Life as Crisis Management: The Anthem Blue Cross Kiada or, how Blue Cross Made Me Want to Scream

It all began innocently enough though I should have known that little is easy in brave new utopian digital world given my age and experience. I retired recently and instead of signing up for the vision insurance I already had through my union, I decided to go with a vision insurance offered by Anthem/Blue Cross/Blue View Vision Value Plan (or whatever else they call themselves; these corporations love to be called by various monikers) to citizens of New York state.

That was a mistake I should not have made since I  knew that I never had any trouble with my union insurance but I experienced  all sorts of hair pulling trials and tribulations when I signed up for New York state retirement. Of course, I had no problem with this corporation for two years while never using it. When I wanted to use it, however, and went to my webpage to look for providers they offered me providers in California. That would have been helpful if I lived in California instead of New York, the place where Empire sent my bills. Surreal. I asked them to fix this problem and stopped recurring automatic payment until they did because I no longer trusted the competence of this corporation. Whether they did fix it or not I do not know since I found a provider by going to the websites of optometrists in the New York city in which I live.

Now, of course, I had to pay by going into the website around the due date every month. And so I did. However, this immediately proved to be a Sisyphean task. I did not receive a paper bill for June though I had received one every month previously. When I tried to pay on the website on two occasions the bill came up as $0.00. I paid but, surprise surprise, I paid nothing. Eventually, I got a you are late in your memo from the company. I paid the two month charge they wanted but it was refunded and so no payment. Finally, I put the bill on my credit card and shocked, shocked, it worked.

I did, of course, make use of customer service during this nightmare but this proved to be a waste of my time. I called the 800 number on the back of my Empire card only to be told to call the number on the back of my card which I did three times with the same response. Monty Python meets Franz Kafka. Then I went online to customer service. The chat was a waste of time as I was chatting to a bot and bots are typically more unhelpful than helpful. The message centre proved to be largely a waste of my time. Most customer service operatives cloned the standard corporate bullshte about we are sorry and go here, the good old run around in circles chasing ones own tail and never getting anywhere experience. The one who actually responded was only somewhat helpful. Next, I contacted the Attorney General of New York but nothing has happened here as yet. Later, I contacted New York Civil service (I tried to contact them initially by phone but despite leaving a call back number I was never called back) only to be sent into a labyrinth of encrypted messages that require access to Microsoft and yet more passwords which I am simply not up for.

Hopefully, the credit card payment will go though and take my coverage up to August. Then I am off to my old vision insurance company so I don't have to fuck around with this bureaucratic takes you an eternity go get anywhere and get anything done bullshite. 

An update: I called Anthem Blue Cross and upgraded to a Basic Vision Plan. I had the operator set up and automatic payment deduction from my credit card to pay for this. I innocently and stupidly thought everything would work this time. Silly me. No automatic deduction payment was taken and now I am once again doing the phone rag with this corporation, the most incompetent kafkaesque corporation I have ever encountered. Caveat emptor. I suppose it is time to think about getting vision insurance from another source that will be awful but not as awful as Anthem. Oh and by the way, despite promises that I would receive a bill by snail mail from this incompetent corporation, I have not.

A postscript: Here at Empire Blue Vision we are proud of how stoopid and how stoopidly fundamentalist and literalist we are. If you want to upgrade your vision plan online well you can and you can't. We will enroll you but we won't recognise that you are already enrolled in a plan and already have an online account with us because we are stoopid (and we don't ask questions). If you want to call us and try to straighten out things well we can and we can't. We can eliminate your redundant account but we can't charge you for the new upgrade and simultaneously arrange for direct payment at the same time because we are stoopid and we have one of the stoopdist online and telephone centre customer service centres in the nation, hell in the world. Empire Blue Vision, proud to bea stoopid and so is our fundamentalist online and telephone customer service. Call us at 1.800.BMorons to sign up now.

Kill Not Really a Thrill: Musings on Kill Bill

 

Last week I spent nearly four hours of my life watching Quentin Tarantino's 2003 and 2004 Kill Bill, a hybrid action-adventure film, spaghetti western, dumb adolescent smart-arse snarky comedy film, reflexivity a plenty film, Italian Giallo cinema, Hong Kong martial arts film, Samurai film, and comic book film, to note a few of its borrowings. After watching it I came to the conclusion that Kill Bill proves once again that in post-Bonnie and Clyde Hollywood revenge oriented cinema is a dish served with oodles and oodles of hot rich spurting red blood revenge sauce, the plot such as it is of the film.

Kill Bill pointed up something else to to me once again. In the world of post-Jaws and Star Wars hybrid Hollywood reflexive cinema, form has triumphed over content. Tarantino, who became a star in the firmament of reflexive Hollywood cinema in the wake of 1994's Pulp Fiction, has long made a living by sampling other films just as Uncle Walt Disney made a living out sampling public domain fairy tales and disneyfornicating  or pollyannaising them in the process so he could sell them to the sentimental masses. Tarantino, you see, is another one of those reflexive post film brat film brats whose university was television, the cinema, and video store work, all in a reflexive key. The complex time structure of  Pulp Fiction and the references to Swiss art house innovative cinema darling Jean-Luc Godard, made Tarantino the latest hero-saint of those who actually did know something about the history of cinema and even more for those who liked their action-adventure snarky and bloody but who had little idea that European art films like L'annee derniere a Marienbad (1961), a film that played with time long before Tarantino did, had already done it, it being the playing with time bit. History and understanding, you see, have never been human strengths.

I thought Kill Bill was OK. As I said Kill Bill, like the films of another neo-film brat David Lynch, a filmmaker whose film work, for me, pales beside the films of Luis Bunuel and Dusan Makavejev, and his film's surrealism and absurdity for surrealisms and absurdities sake. How postmodern. Kill Bill seems to me all content, an emotional orgasmic inducing roller coaster ride from brutal murder to brutal murder, something that I am sure, pleased the I love buckets of blood crowd in the cinema going audience. Its character development is almost nil. "The Bride's" motivation is revenge pure and simple with the ultimate goal to kill Bill (David Carradine doing a kind of updated and somewhat inverted version of his character on the TV show Kung Fu), her former paramour. In this Kill Bill is quite different from Joss Whedon's television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), a show I much prefer to the simulations of Quentin Tarantino. Whedon is another one of those post-Star Wars comic book reflexive neo-film brats though with a healthy dose of existentialism and Shakespeare, one of the fathers of multi-tonality thrown into the mix. Whedon's Buffy is cinematic and reflects Whedon's hours of film viewing. Buffy also, however, and this is critical for me, has a complex narrative, structure, complex characters and complex development, and intellectual heft, particularly when it explores the complex existentialist moral issues that are at the heart of the show (life as hell). Unlike Kill Bill, Buffy has both form and content. It reflects classical novelistic narrative storytelling and this, for me, makes Buffy vastly superior to Kill Bill, a film which seems to me all surface form and little in the way of narrative structure, complex characters, complex character development, and complex dealings with moral issues. The moral centre of Kill Bill, if it has one, after all, seems to be that payback, as the modern proverb tells us, is a bitch. Wow, heavy.

Looking Back at 1978 from 2023: Musings on Rewatching NBC's Holocaust

It was the best of American TV times. It was the worst of American TV times. It was 1978 and I was getting ready to go to college later that year at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. I don't  recall now how I heard about the TV show Holocaust--promos perhaps--but I somehow heard about it and I made the decision that I had to watch it because I liked what I had seen of 1970s short form American television. I found it more akin to British television and I was a devotee of British television. I suspect I also, probably foolishly and naively, thought that I might learn a little bit about the Shoah by watching the miniseries. And then there is the fact that some of my family are Jewish. 

Holocaust debuted on the NBC network and ran for five episodes from 16 April to 19 April. I watched every episode of the five part series and was mesmerised by it. I had rarely seen something that good on American television.

In retrospect and from the vantage point of several university degrees including in history, a much more critical attitude, and fifty years in the rear view mirror it is apparent that Holocaust, like so many American films and television shows of the era and still today, was and is, I would argue, simplistically manichean, overly sentimental, hyper romantic, uber melodramatic and only somewhat successful at being literate. But at least it tried and despite all its limitations it works. 

It also gets a lot of Holocaust history right (a history many Ukrainians, Poles, and Lithuanians prefer to cancel) thanks to its telescoping of so much of the history of the Shoah into the saga of one family, the Weiss family. As I have been rewatching Holocaust it has dawned on me how similar it is to another truly masterful TV series about World War II, a show that likewise looks at how the war impacts a family, the World on Fire (BBC 1, 2019-). By the time I finished my Holocaust rewatch it had become quite clear to me that the show was and remains an impressive achievement in its own right and a historic landmark in American commercial television.

On another matter, the CBS DVD is a cut version of the show. Apparently the blu ray, while containing more minutes of the show, is also abridged. One, of course, can't help but wonder why.  It is not the music of the show since it was written exclusively for Holocaust. Regardless of why this was released in such an incompetent manner by CBS Paramount is does point up something common in the US today: the incompetence of American business. As with the disastrous Buffy remaster by Fox it is clear that many American corporations no longer take pride in the quality of their workmanship. They only seem to care about pigging out at the all you can eat pig sty bar at the cafe Mammon.

Musings on Critical Responses to Joe Wright's and Tom Stoppard's Anna Karenina

I spent several hours today watching Joe Wright's 2012 film adaptation of Lev Tolstoy's great novel Anna Karenina (1875-1877, 1878). Critics at the time of the film's release, as they tend to do in general, disagreed about the quality of the film when it came out. Some liked it. Some were lukewarm towards it. Some did not like it at all. Many, I suspect, even ignored it. Needless to say, such disparate views point up the empirical fact that beauty and value are in the socialised eyes of the beholder.

I found the response of one particularly "critic", the "critic" who wrote the capsule "review" for Leonard Maltin's 2014 Movie Guide, particularly interesting since it was so bizarre. This critic was at a loss as to why Wright set some of the scenes in a decaying theatre. He apparently did not notice, as those who have read and studied Anna Karenina and Tolstoy likely did, that Wright metaphorically and allegorically counterpoints the scenes in the film set in a decaying and decrepit theatres in Moscow and Petersburg, scenes dominated by the mannered, ritualistic, self-righteous, hypocritical and Westernising Russian elite, to the naturalistic rural scenes focusing on Levin and eventually Kitty, the space and the characters that were for Tolstoy metaphors for the "authentic" Russia, the "real" Russia. It would be, of course, this holier than thou Russian elite who, because of their ostracisation of Anna, would drive Anna to commit suicide by falling on tracks as a train passed, something that should also tell us something about Tolstoy's sense of morality and ethics.  

The Books of My Life: Our Lives

 

Canada, as Alvin Finkel shows in his superb political, economic, demographic, and cultural history of Canada since 1945 entitled Our Lives: Canada after 1945 (Toronto: Lorimer, 1997), changed dramatically after World War II, a war Canada entered eight days after the British declaration of war against Germany in 1939, flexing, if somewhat weakly, its political independence from the "mother" country. 

Between 1945 and 1997 (a second edition of Our Lives takes the story of post-war Canada up to 2012 and the prime ministership of Tory Stephen Harper) Canada, as Finkel nicely shows, briefly emerged from behind England's colonial shadow only to become an American economic, political, and cultural colony. He examines how Canada moved from a modified Keynesian economy to a neoliberal bah humbug one, though never one as bah humbugee as that of the United States. He explores the important role the New Democratic Party played in making Canada more of a welfare state and less bah humbugee than the US particularly during years of Liberal minority governments on the federal level. He investigates how English Canada developed a national literature that was read by many, at least in English Canada. There had been, of course, given the close relationship between Quebec nationalism and Quebec culture, a distinct culture in that province for some time.

He delves into how Canada cultivated an image as a kindler and gentler, compared to Imperial America, nation, an image of Canada as a peacekeeper nation, a nation that was perceived, at least by some polemicists, as a golden mean between the US and Europe. He explores increasing tensions between Ottawa, the various provincial premiers, and the provinces. He examines the silent revolution in Quebec and its impacts on Quebec nationalism. He investigates the increasing power of economic elites after the oil crisis of the early 1970s, though the power of economic elites was never absent even during the Keynesian years when Keynesianism dominated mainstream economic thinking among American, Canadian, and European economic "managers" before the oil crisis. He focuses on the demographics of post-World War II Canada. Perhaps more than anything else, however, Finkel does a superb job of showing the realities of poverty and inequality--class based, gender based, ethnic based--lurking beneath Canada's carefully curated and ultimately gilded public relations image the nation presented to the world, something that makes Canada very much like other core nations around the globe unexceptional. Canadian deceptionalism in the end is no more nor less deceptional and delusional than that of the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark...

Highly recommended for anyone looking for a readable, reliable, and wide ranging if selective history of post-World War II Canada.