The Most Memorable Thing About 2014

Of all the instantly memorable things that happened in 2014, of all the phenomena that warmed our hearts or raised our hackles, one thing stands out.

Alex from Target, captured for posterity in a viral photo.

If you were alive at any point in the last year, you saw the photo of this teenager bagging groceries at a Target. What an unforgettable image that says so much about our lives in 2014! We really should send this photo into space so aliens will discover it, or perhaps put it in a time capsule alongside a copy of the Constitution and the original lyric sheet to Rebecca Black’s “Friday.”

Why is this photo so momentous? It’s a teenager! With brown hair! Working at a retailer with hundreds of nationwide locations! And he’s wearing a red uniform shirt!

If you still don’t understand the significance of Alex, then you’re just out of it and I feel bad for you. Whenever I read an account of a photo going viral or “charming the web” or something like that, I don’t question. I obey. I immediately move that viral thing to the top of the inbox of my permanent memory. I mean, CNN interviewed Alex and as we know from its extensive coverage of people with upset stomachs on cruise ships, as well as the theorizing of where a plane that disappeared over the Pacific Ocean could have possibly ended up, the network only covers the crème de la crème of news. 

Along with my wedding day and other select events from my life, I will take my memory of Alex from Target to my grave.

A Little More Sunlight

The sky tilted a little sometime yesterday. Today we have a bit more sunlight than we did. The dying spark on the horizon when we leave work will slowly fan itself into a fire before we know it.

I sigh in frustration at BJ’s, waiting with one item behind several people. Then the two people in front of me see me with just a box of coffee and let me in front of them.

Traffic is all screwed up but then I hear on the news that they are getting closer to finishing widening 202 so maybe it will get better.

I hunger for new music and then days before Christmas, Madonna releases six surprise songs and I can’t get a chorus out of my head.

We wait for spring to come and put our house on the market and it takes forever. But that little drip in the basement seems to have disappeared.  

Money piles up on the credit card. A debt somewhere else disappears.

The grass is brown and the garden is dead but the snows they predicted are holding off so far.

There is death and the threat of death. But there is also the promise of birth.

At the darkest time of year, we get a little more sunlight every morning and every night. When life is drab with clouds, maybe there is still some light under everything.

TV I Watched in 2014

We watch a ton of TV. Here’s the good stuff.

Honorable Mention. The Strain. This show was ridiculous and gross beyond belief but there were two moments I thought were worth it. One is when the villain bellows “You son of a bitch! How daaaare you defy meee?!” in a way that makes Ethel Merman look subtle. The other is when you see two people in the background of a shot discussing something on a hotel balcony. Even though the man throwing the other person off the balcony is telegraphed a mile away, it’s no less hilarious when it happens.

Honorable Mention. House of Cards. This show deserves a mention because they killed off annoying ferret Kate Mara in the first episode by having the vice president push her in front of a train. It was like they heard my complaints.

9. Blackish. I am really enjoying the show’s exploration of getting your kids back in touch with their heritage when they didn’t grow up under the same circumstances as you. Tracee Ellis-Ross is wonderful and those twins are adorable.

8. The Goldbergs. Wendi McLendon-Covey is a treasure and a big part of why this show makes me laugh out loud. My favorite episode is when the father tried to pass off the theme from Family Ties as his wedding renewal vows and the mother countered with the theme of The Facts of Life.

7. The Middle. Even in whatever season we’re up to now, The Middle is as funny and frank about the working class as ever. The highlight this year was Frankie mistakenly buying a dollhouse dining room table, thinking she was getting a great deal for once.

6. Parks and Recreation. I liked the arc about Pawnee merging with Eagleton and their Doppelgangers. This show is hilarious but I guess it is time to end. It’s a shame that NBC is burning off the remaining episodes in a bizarre half-season in a weird time slot. It deserved better. And if Amy Poehler leaves without an Emmy, it will be an injustice. Still, when the show ends, your eyes are gonna piss tears.

5. Orange Is the New Black. The addition of Vee to the cast was a great move since the show needed some prisoners who were straight-out villains and not just people who were flawed but sympathetic. There have to be some people, even in a minimum security prison, who are just evil. What Vee did to manipulate Crazy Eyes and Taystee was tragic. Her demise was quite satisfying but I will miss Lorraine Toussaint.

4. Fargo. The starkness of the Minnesota landscape was like a manifestation of this story’s battle between good and evil. The evil was the man who knowingly sent his wife to her death via an assassin who had been targeting him. The good was Officer Molly Solverson doggedly solving the crime, with a deft performance by Allison Tolman. Fargo evoked the feel of the movie but didn’t just rehash it. 

3. The Walking Dead. Alright, I surrender. After resisting this show for years, I finally enjoy it. I think the group we have now is the strongest of the series and I am particularly invested in where the story takes badass Carol, who has become my favorite. I still have some problems with the writing but I can’t deny that The Walking Dead is one of those shows where I can’t wait to see what happens from week to week.

2. Mad Men. The first half of season seven started slow with most of the characters very unhappy amidst the chaos of 1969. The last two episodes were sublime. The scene with Don and Peggy dancing to “My Way” during an all-nighter really drew on the characters’ history, as did the end with those two and Pete, the work family, sharing a meal at Burger Chef. The tribute to Bert Cooper at the end was beautiful, graceful and strange and linking it to the moon landing was poetry. I will be sad when these characters leave to journey into the ‘70s.

1. The Americans. By a mile, The Americans was the best TV show I saw this year. The second season may have even been better than the first season as the show dug deeper into what it means to be parents when you’re Soviet spies posing as Americans. The performances were outstanding, particularly from Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, who often play roles within roles within roles. The season finale’s revelations were like a bucket of ice water in the face. It amazes me that The Americans, with two lines of dialogue, can express a sentiment so loaded and tantalizing:

Philip: It would destroy her.

Elizabeth: To be like us?

Season three cannot come quickly enough.

Movies I Saw in 2014

It is one of our greatest American traditions for me to rank the best movies of the year for discriminating cinephiles. We don’t go to the movie theater much so this is limited to the few 2014 movies we saw outside our house. I didn’t see any prestige pictures yet. It’s mostly superhero movies.

99. Into the Storm. I knew this wouldn’t be a cinematic triumph but just wanted to see some tornado special effects. It wasn’t worth the scene with the tornado of fire. The acting was even worse than you thought it would be. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

71. Godzilla. Not a fan. I fell asleep in the theater (we had just flown home from vacation).

4. X-Men: Days of Future Past. This movie played fast and loose with some of the details of the comics classic but for what it was, it worked. I understand why they had to change the main character to Wolverine because audiences are going to want to watch him run around more than Kitty. The only thing I didn’t like is that so many D-list mutants were alive in the future. The original was so poignant because only the core group was left. They also could have thrown in an appearance by Rachel Summers, who was so crucial to the X-Men mythos. I loved how preventing the dystopian future rebooted the series. As resetting franchises goes, it was a smart, in-story way to do it, rather than just starting a new series in three years and not acknowledging what came before.

3. Guardians of the Galaxy. Initially I had no interest in seeing this, as I didn’t care about many of the C-list characters. But what a treat to see a comic movie with such humor and such heart. In a completely different role than his Parks and Recreation character, Chris Pratt wins me over.

2. Captain America: The Winter Soldier. This may have been my favorite superhero movie yet, a riveting adaptation of the acclaimed comic story that brought the long-lost Bucky back into circulation as a brainwashed former Soviet killer. It played like a ‘70s spy thriller and in dismantling SHIELD, was a true alteration of the status quo for the Marvel movies. The tension-filled scene with Captain America getting ready to fight Hydra agents in the elevator was one of my favorite scenes of the year.

1. Gone Girl. Yes, Amy is psychotic but she still has a point about how men can treat women in the “Cool Girl” speech. Her husband is no prize either and by the end of the movie, you realize these two were made for each other. I don’t know if Gone Girl was a dark comedy or thriller or what but there is enough meat there to warrant discussion and elevate the movie. If you’ve read the book, this adaptation is very faithful, only without the last few knockout lines of dialogue. The cast is wonderful, including sulky Ben Affleck, level-headed Carrie Coon, creepy Neil Patrick Harris and hilarious Casey Wilson. Best of all is Rosamund Pike, who deserves an Oscar nomination for her terrifyingly unknowable performance.

How do superheroes celebrate the holidays?

What with having to stop would-be world conquerors seemingly once a month, superheroes probably find it hard to celebrate the holidays. But sometimes festive occasions do pop up in the Marvel Universe.

Nobody seemed to celebrate X-Mas as often as the X-Men. The first Christmas I remember is at the beginning of the Chris Claremont run. Marvel Girl, Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Banshee celebrate Christmas Eve 1976 by taking a trip to Manhattan. Unfortunately, Sentinels attack and ruin their night on the town, kidnapping Jean, Scott and Logan into space. It was in this storyline that Jean ends up becoming Phoenix after the team’s spaceship crash lands.

A famous holiday X-Men story took place in Uncanny X-Men #143. Kitty Pryde has just joined the team and is spending Christmas Eve 1980 alone at the mansion. A nasty monster attacks her and she must use her wits to defeat it, which she does by trapping it in the hangar bay and incinerating it in the Blackbird’s engine thrust, a move explicitly inspired by Alien. The battle wrecks the Danger Room and a lot of the house but the Kitty proves herself very capable. The issue ends as the X-Men bring Kitty’s parents to the mansion for a surprise Hanukkah visit.

The X-Men later proved they have no luck visiting Manhattan for Christmas. In 1996, the same thing happened as it did in the ‘70s as the team gets kidnapped into space during a holiday visit. This time it was the Gladiator who spirits the team away for a battle in the Shi’ar Galaxy.

I don’t remember any Avengers Christmas stories, so I guess things were quiet around Avengers Mansion in December. I do remember Christmas 1981 at the Baxter Building, when Reed Richards invents a high-tech artificial Christmas tree that sort of folds into itself. This aggravates Susan, apparently not a fan of fake trees.

Christmas 1985 was a particularly bleak holiday season for Matt Murdock in my all-time favorite comic story, “Born Again” in Daredevil. Kingpin has discovered Daredevil is Murdock, a blind lawyer, and destroys Matt’s life. He ends up penniless and mentally unstable, confronting a small-time crook wearing a Santa suit in Times Square, getting beaten up for his troubles. Meanwhile, Matt’s estranged girlfriend Glorianna gets mugged at Rockefeller Center while Christmas shopping and leaves him for his best friend Foggy Nelson. Daredevil spends a horrible Christmas morning collapsing and nearly dying at the gym he trained at as a kid, before being saved by his long-lost mother, who has become a nun. Yeah, it was kind of an involved story.

Anyway, happy holidays, whether superheroic or not.

What is Marvel's Illuminati?

By request, the time has come to explain Marvel’s Illuminati. I don’t know the group that well since they started well after I bowed out of current comics to relive the past but they do factor a lot into my other writings so I’ll take a shot.

The Illuminati is basically the smart club of the Marvel Universe. It’s a group of highly intelligent and powerful people who focus on major threats rather than just worry about saving civilians from danger. They’re kind of overlords who make tough decisions “for our own good.”

The Illuminati consists of Reed Richards, super-intelligent leader of the Fantastic Four; Iron Man, wealthy industrialist and founding Avenger; Black Bolt, king of the Inhumans; Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme; Black Panther, king of Wakanda; Namor the Sub-Mariner, king of Atlantis; and the Beast, the scientist and X-Man who replaced Professor X in the group after his death.

What do these people all have in common? They are intelligent and powerful people who have sometimes come undone due to their hubris. That is why Captain America, one of the great leaders of the Marvel Universe, is conspicuous in his absence. Cap does not believe in lording over the Marvel Universe from the shadows as this group sometimes does. The Illuminati mid-wiped Captain America after he challenged them, which is a major ethical violation.

One of the Illuminati’s greatest hits is how they dealt with the Hulk. Finally fed up with his destruction, the group launched the Hulk into space, but the plan backfired. The Hulk ended up conquering the planet and coming back for vengeance against the Illuminati. Great work, everybody. More recently, there has apparently been a story that involved other Earths nearly colliding with ours. To save our planet, the Illuminati decided to blow up the alternate Earths. The moral implications to this are staggering. You could say they made a tough decision that nobody else was willing to make but it never should have come to that.

That’s my philosophical problem with the Illuminati: It never should have come to that. Blowing up a planet is just too dark for heroes. I don’t mind some darkness and moral ambiguity in the Marvel Universe as I certainly don’t need everything to be happy-go-lucky like some Superman story from the ‘50s. But in recent years, nobody seems very heroic. Rather than saving civilians from danger, they just fight with each other.

The Illuminati both illustrate and contradict the difference between Marvel and DC. As brilliantly illustrated in the Avengers/JLA miniseries, Superman visits the Marvel Universe and sees the despotism of Doctor Doom and the prejudice against mutants and rages that heroes like the Avengers do too little to fight evil. Captain America visits the DC universe, sees how people worship their heroes, and feels the Justice League of America parades around like gods and almost rule the planet as overlords. Both heroes exaggerate, and both heroic models have pros and cons, but the story was a fascinating look at the contrasts between the two universes. The Illuminati, however, stray too far into the DC “too much intervention” model, going far beyond anything in DC to become tyrannical. It’s something Captain America, a World War II veteran, would certainly recognize and warn against.

Next in Line

Days later, I wonder if the mother and daughter are still in Bath and Body Works, standing at the counter, waiting for the cashier to ring up their purchases correctly.

I didn’t time how long I was standing in line behind them but it seemed excessive. It was long enough to be noticeable. It was long enough to slow down the Christmas shopping roll I had been on, getting in and out of stores quickly until I hit a brick wall on my last stop.

The mother fiddles with various pieces of plastic in her purse. The cashier rings up each item separately, with a concentration that is almost bovine. I have mentally gone over my list of remaining Christmas shopping. I can’t make out everything they’re buying. It seems like a lot of little bottles of lotions and things. I mentally go over next week’s grocery list. Then the cashier starts taking each item out of the bag. He unwraps a delicately wrapped glass bottle. I start counting floor tiles. He starts ringing everything up again.

I remember the settlement on our house took about half an hour.

This was my fault, really. After doing so much shopping online, I figured going to physical stores might be a change of pace, especially for things like clothing. I don’t like physically shopping but sometimes it’s nice to leave the house. Sometimes.

Maybe I shouldn’t judge. Maybe things are just that complicated at Bath and Body Works that it takes many minutes of price scanning and double checking and all other sorts of precautions. It may be that the scented potions that the store sells in those little bottles are just too precious for anybody to walk in off the street to buy. Maybe there’s a screening process, like with a new car.

Of course, it could all be some kind of bizarre cover. Maybe the woman and her daughter are spies who are helping the cashier break into the NSA computers. Maybe each step of the complicated process brings them closer to government secrets.  

In any case, I’m still standing behind them, too meek to speak up but becoming less meek by the second, if only in my own head. The woman in line behind me finds an employee at the front of the store who asks where the other cashier is. The cashier/spy says she’s in the bathroom but she’s been there for some time. The third employee rings me up with an apology. I swipe my credit card and the whole thing takes 30 seconds.

The mother and daughter may still be at the store. Maybe it stayed open all night until they could pay for their soaps and lotions. Maybe they’re slumped over the counter and hungry and tired and cranky. Can we expedite this? There are only 14 shopping days til Christmas.

Stay

Last weekend while wrapping Christmas presents, I was watching It’s a Wonderful Life, which is one of my traditions. The movie was overexposed for years, being shown repeatedly on TV as its copyright had expired, but I still think it’s a masterpiece.

Some people might think the movie is hokey, with all the “every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.” When I was younger, I thought the ending, with everybody helping out George Bailey, was a little too sugary. But I have come to realize that this is one movie that earns its happy ending though the darkness that precedes it.

Beyond the romantic moments like offering to lasso the moon for Mary, there was a lot of darkness in George’s life. He went deaf after saving his brother from falling in an icy lake. He got beaten by a depressed, drunken pharmacist after pointing out a prescription error. He gave up his dreams and financial success to save the Bailey Building and Loan from disaster.

The most horrifying of all scenes comes on Christmas Eve when George returns home and takes his anger out on his children after facing financial ruin and possible jail time. The look on George’s face when he hugs his son to his chest, like he’s simultaneously protecting him and hanging onto him for his sanity, is shattering every time. Then Mary tells him, “Why must you torment the children? Why don’t you —” and stops herself. George looks at her and heads for the snowy bridge. That is pitch black.

So I watch It’s a Wonderful Life every year and reach the catharsis at the end, with the people of Bedford Falls gathering to bail out George, “the richest man in town.” I’ve just been thinking about this lately as my cousin Raymond committed suicide at the end of September. I know I haven’t said much about this but you know how I am with communication. I haven’t written anything on it because I didn’t have the heart at first and didn’t want to use someone’s pain as fodder for some kind of art or navel-gazing. But I feel I should say something because as I make blogs out of things that truly don’t matter, something that really does matter is certainly worth writing about.

Raymond was 44 and had a wife and three daughters, to whom he was devoted. I did not realize he had been having any problems but I hadn’t seen too much of him in the past few years so I didn’t have a window into his thinking. He did come to the wedding and I saw him once after that. Now I wish I had spent more time with him. He was the type of person who did so much with his life (he was a Navy SEAL, a nurse and later owned his own construction business). Those pictures displayed at the wake with him smiling with his family were very true to who he was.

A few things strike me now. I can’t speculate on what was going on in Ray’s mind and maybe it’s ultimately unknowable, so I don’t know what kind of problems preceded this. But I just feel sorrow and horror for how deep down people can go. How terrible does the situation have to be for people to feel they are better off gone, leaving behind their families?

The other thing is that there had to be hundreds of people at my cousin’s funeral. We waited an hour in line just to get into the funeral home. All those people loved him and nobody was able to save him. I realize you can’t swoop in like a superhero and save people. Not every George Bailey gets the angel Clarence talking him down off the bridge. That doesn’t make it a truth that is any easier to confront.

Since this can be a season for depression, what I do hope is that more people who are going through something will get help with it. Whatever people are suffering with, hopefully it helps to know that, for God’s sake, there are people who want them to stay.

Way to Ruin It, Ladies

That Bill Cosby rape scandal sure is sad. Dozens of women have come forth to accuse a beloved, groundbreaking comedian of drugging and assaulting them. But you know what the saddest part is? It’s what this all means for me. It’s that I can no longer enjoy reruns of The Cosby Show.

Heathcliff Huxtable has always been an archetypal TV father, being loving and indulgent to his kids but disciplining them when he needed to. Now a sick feeling will come over me whenever I watch him lecture Theo that “I brought you into this world and I can take you out” or eat a massive hoagie that he knows he should stay away from. Sure, I could still watch Cosby for the whip-smart charm of Claire Huxtable or Rudy’s lip-synch routines but most of it is just ruined by all this rape business and my rerun viewing habits are inconvenienced.

Way to ruin it, ladies.

We could have avoided all this if you’d just overcome the pain of being subjected to a violent crime and taken the very real risk that reporting a rape by a wealthy, powerful, popular entertainer would have destroyed your career. Why did you wait so long to have your allegations minimized and have lawyers and misogynists drag your name through the mud? It defies explanation.

We could have all been happy but since this scandal has forced TV Land to stop showing The Cosby Show, now I can’t just have the show on in the background while I’m making dinner or folding laundry. I can’t waste time at work reading articles and top 10 lists reminiscing about the 30^th anniversary of the sitcom. My childhood now has a black mark on a tiny, tiny part of it. What a tragedy. For me.

And that’s not even getting into the Jell-O pudding pops. What a disgrace that I can no longer enjoy them without feeling dirty. I don’t believe they’ve actually made these things in years, but still.

Again, this is about me. Can’t we just all think of what’s important here? My needs?

Shave

Now that Movember is over, the mustachioed men of America are free to … carry on like they always have. They had facial hair before and will have facial hair afterwards. So many men have facial hair now that wouldn’t a more effective way to show you care about a disease be for people with mustaches and beards to shave them off for a month? 

I’m not mocking anyone’s commitment to disease here; just poking fun at the ubiquity of beards. Sure, if I grew facial hair, everybody would notice because I’ve never had it. But for most men, it seems like they have some kind of facial hair already so the charity idea is not as noticeable. I think the only people I noticed growing facial hair last month were Joe Buck and Troy Aikman.

So next year, everybody shave for cancer awareness. What’s that? You look too young without facial hair? Your face is too sensitive? Think of the children. Don’t you care about all those kids with prostate cancer? What a monster.

I am fine with people have facial hair and am certainly not anti-beard. I even got used to my husband having a beard. It’s just not anything I would personally ever do, at least not again. Remember when I grew a mustache and beard for Jesus Christ Superstar? I looked so old and I was only 30. Looking any older than I absolutely have to is completely unacceptable for me. I realize my hair is gray but it’s just too aggravating to dye it (I tried once) and it’s too jarring because everyone would immediately notice.

Don’t give me that “you look distinguished” because “distinguished” is code for “old.” It’s a way to sugarcoat something. It’s like calling someone’s house “cute.” You mean “small.”

No, it’s clean shaven for me from now until I’m in a coffin. Facial hair is ubiquitous but I don't believe everyone looks good with it or that it’s something that all men need to do. Some people look terrible with facial hair and I’m one of them. Even if someone liked it, that’s fine but it’s my face and I have to look at it in the mirror so I’m never not shaving. I have even read that so many men have beards now that having bare cheeks is like a new trend. Maybe for once in my life I will finally be trendy.

The Inhumans? Who?

The Inhumans are another Marvel property that will get a movie in a few years. I’m not sure how many non-comics readers have heard of them since they were never really A-listers.

The Inhumans are a genetically altered subculture that first appeared in the Fantastic Four in the ‘60s. Although basically human, they acquire superpowers when exposed to the Terrigen Mist. The group lived for centuries in the city of Attilan in the Himalayas. After the Inhumans began to suffer the effects of Earth’s pollution, Reed Richards helped them move Attilan to the blue area of the moon, a lunar area with a breathable atmosphere that is home to the Watcher and was the place where Dark Phoenix disintegrated herself.

The king of the royal family of the Inhumans is Black Bolt. His voice is so powerful that one whisper from him could shatter mountains, so he is silent except in very rare circumstances. His great rival for the throne has been his brother, Maximus the Mad. Black Bolt has been one of the great leaders of the Marvel Universe and is now part of the Illuminati. 

The queen is Medusa, a woman with long red hair that she can manipulate as if the strands were hands. She has served as a member of the Fantastic Four when the Invisible Girl was on maternity leave.

Another member of the family is Crystal, who has the ability to control the four basic elements of earth, wind, water and fire. She also served briefly on the Fantastic Four and was an Avenger. She has had relationships with the Human Torch and the Sentry and I believe had an affair with the Black Knight. Crystal was also married to Quicksilver (making her part of the convoluted Maximoff/Lehnsherr family tree) and they had a child, Luna. In a twist, Luna was that rare Marvel Universe child of superheroes who was born a normal human with no powers. The marriage was later annulled.

The other main Inhuman members are the amphibious Triton; Karnak, who can detect the one flaw in an object and then use that knowledge to destroy the object; and the superhumanly strong Gorgon. Last but certainly not least is the royal family’s dog, the beloved Lockjaw. He is a massive dog with a tuning fork on his head that allows him to teleport several Inhumans at a time. He has served as a member of the Pet Avengers. You heard me right: the Pet Avengers.

The Inhumans played a major role in the great miniseries Earth X, which was a look at one of the Marvel Universe’s possible distant futures. In the story, everyone on Earth received superpowers due to the Terrigen Mist’s release to the general populace. Black Bolt sacrificed his life to call Galactus (not actually Galactus but a vastly powerful Franklin Richards believing himself to be Galactus) to stop the Celestials from birthing the Celestial embryo in the Earth’s core. It was a pretty involved plot.

There is speculation that Skye from Agents of SHIELD is an Inhuman and her father is Maximus the Mad. There is also speculation that Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch will be Inhumans instead of mutants because all mention of mutants in the Marvel Studios movies is verboten. Since the Terrigen Mist is a common origin for superpowers like mutation, that’s a good way to get around the tangle of rights issues.