Leni

Leni Riefenstahl was a major force at St. Martin's Press, the small house that was quickly becoming a midsized one during my apprenticeship. She'd become our shot at entering the grown-up world of bestsellers about infamous personalities from history that give a house prestige and win awards. The attention over a hardcover edition drives sales, and a major hit is something a house can make a profit from for years, which meant everyone who could get involved did so most vocally. 

I was first introduced to her in the art department. One of my friends was jealous that another art director he considered less talented was designing the cover, and in our back-stabbing world of "celebrity" designers, you're only as good as your last cover design. It wasn't lost on me at the time that we mirrored her world of uneasy alliances made in service to art and design, because she'd worked as a filmmaker during Hitler's regime. 

After the hardcover edition went to paperback, my friend finally got to revise the design to meet his standards, and that's when we talked about Nazi Germany; at his computer, while he colorized her cover photo. He told me he could relate to her conversion to fascism (!!) through the carefully fabricated military outfits. "How seductive it must have been to a poor farm kid back then", he said to me as the son of Chinese immigrants who owned a laundry business. The leather boots, those sharp shoulders on the jacket that fit just so...

Huh. That's....eerie, dude. The first "Leni" art director would come out of the closet years later, after dumping his very masculine wife and their adopted Asian baby, before my friend finally came out as ADHD and OCD. On the heels of those twin disclosures, I could finally see what kind of monst...er, person, would be attracted to stage sets full of blond boys in matching military dress, and just like then, I still don't like what I heard as an excuse for genocide through collusion. What horror!

It brought me back to the importance of authenticity, and how very important it is that we tell the truth about our histories, hard as that may be. For my family, we finally got the happy ending we were seeking, not that we had sat around waiting for validation from anyone. My father's family had told us the truth about our Acadian Metis origins as the first generation of Europeans to intermarry with the Micmac people of Nova Scotia, because that's exactly what my dad's East Asian/Native American DNA reflects: the time period of first contact in Canada between 1780-1600s. BTW, my little native percentage showed up as a Yakutian from East Siberia before our ancestors crossed the Bering land bridge many moons ago.

And so it was no surprise to me that I remembered hearing the art directors talk about Leni Riefenstahl's fake autobiography, because it was said she had her birth certificate forged so she could profit from Hitler and the Nazi Regime as an artist. So, that isn't actually in the book? I had to know our culpability. The art director told me the editor wanted it in the epilogue, but he'd been shot down. Well...what is it? "She lied about not being Jewish, and he's Jewish, too." Oh. That's kind of big deal. 

As I wrote this piece to you, I thought about my part in the process when I relieved myself of debt from a honest lifetime spent on basic food, clothing, and shelter, bought at the time with my bargain salary of $19,500/year. I know I've paid it back in full, and then some. 
The real question is: have you? 

A New Chapter (at the end of the world)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy

Greece has officially joined the party for change this month by declaring bankruptcy and asking us for debt forgiveness, which is exactly what one of our oldest and most evolved societies should do. Ancient Greece, anyone? Yeah, that's what I thought. 

Why do they need to honor our overblown debt system, with it's petty bureaucrats and rampant corruption? For what, exactly?! Providing a template the world over for a true democracy? Or is it the concept of "no taxation without representation" that you find so insulting?! Maybe Senators piss you off because they're smarter than you, but who really cares anymore? Stuff it, wanker. 

We've had enough of the bullshit, hate, and lies. Go bankrupt yourself, and instead of finding fool's gold at the end of the it, you may find yourself among the righteous, bad publicity excluded. Hey, I feel like getting a gyro from the diner here, with extra tzatziki* sauce on the side, and a heap of freshly cooked french fries! 

Now do your homework, and maybe you can join me there sometime. Maybe.

• http://biblehub.com/acts/2-45.htm

• https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+6%3A19-21&version=ESV

• https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Timothy+6%3A6-10&version=ESV

• https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Corinthians+9%3A6-9&version=ESV

• http://biblehub.com/luke/12-33.htm 

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzatziki

 

The Queen of Versailles

The Queen of Versailles brought together several themes I've been interested in for a lifetime; the curdling of The American Dream, and the seamy ugly underbelly of a mythical beast we helped to create. What do you do when you finally wake up from that artificially pink, fluffy, Disneyland princess fantasy with a huge credit card bill and a hangover? This movie tells you exactly what happens. Consider it the antidote to the toxic poison you've been swilling for decades.

It starts off on a high roll, like the best night in Vegas you've ever had, before the collections department comes to repo your leased Benz for missed payments. We see the old head of a company married to a typical trophy wife, consuming and spending like a glutton who thinks the Thanksgiving feast will never end. She fits the marketing version of beauty that we've come to expect nowadays: tall, thin, with long, flat-ironed, dyed-blond hair, a former model (a divorced Mrs. Florida from 1993) with an obvious boob job who tans excessively, shops to excess, then brags about it, and loses herself in the process.

He sees himself as The King to her throne, and in turn labels himself a kingmaker for his huge campaign contributions to then-President George W. Bush Jr., claiming credit for securing his presidency, though he is loathe to disclose details that he hints may be "illegal". They're a horrible couple blinded by greed, with cartoonishly bad taste in just about anything and everything you can think of: food, art, design, pets, clothing, furnishings, and houses. On a serious money high, they embark on building the largest private residence in the world that they dub "Versailles", through bank credits and mortgages.

Because his fortunes are based on selling Florida timeshares to the working poor through pyramid schemes and high pressure sales tactics, like fly-by-night con-men selling uninhabitable swampland as a vacation paradise, he can't actually afford what you see in the film. It's almost all on credit, living just like the vulnerable people he directs his pitchmen to target and attack. When the market flips on them in 2008, you see how little resources the couple actually have to draw upon, and the depths to their superficiality that exist on every level. There's no emotional support between them, because their marriage isn't built on that. There's no financial support, because bankers turn cruel when your money dries up. 

When they start going downhill, no one around them can stop the landslide. Their nannies struggle to clean up after them, because the wife is too incompetent to run a large household. The staff is also awash in debt. In an ironic Capitalist twist, one of their nannies is in foreclosure for her modest home at the same time their Versailles goes into foreclosure, a horrid symmetry when the supposed "rich" and "poor" are exactly alike. The other nanny raises their eight children, seven of them and a family niece, because the wife got hooked on having babies when she found out she wouldn't have to raise them. In another heart-breaking reveal, we find out that her nanny, broken down and in tears, hasn't seen her own son, who lives in the Philippines, for years, because she saves every penny she can to send home to her family who depend upon her.

It is cruel and bleak and savagely funny because it's obvious to us that they are steeped in dysfunction and compulsion. He proclaims himself the victim of a money-lending system that got him "hooked" on cheap available cash, which we feel very little sympathy for. The banks stop the joy ride when he doesn't deliver on empty promises built upon the backs of people too crippled to bail themselves out, let alone their rich master. His third wife is snared in all the usual traps that women like her fall into: shopping sprees with unlimited spending and expensive cosmetic procedures, because her prince of a husband has already charmingly joked about trading her in for younger models. Isn't that funny? No? I wanted to cry, too - how little value they have as humans, because they've become zombified through addictions that have become deeply entrenched in the American lifestyle.

When I was on my way to the library to return the DVD, I ran into a new friend who was coming out as I was walking in. We discussed our DVD selections. I talked about the documentary I just saw and my ideas for this piece. He confessed to being a salesmen for timeshares while living in Florida years prior; a man on welfare, living in a tiny room in a dilapidated building that has one shared run-down bathroom on the second floor, piecing together part-time work through a series of small jobs, going to community college in the hopes of a better life, battling drug addiction and mental illness. He admitted to me that psychological tactics were an important part of the job, and that he himself bought a timeshare back then, too. Of course he did.

http://www.magpictures.com/thequeenofversailles/