Scarred (Never After Series)

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TV takes up nearly half the book, such is the rich vein of brilliance to be mined. Because it wasn’t only kid’s TV that put the willies up the nation, adults were treated to such downbeat fare as Callan, Play For Today, Gangsters and all those peculiarly British dystopias such as Doomwatch, Survivors and Quatermass. No wonder it was a troubled decade. We were basically being told the future was rubbish! But in amongst all this there was some gloriously low budget, but highly imaginative, prime time Sci-Fi to be had as well. UFO, Space 1999 and Blake’s 7 to name but a few. Plus there’s a whole section devoted to Doctor Who (of course!) From BookTok sensation Emily McIntire comes a dark and delicious fractured fairy tale reimagining of The Lion King. La forma tan intima y respetuosa que tiene Sarah de contar su historia hace que este libro no se vuelva tan pesado, si bien el tema es delicado, Sarah lo sabe llevar muy bien sin caer en el morbo, lo único que deseas es justicia. eh I mean if you read that big New York Times article about NXIVM you probably got all the good details. This I think could have used another pass from the co-writer to make it more accessible to people who weren't in this cult for 12 years, it gets bogged down a lot in the NXIVM language which is like Scientology but different. She’s strong-willed. She’s fire. She’s the devil, parading as a snake, convincing people to eat the apple. Ma petite menteuse… My little liar.”

The toys and games section is an interesting curio since many survived in one form or another into the 80's and the sweets section is quite interesting too. I distinctively remember the candy cigarettes with the red tip to mirror a real cigarette. And yes, us kids did pretend to smoke them, preparing for adult hood. There are so many similarities between Nxivm and Scientology that Keith Ramirez must have been in Scientology or seriously researched it.

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True power lies in the ability to harness energy and wield it like a sword, becoming the puppeteer that masters all the strings instead of the marionette being forced to dance.” T here’s a terrible habit, when looking at the culture of a decade, to not go into any depth; it’s an easy task to just laugh at the fashions, or assume that referring to a handful of common references will cover it. The 1980s in the UK were a time of unemployment, poverty, social unrest, and political divisions – not just everybody wearing red braces, having fax machines and watching John Hughes movies… This tell-all follows Sarah from the moment she takes her first NXIVM seminar, to the invitation she accepts from her best friend, Lauren Salzman, into DOS, to her journey toward become a key witness in the federal case against its founders One of the things about the 70's was that it was absolutely a decade of boundary pushing. I've reflected on this in terms of cinema before - some of the most challenging, uncomfortable, and downright nasty films in history were made in the era. It's an era of relaxed censorship in media, of changing social attitudes to marginalised people, of social issues pushed to the forefront of popular culture. It's a decade of freedom for creative people, and yet they are experiencing a hangover of the peace and love era. In Britain at least the spectre of World War II is still remembered, and it is a decade of political and economical turmoil. What I think this led to was continual boundary pushing, and the impact of that was, that a lot of wonderful creative media was produced and aired - however, much of that would never get past a savvy media executive today. We live in an era of focus groups, of targeted advertising, of sensitivity. Parents today are hyper-sensitive to the media their children consume compared to in the past (not saying that is a good or bad thing). Scarred is Sarah Edmondson's compelling memoir of her recruitment into the NXIVM cult, the 12 years she spent within the organization (during which she enrolled over 2,000 members and entered DOS—NXIVM's "secret sisterhood"), her breaking point, and her harrowing fight to get out, to expose Keith Raniere and the leadership, to help others, and to heal. Complete with personal photographs, Scarred is also an eye-opening story about abuses of power, female trust and friendship, and how sometimes the search to be "better" can override everything else.

Reading this book was kind of wild for me because a good majority of it took place in the Town of Clifton Park New York where I lived from the ages of 15 to 37 it reference a lot of locations that I know including Knox Woods where I lived for a couple years. This cult was somewhat well known in our town before I do big stories broke on it. I had a colleague who lived across the street from a house they owned and had meetings in. And he ended up doing a lot of research on them and had told me about it. So when the story broke I was not surprised I figured it was only matter of time. Whether, like me, you were born at the right time to grow up in the seventies, or are simply interested in seeing just how things have changed culturally in the past fifty years this is a great book. I’d like to draw you,” I rephrase, moving in closer, my fingers dancing across her skin. “Just like this, with your face kissing the stars... I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” The launch of Channel 4 in 1982 provided another sense that boundaries were starting to stretch. The newly launched channel made an effort – not just in the original programming it offered and commissioned, but also in showing foreign language films and unconventional animation. For example, it screened Jan Svankmajer’s Alice (which is possibly the best adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland) cut up into six parts over the 1989-1990 New Year. If you look for further information on this, you’ll understand why it may have made an impact on impressionable viewers.

Overview

Captive by Catherine Oxenburg (a mother’s account of rescuing her daughter from sex slavery in NXIVM) Nostalgia seems to define and dictate our present culture, perhaps as it never has before, in ways undreamt-of as recently as a decade ago. Ever since our ability to record, edit and re-share the visual and sonic textures of our common (and sometimes uncommon) cultural experience became a viable option to those outside the entertainment industry, people (largely, it has to be said, bespectacled introverts with testicles and optional BO) have been doing so. First by exchanging physical objects with one another in the playground: physical objects like last night’s John Peel Show or that (“Honest to God it IS!”) snuff movie we got a loan of off our dodgy cousin in the next school along. Recorded onto magnetic tape and somehow both comically bulky to the eyes of today’s Netflix-and-Spotify-reared generation and simultaneously fragile, flimsy, as delicate as a butterfly’s wing. As digital files and the internet gradually came to replace pretty much every aspect of our day-to-day entertainment and social requirements the exchange now happens invisibly, across thousands of miles of fibre-optic cabling and through the phantom miracle of wi-fi.