Is Michael Jackson Dying?

According to recent star news, Michael Jackson is in fact dying. The following news portions and star blogs describe the condition of the "King of Pop":

Pop music icon Michael Jackson is near death, suffering from a potentially fatal genetic disease that has affected his lungs and stripped him of vitality, Jackson-biographer Ian Halperin has claimed in a recent interview.

Speaking with the UK's Sun, Halperin has been quoted saying, 'He needs a lung transplant, but may be too weak to go through with it. He also has emphysema and chronic gastrointestinal bleeding, which his doctors have had a lot of trouble stopping. It's the bleeding that's the most problematic part. It could kill him.'

• The Court Of The Dancin' King

Specifically, Halperin claims that Jackson, now 50 years old, has developed a rare alpha-1 anti-trypsin protein deficiency, leaving his lungs unable to protect themselves. He also claimed Jackson, who was photographed in a wheelchair earlier this year, had been battling the disease for several years. 'He can barely speak. The vision in his left eye is 95 percent gone. For years, Michael has been working with his doctors to make sure (the disease) doesn't progress.'

Jackson's usually outspoken and stridently defensive publicist and family members have not moved to deny the claim, which in turn has only fueled speculation.*

*http://www.rediff.com/movies/2008/dec/22is-michael-jackson-dying.htm

Is Michael Jackson Dying From Deficiency Disease?*

Posted by Fara Kearnes on December 16, 2008 5:00 PM | Permalink

InTouch Weekly is reporting that Michael Jackson IS gravely ill - and not just faking it to get out of appearing in court. He's alleged to be ill with Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency and a load of other stuff.

Ian Halperin, an investigative journalist tells the magazine: "He's had it for years but it’s gotten worse. He needs a lung transplant but may be too weak to go through with it.He also has emphysema and chronic gastrointestinal bleeding, which his doctors have had a lot of trouble stopping. It’s the bleeding that is the most problematic part. It could kill him."

Halperin added, "For years, Michael has been working with his own doctors to make sure his condition doesn’t progress. He has been on many medications that have stabilized him."

The journalist claims the King of Pop can "barely speak" and "the vision in his left eye is 95 percent gone.”

A close friend of Jackson told Halperin that the singer is scared he won’t live longer than six months.

“Michael wants to have the lung transplant but because of other illnesses he’s fighting he’s too weak to undergo such a major procedure,” the friend said. “He’s taking one painkiller after another. I’ve known him over 20 years and have never seen him in such a frail state. It’s very sad.”

If Jackson is ill, and nearly broke, and wanting to leave something for his kids - that would explain his plans to sell much of his stuff at a massive estate sale scheduled for April 21 to April 25 in Beverly Hills. Included in the auction will be more than 2,000 of his personal items, including the white glove he wore in the 1983 video for “Billie Jean” and the wrought-iron gates from his Neverland Ranch.

*http://www.starblogs.net/archives/2008/12/is_michael_jackson_dying_from.html

Panic At the Disco...

Panic at the Disco is my new favorite band. Some of their songs are controversial, with song titles such as "Lying is the Most Fun a Girl can have without taking her clothes off" and  "The only difference between Martyrdom and Suicide press coverage".  I love their style; its so much fun blast Panic, dance around and sing at the top of my lungs in my room!! :-) 

Mona Lisa Smile & Gender roles in today's media

Mona Lisa Smile (2003) is a motion picture that depicts a woman named Katherine Ann Watson who travels from sunny, liberal Southern California to the cold, and traditionally conservative campus known as Wellesley College in order to teach art history. It is at this institution where women are taught some academics (art, languages, history, etc.), but the underlining purpose of Wellesley is to teach the girls who attend how to be a good wife- to thrive domestically.

     Ms. Katherine Watson (played by Julia Roberts) was criticized by many at Wellesley for being too liberal. Rather than sticking to the syllabus that was originally given to her in order to teach the art history course, she talked about and showed the class more contemporary pieces. One of the main characters, Betty Warren, publicly humiliated Ms. Watson in an article in the school newspaper, stating that Ms. Watson had “declared war on the sacrament on marriage, she had subversive and political thinking that taught Wellesley girls to reject the roles they were born to fulfill”.

Watson challenged this article by questioning the recent ads (from the era- the 1950s) in class the day that the article was released to the students. One advertisement in particular that was displayed to the class that day was one about girdles. The woman in the picture was wearing one and looked ecstatic, as if it was the best article of clothing she owns. Under this captioning is a quote that reads “A girdle to set you free”. Ms. Watson expressed to the class that day that she can’t understand how a woman who graduates from Wellesley can simply decide to stay at home cooking and cleaning all day. Katherine was deeply offended by this article. She had no intention of ruining the “roles women were born to fill” mindset of some of the students at Wellesley by instilling wisdom and excellence into her students.

     Mona Lisa Smile also illustrated the lives of the girls whom Ms. Katherine Watson taught. These beautiful ladies lived together in the dormitories and participated in various college social events as well. One of these students, Joan is an extremely bright and talented girl who expressed interest in going to law school after graduating from Wellesley. She informs Ms. Watson of her desire and she helps Joan acquire an application and provided any other vital information for the admissions process.

     The audience learns later on in the film that Joan chooses being a housewife over early admission to Yale University’s Law School. When she informed Katherine that she and her fiancé had eloped, Katherine insisted that she could do both- be married and go to law school. Joan stood her ground and explained that getting married is something that she really wanted. She went on to tell Ms. Watson that she had instilled in her that she could achieve anything she wanted and that getting married and having a family is something that she truly wanted. 

GREAT JOB Com 6770 (Media Crit.) Class!! :-)

I'm watching the theorist dvd that was recorded earlier this past semester in our class. I've learned so much from all your research (and my own of course).  All hard work has paid off! :-)

Ally McBeal and Feminist studies...

I just wanted to share an interesting excerpt from my final paper for Com 6770 (Media Critisicm) in regards to Ally McBeal and some issues with feminist studies.*

Ally McBeal premiered in September of 1997. This pilot episode’s ratings “beat ABC’s Monday Night Football in terms of 18-49 year-old viewers, a novel event in the history of televised Monday Night Football” (Svetkey 1998). The show depicts the life of a single, independent woman who works in a successful law firm in Boston. “Ally McBeal represents one of the last major commercial productions to address feminism itself as the subject of its narratives as its evident in its numerous episodes on litigation and the human rights issues central to the feminist agenda, as well as its direct confrontation with sexual politics in the office” (Owen et. al 2007). The show’s creator David E. Kelly described Ally McBeal’s character in the following way:

“A positive representation of a strong, professional woman who, was not the hard, strident feminist out of the ‘60s and ‘70s…She’s all for women’s rights, but she doesn’t want to lead the charge at her own emotional expense” (Owen quoting from Bellafonte 1998).

      In addition to the Ally McBeal’s great audience’s reactions and the positive things that the creator had to say about this successful show, the series also benefited to the society in some of the content that it covered (i.e. sexual harassment laws and the issues of legal and social equity). This fact is shown through the plot line of the show’s pilot when we see that Ally quits a prominent law firm in which she got hired fresh out of Harvard Law School (Owen et. al 2007). The events that lead up to her walking out of this law firm are described as the following: “ …the firm fired her rather than Jack Billings, the senior ‘rainmaker’ partner in the firm who repeatedly grabbed Ally’s rear and who, when confronted with being fired himself, threatened to counter sue the firm under the Federal Disabilities Act, claiming he had an obsessive compulsive disorder that impelled him to squeeze butts” (Owen et. al 2007). After walking away from this situation and leaving the firm, she bumps into one of her collages from Harvard Law School named Richard Fish who invited her to join a firm that he and John Cage had started (Owen et. al 2007).  It is here at Cage and Fish, where Richard exposed Billings of his misleading and perverted defense claims. “Although the pilot episode affirmed the legal right of working women to be free from sexual harassment by powerful superiors in the workplace, it also affirmed that male power holders continue to regard occupationally competent, successful women as transgressive and attempt to discipline them through sexually infantilizing and intimidating behavior” (Owen et al. 2007). 

     Ally McBeal also came with much criticism from the more conservative spectrum. One example of this criticism came with Second Wave journalists and viewers who were frustrated at the “realization that hey were not being treated as equal partners in the civil rights movement, the peace movement, or in their everyday lives” (Owen et. al 2007). According to these feminists, Ally’s short skirts worn in the series “made her the antithesis of a feminist and a poor role model. They read Ally’s adoption of the signifiers of sexual feminine fashion as participating in the very sexism Second Wave feminism had struggled against and as legitimizing the hegemonic masculine view that all women are primarily and fundamentally objects of sexual desire” (Owen et. al 2007) .

     When Ally McBeal was at its peak (during the end of the first season), the question of  ‘Is feminism dead?’ resounded in an issue of Time magazine that came out on June 29, 1998 (Owen, et. al 2007). “Journalistic critics’ and viewers’ responses to this query were quite divided. Some argue that the series and its title character were a powerful expression of contemporary Third Wave feminism. Others asserted that the series was an elegantly crafted backlash against feminism, a televisual reflection of the antifeminist tropes in the writings of Kate Roiphe, Camile Paglia, Naomi Wolf, and Pene Denefield” (Owen, et. al  2007).

*Citations provided from the following sources:

Bellafante, Gina (1998). ‘Feminism: It’s All About Me!’, Time, pg. 58

Owen, Susan A., Stein, Sarah R., & Vande Berg, Leah R. (2007). Bad Girls: Cultural

     And Media Representations of Transgressive Women, Peter Lang Publishing, Inc:

    New York.

Svetkey, Benjamin (1998). ‘Kelley’s Heroes’, Entertainment Weekly, pp.32-34, 37-38, 40

Oracion por Marilyn Monroe (Prayer for Marilyn Monroe)

Earlier in this semester, Dr. Anne Kennedy showed a documentary in my International Communications class. Part of this documentary included a segment called "Oracion por Marilyn Monroe", this is a poem written by Erneston Cardinal. This poem (a sort of biography of Marilyn) was originally written in Spanish, but has been translated in English... I wanted to share it with whomever is willing to read. I love the imagery Ernseton uses in this poem. Enjoy!

Prayer for Marilyn Monroe

Lord

Receive this girl known around the world by the
name Marilyn Monroe
although that was not her real name
(but You know her real name, that of the little orphan girl violated
at age 9
and the little store clerk who at 16 had wanted to kill herself)
and who now presents herself before You without any makeup
without her Press Agent
without photographers and without signing autographs
alone as an astronaut facing the night of space.

She dreamt as a girl of being naked in a church
(as reported by Time)
before a prostrated crowd, with heads to the ground
and she had to walk on tiptoes so as not to tread on the heads.
You know our dreams better than the psychiatrists.
Church, home, cave, are the security of the mother’s breast
But also something more than that…
The heads are those of her fans, it is clear
(the mass of heads in the darkness beneath the stream of light)
But the temple is not the studios of 20th Century-Fox.
The temple – of marble and gold – is the temple of her body
in which the Son of Man with a whip in hand
drives out the 20th Century-Fox flesh merchants
who made Your house of prayer a den of thieves.

Lord
In this world of sins and radioactivity
You will not blame a little store clerk only.
Like all shop girls she dreamt of being a film star.
And her dream was reality (but the reality of Technicolor).
She did nothing but act according to the script that we gave her
- That of our own lives – And it was an absurd script.
Forgive her, Lord, and forgive us
for our 20th Century
for this Colossal Super-Production on which all of us have worked.

She was hungry for love and we offered her tranquilizers.
For her sadness, as we are not saints,
Psychoanalysis was recommended to her.
Remember, Lord, her growing fear of the camera
and her hatred of makeup – insisting on fresh makeup for each scene –
and how the horror kept building in her
and her late arrivals at the studio became more frequent.

Like every shop girl
she dreamt of being a film star.
And her life was unreal like a dream that a psychiatrist interprets and archives.

Her romances were a kiss with closed eyes
yet when she opened her eyes
she discovered that she was under spotlights
and they turned off the spotlights!
and they take down the two walls of the setup (it was a movie set)
while the Director walks away with his notebook
because the scene was shot.
Or like a yacht trip, a kiss in Singapore, a dance in Rio
The reception at the mansion of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor
viewed in the miserable little living room of an apartment.

The movie ended without the final kiss.
The found her dead in her bed with the phone in her hand
And the detectives didn’t know who she was going to call.
She was
like someone who had dialed the number of the single friendly voice
and had only heard the voice of a recording that told her: WRONG NUMBER
Or like someone who had been wounded by gansters
reaching for the disconnected telephone.

Lord
whoever it might have been that she was going to call
and didn’t call (and perhaps it wasn’t anyone
or it was Someone whose number isn’t in the Los Angeles Directory)
You answer the phone!

Slumdog Millionaire; life goes full circle

One of my new favorite movies is Slumdog Millionaire. I LOVE Indian people and Indian culture! :-)

     In Slumdog Millionare, Jamal Malik is  being physically tortured and antagonizing interrogated  because of the fact that some officals in India believe that he was cheating on the all famous show called “Who Wants to be a Millionare”. Throughout his interrogations, we witness many flashbacks on his life – stretching back from his childhood.  The themes seen in this inspirational film include destiny, lives going full circle, and beating the odds.

Jamal Malik was born in extreme poverty in Inda. The government (police) were constantly present and violent riots were an unfortunate common occurrence.  On one occasion, we witnessed one of Jamal’s flashbacks. This memory in particular involved some horrible Gestapo members causing havoc, death, and ultimate destruction on the streets. Jamal and his brother were playing with the local kids (as usual) as his mother and many other women were washing laundry in the common canal one day. We see a huge group of men come and rampage the city, killing many innocent people (including Jamal’s mother) along the way. Jamal and his brother  Salim make a run for it- determined to escape and spare their lives. Luckly, they make it out of this mess and find shelter.

Further on in their adventures, Jamal and Salim were sleeping under a quick made tent, made of a simple sheet/blanket in the middle of a literal dump. Two men came along and offered the boys some coke. Oblivious of the danger that these strangers were, Jamal and Salim followed them, ultimately allowing them to kidnap them (perhaps there was something in the Coke that made them docile and compliant?).  It wasn’t too long after this that the two meet their “third musketeer” (beautiful Latika). After facing many trials and tribulations, including one incident that involved the perverted men who took the Jamal, Salim and Latika (as well as many other orphaned children) “under their wing”, so to speak and made them sing a national anthem type song. These kids were tricked, thinking that if they had a nice voice, something good would happen to them- that they would gain something in return for singing. Unfortunately, the opposite occurred. One little boy was singing his heart out for these men, but sadly, his eyes were burned away and he wound up blind. Jamal and Salim were lucky enough to escape from this treachery, but Latika was left behind (since she could not make it onto the moving train the brothers managed to escape on).

With the song “Paper Planes” in the background, we see Jamal and Salim grow up while riding atop of speeding trains and stealing their way to survival (acting as tourists, using ropes to take food out of train windows, etc).  In accident that happened as they were trying to steal bread caused their travelling to be put on halt, and from there Jamal went searching for his lost friend and ultimate true love Latika.  The beautiful girl was found, learning how to belly dance so that she could sell her body to any man who wanted her. Jamal and Salim come to the scene, and we see the trend of slumming, bargaining, and violence all in the process of Salim’s escape from the whore house she was living in.  Destiny and life coming full circle are two key themes in this film because each character truly did find their destinies in a way. Jamal got his girl in the end and Salim (who dedicated his life to stealing and cheating his way through things) died in a literal pool of blood and money that he stole from other people. Jamal beat the odds that were against him in his life by winning the "Who wants to be a Millionaire" game and becoming a television celebrity.