.

Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards were married in 1969. They had 5 children. Blake brought two children to the marriage, Jennifer and Geoffrey and Julie brought one child, Emma Walton and together they adopted two Vietnamese girls, Amelia in 1974 and Joanna in 1975. Blake and Julie worked together on 10 – S.O.B. – Tamarind Seed – Darlin Lili – That’s Life – Victor/Victoria [Julie received an Oscar Nomination] and Victor/Victoria on the Broadway.

Julie received a Tony Nomination for her role in Victor/Victoria, in which she declined and made her infamous ‘egregiously’ overlooked speech standing up for the entire team of “Victor/Victoria” who were totally snubbed for any nominations themselves.

Julie Andrews turning down her Tony Nomination for Victor/Victoria
17 years ago on May 8th, 1996.

Blake was the producer, director and writer of the show. They used Henry Mancini’s music and lyrics, he had already died before they could get it to Broadway. Extra songs were written by Leslie Bricusse [music] and Frank Wildhorn [lyrics].

Julie’s voice was really tested to the limit and shortly thereafter she had her throat surgery from which she never recovered her singing voice, we all love. Julie became extremely depressed after this. But eventually started to write with Emma, working in the theatre at Sag Harbour and other ventures. Then came the new children’s books they worked on together.

When Julie and Blake met in their passing cars leaving or heading to their psychoanalyst’s office, sometime in the mid-60s, in-between Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. It was amusement and love at first sight. Julie divorced Tony Walton, her first husband and Emma’s father, in 1967.

Tony and Julie have and still do work together on many projects and have remained friends over the years. Julie after she lost her ability to sing, due to the throat surgery gone bad in the 90s, has done some film work, Princess Diaries being my favorite.

On Dec. 15th, 2010, Blake Edwards died of complication from Pneumonia. Julie was by his side. He was 88.

The first book she wrote Mandy, which I read and fell in love with, was inspired by a dare from her children, I believe specifically Jennifer Edwards. It was a dare to get Julie to stop swearing. If she didn’t then she had to write a story for them. Well, she wrote her first book. It is quite good and I highly recommend it for middle aged children to adults. It is magical.

Wonderful things start to happen for Mandy after she wanders away from the boarding school she attends. She comes upon a cabin. Like an enchanted house just right for a young girl. I wanted to be Mandy. She is someone to emulate. It has been a while since I read Mandy. I should put on my reading list again. It would be enjoyable to remember and relive those moments of escape from my world. In this way I felt so much like Mandy.

Julie found another calling due to her predisposition to swearing. She has quite the rep for her language. Anyway a wonderful book and a must read for anyone who likes to see surprisingly good things happen to those who deserve them.

Now Julie works with Emma writing more children’s books and turned one into a musical with the help of Tony Walton. Julie is leading an active life. She is looking fabulous. Last picture, fairly recent, I saw of her was from Australia. She was part of a large party in a restaurant and her companion sitting next to her was her chum Angela Lansbury. Julie looked happy, as happy as one could be.

If I remember correctly, the two were both up for Bednobs and Broomsticks and as anyone who has seen B & B, we know Julie did not get that part. But then, she was Mary Poppins and Maria Von Trapp. Pretty good choices. I think I am almost over Julie not getting cast as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. Audrey Hepburn was offered the role and she only accepted when she found out that Julie was never going to be considered for the role. A final decision made by Jack Warner, the head of Warner Bros.

And Julie received her Oscar for Mary Poppins and a nomination for The Sound of Music. By ticket prices today and the number of tickets sold for The Sound of Music, it is the 3rd highest grossing films of all time.

My wish for Julie is to find at least one more remarkable role, she is chosen to play the part and it is so powerfully done, she is nominated for all the awards, especially the Oscar, and when they announce who is going to take home the Best Actress Oscar, they call out the name, Julie Andrews.
By Jennifer Kiley

A Modified Film Review of Mary Poppins

Mary Poppins, a not very ordinary nurse maid, who has charmed millions of children (and grown-ups) throughout the world since she first entered the literary world through the author Ms P. L. Travers in 1934, was finally made into a movie, with Julie Andrews. I loved the books and was so delighted to find out about the movie.

A combination of animation and humans interacting, a musical score so delightful, I fell asleep to it every night for so many years, wearing out so many LPs and Tapes and eventually to CD and MP3.

A film great for children and adults alike. If you know Mary Poppins, you know that no one would dare to try to fool around with her appearance and her staunch individuality. She would have a few words to say about that with a warning and saying crisply, “That will be quite enough of that.”

This is the genuine Mary Poppins that comes sailing in on an east wind, her open umbrella sailing over the starboard bow, to take on the care of the Banks children, Jane and Michael, in their parents’ London home, and vastly uplift the spirits of that father-dominated family.

Julie Andrews is superb. with her feet splayed out to give her an unshakable footing and a look of complete authority, who calmly proceeds to show her charges that wonders will never cease and that there’s nothing like a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, but, of course, they are different colours for Jane, Michael and Mary, too, ‘rum punch.’. With her unrelenting discipline and her disarmingly angelic face, she fills this film with a sense of wholesome substance and the serenity of self-confidence.

Mary Poppins is a wonderfully agile spirit with a gift for fun. To her, it is not the least amazing that she can fly with an umbrella, slide upstairs on banisters on which ordinary people slide down, walk through chalk drawings on the pavement into glittering magical worlds, and take her young charges along with her, to their surprise and delight. They pass into a cartoon wonderland where barnyard animals dance about. There’s a carousel where the horses take off on a grand adventure. They get mixed up in a cartoon fox-hunt, with a darling Irish fox, and ride on into the Derby horse race, which, needless to say, Mary Poppins wins.

A brilliant ballet sets in motion, after the children are sucked up to the rooftops and Bert and Mary must follow. Julie Andrews with Dick Van Dyke as Bert scatter and join in with a gang of chimney-sweeps on the London rooftops. Dick is joyous as Bert, the delightful and irrepressible street merchant who is the companion of Mary Poppins and the kids. The latter, performed by Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber, are just as they should be, and their parents—appropriately eccentric—are done beautifully by David Tomlinson and Glynis Johns.

Ed Wynn is grand as Uncle Albert, who soars up to the ceiling when he laughs, and Reginald Owen makes a great Admiral Boom, the nautical neighbor, a natural caricature. Hermione Baddeley, Elsa Lanchester, and Arthur Treacher are droll but perfect in smaller roles. Robert Stevenson directed with inventiveness with a true flair for creating a genuine Mary Poppins.

It is sentimental but that’s what makes it so enjoyable. Mary Poppins has a saying, “Practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their feelings.” But being not practically perfect, she is irresistible. Children and adults will feel this way ever so easily.

So enjoy the following videos of ‘The Making of Mary Poppins.’ Hear the inside story of how it all came about, such a classic film of pure delight and entertaining as well, from start to finish, from surprise to surprise. You never want the wind to change. If you’ve seen the film, you know what happens when the wind changes. See the film if you never have and let the child out inside of you and if you have seen Mary Poppins, maybe it is time to see it again. Written by Jennifer Kiley

Julie Andrews Winning Oscar for Best Actress in Mary Poppins

The Making of Mary Poppins [1/6]

The Making of Mary Poppins [2/6]

The Making of Mary Poppins [3/6]

The Making of Mary Poppins [4/6]

The Making of Mary Poppins [5/6]

The Making of Mary Poppins [6/6]

Chapter #19: Something Wicked That Way Goes
Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
First Chapter Published 19th March 2013
Published Tuesday AM
Nineteenth Chapter Posted Tuesday 30th July 2013
WARNING: ADULT LANGUAGE AND CONTENT. NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN

ALL CHARACTERS ARE FICTITIOUS.
ANYONE RESEMBLING ANYONE LIVING OR DEAD
IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL.

Letters of Import: Something Wicked That Way Goes — Chapter #19

“You cursed brat! Look what you’ve done! I’m melting! melting! Oh, what a world! What a world! Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness? Oooooh, look out! I’m going! Oooooh! Ooooooh!” — Wicked Witch of the West

I’m Melting! – The Wizard of Oz — Movie CLIP (1939) HD

Tuesday 5th February 2008

Annie,

How can you tell if you have a grip on reality if you aren’t exactly sure what reality really is? I have never been certain about the answer to the question, ‘What is reality?’ It has puzzled me for most of my life. Include with that question, ‘What is sanity?’ These seem to me to be valuable questions to have the answers to, otherwise, how is anyone to tell whether there world is real and sane. If I judge mine to be real and sane, what if I am wrong. All along I have believed something which may not be true.

Truth is another element needing definition. Is it an absolute? No one has the power to change what it is. It just is. Can there be smaller truths one can claim as being true? Simple perceptions of reality, like a bird can fly, or at least most birds can fly.

I am in a strange mind. Depression has been pressing on me in the late of night. Getting a handle on it seems practically impossible. Scottie has been away doing finishing touches on our film Brief Sacrifice. It is somewhat lonely at the Chateau. Sure Toker and Mikey snuggle with me in my study when I am writing. Patrick is usually wandering around looking for Scottie when she is away. He doesn’t like her being missing either. He misses his snuggles with her and most of all sleeping on her head while I rest my head on her shoulder, as close as possible the three of us together.

Something needs to keep me occupied, to pull my feelings away from feeling depressed. I do some of my digital art on the computer or write a poem, if my muse has something she wants me to express. I try anything not to feel depressed or missing Scottie. I go with her sometimes but I really don’t like to travel. I’m so claustrophobic and hate flying commercial jets. Now if I were the pilot, I could handle that. But I stopped flying years ago. Right after college, when I had a near head on collision while landing my plane. Some asshole, unauthorized to land, came in from the wrong direction, tried landing on my runway, heading directly at me. Thinking fast I increased my power, pulled up the yoke and flew my ass right over the bastard. Wheels almost grazed the top of his tail wing.

Shaking to death by the time I finally landed and taxied to park. Rushed out the exit door. Never set foot in a plane again, too many near death experiences do that to you. I am land bound completely now. I get sea-sick, so no boats. Only cars and trains now. Had great adventures in the sky but now too many crazy people up there and on the ground with no idea or attention span to be operating any moveable object.

I have some more for you on the film I wrote, Brief Sacrifice, but I wanted to tell you something really disturbing about Dr. George first. In our last private session he accused me of spreading rumours about him having an affair with one of his clients. He didn’t tell me which one. Figured I would know. None of which is true. Why would I accuse Dr. George having sex with a client? He is straight. I don’t know any woman who would want to have sex with him. The thought is gross. It just seems a way for him to talk about sex. He’s always so graphic.

I denied it. Told him if he mentions it again, I would go to the director of the clinic, and report him for sexual harassment. That him shut up. Then he pouted. Barely said another word during our remaining half hour. I’m disturbed about my sense of reality and sanity, what does he talk about, his insane hallucinations. Rumours of people trying to destroy him. Thinking I’m the one responsible. Sounds more mad than I am.

By the way, I hated group today until you took over. He was flipping out there, too. What is with him? He’s always been strange, self-obsessed and sexually obscene, but not this strange. His words don’t seem to make any sense, to me, he sounding pretty crazy.

Your sensitivity taking over went perfectly. He didn’t even noticed. You salvaged group. Thank you for slowing the fall down the rabbit hole. It’s going to Tumble faster than a boulder rock soon. No one will be able to save it. Group is on a slow burn to extinction.

I say forget about him, group therapy and being mentally fucked up. I want to tell you what comes up next in Brief Sacrifice. Last time we were about to have the unveiling underneath the fake covering on the side of the leather briefcase. James found the spot with his pawn. Due to his persistent Carter, his mum, looked underneath his paw. Jasper and Jax wanted in on the fun, so as Carter tried to remove the layer of fine leather, the two boys started clawing at it with extreme vigor until they loosened it enough for Carter to completely remove it. The boys, her Savannah cats, made it simple for her.

All eyes were on the spot where the patch was removed. Carter stared at it. It was the markings of letters and numbers, not in any sensible order. Some kind of mystery code, left covered, which meant Carter thought, no one wanted it to be found. But who? What did the letters and numbers mean? How would they understand or even begin to understand what they had found?

“Okay, boys, what do we do next?”

She found a small notebook, where she jotted down her subconscious ramblings as they surfaced, grabbed a pen, a writer always has both near by. She flipped open the notebook to a blank page. For a moment, she thought, ‘How should I record the letters and numbers. They weren’t in columns or rows exactly. To be perfectly honest, they were all rather jumbled up in no particular order at all.’ This thought was frustrating her.

James reached out his right paw, placed it on the letter ‘S’, pulled back his paw so Carter could see where he had just pointed.

“‘S’! James, why an ‘S’?”

He stared at the briefcase, as if he knew something. He was a rather psychic cat. Carter wrote down the ’S’ at the top of the blank page. “What next?”

James put his paw on the letter ‘I’ and once again pulled it away.

“Okay, James, what is it you see that I am not? What is the significance of an ‘S’ and an ‘I’”?

She stared at the letters and numbers for quite some time as her boys watched. They were spellbound, all of them. Carter could see nothing yet, that made any sense. But she knew James was seeing something.

“Too bad you can’t speak, James. You’d have this figured out and we could all relax and discover what the mystery is right away.” Carter thought to herself, ‘It really isn’t going to be that simple.’ They would just have to wait until James put his paw on the next letter or maybe it would be a number next.

In a quick gesture, James placed his right paw on another figure. When he took it away, Carter could see the it was the letter ‘T’ and she shouted out loud. “You have something there James. It spells out S.I.T. Amazing. What does ‘sit’ mean?” Carter looked at her boys, her lips pursed and brow raised. Gently, she placed the notebook on the coffee table next to the briefcase, leaned back on the couch to let her boys climb into her lap. They all sensed their mum was finished with the adventure for the evening, so they snuggled in relaxing into a good snog with mum.

That’s it for today, Annie. It does move faster eventually. First the letters and numbers have to be figured out. Do they follow a certain ordered sequence? Are the numbers on their own or do the letters and numbers somehow connect to the other? Randomly or specifically? You will find out in due time.

Listen, therapy is turning into the Madness of King George. You have your degrees. Your letter from the Board of the APA. Your license is legal. So what are you waiting for? Please HELP ME. I need you to help me stay sane, if I haven’t lost it already. I am pleading with you. Take me in. I am at your mercy.

Next time I want some good news. So until then.

Fondly.
Madison
@>-;—

Sets & Animals for Film: Brief Sacrifice with Lead Character CARTER MCLEOD. [Portrayed by BAFTA Nominated Actor NATALIE STEPHENS] Savannah Cats are Carter’s. Screenplay: MADISON TAYLOR. Director: SCOTTIE ANDREWS

film ‘Brief Sacrifice’ library living room fireplace in mansion where Carter McLeod lives with her three Savannah cats, Jasper, Jax and James.

film ‘Brief Sacrifice’ James is one of three neutered male Savannah Cats, Carter McLeod has as her companions. He is enjoying a good lounge on his favorite sofa.

Fear of the Darkness — Iron Maiden

Soon Annie will get to read Madison’s Letters. Some at a time. All will be revealed in time.

Dr. Annie Haskell’s Office as a Psychoanalyst— Just count the weeks.

Maksim — Somewhere In Time — Theme Song For Letters of Import

I Die For The Last Time
Written by Madison Taylor
February 3rd 2008

Will I die before you
Rather feel my death around me
Let you act as though
You won’t miss me
If I should be the one to go
The madness in my head
Makes those retreat
Yet empathy is what is shown as caring
Now just retreat
As if touched by poison

Gone is the spirit that fights
Staying alive doesn’t have any attraction
Nothing is worth the effort
Stopping now would reduce the struggle
Escaping into the unknown
Even if it is empty
Is less painful
Than feeling an absence
Which once felt filled by love

All have left
The party has moved
Hell is ready to enter
Punishment enough for suicide
After I satisfy the terms
Of the fiery incarceration
Being a victim
Climbing out won’t be impossible
Returning inside a new identity
Never to have to know the world again

Just a ghost of slim memories
Might cross the mind with blurred recall
Thinking the images from a bad dream
Occurred from a childhood
Now is back to haunt
All surroundings filled with pain
Hatred of the innocence
Couldn’t find their own
So they stole from children
Never to be in sight again
Going away forever
Never to live a moment of peace again

Escaping through death is the only way
To discover the path to spiritual destiny
Some were not meant to be
Running away
Carried by the swiftness of the wind
Away
Escaping the pain
Living without blessings
Celebrate
Gone
All is gone
No more sound
Or sight
Reading words again
Good bye friendless face
Goodbye
It is come
To the end

© madison taylor 2008

Escape Into the Unknown — Remember When It Rained? — Created by Jennifer Kiley

“A Dream
The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor

English garden off the back marble patio

Patrick when he was five weeks. He is a Bengal kitten. Madison gave to Scottie as a present for her Birthday. As he grows he becomes devoted to her.

Patrick at 3 mos is a curious fellow, always checking the unusual out

Patrick our Bengal cat his favorite piece of scratching wood

Patrick is our Bengal cat in tree. It is protected area. Patrick cannot leave property from there. He loves Scottie. They are buddies.

Awesome lighted tree-house on the estate of Chateau de Rocher. A place of escape for Madison. She liked to run away when she was a kid. Climbing trees were her favorite places to hide. Scottie had this built for Madison as their 10th Anniversary present.