Pie Filling

When I first heard that the classic James M. Cain story Mildred Pierce was being remade as a five-part HBO mini-series, my first thought, like a lot of people's, was why bother. The original film version's plucky heroine was so firmly associated with Joan Crawford's stalwart interpretation of the titular character it seemed nothing could compare with its noirish perfection.

But having just read the source material, I understand why another pass was called for. Unlike the film, which was released in 1945, Cain's novella takes place in the early years of the Depression, when the hopelessness of a woman abandoned with two young daughters, and the narrow field of options open to her, are far more palpable. So instead of being the story of a stoic entrepreneur riding the surge of war-era prosperity, it's one of a desperate woman rising above a landscape of global impovershment.

There's a deeply carnal element to the story that couldn't be depicted in the Crawford film, and that too adds texture to Mildred's feverish hunger for success, especially as depicted by Kate Winslet in the new series. But there's an added subtext of sexual obsession between Mildred and her now adult daughter, the cruel and calculating Veda, that comes through in the book as well. It's not at all the story of a mother sacrificing everything for her daughter's chances, it's one of a mother who idolizes and, yes, sexualizes her wicked daughter to the exclusion of all else -- even her younger child.

If you go back to director Todd Haynes' past films, from his first effort in 1987, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (enacted with disfigured Barbie dolls), to the popular Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven, which hinged on a chaste friendship between a white suburban housewife and a black gardener, you'll quickly see that he's not a subtle technician. His choices are very deliberate and they get your attention. In the new series, when one of the thirties-era roadsters bustles down a street and emits a huge plume of exhaust, you know that was an intentional effect; he's reminding us that the few vintage cars we see now from that period are maintained to current environmental standards, not those of eight decades ago.

More importantly, when the Pierces' fortunes begin to improve and Milded is able to hire the maid Letty, I was surprised to see that the actress cast in the role was white and was perhaps instructed to be something of an Okie.

That makes some historical sense, I suppose, because the Los Angeles area of the day was infused with Dust-Bowl evacuees eager for any kind of work. But the wonderful black actress Butterfly McQueen, who had the role (named Lottie) in the film was so entrenched in my mind in that part that I went back to the novel to see how she was depicted there and, yes, it only says that Mildred engaged "a girl named Letty" for various household tasks. I still think Cain intended her to be black, and have to feel that Haynes made a politically-correct decision that revises a history we find unsavory today. But if we can revisit the national tragedy that was the Great Depression, shouldn't we also accurately reference the status of blacks within society during that period? Having next read the novella that Double Indemnity was based on, my suspicion that Cain equated a hired-help "girl" with an African-American maid is confirmed; there's extensive reference to protagonist Walter Huff's Filipino houseboy but the young man is never once mentioned by name.

Regardless of your thoughts on the new series, I strongly endorse reading the original novel. The prose is rich and muscular, providing us with a masterfully direct depiction of an era in American history that's both alien to us and, due to recent economic events, strangely familiar, peopled with vivid characters and settings that leap off the page.

Two-and-a-Half Mein Kampf

Let's face it, despite Charlie Sheen's epic meltdown, CBS isn't going to scrap Two-and-a-Half Men. Say what you will about this low-brow, highly scatological sitcom, it's a deeply entrenched, long-running series on a failing network with few other hits, and it generates tons of revenue.

So obviously they'll try every means possible to continue it, short of bringing back Sheen, because even in Hollywood you can't tie a nice bow on a stream of anti-Semitic epithets and pretend it never happened. They'll have to replace Sheen with a similar hard-drinking, womanizing sleazeball character -- a cousin or some other extended family member who can stumble out of the woodwork and be introduced into the setting without too much suspended disbelief. It's a time-honored way of getting a few more years out of a wheezy sitcom, like when Sandy Duncan replaced Valerie Harper years ago because of her salary demands. That show was actually called Valerie's Family and it still didn't stand in the way of killing off the main character in a convenient auto wreck.

Actors like John Stamos and Rob Lowe have been mentioned as possible bad-boy replacements, but Stamos is too likeable and Lowe is contractually bound to another series. If CBS were really on their game, there's only one replacement to consider for Sheen: Mel Gibson.

Think about it: you've already got a show that panders to the lowest mouth-breathing element of the television-watching public, one that's featured an underage character constantly exposed to sleazy adult situations since early boyhood and whose puberty we have been forced to observe. It's a PG-13-rated version of Sheen's lifestyle, served up to the viewing public like luke-warm porn. Why not go all the way, and capitalize on Gibson's volatile persona, put him in that beach house with the fat, sardonic maid and the milquetoast brother and the withering Beverly Hills social X-ray of a mother and just let him go at it about the Jews and the Muslims and Hollywood sugar tits and cops and...I think you get the picture. It'll be ratings gold, because there's nothing America loves more than a spectacular flameout. Let's frame this one in the perfect incendiary setting and be done with it.  

All the News that Flits

If you have any doubt that the newspaper as a medium is dead, just pick up a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle.

At about three-quarters the size format of a normal paper, it's so wispy it hardly qualifies as a pamphlet. It contains so little content -- and by that I mean paper material, because let's not even talk about the articles picked up from other news feeds -- that it would take at least two to provide enough kindling to build a decent fireplace blaze.

But there's another aspect to the demise of the modern urban newspaper. Like most publications, the Chronicle has an online version: the S.F. Gate. You'd be right to expect that this is simply the evolution of journalism in the 21st century, and that the paper's web site is the inevitable electronic descendent of what you once found in news racks all across the Bay Area. But you'd be wrong.

That's because the demands of constantly updating a web site to accommodate breaking news and developing stories have transformed this once iconic paper -- one held as the gold standard when I attended Journalism school in the 1970s -- into little more than a content mill. And a sloppy, hastily slapped-together one at that.

Take a look at this little gem, from today's S.F. Gate: Iconic kisses -- it purports to list the top iconic kisses in human culture. The first image from a Greek vase is misidentified as a man who kisses his wife when he "comes home from work" to see if she has spent the day knocking back ouzo, when actually it depicts Spartan love between a grown man and a boy. That's almost beside the point, though: just about anyone could rattle off a list of iconic kisses: Prince Charles and Princess Diana at their storybook wedding, Bette Davis and George Brent in Dark Victory, Judas betraying Jesus with a kiss at the Last Supper, even Adrian Brody smooching Halley Berry at the Oscars. But some unknown screen kiss from 1896? Do they even know what the word iconic means?

This kind of lazy content milling can be seen on a daily basis on sites like CNN.net, where teams of content generators spew "articles" like The 7 Things to Never Say at a Job Interview or Islands to See Before You Die.

As someone who once started each day with a cup of coffee and a fresh newspaper, I'd made the adjustment, some time ago, that online news was simply Newspaper 2.0. But it was just today, stupidly, that it really hit me that the eradication of physical newspapers has set in motion an unexpectedly complete dumbing down of the remaining local news culture. What's left?

Advertising to Die For

One of the most shocking events of the late 20th century was the Jonestown massacre, when more than 900 men, women and children -- many of them from the San Francisco Bay area -- were made to ingest cyanide by People's Temple cult leader Jim Jones. News photos showing rows of bodies bloating in the Guyanese sun etched an indelible image on the collective consciousness, a testament to the horror and waste a delusional theocrat can inflict on impressionable people seeking meaning in their lives.

The incident was so impactful that to this day people in corporate America make reference to whether or not someone has "drunk the Kool-Aid" -- in other words, whether they've appropriately aligned themselves with the ethos of their particular corporate "cult." Never mind that the cyanide dosages were delivered in a fruit drink called Flavoraid, it's always been remembered as the more popular Kool-Aid brand.

So when the Hacienda Mexican food chain recently put up billboards in its hometown of South Bend, Indiana that claimed "WE'RE LIKE A CULT WITH BETTER KOOL-AID," some people were understandably outraged (and not because of the inexpertly-applied punctuation). You could argue that in the 33 years since the horrifying event -- the single-largest loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster event until 9/11 -- the sands of time have eroded the specifics of the event to the point that Hacienda was referencing only the general concept of the cult, just as we now speak of drinking Kool-Aid in a general way without full awareness of the phrase's origin. But that extra "TO DIE FOR" shatters that argument. There's absolutely no way this outdoor advertising references anything but the Jonestown massacre. That makes it one of the most shockingly insensitive and irresponsible ads I've ever seen.

I'll Pass on the Edamame, Thanks

I've written before about my inexplicable nausea at the sight of apes in human clothing, a condition that dates back to the Red Rose Tea commercials of my youth. Since medical punditry has yet to name this condition, I've decided to christen it Simian Sartoriosis. Well, the Kayabuki sushi restaurant, located in a town north of Tokyo, has significantly upped the ante by tossing another of my phobias into the mix. They've hired two monkeys as waiters -- is there no Board of Health in Japan? -- and not only dressed them in women's clothes but made them wear scary female masks. Welcome to Simian Sartoriosis Chuckyanus.  

Royal Flush

I have to admit I got some pleasure out of seeing this photo of Prince Charles and Camilla reacting to the recent student demonstrations in London, once the violence was directed at their noble personages firsthand. When a breach in police security lines piled a phalanx of protesters around the privileged twosome's Rolls Royce as they headed to the theatre, the shock suddenly registered on their Stonehenge-like countenances. Reports claim the students rocked the car and shouted "off with their heads" while someone even poked Camilla in the ribs with a stick, as though assessing the old horsewoman the way she might inspect a pony's fetlocks. I wonder if it was the first time either of them, in their well-sheltered lives, had been truly frightened.

The fact that these two are living out their storied lives together now, and may soon be king and something very close to queen, seems unfair. When the prince selected the 19-year-old Diana Spencer for his bride 30 years ago, she was naive enough to think she was marrying for love. The reality was that she'd been chosen for her virginity, fertility, and a lineage that went back many centuries. She was simply a brood mare to the royal family, and it wasn't long before she realized her specific role and the fact that her husband had never ended his relationship with the older woman. By the time she finally extracted herself from the family and began to define herself it was already too late.


Knowing the fate that would befall Diana, it's hard to watch this early interview when the engagement was announced. Seeing the prince caress her one finger, as though that represents affection to him, is quite sad. Worse still, though, is what comes after the 7-minute mark, when he is asked if they're in love. "Whatever 'in love' means," he responds.





Understandably, there's a lot of speculation as to whether a similar fate will befall Kate Middleton, the fiancee of Diana's son Prince William. It seemed a bad omen to use Diana's engagement ring to start this marriage, but maybe that's just superstition. Certainly the press will follow their every move, but the couple has already had a lengthy courtship and are both 28, on a more even footing even though Kate is considered a commoner. Let's hope that in this case history doesn't repeat itself. 

Getting the Scoop

Journalism is in a sad state when you're more likely to get breaking news from a check-out stand tabloid than the New York Times. But more and more, gossip rags like The National Enquirer, which once featured front-page stories on Bat Boy or Nostrodamus' predictions of world annihilation, are scooping their more esteemed colleagues in the Fourth Estate.


That was the case with the sad news that Motown legend Aretha Franklin is suffering from -- and most likely dying from -- pancreatic cancer. While other news agencies were gingerly approaching the subject of the singer's recent hospitalization, the Enquirer wasn't afraid to make the announcement -- just as it did with the revelation of John Edwards' affair and paternity issues involving his videographer. 


Fortunately, you can still count on wide-ranging journalistic takes on current events and celebrity news. Case in point: two side-by-side publications currently on the new stands: