Burn Notice Morality Play Ends. Yeah, yeah, spoiler alert, what, four years later?

Well, I finally finished the last Burn Notice episode. Michael Weston's story arc--will his efforts to save his career, reputation and country cause him to lose his soul? (along with a concussion, a sinus infection and some writing avoidance) --kept me binge watching through all seven seasons. Yes, his acting was extraordinary. Yes, he seemed to go to the depths of the human soul. Yes, there's a but coming. It's all about the writing.

The trope of Weston at the mercy of evil geniuses with world-ruling ambitions, it got tiresome after the fifth iteration, no matter how fabulous the performances. (By the way, did you notice how the "clients" were almost all eminently forgettable--intentionally so it seems--while the villains were mostly top-notch character actors?) Bruce Campbell and Coby Bell as Michael Weston's best buddies, became cutesy sidekicks after awhile--a waste of great talent--while the brilliant Sharon Gless and Gabrielle Anwar remained anything but.

Still, Anwar's Fiona Glenanne had to fight against a one-note character who got profoundly noble and then had to keep saying, "Michael, you're losing yourself, and I can't watch it anymore," for seven long years. Gless had a more powerful character arc, and she worked it like the pro she is--and I get the arc about her willingness to sacrifice for her family--but honestly, after seven years of watching Fiona and Michael invent detonators out of a tampon, some sealing wax and borax, are you telling me that Madeline Weston and Jesse Porter couldn't think of anything better than her sitting in her living room with a ciggie and the blast button, blowing herself to pieces? "This is for my boys."

And of course, they had fun blowing up the last building. 

Down the Rabbit Hole of Research, Part 3. Gabrielle Anwar's New Family Goes Mad Hatter.

So--To recap:

Gabrielle Anwar, brilliant actress from The Tudors, Burn Notice and other works,








recently married Shareef (Mark) Malnik,








whose father is Alvin Ira (Al) Malnik,        
who, pardon my snark,  looks like he's had enough facelifts that his earlobes need suspenders.








Alvin, 82, has ten kids, ranging from Shareef, who has a law degree and runs a nightclub called The Forge, through the children Al has with his second wife, Nancy: triplets, a singleton and twins.

Then, Michael Jackson comes into the picture, and things go Madder than Mad Hatter.  

Much like with the earlier Sheik, Al Malnik becomes indispensable to Mr. Jackson. He manages his finances, the two families become friends, the children--Michael Jackson, Jr., Paris Michael Jackson, and Prince Michael (Blanket) Jackson--become friends with Al's younger set of kids: triplets Spencer, (female) Jarod and Nathan, 15, Jesse, 9, and twins Noah and Sterling, 8. Malnik parties with Jackson, and is supposedly named guardian for Mr. Jackson's children in the event of Jackson's death.

Jackson's three children were born to Debbie Rowe, Jackson's then wife, and an unnamed surrogate, who gave birth to Blanket. Rowe has since claimed that her marriage to Jackson was never consummated, and that her children were conceived via an unnamed sperm donor, not Jackson. Al Malnik said, after Mr. Jackson's death, that he was the genetic father of Blanket, the third child. "I'm the one who saved Michael from bankruptcy, and in return, he said he would name me executor of his will. I was a father figure to Michael and now I intend to be a father figure to the son who is rightfully mine."

I normally do not pay much attention to gossip except to think, wow, that's a lot of drama. This is the case here as well. After all, if it's true, then
Prince Michael/Blanket/Jackson is Gabrielle Anwar's brother-in-law, and thus uncle by marriage to her children.








Perhaps someday, a mad tea-party will be had by all.

Down the Rabbit Hole of Research pt. 2, Gabrielle Anwar, Burn Notice and Crazy Research.

So, to recap. Gabrielle Anwar

married Shareef (nee Mark) Malnik

whose father is Al Malnik (get a load of the plastic surgery on these two)

with the ceremony performed by Tantric Kaballah Rabbi (!) and likely serial sexual assaulter and child predator, Marc Gafni, (nee Marc Winiarz) 

But the story gets both more interesting and crazier. The interesting part to me is that of Gabrielle Anwar's family.

 Grandpa on her father's side was Rafiq Anwar, from India. Rafiq went to England as an engineering student.  In London, he met Edith Reich, an Austrian Jew. (I cannot find a photo of her.)These two married and went back to India, where Rafiq became an actor. They had two children, one, a son, born in 1945. Which means they must have met before '45. Which hints that Edith had fled to England from the Nazis. 

In 1946, Rafiq starred in a film produced by his brother, Rashid, called Neecha Nagar, which won the first ever foreign language film award at Cannes that year. (The music was by a young guy named Private Ravi Shankar, and the dance segments, created by the doyenne of Indian cinema, Zohra Saigal,  were edited out for the Cannes screening.) 

Edith came back to London with her two children, followed by Rafiq, who also worked in Hollywood, in The Spy Who Loved Me and Lord Jim. Edith and Rafiq's story sounds rich and complex, something I would love to learn more about. Give a holler, everybody, if you know more than this bare outline I can find. 

Their son, Tariq, became a very well-known film editor: The Crucible, Oppenheimer, American Beauty, and The King's Speech, which earned him an Oscar nomination and two BAFTA Awards.He is now based in the United States and England. He is the father of actress Gabrielle Anwar. Mother is actress Shireen Anwar, nee Shirley Hills, and this is the only photo I can find. 

That's all the interesting part. The crazy part has to do with Michael Jackson, Al Malnik and Jackson's children:  Michael Jackson, Jr., Paris-Michael, and Prince Michael Jackson II, known as Blanket. More about that later. 

Sometimes, with the Internet, it's just fun to go down that rabbit hole. 

Down The Rabbit Hole: Internet Research About Nothing in Particular, Burn Notice, and Gabrielle Anwar

I'm a little slow on the uptake when it comes to popular culture, which is why I just discovered the TV series Burn Notice (via Netflix.) Of course, I had to look up the writers, producers and actors, and when I did, I fell down the All-Time, Bizarro Rabbit Hole of internet research, all intertwining around the actress Gabrielle Anwar.

I have nothing at all against Ms. Anwar. In fact, I think she is an actress of extraordinary brilliance, so good at expressing complexes emotions that her face seems almost translucent. The rabbit hole, however, began with an article about her recent wedding to a man called Shareef Malnik, the service performed by--as the papers stated--a Tantric Kabballah Rabbi who officiated and read passages from his book to the blissful couple.

"Tantric Kabballah Rabbi. The name, which implies a tantalizingly silly mix of Hindu sexual practices, Medieval Jewish mysticism and the term for a Jewish teacher, set my Hilarious Garbage Antennae twitching. Those antennae were accurate. The tantric Kabballah rabbi in question, one Marc Gafni, (born Marc Winiarz), has a Phd from Oxford, and has been believably accused of sexual assault many many different times, including the grooming and assault of a thirteen-year-old student.

The woman in the Forward article,
speaking of her experiences being groomed and molested by Gafni.

(http://forward.com/opinion/329620/i-was-13-when-marc-gafnis-abuse-began/?attribution=author-article-listing-1-headline)

Okay. Not exactly the guy I'd want at my wedding ceremony. Especially given that Anwar has three children by previous marriages and relationships, and her new husband also has a kid.

But if you want to go further down the rabbit hole, remember new hubby named Shareef Malnik? Hilarious Garbage Antennae go a bit haywire over that name. Is he the result of a Moroccan mixed marriage? A Jewish Mama's long-time crush on Omar Shariff?

Nope. Mr. Malnik was born as Mark Malnik in the U.S. in 1958.

Al Malnik then

Al Malnik now

In fact, Daddy is an all-American mob associate, Al Malnik, one-time lawyer for gangster, Mayer Lansky. It seems besides being mobbed up and representing Sammy Davis Jr. and some of his Rat Pack pals, Daddy more or less invented off-shore money-laundering in the Bahamas. Somewhere in between having his Rolls blown up (of course it was canary yellow) and the unsolved murder of some of his associates, Al became chief financial advisor--and much, much more--for Saudi Royal member Prince Turki Bin-Aziz. 

Now, Turki Bin-Aziz was one of the many sons of the king of Saudi Arabia. Bin-Aziz came to the U.S. in the 1980's on a crazed spending spree that encompassed several years, billions of dollars, and the kind of insanity that makes interesting news articles ("Saudi Prince hires decorator to paint genitalia of all mansion's statues in glorious, living color") and desperate neighbors. (Saudi family parks multiple Ferraris on your grass, lands their helicopters in your backyard, and shows up in middle of night offering three million for your bungalow as long as you and your family leave within the next half hour.) 

During this blazing craziness, son Mark starts toting a copy of the Koran and winds up married (briefly) to the sister of the Prince's commoner bride. (Look, this is so complicated and bizarre, that I can only hope I'm getting the details right.) I would assume it is at this point that Mark became Shareef, a name which, come to think of it, beats, say, Muffy Malnik for assimilationist silliness. 

The story gets even crazier, but I think I have used up my Rabbit Hole quotient for the day. And the good news is, it seems as if Anwar and Malnik's use of Gafni for their wedding has, hopefully, shown new light down Gafni's rabbit hole. Wouldn't it be wonderful if a costumed, Wild West marriage between an actress and a "restauranteur"/possible mobster, (this being wedding number five for him) would lead to a sexual predator finally having to face some of the consequences of his actions? Let's keep our fingers crossed.