Okay, so I'm officially hooked on "Dickensian". Binge watched four episodes tonight (30 minutes each). The writers have skillfully woven together all of the various threads in Dickens novels, and have turned the whole thing into a murder mystery. I am super tempted to tell you the names of the victim and the main suspect, because it's really a bit of a hoot (though depicted in a serious manner), but I just cannot give out these spoilers because they come as such a surprise (one especially!). Don't Google it, either. Watch the series instead. I am now six episodes in with fourteen to go, and I eagerly await whatever will be cooked up next in this stewpot of great characters and stories. If Victorian London was really as Dickens described it, and if it's citizens were really this eccentric, then one wishes for a Time Machine to afford a visit there. It appears to be a very quaint and picturesque hellhole, halfway between blessed and cursed, but with great personalities at every turn.
Less than 100 years later these same people would change the world with incredible music.
The English are something else. If it's not Scrooge, it's Jack the Ripper or Mary Poppins and if it ain't them it's John Lennon and Elton John. Or William Shakespeare.
Or Charles Dickens. Tomorrow night I will take a short break from "Dickensian" in order to watch a movie, but I will resume and binge-watch another four eps on Friday evening. If you like anything having to do with Dickens, I think you will love this show as much as I do, and thus it is highly recommended. ///
This afternoon I finally checked out from the Libe K.K. Downing's book "Heavy Duty : Days and Nights in Judas Priest". I had reserved it back at the beginning of October, so it was a long and highly anticipated wait. Much speculation has been offered as to why he quit the band in 2011, and reviews have suggested that K.K. is quite blunt in his assessment, so we shall see what he reveals. I started reading the book tonight, just prior to writing this blog, and the first few chapters deal with his incredibly rough childhood. I think that many of us have experienced psychological trauma from living in dysfunctional homes as children, and I also think that each child in such a situation feels so isolated the he or she feels that they come from the only abnormal family in the world.
A child of dysfunction thinks that all the other kids must have normal homes, and that only his is weird and hard to deal with. But as you go along in life, you discover that the idea of a perfect "Brady Bunch" family is the real illusion, and that many, many kids grow up in very difficult domestic situations. Reading about K.K. Downing's childhood causes a person like myself to realise that, as tough as my own childhood sometimes was, that there were kids who had it a lot worse.
He lays it all out for you, bare and honest, with this same rough-hewn English backdrop I've been talking about. Man, these people were poor following WW2. Many folks didn't even have indoor toilets, but instead outhouses. Families lived in homes without heat - row houses, where you could hear your neighbors through the walls. It all sounds pretty horrible, which makes you appreciate the English resilience even more.
As Tiny Tim said, "God Bless Us, Everyone", and I think we should all send that message out into the world loud and clear.
CSUN was shut down tonight because some disturbed person had scrawled a threat of violence on a bathroom wall, and then another person followed it up with a handwritten note the next day. Those things you can Google if you want to. I won't elaborate on them except to say that I took my walk off-campus tonight, on the side streets surrounding the school. Since yesterday there have been police cars around every corner.
We need to think of solutions so that we don't have to live this way anymore. Me, I think we are living in a time of too many electronics. Young people walk around with devices in their hands and are detached from the world. Too many electrons are flowing and it's like the Matrix, with everyone plugged into everyone else's brain. We also have way too many cars on the road, and too many people in cities, when there is land abundant all across the country.
But really the problem is too many electrons, too much media, and not enough real meaning in society.
Life has to mean something. There has to be something to strive for besides just another iPhone.
I think people like Steve Jobs did a tremendous disservice to humanity.
Look back at the world of Victorian England, and how difficult a situation that was, and then consider that the same country had their backs against the wall, fighting Nazi Germany in WW2. And then they came out of it all by infusing the entire world with some of the greatest music ever created, music being a force on par with love.
America needs to come out of it's dark period now as well. We need to regroup and to shine a light out into the world, as we have done in the past, so that we don't have to live this way anymore.
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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