For 'Person of Interest' Season 3 Premiere Day: the John Reese Family Tree

Tuesday, September 24, 2013: the season premiere of Person of Interest, going into its third season.

When we left off at the end of season 2, The Machine had been set free, Root was recovering from a gunshot wound in what appeared to be a mental health hospital, Sam Shaw appeared to have joined Finch and Reese, and Carter had, for some reason, saved the life of Carl Elias. Kara Stanton's virus has wreaked its havoc, and it's unclear at this point how Finch and Reese will continue to save lives.

This family tree isn't originally my idea. Like so many great things in life, it started with Tumblr. Specifically, with this post posted by the blogger whose blog is Obsesiones Mias. (I feel like I should know her name, but I don't.) The contention of this post is that John Reese seems like he's a little superhuman because, perhaps, his distant ancestor was Kainan - a character in the film Outlander*, also played by Jim Caviezel. The character is an extraterrestrial. Kainan crash-landed on Earth in an Iron Age Viking settlement and, after defeating the space dragon he'd brought with him, he became king of the Viking clan.

At a later time, the Obsesiones Mias blogger said something about adding to the Reese family tree, which got me thinking, until at last I came up with:

It was surprisingly hard to find a way to make fictional family trees online. I gave up the search and instead used a scrapbooking website, CropMom. It's not the most elegant scrapbook page ever - I made it in a bit of a rush.

Let me break down the line of descent:

We can begin the John Reese family tree with Mary.



Her son, Jesus...



...married Mary Magdalene (well, that's one possible scenario, isn't it?)...



...who was pregnant at the time of Jesus' death. Different versions of folklore disagree as to whether the couple had a daughter or a son, but let's say, hypothetically, they had a daughter. This is actually an image said to represent Mary Magdalene, but it could be how the daughter of Jesus and Mary looked. (Some people say her name was Sara. I can't remember if her name is mentioned in The Da Vinci Code or not.)



Now let's say that Sara has many generations of descendants - hundreds of years go by. Some say that the Merovingian kings of France were her descendants. Imagining that she was the ancestress of a royal line, let us speculate that some of her royal descendants migrated northward, to the Viking regions. Let's say that one of her descendants was the warrior-king Hrothgar.



Hrothgar is on the viewer's left, portrayed by John Hurt. You may remember John Hurt best as Mr. Ollivander from the Harry Potter movies; I do too, but I also like to think of him as Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. You may also remember that Hrothgar is the name of the king whose realm is under attack from Grendel in Beowulf, but I don't think the Outlander movie is meant to imply that this is the same Hrothgar.

Hrothgar's daughter, Freya - a warrior princess - marries Kainan, the outlander.



Presumably, they have children who have both royal DNA and Kainan's extraterrestrial DNA. We'll just assume Kainan's DNA is close enough to that of Homo sapiens that he and Freya can interbreed without difficulty. Their princes and princesses have descendants, some of whom may end up in France (or back in France, if that's where we imagine Mary Magdalene and her offspring ended up).

Hundreds of years later, one of their descendants may have been Edmond Dantes.



Dantes, after many long years of suffering, married Mercedes.



I imagine they had several children together (at the end of the movie, Mercedes rests her hand on her belly, which I always think means she's already pregnant again), but their oldest was Albert. If Albert resembles Superman, it's probably because of the Kainan DNA. Superman is an alien, too.



Albert Dantes, born in the early 1800s, had descendants who, several generations later, included John Reese.



Maybe Reese is the last of this bloodline. But maybe there's a baby Carter-Reese in his future.

*Not to be confused with the 2014 movie based on Diana Gabaldon's time-travel romance novel also called Outlander.

If you need me, I'll be counting down the hours until 10 p.m. Eastern.

Mabon Greetings, Day 2: Let's Talk About Sif

Yesterday we talked about Mabon; today I'll focus on a Northern European goddess strongly associated with the grain harvest, an ideal archetypal figure for a fall holiday of thanksgiving. We can learn a little about this Norse goddess, often simply referred to as "the wife of Thor" (typical patriarchy! to honor a goddess only as far as her relationship to a male divinity), from a beautiful old book I rescued from a library book sale.

My cover looks different. This image is from Amazon.co.uk, and is by this person*

This book, first published in 1957, is called The Lost Gods of England by Brian Branston (not to be confused with Breaking Bad actor Bryan Cranston!). It's all about the religious-mythological system of the British Isles during the Anglo-Saxon period, which it appears was something of a mash-up between traditional Norse mythology and Celtic mythology. The two cultures had some similarities anyway, because all Indo-European pantheons can be traced back to the very ancient religion of the Indian subcontinent.

I just made a really cool thing sound incredibly boring. Norse myth is cool, really. Otherwise, Marvel wouldn't have co-opted it for comic books, and an increasingly successful movie franchise. More on the comic book Sif later.

Sif's brief article at Encyclopedia Mythica will tell you the story of how Loki sneaked into Sif's bedroom and cut off all her golden hair. The crime was investigated by Veronica Mars - no, I'm just kidding. Thor threatened to pull an Incredible Hulk on Loki unless Loki found a way to replace the hair. The ever-resourceful trickster god went to some dwarves, who spun gold into replacement locks, which Loki then magically attached to Sif.

Lost Gods is slightly more instructive. Slightly. Sif comes up four times. The first time is on page 117 of my edition, which teaches us that the Anglo-Saxon counterpart of Thor, called Thunor, is associated with agriculture, which "make[s] for a fertility element to his cult...He is married to the golden-haired goddess Sif, the northern Ceres, another manifestation of Mother Earth." Ceres, of course, is the Roman equivalent of the Greek grain-goddess Demeter, the mother of Persephone.

She comes up again on page 123, in the myth of how Thor once fought a stone giant named Hrungnir and ended up with a piece of stone embedded in his skull. The original source for this tale is the famous Icelandic poet and politician Snorri Sturluson, who lived in the 12th and 13th centuries. Christianity came to Iceland around the year 1000, and by Snorri's time, the Norse religion was no longer the dominant one. But I digress - this myth says only that Hrungnir threatened to abduct both Sif and Freya.

As seen in this Creative Commons image, another famous Icelandic person is Bjork. 

The third reference, on page 128, is similarly brief; Branston merely asserts that Freya and Sif are the same goddess, and so is Frig.

The final reference, on page 145, takes the tale of how Sif lost her hair as a metaphor - our old favorite, the agricultural metaphor of the Annually Dying and Returning God and his mother/lover who is Mother Earth. The loss of hair is the loss of the lover ("death" of the harvested crops), and its return is the lover's return (springtime growth of new crops from seeds planted in autumn). Branston cites another version of this myth from the Norse canon. In it, Loki steals the Brisingamen (a really fancy piece of jewelry) from Freya.

Heimdall, the guardian of the godly realm of Asgard who controls the rainbow bridge, Bifrost, transforms himself into a seal selkie-style and swims out to the rock on which Loki has stashed it, and after a battle with Loki, retrieves it for the beautiful goddess of sex and death.

If you read Eternally Bad: Goddesses With Attitude by Trina Robbins, as I did many years ago, you'll read a slightly different twist on the story of Freya and the Brisingamen. In it, Freya offers her sexual services to the dwarves, whose craftsmanship produced the shining jewel (a necklace, in Robbins' telling). From this bawdy Norse myth descends the Western European folk tale of Snow White. Oddly enough, by the 20th century this was regarded as such an innocent children's tale, Walt Disney turned it into the first full-length animated Disney movie.

Public domain image, a screen capture from the trailer for the 1937 Disney film, from Wikimedia Commons

Did you wonder why the seven dwarves worked in a diamond mine?

Trina Robbins also wrote The Great Women Superheroes, which my brother bought me one Winter Holidays. It doesn't mention the Marvel Comics version of Sif. (It does, however, mention The Valkyrie, briefly a member of the Marvel "superteam" The Defenders in the 1970s.) But if you saw the 2011 movie Thor, you may remember that Sif was a character - played by a distinctly brunette actress (Jaimie Alexander). If you were a fan of that movie, you've probably already seen this.

Thor: The Dark World is scheduled for a November 2013 release. The Marvel comic book character Sif, according to the Marvel Universe wiki, first appeared in 1964. In this version of the loss of Sif's golden hair, Loki was overeager to get the replacement hair to the goddess, and over time it darkened from shining gold to jet black. The first Thor film ends with the god's mortal beloved, scientist Jane Foster (played by Natalie Portman), waiting on earth for Thor while he remained in Asgard. In the comics, Thor and Jane have a fairly brief relationship, Odin has long approved of Sif as a mate for Thor, and Thor and Sif get engaged (although they've never been married in the Marvel Universe}. Jane and Sif never come up in the next Marvel film to feature Thor and Loki, The Avengers (2012), but it's possible there may be a bit of a love triangle in The Dark World. Loki has a wife, Sigyn, both in Norse mythology and in Marvel Comics, but she isn't in the film franchise. That's because the filmmakers want Loki to be a single guy, because they know he is attractive to women. Like me. I love Tom Hiddleston as Loki, and I think Idris Elba is absolutely gorgeous with the golden eyes he has when playing Heimdall. Of course, Idris Elba is absolutely gorgeous reading the phone book, or sitting in traffic, or naked on the roof of the Empire State Building eating an Eskimo Pie. (Yeah, I reached way back into the '90s for that reference.) Did I have a point here? Ah, yes - Mabon. The mythological Sif is a great goddess to celebrate at the harvest time because she's a fertility goddess whose golden hair represents the golden sheaves of wheat, or corn, or whatever grain you have that's ripened to a golden brown in the autumn. The sexual pairing of Sif and Thor assures the fertility of the crops. We can also think of Thor and Loki - the fair-haired brother and the dark-haired brother - as archetypes of the Oak King (Thor) and the Holly King (Loki). At Mabon, Loki's powers are starting to decline. At the Winter Solstice - Yule - Loki has his final fling as Lord of Misrule and then becomes the yearly sacrifice of a warrior that Hel (underworld goddess - Loki's daughter, incidentally) demands. Thor will rule until the Summer Solstice, when they'll once again switch places. Eternally. Or at least until Ragnarok, when Loki's monstrous child the Midgard Serpent and Thor kill one another.

I made this myself at QuickMeme.

*This person is Mr. Ian Johnston of Bon Bon Books, Cottenham, Cambridgeshire, U.K. Bon Bon is one of the two bookshop dogs, both Cairn terriers. The other is named Robbie. I only mention it because it makes a charming footnote. Compare Selected Works and its bookshop cat. This is an affiliate link: League of Super Heroes: Rise of the Villain (#1) (Party Game Society Hit Party Game) by Celeste Ayers. $2.99 from Smashwords.com The League of Super Heroes HQ is under attack! A Super Hero went missing last night. Looks like someone is out for blood… someone is killing heroes… but who? Who amongst you has turned from Super Hero to Super Villain? It’s time to suit up and take control of this evil once and for all. The fate of the world is at stake. Will the good guys be victorious in sniffing out the tyrants?

Mabon Greetings

Blessed be! The Wheel of the Year turns to Mabon, the autumnal equinox, also known as harvest tide or the “witches' Thanksgiving.” Its ancient antecedent was the second of the three Celtic harvest festivals, in between Lughnasa (August 1st, also known by the Christianized name Lammas) and Samhain (the harvest of winter meat, when the grazing animals were brought down from the hills for the winter, October 31). 

Mabon is a period of equal day and night, exactly in between Midsummer Night and the Winter Solstice. What exactly is Mabon as a Neopagan/Wiccan celebration? In modern practice, it's largely a harvest festival for enjoying autumn-gathered foods. It's also a solemn time for reflection on mortality; the goddess in her dark/death-bringer aspect may be recalled at this time. 

In agricultural symbolism, Mabon represents the death of the Green Man* – the crops now die so that human beings can store up food for winter. This is sometimes symbolized by the “sacrifice” or burning of a straw man, the Harvest Lord. The last sheaf of grain to be harvested is sometimes dressed up to become the Harvest Queen. The Harvest Queen is not burned, because she represents fertility and the hope for a good harvest again the following year.

I haven't read this one - the Henry Treece that I've read was 'Red Queen.' 

Because the power of the sun appears to be declining as we now head toward the Winter Solstice, Mabon can be a time to mark the passage of loved ones (as well as a time of mourning for the Green Man and/or the sun god). If you happen to pass a grave during Mabon, you're supposed to acknowledge the person who died and make your respects.

Various ancient Celtic legends have to do with Mabon. One has to do with a Welsh god named Mabon who is born from the womb of Mother Earth – the Earth is quite literally his mother, Modron – springing forth full of knowledge and strength he gained from his mother. (The goddess Modron comes down to us in Arthurian legend as Morgan.)

Another legend has to do with the Irish gods Lugh and Tanist. The twin brothers have opposite functions – Lugh is the god of light, and Tanist is the god of darkness. At Mabon, Tanist defeats Lugh, sits on his throne and steals Lugh's lover, the goddess Tailltiu. Nine months later – at the Summer Solstice – Tailltu gives birth to...well, Tanist. He dies and is reborn every year, and the legend of the dueling brothers relates to the legend of the holly and oak kings. 

However, it's a bit difficult to get really good sources for either of these legends, so take them each with a grain of salt. For example, if we turn to Encyclopedia Mythica:

- An article on Mabon is included, mentioning that Mabon is the son of "mother goddess" and lived in Annwn, which the encyclopedia names as the Welsh underworld but does not link with the mother-goddess's womb

- An article on Modron, without reference to her as Mother Earth, calling her only "a Welsh goddess" and a prototype of the Arthurian Morgan. 

- An article on Lugh, which doesn't mention him being a god of the sun or of light (although his fertility magic is related to the ripening of the crops, which was celebrated with a 30-day summer festival which was the antecedent of modern Lughnasa) and names his consort as Rosmerta (the Gaulish goddess of "fire, warmth, and abundance;" J.K. Rowling named the Three Broomsticks barmaid after her, perhaps for Madam Rosmerta's ability to dispense an abundance of butterbeers). 

- No article on Tanist. Wikipedia says that "tanaiste" (with an accent on the first a) is an Irish Gaelic word meaning second-in-command, heir, or first deputy of the clan chief or king. Ireland still uses the word to indicate the deputy prime minister. The Wikipedia entry also says that James Frazer, in The Golden Bough, used the word to designate a "substitute for the sacred king." To say that the god Lugh has a tanaiste or tanist may simply be a way of saying that he had a highly-honored "deputy" who was sacrificed in his place. 

However, in the holly king-oak king tradition, when Lugh's reign was over, Lugh would be sacrificed to make room for Tanist. Then Tanist's reign would end, and Tanist would be sacrificed to make room for Lugh in a never-ending cycle. 

- An article on Tailltu (spelled there with only one L) that names her not as Lugh's consort, but as his nurse. 

However, it's certainly possible that Tailltu and Rosmerta are different aspects of the same goddess, and it's certainly not unknown for a fertility/agricultural god to have a mother who, in another aspect or phase, is also his lover - it's an agricultural metaphor for the relationship between the earth (mother) and seed-bearing crop (son). 

Another myth that accounts for the declining daylight at this time of year is the myth of Persephone's descent into the Underworld, which is sometimes observed at Mabon. The grain-goddess Demeter is in mourning when her daughter Persephone goes into the Underworld, and her mourning is another aspect that gives Mabon a somewhat sad, solemn character in contrast to the joy we usually associated with harvest/thanksgiving celebrations.

Here is a review of the book Persephone (Daughters of Zeus), a book written by Kaitlin Bevis. The review is written by Abbey at Finding My Forever. 

Two more Persephone books that I read and reviewed over the past year:

Miss Underworld by Rachel Kechagias

Cora: The Unwilling Queen by Amy Hutchinson

Read more at The White Goddess, Earth Witchery, Love of the Goddess, and Mystickal Realms.



*In other versions of the legend, the death of Green Man, or the Holly King/Holly Knight (Sir Gawain's Green Knight) is associated with the Winter Solstice and the Lord of Misrule or Fool who was sacrificed after his moment of glory at the solstice festival. In his place, the Oak King would rule until he was deposed by the Holly King at Midsummer, i.e. the summer solstice. In this case, it would be easy to associate dark Tanist with the Holly King and bright Lugh with the Oak King, but then Mabon would only be the halfway point in Tanist's rule. Perhaps rather than his death, Mabon commemorates the Holly King's/Green Man's/Tanist's waning power.



This is an affiliate link:

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Pairs of Really Big Ones

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Book Review: Dan Brown's 'Inferno'

I am brimming with literary excitement at the news that J.K. Rowling's post-The Cuckoo's Nest project is a screenplay based on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. It won't just be one film, but a new series. Never has there been a more appropriate time for a Potterhead "Squee!"

What I Thought of Dan Brown's Book

But more news on that as it develops. Right now, let's talk about Dan Brown's 2013 release, Inferno. I got this book at the library and was not compensated for this review in any way; it represents my own honest opinion.

When I read a Dan Brown novel, I have certain expectations:

*Robert Langdon will be man's fantasy hero, a frumpy middle-aged professor who attracts a hot, brilliant, much-younger love interest - check. (It's okay. Middle-aged men are allowed to have their fantasies, too.) In this volume, her name is Dr. Sienna Brown. The plot involves Langdon having amnesia, which is entirely appropriate, because at the beginning of each new book he has completely forgotten about the heroine of the previous novel. Vittoria who? Sophie what? Katherine hmm? In Dan Brown's imagination, female characters have very short shelf lives.

One billion bonus points to whoever writes a spin-off series in which Vittoria Vetra, Sophie Neveu, Katherine Solomon and Sienna Brown team up and solve a mystery on their own. Maybe with one brief consultation with Langdon.

Incidentally, I want to know Vayentha's whole back story, starting with what her name means.

*Historically- and culturally-rich locations? Check. In this volume, we spend most of our time in exotic Florence, the birthplace of Dante Alighieri, then travel to that hotbed of Italian intrigue, Venice, then to Istanbul. This is probably the most fun part of any Dan Brown novel - the vicarious travel.

*Horrifying vandalism of a priceless world heritage artifact? Check. This time, it would be Dante's death mask.

*Tantalizing hints of a conspiracy theory, without suggesting that any living person, government or corporation is guilty of anything we should concern ourselves with? Check.

Because I got exactly what I expected out of this book, I wasn't disappointed. My favorite will probably always be The Da Vinci Code, because as one inclined toward worship of a deity in feminine form, I never related to Robert Langdon quite so much as when he reverently knelt at the grave of Mary Magdalene. Goddess worship in mainstream fiction? More, please!

I quite enjoyed Angels and Demons as well, which I thought was pleasantly suspenseful, and that's probably still my second favorite, but I liked Inferno better than The Lost Symbol, if for no other reason than that Istanbul is more fun to explore than Washington, D.C.

The ending's a little weird. Without spoiling too much, I think I can say that the bad guy kinda wins, and there's really nothing anybody can do about it. The characters in the novel are kinda okay with it, too. What happens is an extreme solution to the world's supposed population crisis, and if this were to happen in real life, it would be absolutely heartbreaking. It's not really a happy ending at all. I wonder where Dan Brown will go next.

Issues Raised By This Book

Let it be said that in real life, while the population crisis that Brown addresses does involve some serious environmental concerns that I believe are fact-based, there's something that's never addressed: much of the human misery that's allegedly caused by "overpopulation" isn't really due to overpopulation, it's due to unequal distribution of resources. For example, we currently have enough food to feed everyone in the world - that's not why people go hungry. People go hungry because governments don't have the political will and/or the infrastructure to get food to the people who need it the most.

Also, we're not doing everything we could be doing to make our limited resources last longer. If more of us were vegetarians or semi-vegetarians (meat once a week, maybe), we could take the land we use for raising animals and the land that grows animal feed, eliminate the middleman (middle being, in this case) and feed that grain directly to ourselves instead of animals raised for slaughter. As the food-animal population gradually dwindled, we could turn grazing lands and feed lots into more land for growing grains and/or more housing for human beings. People in industrialized nations can live much-simplified lives to help people all around the world have access to more resources, if we had the collective will to do it.

It is pretty shameful that about half of pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned, though. I've read that statistic elsewhere besides in this novel. I'm childless by choice, but you know, it was never that hard for me and my husband to avoid parenthood. Is it lack of sexual education that prevents other couples from enjoying the same freedom? That's sad. Sexual education for everyone before they reach the age of 14, please. Parenthood only by free, conscious choice, and all babies wanted babies - let's make that happen! "Accidentally pregnant" should not be the default setting for a human woman in the 21st century.

So as you can see, this book raises interesting issues far beyond the needs of mere fictional storytelling.

Inferno

I read Inferno in novel class, which was a class I took the first semester of my senior year of high school - that would have been 1994. It's been quite a while. We had an Italian exchange student that year, Gabriel Violi. (My friend Sarah played viola, and every time I said "viola" he thought I was calling his name.) He read us some of the pages in Dante's original Italian, but he made sure we knew it was very strange, old-fashioned Italian. Also, he didn't speak Italian much in his day-to-day life, preferring to use his regional dialect (I forget which one) at home.

Speaking of the storytelling, though, there were a few moments that took me out of the story. One was the mention of the devil's three mouths in Dante's Inferno. Langdon was supposed to have not only read and studied The Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso) but also lectured on its symbols at Harvard. He gives some explanation for why the devil, in the lowest circle of hell, has three mouths in Dante's depiction, and later there's a mention of Judas Iscariot, but the other two traitors depicted as being in the lowest circle of hell, Brutus and Cassius (the murderers of Julius Caesar) are never mentioned. Why didn't he just say that the devil has one mouth for each of the three traitors, to take bites out of them?

That was a very minor issue I had. I bristled a little more when Langdon said, "They're called chthonics because they reside in the underworld and are associated with hell." (That weird word "chthonics," with a silent "ch," just means "subterranean.") No, Robert Langdon, "the underworld" and "hell" are concepts from two different cultures that shouldn't be confused, and you would know that better than anyone. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed in an underworld in which exceptional individuals might be slightly rewarded (in Elysium), but in general, dead human beings were not punished. They simply existed as memoryless shades. "Hell" is an underworld specifically for punishment of evil human beings who have died, and it's a concept from Zoroastrianism first and, later, Christianity. There wasn't a culture that thought the Greco-Roman underworld was hell, or that hell was the Greco-Roman underworld.

And Robert Langdon would definitely know that. He's far too academic to let something like that slide. But again, that's a pretty minor point.

Chthonics

One more thing about chthonic beings: late in the novel, Sienna and Langdon are talking about them, and Sienna says, "Medusa and the entire class of chthonic deities live underground because they're associated directly with Mother Earth. In allegory, chthonics are always symbols of--" And Langdon finishes her thought with, "Fertility." Human fertility was what the antagonist of the novel feared the most; hence his extreme solution. But what Dan Brown isn't really an explanation of why underworld deities and beings are associated with fertility, and there's another thing he isn't quite saying about the red underworld cistern of Langdon's visions (which turns out to be a place in Istanbul).

So I'll tell you, with the help of my trusty The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker. Red, underground water? That's the womb of the goddess, filled with her wise blood. Mother Earth is our mother because we came out of her womb - a dark, hidden, earthy space that encloses us fully - her underground caves. Robert Langdon is looking for the Holy Grail yet again - the Goddess's vessel or cauldron, her womb. Life starts there, and when we die, we go back into the earth, buried yet again in the Goddess's womb - from whence we could be reborn. That's the Pagan circle of life: birth, death, burial, rebirth.

Under cauldron, Walker writes, "Among the Celts of Gaul and Britain, the Cauldron of Regeneration was the central religious mystery: reincarnation within the womb of the Goddess" and "Each Celtic temple had its sacred cauldron."

To put it plainly, underworld or subterranean mythological creatures, like Medusa and Hecate, are associated with fertility because they live directly in earthen caves and in the underworld - they live directly inside the Goddess's womb.

Stars

Finally, the last word of this book is "stars." If you know The Divine Comedy, then you'll know why the last word in the book had to be "stars."

Ms. Destiny, 9 and 14 - Happy 30th Birthday, Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse would have turned 30 years old today.



I wrote a beautiful Amy Winehouse tribute post that I published on Sept. 10, 2012. Unfortunately, it used the old Pinterest codes and the old YouTube embedding format, and when I tried to update it, I destroyed it. That may be the first time in five years that I deleted a blog post, but my html knowledge is more basic than that required to fix the boo-boos.

So I had to start anew.

The first time I ever heard an Amy Winehouse song, I was at my small town's lgbtqia bar (sadly, now but a memory - you can read its elegy in "Gold Lipstick at the End of the Rainbow"). Someone sang "Rehab" at the karaoke bar. I thought it was an interesting song, but it wasn't love at first listen.



The songs that made me fall in love with Amy Winehouse's voice were "Me and Mr. Jones" and "You Know I'm No Good." Then I started reading From Here to Eternity, fell ass-backwards in love with the words of James Jones (it was my major obsession last year), and in my mind I linked "Me and Mr. Jones" with Mr. James Jones.



This is how my mind works. (See also: "Whistle")

This happened. And I haven't stopped listening to Amy since.



Jewish chicks and black eyeliner - a match made in ancient Egypt.



I think this is one of the loveliest songs Amy ever recorded.

I still haven't read Mitch Winehouse's book Amy, My Daughter. I think it would make me sad to read about Amy through the eyes of the dad who loved her so much. I'm sure he shares lots of happy memories of her, though. Not just the tough stuff.

If you've ever loved an addict, then you know how you can regard them with a mixture of love, anger and loathing - but you still love them.

A Possibly True Hollywood Story: My Dad's Stories About His Grandfather

This is Buster Crabbe.

Public domain image within the United States

The Old Hollywood movie star isn't exactly a household name today, but he was an Olympic swimmer who won a gold medal in 1932, and he played Tarzan, Buck Rogers, and Flash Gordon in movie serials in the 1930s.

Public domain image

My dad claims that somewhere, he possesses a photo of Buster Crabbe posing with my great-grandfather Bill. Bill and Buster were supposedly drinking buddies. Although my great-grandfather was born and lived most of his life in Colorado (my grandfather, also named Bill, was born in Fort Collins), he did live for a time in Los Angeles. 

Family legend has long held that my grandfather ended up in the Navy and at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 - he was 17 years old - because, as a juvenile delinquent running around L.A., a judge sentenced him to either prison or military service.

A family photo of Grandpa Bill in his Navy uniform.
Circa 1941.

Now I know another little bit, at least according to my dad (also named Bill):

Great-grandpa Bill, possibly still married to Wife #2 (Grandpa Bill's mother, Anna Wien, was Wife #1), went to L.A. to pursue the future Wife #3 (at least common-law wife; the woman my dad called Grandma had the last name of Suttlemeyer. She may have been an immigrant from Germany), who worked as a seamstress on one of the movie studio lots. (At various times, Buster Crabbe worked for Universal, Paramount and smaller studios. The Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers series were from Universal.)  His relationship with Ms. Seamstress was how Great-Grandpa Bill came to be friends with Buster Crabbe.

Great-grandpa Bill, like Dad Bill, was a police officer. I think this was in L.A., but it may have been/also have been in Colorado. He went on a burglary call at a bar one day. He caught the thief in the act, and the thief swung an iron pipe at Great-Grandpa Bill. In self defense, Great-Grandpa Bill shot the burglar and killed him. Although the burglar was over six feet tall and looked like an adult, Great-Grandpa Bill found out the thief was only fourteen years old. Great-Grandpa Bill was very distraught over this and was never able to work as a police officer again. 

Great-Grandpa Bill later became a truck driver. He drove the tanker trucks that deliver gasoline to service stations. As a child, my dad was able to go with his grandpa on some of these deliveries. Dad and Great-Grandpa Bill got along much better than Dad and Great-Grandpa Wade. My grandma's dad was the archetypal crotchety old man, and he's the one who came to live with my grandparents when my dad, aunt and uncle were growing up. Great-Grandpa Bill bought a ranch in Colorado and lived there until he died. 

That's all I know about my family's possible connection to old Hollywood. If, some day, I come across that picture, I will make copies and share them everywhere.