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3/445 mph winds today slap up whitecaps down below my window. Low clouds slide steadily along the skyline --I can see their shapes on the water, surrounded by sunglints. The small dock is rocking, washed and wobbly on the unsteady, unstoppable sea. sun comes and goes, numbs and glows, huge through doubled glass with no cracks for. I suck canned dust and hack, wishing for a real breeze to scour and sweep my lungs, the desks, the grey shagless carpet of the hall stretching away.
3/2 Today, 15,000 doctors joined the Service Employees International Union, affiliated with the AFL-CIO. There's nothing up on the AFL-CIO website yet, but I'm curious to see what they have to say. Doctors are organizing to fight the power of HMOs. Right on! It's a pretty interesting phenomenon. There was a weird little article in the Physician's News magazine urging doctors to join unions, talking about it how used to be thet they had to vigilant against the "threat from the left" i.e. government interference in their business and practices. but now, says the article, a new danger has snuck up on them from the right: the HMO's and the medical management business. bingo. When it's someone else's profit organizing things, y'all sit up and take notice. This reminds me of how I feel about government supervision... at least a (supposedly) democratic government has the *ostensible* motivation of something besides profit, like maybe the wellbeing of the nation. I don't see how one would trust the profit motive to run things like health care and education. In this case I feel similarly, with doctors being the lesser of two evils because of their ostensibly higher motive. but it's pretty incredible. Doctors identifying themselves with service workers. Quite a switcheroo, prestige and authority-wise.
3/1 *new addition monday afternoon, below this entry "How about two snakes biting at your crotch?"I said "excuse me?" and he said "For a tattoo. you know, two snakes, biting at your crotch." I gave him my blankest blank look, then looked off to the left and said "I never thought about it." end of conversation. you know, i don't think I could come up with a worse thing to say to a girl...Then on Sunday me and a friend went to see "Duel in the Sun" with my boyfriend Gregory Peck. Can I just say that in this flick Gregory Peck (c. 1947) is the sexiest man ever to be on film. He beats Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, even Denzel Washington in 'Devil in a Blue Dress." I'm sorry, gentlemen, but Gregory Peck wins hands down. When he first came on the screen I couldn't hep it, i said "Oh my *gawd*." Whew. Anyway the movie is utterly bizarre. It's a Selznick production, on which he spent 3 million dollars *more* than "Gone With The Wind." It has some similar problems:1) Butterfly McQueen, playing the same horrible role as the featherheaded maid. younger an thinner here. She's still excruciating to watch, and there are some truly terrible lines about her from other characters. I won't kid you, this movie is really racist. and sexist. It's also unbelievable melodramatic. Jenny Jones plays the "half-breed" (she's half injun, supposedly) torn between two brothers, a good boy (Joseph Cotton) and a bad one (Gregory Peck). It's all about her wild and uncontrollable nature. And she's wearing truly baroque brownface. I figured out what her chracter is like: if an alien were to come to earth and try to find out what women were, and read nothing but victorian-19th century medical and psychological texts, the alien would come up with Pearl Chavez. She is a creature ruled entirely by her emotions and her body. She has no reasoning faculty at all. She's also the most melodramatic actress ever. If she is frightened by someone, she doesn't just change her body language, or look scared, she presses her whole body back against the wall, with her elbows akimbo and her hands pressed against the wall. When she's upset, she's liable to fling herself on the ground, cry and laugh, etc. However, this movie has such an amazing ending. I can't give it away, but suffice to say I did not foresee it at all, it totally took my by suprise. the movie is nuts. High camp. I recommend it, with all it's horrible flaws, they are part of what makes it so over-the-top. I probably am not doing it justice, but it is so melodramatic, so sexually charged, so unbelievably filmed, the sets and painted backdrops are lurid with color and filters. It's best on the big screen, where the color really jumps out at you. Oh gosh it was amazing and twisted. oh and in the beginning, whern we see pearl's "injun" mother, she's another actress with facepaint, center-parted black hair and a beaded headband, and she's dancing on a table, and it's another of those hollywood moments where their choreographers are trying to make up a dance like what "those wild people" would do, and it's so bizarre, with all these high kicks and goofy arm movements.. I can't say enough. go see! Also, Christopher Lydon was an exercise in gender politics the other day. That guy hates women, it's plain to see, but occasionally he knows it's a good idea to have one on the show. Sort of like the David Letterman of the (wannabe)intelligentsia. So he had on the show Janine Wedel, who wrote a fascinating-sounding book on the role of Harvard Economists in what has happened to the post-Soviet Russian economy (this issue is currently under investigation by the US. government). She has an article in The nation, here. And she testified before a congressional comittee on international relations, testimony available hereSo the two most common and obvious gender games were played: Lydon *constantly* interrupted her. It was clear she had been coached on how to deal with this, she would just continue talking through him until she was finished; and he called her by her first name, and the male callers who were professors were referred to as "professor so-and-so" or "doctor this-and-that." And THEN, the principal person on the phone was Jeffrey "the-blood-of-the-russian-people-is-on-my-hands" Sachs, one of the principal actors in the book, and one of the main proponents of "economic shock therapy" which is pretty much what it sounds like (especially shock therapy circa the first half of the century). they don't often have one of the subjects of a book on the line to debate with the author , in investigative or academic circles it's not that useful, it's a gossipy and personal way to set it up. And Sachs' main way of dealing with her critiques was to say "that's a ludicrous idea" or "there are no ideas in this book" or try to disassociate himself from the corruption, all without presenting an alternative view on the actual events, or alternative data. He basically resorted to name-calling and personal insult. And Lydon constantly gave Sachs the last word. then the last caller was this guy (addressed by Lydon as Doctor) from the Gorbachev Foundation (I don't know what that is) who said that the book was useless because it focused too much on the origins of things and not enough of what we should do now. I hope every historian in the country burst a blood vessel on that ludicrous statement. gahhhhh.... |