Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 11
October 28, 2023
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "QUINCY"
You can scare me, but you can't stop me. -- Quincy
Everything in existence has a point of origin, but sometimes it is damnably difficult to find. This is true even in television, a medium which is not even a century old and by its nature is extraordinarily well documented. The effective origin of the forensic or medical detective show was QUINCY, M.E., which ran from 1976 to 1983 on the NBC network. It is remembered as "the first drama series to regularly feature detailed forensic investigations" [Google] and is thus the Big Bang of this particular genre of television. A search I conducted on reality and scripted medical detective series turned up 96 in English speaking countries alone, and this list only ran from the early 1990s. It does not include a number of series which came in the intervening decade between '93 and '92, including DA VINCI'S INQUEST, CORONER, HOUSE or even PROFILER, which wobbled on the borderline of this genre but probably falls within its reach.
I could a tale unfold about the history of this genre and what I truly feel precipitated its explosion in popularity, but let us stick to cases -- the case of Quincy, the crime-fighting coroner from Los Angles with the big nose, big mouth, and big heart, whose absence is felt as keenly, in my own heart anyway, as his once-overwhelming presence.
QUINCY was originally envisioned by legendary TV producer-writer Glen Larson as a series of TV movies in which a crusty, hot-tempered, skirt-chasing L.A. County coroner would utilize his knowledge of forensic pathology to solve seemingly impenetrable murder mysteries. At the time, the "holy trinity" of TV was composed of doctor shows, lawyer shows and cop shows: QUINCY offered something different: a doctor show in which all the "patients" were already dead, combined with a cop show in which the coroner outhustled and outhought the police. Hell, it even threw in a fair amount of legalese, and thus seemed to cover every base, at least partially. Cast in the starring role was a reluctant and combative Jack Klugman, co-star of THE ODD COUPLE, who didn't see himself in such a role and had little patience for the sort of weak, by-the-numbers storytelling which abounded on TV (then as now). Indeed, Klugman's determination to bring something "more than just screeching tires" to the boob tube led to the more orthodox-thinking Larson being elbowed out of his own show, and Klugman became, in effect, not merely QUINCY's star, but his own executive producer, showrunner and executive story editor. This act of aggressive egotism was to have profound consequences for the whole history of television.
Why? Because the ratings success of the four QUINCY TV movies led the show to be bumped unexpectedly to a weekly episodic series, and Klugman, who had a ferocious temper and was legendary for his screaming fits and stinging insults ("There are a lot of people in Hollywood who can type," he once remarked acidly. "There aren't many writers."), forced the ever-changing writers' room to bring him scripts which were actually about something. This led QUINCY to develop a unique identity as "the show with a cause."
Actually, "the with causes" would have been a better description, for although there are many QUINCY episodes which are simply forensic murder mysteries without societal commentary, every season devoted a hefty number of stories to questions of social justice. The way these topics were approached was by dressing them up as mere murder mysteries, and then -- usually by the second commercial at the latest -- revealing the underlying societal evil the producers wished to address, combat and correct. Without consulting the internet, I can think of dozens of causes the show dragged into the light of day for discussion: a random sampling would include autism, alcoholism, industrial waste, fad diets, orphan drugs, illegal immigration, airline safety, Tourette's Syndrome, PTSD, affirmative action, bureacracy, gun control, illiteracy, big pharma, pollution, the federal grand jury system, DUI laws, juvenile crime, incest, domestic violence, elder abuse, mental health, drug culture, child pornography and human trafficking, drug use in sports, medical insurance, Down's syndrome, abortion, vigilantism, PCP, holistic medicine, ghost surgery, and numerous issues within the medical community itself, such as incompetence, negligence, ethics, and addiction. Some topics were visited several times from different angles. What is particularly striking about this sampling is how timely most of the causes remain, even viewed through a distance of half a century. If ever we needed a reminder that some social problems are always with us, watching QUINCY rage, in 1978 or so, about topics we see in the 2023 headlines on a weekly basis, will surely fill the perscription. I myself have noted in my professional life as an advocate for victims of crime how ahead of the curve QUINCY was about lax drunk driving laws, or the loopholes the criminally insane or sex offenders used to wreak yet more havoc. In the case of so-called orphan drugs -- drugs developed to fight extremely rare diseases, which are therefore not profitable to manufacture -- QUINCY was actually instrumental in getting laws changed. It was a case of life consciously choosing to imitate art.
Klugman's performance as the crusading coroner deserves especial mention. While some of the dialog defeated his acting abilities, and his own acting range was not especially wide, his passion for the role generally overflowed even the weaker scripts and more hastily-constructed storylines. He is one of those performers who is just a joy to watch, as much for his flinty charisma as for his actual thespianism. The heavy New York accent ("coffee" is pronounced "cawfee") only adds flavor to a delivery already spiced by his deep, raspy voice. He is of that category of actor whose acting is less important than his presence -- and that he has in spades.
Quincy the character was given very little background. We never even learned his first name, not in eight years and 156 episodes ("I have one," he informs his soon-to-be-wife in the final season, "but nobody ever seems to use it.") We only knew that he was a surgeon who chucked his practice following the death of his wife from a brain tumor; that he lived on a boat and did not own a car; that had devoted his life to forensic pathology; that he was a womanizing workaholic with a fiery temper and a restless social conscience; and that his penchant for liberal muckraking belied a naive belief that we fight the fights that need fighting and that one man can make a difference if he pushes hard enough. QUINCY, the show, was at its heart a harsh civics lesson using forensic medicine as a kind of sugar-coating: beneath the sophisticated jargon and flashy science and the curiosity about whodunnit, it ceaselessly and shamelessly preached the need to get involved, to petition, to protest, to vote, to march, to meet, and to treat democracy as a cranky pull-motor that needed a lot of elbow grease and forehead sweat to get going. Quincy the character hated injustice and cruelty, fought for the little man against the big man, and preached a never-ceasing sermon against apathy; he believed the truth was holy.
Quincy was supported by, and often fought with, his good natured but long-suffering assistant Sam Fujiyama (Robert Ito); his equally long-suffering boss, the paper-pushing but principled Dr. Robert Asten (John S. Ragin); fiesty homicide detective Lt. Frank Monohan (Garry Walberg) and his sidekick Sgt Brill (Joe Roman); and sarcastic ex-con Danny Tovo (Sal Bisoglio), whose dockside restaurant was Quincy's favorite hangout. These co-stars were archetypes frozen in personality, changing not a whit over the course of eight years, but their very stolidity buttressed the show's theme that right and wrong, while not oversimple concepts, were fixed and not situational. Aside from the transition from periodic TV movies to series, only really atomic change in the show was Quincy's marriage to Emily Hanover (Anita Gillette) in the final season, but even this was more a nod to the fact that the story needed an ending than a desire to acknowledge the passage of time.
QUINCY reflected the spirit of its age, the 1970s, which was a curious mixture of post-Vietnam exuberance, post-Watergate cynicism, and Cold War nihilism. It had a tendency toward naivete in dialog and often tacked on unrealistically happy endings onto stories, though this was certainly not the case in episodes like "Scream to the Skies," "Headhunter," "Guns Don't Die," or "Into the Murdering Mind," to cite just a few examples. Its sense of humor was quite lively and stinging, though it could often be cringe-inducing and silly. Some of the funnier running gags were Sam's inability to keep dates because of Quincy forcing him to work late hours, Quincy bitterly railing about the taste of the office coffee, Asten's merciless penny-pinching, Quincy insisting on parking the coroner's meatwagon outside Danny's restaurant, and Danny's jokes, which were almost 100% at Quincy's expense. Though its politics were generally left of center, it generally gave at least lip service to critics of the "causes" in question, and while it took some pains to actually reflect the racial and cultural diversity of Los Angeles, by today's standards, a lot of the humor at Sam's expense was flat-out racist. Additionally, it sometimes saw boogeymen where none were present: its most notorious episode "Next Stop, Nowhere" memorably and laughably presented the extended musical belch that was punk rock movement as an imminent societal threat. Other "causes" such as look-alike drugs and midwifery, did not stand the test of time. But in the last analysis, QUINCY had an almost eerie sense of timeliness, of prescience. It -- by which I mean Klugman and his producers and such writers as survived his temper and his purges -- had a remakable ability to sense which headlines really mattered, which evils needed to be fought and defeated. The speech Quincy gives railing against big pharma's effect on society -- From birth, children are told by newspapers, by radio, television commercials that they needn't put up with one moment of mental anguish, that relief is just a short reach away to the nearest bottle of pills. It's become a form of escape and a form of recreation. -- is more relevant now, in 2023, than when it was given, in 1979. And it is but one of many which have remained relevant, despite the feeling, when one watches an episode now, that one is looking into an unrecognizably distant past.
So where does that leave QUINCY after an interval of almost fifty years? Does the show still matter in this age of unremitting cynicism? What is its legacy?
As I said above, QUINCY feels enormously dated, more because of the heavy-handed way it presents its stories rather than because of the stories themselves: it tends toward naivete or at least a fairly shiny idealism, towards a belief that despite every manner of villainy, the universe bends toward justice. It can be terribly, almost irredeemably cheesy, especially when it insists on unrealistic happily ever afters. And yet, if one can get past the thick, stale layers of this pasteurized product, one cuts through to a heart which is still powerfully beating. I have often praised the tendency of older television shows to come down on the side of decency, chivalry, honor, etc. rather than cyncism and moral ambiguity: QUINCY is a mighty spear-carrier for this cause, but it carries its spear in a more mature way than you might expect. It insists, shrilly and insistently, that people have to get off their ass if they want to live in the world they actually desire, rather than the shitty one they actually inhabit. It pokes the chest of its audience like an ill-tempered ethics teacher trying to get a stoned, cheetoh-eating teenager to vote. It underscores, with a large red marker, the fact that democracy is everybody's job. In the age of Trump, of Putin and Netanyahu, this is more important than ever.
QUINCY went off the air forty years ago, but if you want to see its practical legacy, you have only to look at the monkey-branch of forensic and medical detective shows that have proliferated since it went off the air. QUINCY is not solely responsible for them -- Thomas Harris, who wrote Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs is probably the real culprit, and QUINCY was predated and probably heavily influenced by WOJECK, a Canadian forensics show from the late 1960s which also embrace "causes" -- but it is the series which brought forensic pathology to the broad masses, and in a way that made science approachable and even sexy. Quincy didn't beat people up; he outthought them. His weapons were a microscope, a scalpel, the scientific method, and a belief in "civility," meaning not merely politeness or nonviolence, but an abiding faith in human civilization. SEINFELD was once aptly described as "a show about nothing." QUINCY was a show about decency -- how hard it can be to achieve, and how impossible it is to live without.
Everything in existence has a point of origin, but sometimes it is damnably difficult to find. This is true even in television, a medium which is not even a century old and by its nature is extraordinarily well documented. The effective origin of the forensic or medical detective show was QUINCY, M.E., which ran from 1976 to 1983 on the NBC network. It is remembered as "the first drama series to regularly feature detailed forensic investigations" [Google] and is thus the Big Bang of this particular genre of television. A search I conducted on reality and scripted medical detective series turned up 96 in English speaking countries alone, and this list only ran from the early 1990s. It does not include a number of series which came in the intervening decade between '93 and '92, including DA VINCI'S INQUEST, CORONER, HOUSE or even PROFILER, which wobbled on the borderline of this genre but probably falls within its reach.
I could a tale unfold about the history of this genre and what I truly feel precipitated its explosion in popularity, but let us stick to cases -- the case of Quincy, the crime-fighting coroner from Los Angles with the big nose, big mouth, and big heart, whose absence is felt as keenly, in my own heart anyway, as his once-overwhelming presence.
QUINCY was originally envisioned by legendary TV producer-writer Glen Larson as a series of TV movies in which a crusty, hot-tempered, skirt-chasing L.A. County coroner would utilize his knowledge of forensic pathology to solve seemingly impenetrable murder mysteries. At the time, the "holy trinity" of TV was composed of doctor shows, lawyer shows and cop shows: QUINCY offered something different: a doctor show in which all the "patients" were already dead, combined with a cop show in which the coroner outhustled and outhought the police. Hell, it even threw in a fair amount of legalese, and thus seemed to cover every base, at least partially. Cast in the starring role was a reluctant and combative Jack Klugman, co-star of THE ODD COUPLE, who didn't see himself in such a role and had little patience for the sort of weak, by-the-numbers storytelling which abounded on TV (then as now). Indeed, Klugman's determination to bring something "more than just screeching tires" to the boob tube led to the more orthodox-thinking Larson being elbowed out of his own show, and Klugman became, in effect, not merely QUINCY's star, but his own executive producer, showrunner and executive story editor. This act of aggressive egotism was to have profound consequences for the whole history of television.
Why? Because the ratings success of the four QUINCY TV movies led the show to be bumped unexpectedly to a weekly episodic series, and Klugman, who had a ferocious temper and was legendary for his screaming fits and stinging insults ("There are a lot of people in Hollywood who can type," he once remarked acidly. "There aren't many writers."), forced the ever-changing writers' room to bring him scripts which were actually about something. This led QUINCY to develop a unique identity as "the show with a cause."
Actually, "the with causes" would have been a better description, for although there are many QUINCY episodes which are simply forensic murder mysteries without societal commentary, every season devoted a hefty number of stories to questions of social justice. The way these topics were approached was by dressing them up as mere murder mysteries, and then -- usually by the second commercial at the latest -- revealing the underlying societal evil the producers wished to address, combat and correct. Without consulting the internet, I can think of dozens of causes the show dragged into the light of day for discussion: a random sampling would include autism, alcoholism, industrial waste, fad diets, orphan drugs, illegal immigration, airline safety, Tourette's Syndrome, PTSD, affirmative action, bureacracy, gun control, illiteracy, big pharma, pollution, the federal grand jury system, DUI laws, juvenile crime, incest, domestic violence, elder abuse, mental health, drug culture, child pornography and human trafficking, drug use in sports, medical insurance, Down's syndrome, abortion, vigilantism, PCP, holistic medicine, ghost surgery, and numerous issues within the medical community itself, such as incompetence, negligence, ethics, and addiction. Some topics were visited several times from different angles. What is particularly striking about this sampling is how timely most of the causes remain, even viewed through a distance of half a century. If ever we needed a reminder that some social problems are always with us, watching QUINCY rage, in 1978 or so, about topics we see in the 2023 headlines on a weekly basis, will surely fill the perscription. I myself have noted in my professional life as an advocate for victims of crime how ahead of the curve QUINCY was about lax drunk driving laws, or the loopholes the criminally insane or sex offenders used to wreak yet more havoc. In the case of so-called orphan drugs -- drugs developed to fight extremely rare diseases, which are therefore not profitable to manufacture -- QUINCY was actually instrumental in getting laws changed. It was a case of life consciously choosing to imitate art.
Klugman's performance as the crusading coroner deserves especial mention. While some of the dialog defeated his acting abilities, and his own acting range was not especially wide, his passion for the role generally overflowed even the weaker scripts and more hastily-constructed storylines. He is one of those performers who is just a joy to watch, as much for his flinty charisma as for his actual thespianism. The heavy New York accent ("coffee" is pronounced "cawfee") only adds flavor to a delivery already spiced by his deep, raspy voice. He is of that category of actor whose acting is less important than his presence -- and that he has in spades.
Quincy the character was given very little background. We never even learned his first name, not in eight years and 156 episodes ("I have one," he informs his soon-to-be-wife in the final season, "but nobody ever seems to use it.") We only knew that he was a surgeon who chucked his practice following the death of his wife from a brain tumor; that he lived on a boat and did not own a car; that had devoted his life to forensic pathology; that he was a womanizing workaholic with a fiery temper and a restless social conscience; and that his penchant for liberal muckraking belied a naive belief that we fight the fights that need fighting and that one man can make a difference if he pushes hard enough. QUINCY, the show, was at its heart a harsh civics lesson using forensic medicine as a kind of sugar-coating: beneath the sophisticated jargon and flashy science and the curiosity about whodunnit, it ceaselessly and shamelessly preached the need to get involved, to petition, to protest, to vote, to march, to meet, and to treat democracy as a cranky pull-motor that needed a lot of elbow grease and forehead sweat to get going. Quincy the character hated injustice and cruelty, fought for the little man against the big man, and preached a never-ceasing sermon against apathy; he believed the truth was holy.
Quincy was supported by, and often fought with, his good natured but long-suffering assistant Sam Fujiyama (Robert Ito); his equally long-suffering boss, the paper-pushing but principled Dr. Robert Asten (John S. Ragin); fiesty homicide detective Lt. Frank Monohan (Garry Walberg) and his sidekick Sgt Brill (Joe Roman); and sarcastic ex-con Danny Tovo (Sal Bisoglio), whose dockside restaurant was Quincy's favorite hangout. These co-stars were archetypes frozen in personality, changing not a whit over the course of eight years, but their very stolidity buttressed the show's theme that right and wrong, while not oversimple concepts, were fixed and not situational. Aside from the transition from periodic TV movies to series, only really atomic change in the show was Quincy's marriage to Emily Hanover (Anita Gillette) in the final season, but even this was more a nod to the fact that the story needed an ending than a desire to acknowledge the passage of time.
QUINCY reflected the spirit of its age, the 1970s, which was a curious mixture of post-Vietnam exuberance, post-Watergate cynicism, and Cold War nihilism. It had a tendency toward naivete in dialog and often tacked on unrealistically happy endings onto stories, though this was certainly not the case in episodes like "Scream to the Skies," "Headhunter," "Guns Don't Die," or "Into the Murdering Mind," to cite just a few examples. Its sense of humor was quite lively and stinging, though it could often be cringe-inducing and silly. Some of the funnier running gags were Sam's inability to keep dates because of Quincy forcing him to work late hours, Quincy bitterly railing about the taste of the office coffee, Asten's merciless penny-pinching, Quincy insisting on parking the coroner's meatwagon outside Danny's restaurant, and Danny's jokes, which were almost 100% at Quincy's expense. Though its politics were generally left of center, it generally gave at least lip service to critics of the "causes" in question, and while it took some pains to actually reflect the racial and cultural diversity of Los Angeles, by today's standards, a lot of the humor at Sam's expense was flat-out racist. Additionally, it sometimes saw boogeymen where none were present: its most notorious episode "Next Stop, Nowhere" memorably and laughably presented the extended musical belch that was punk rock movement as an imminent societal threat. Other "causes" such as look-alike drugs and midwifery, did not stand the test of time. But in the last analysis, QUINCY had an almost eerie sense of timeliness, of prescience. It -- by which I mean Klugman and his producers and such writers as survived his temper and his purges -- had a remakable ability to sense which headlines really mattered, which evils needed to be fought and defeated. The speech Quincy gives railing against big pharma's effect on society -- From birth, children are told by newspapers, by radio, television commercials that they needn't put up with one moment of mental anguish, that relief is just a short reach away to the nearest bottle of pills. It's become a form of escape and a form of recreation. -- is more relevant now, in 2023, than when it was given, in 1979. And it is but one of many which have remained relevant, despite the feeling, when one watches an episode now, that one is looking into an unrecognizably distant past.
So where does that leave QUINCY after an interval of almost fifty years? Does the show still matter in this age of unremitting cynicism? What is its legacy?
As I said above, QUINCY feels enormously dated, more because of the heavy-handed way it presents its stories rather than because of the stories themselves: it tends toward naivete or at least a fairly shiny idealism, towards a belief that despite every manner of villainy, the universe bends toward justice. It can be terribly, almost irredeemably cheesy, especially when it insists on unrealistic happily ever afters. And yet, if one can get past the thick, stale layers of this pasteurized product, one cuts through to a heart which is still powerfully beating. I have often praised the tendency of older television shows to come down on the side of decency, chivalry, honor, etc. rather than cyncism and moral ambiguity: QUINCY is a mighty spear-carrier for this cause, but it carries its spear in a more mature way than you might expect. It insists, shrilly and insistently, that people have to get off their ass if they want to live in the world they actually desire, rather than the shitty one they actually inhabit. It pokes the chest of its audience like an ill-tempered ethics teacher trying to get a stoned, cheetoh-eating teenager to vote. It underscores, with a large red marker, the fact that democracy is everybody's job. In the age of Trump, of Putin and Netanyahu, this is more important than ever.
QUINCY went off the air forty years ago, but if you want to see its practical legacy, you have only to look at the monkey-branch of forensic and medical detective shows that have proliferated since it went off the air. QUINCY is not solely responsible for them -- Thomas Harris, who wrote Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs is probably the real culprit, and QUINCY was predated and probably heavily influenced by WOJECK, a Canadian forensics show from the late 1960s which also embrace "causes" -- but it is the series which brought forensic pathology to the broad masses, and in a way that made science approachable and even sexy. Quincy didn't beat people up; he outthought them. His weapons were a microscope, a scalpel, the scientific method, and a belief in "civility," meaning not merely politeness or nonviolence, but an abiding faith in human civilization. SEINFELD was once aptly described as "a show about nothing." QUINCY was a show about decency -- how hard it can be to achieve, and how impossible it is to live without.
October 25, 2023
MIDDLE AGE AND EMBRACING THE SUCK
Yesterday I went to my barber, Olivia, for my tri-weekly haircut. I estimate the hair I have was perhaps a half-inch long at the most, but it was too much: a few swipes of the electric razor later, it was nothing but stubble. Marine recruits have more hair. Before I left, I decided to come back not in three but two weeks: I don't want even that barely half inch. Just Kojack me.
To anyone who knew me in college, the idea of me rocking a nearly bald dome would be beyond belief. I was famous for my luxurious head of hair, which I modeled after James Dean and Mickey Rourke and Luke Perry, and infamous for my vanity about it. My college dorm-mates laughed at the sight of my "preening bucket" -- the bucket I took to the showers each morning which contained a brush, a blow-drier, gel, mousse, a comb, and God knows what else. I quite enjoyed this mockery. I enjoyed the jokes about me doubling for Vanilla Ice. I was proud of my heavy brown locks and was more than willing to endure some ribbing about it.
I remember the day when it finally sank in that I was losing that hair. I was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, and I compared the driver's license picture from my final year of college with the one just snapped. It struck me then that I had a lot more forehead. A lot more. I don't mean I was bald. I wasn't even what is generally referring to as balding. I just had...more forehead.
I began to sweat. As ridiculous as it sounds, a good deal of my identity had been invested in those follicles. They were part of my look, which was part of my vanity, which was part of my personality. I went into a state of denial, and after denial eroded in the face of the slowly growing forehead, I engaged in a bitter struggle to find hairstyles that worked. This struggle lasted almost twenty years, and the later half of it was very ugly indeed. Sometimes I'd go a whole year, or more, without a haircut, in hopes of compensating for fewer follicles. (This worked the first time, but never again.) Sometimes I'd rock the classic Caesar cut, which worked wonders until the quarter-sized bald spot on the back of my head grew to fifty-cent-piece, silver dollar, and finally teacup circumference. Sometimes, at the behest of my barber in Burbank, I'd powder the bald spot and grow out the front. Later, I grew out the front for almost two years and slicked it back, which bared yet more forehead but covered the growing desert in the back. I always congratulated myself on the success of these camouflage manuevers until I realized, usually through photography, that I was fooling no one but myself.
Not too long ago, I marched into the barber shop I've been utilizing here in York for several years, and told my cutter to let fly with those clippers. Just buzz the whole goddamn dome. I believe the number I selected was a No. 2. This looked pretty good to me, but it grew back all too quickly -- the central irony of baldness is that the hair you have grows like weeds -- so I returned and asked for a No. 1.5, and then a No. 1, which is the afformentioned Marine recruit buzz.
I'm like that: I will do everything humanly possible to avoid a decision I don't want to make, but when I finally make it, I run headlong at it like Sgt. Rock at the German lines, yelling "You wanna live forever?" between bursts of Tommy gun fire and hurling hand grenades. I do what folks in the military call "embracing the suck." Embracing the suck, I'm told, consists of not merely accepting that you are in a shitty situation, but opening your arms to it, and even learning how to enjoy it, whether on a philosophical or ironic level. It is, after all, unavoidable, so why bother crying and moaning?
Middle age is a damned strange business. Physically, I don't feel any different now than I did at thirty: I'm actually stronger, more muscular and probably a little more flexible. I've noticed no decline in stamina. Creatively, I'm doing better than ever, so there has been no cognitive decline. It's harder for me to lose weight, for sure, but I can still lose it, as I have documented on these very pages. Sexually I'm not twenty-one anymore, but show me a fifty year old man who is without having a Viagra I.V. The only real decline I can think of has been in terms of the quality of my sleep, but I've found ways to improve even that. And yet, according to the United Nations, old age begins at sixty. For me, that is nine years away. So I'd say you're only as old as you feel...but then I look in the mirror and remember I used to have James Dean hair, and I feel, well, kinda long in the tooth. Kinda gray in the muzzle. Kinda silver in the back. And I say to myself, "This is what it is, and you have to accept it. You have to embrace the suck."
It isn't easy. Not for me, anyway. I want to cry. I want to moan. The vanity of my youth persists in my mind like a poltergeist, and like a poltergeist gives me no rest on the days when a photograph or a video forces me to accept the 25 or 30 year old man I expect to see in the mirror is gone and ain't coming back. This happened to me recently, and at an inopportune time: celebrating the loss of almost fifteen pounds, I was sent nightly news footage of myself at a charity event...and I saw a bald, beefy, tired-looking guy who looked like he needed to lose another ten or fifteen pounds, easily. It was tough to take. I didn't get what I wanted after a lot of hard work. But rather than run to the nearest hair transplant center by way of a plastic surgeon specializing in liposuction, I just took a deep breath, sulked for the rest of the night, and then went back to the grind of shaving an ounce here, and an ounce there...and my head, now every two weeks.
Kierkegaard said that life was lived forward but understood backwards. He was more right than he knew. The more progress I make toward my real life goals, the further I get from my own physical ideal, and more I realize that the old me, the one which is evaporating, sloughing off, flaking away, is not going quietly or easily. I may be embracing the suck, but he is not. This poltergeist ain't getting exorcised quietly. He's gonna smash plates, up-end tables, spill drinks, blow out candles, and knock pictures off the wall. He's gonna crack windows and make thumping noises at three in the morning when all I want to do is sleep. Vanity is a bitch and doesn't want to be dumped. Who knows? Maybe this is a bit of a good thing. Maybe wanting to be young physically forces me to be as young, physically, as a fifty-one year old man can be. But chasing youth is a dangerous business, ultimately futile, and contains a note of tragic absurdity. The line between fighting the good fight and the cost-loss fallacy is fine, and middle-aged men don't always have the clearest or sharpest vision. It is, however, a little easier to see if you shave your head: at least the hair won't get in your eyes.
To anyone who knew me in college, the idea of me rocking a nearly bald dome would be beyond belief. I was famous for my luxurious head of hair, which I modeled after James Dean and Mickey Rourke and Luke Perry, and infamous for my vanity about it. My college dorm-mates laughed at the sight of my "preening bucket" -- the bucket I took to the showers each morning which contained a brush, a blow-drier, gel, mousse, a comb, and God knows what else. I quite enjoyed this mockery. I enjoyed the jokes about me doubling for Vanilla Ice. I was proud of my heavy brown locks and was more than willing to endure some ribbing about it.
I remember the day when it finally sank in that I was losing that hair. I was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, and I compared the driver's license picture from my final year of college with the one just snapped. It struck me then that I had a lot more forehead. A lot more. I don't mean I was bald. I wasn't even what is generally referring to as balding. I just had...more forehead.
I began to sweat. As ridiculous as it sounds, a good deal of my identity had been invested in those follicles. They were part of my look, which was part of my vanity, which was part of my personality. I went into a state of denial, and after denial eroded in the face of the slowly growing forehead, I engaged in a bitter struggle to find hairstyles that worked. This struggle lasted almost twenty years, and the later half of it was very ugly indeed. Sometimes I'd go a whole year, or more, without a haircut, in hopes of compensating for fewer follicles. (This worked the first time, but never again.) Sometimes I'd rock the classic Caesar cut, which worked wonders until the quarter-sized bald spot on the back of my head grew to fifty-cent-piece, silver dollar, and finally teacup circumference. Sometimes, at the behest of my barber in Burbank, I'd powder the bald spot and grow out the front. Later, I grew out the front for almost two years and slicked it back, which bared yet more forehead but covered the growing desert in the back. I always congratulated myself on the success of these camouflage manuevers until I realized, usually through photography, that I was fooling no one but myself.
Not too long ago, I marched into the barber shop I've been utilizing here in York for several years, and told my cutter to let fly with those clippers. Just buzz the whole goddamn dome. I believe the number I selected was a No. 2. This looked pretty good to me, but it grew back all too quickly -- the central irony of baldness is that the hair you have grows like weeds -- so I returned and asked for a No. 1.5, and then a No. 1, which is the afformentioned Marine recruit buzz.
I'm like that: I will do everything humanly possible to avoid a decision I don't want to make, but when I finally make it, I run headlong at it like Sgt. Rock at the German lines, yelling "You wanna live forever?" between bursts of Tommy gun fire and hurling hand grenades. I do what folks in the military call "embracing the suck." Embracing the suck, I'm told, consists of not merely accepting that you are in a shitty situation, but opening your arms to it, and even learning how to enjoy it, whether on a philosophical or ironic level. It is, after all, unavoidable, so why bother crying and moaning?
Middle age is a damned strange business. Physically, I don't feel any different now than I did at thirty: I'm actually stronger, more muscular and probably a little more flexible. I've noticed no decline in stamina. Creatively, I'm doing better than ever, so there has been no cognitive decline. It's harder for me to lose weight, for sure, but I can still lose it, as I have documented on these very pages. Sexually I'm not twenty-one anymore, but show me a fifty year old man who is without having a Viagra I.V. The only real decline I can think of has been in terms of the quality of my sleep, but I've found ways to improve even that. And yet, according to the United Nations, old age begins at sixty. For me, that is nine years away. So I'd say you're only as old as you feel...but then I look in the mirror and remember I used to have James Dean hair, and I feel, well, kinda long in the tooth. Kinda gray in the muzzle. Kinda silver in the back. And I say to myself, "This is what it is, and you have to accept it. You have to embrace the suck."
It isn't easy. Not for me, anyway. I want to cry. I want to moan. The vanity of my youth persists in my mind like a poltergeist, and like a poltergeist gives me no rest on the days when a photograph or a video forces me to accept the 25 or 30 year old man I expect to see in the mirror is gone and ain't coming back. This happened to me recently, and at an inopportune time: celebrating the loss of almost fifteen pounds, I was sent nightly news footage of myself at a charity event...and I saw a bald, beefy, tired-looking guy who looked like he needed to lose another ten or fifteen pounds, easily. It was tough to take. I didn't get what I wanted after a lot of hard work. But rather than run to the nearest hair transplant center by way of a plastic surgeon specializing in liposuction, I just took a deep breath, sulked for the rest of the night, and then went back to the grind of shaving an ounce here, and an ounce there...and my head, now every two weeks.
Kierkegaard said that life was lived forward but understood backwards. He was more right than he knew. The more progress I make toward my real life goals, the further I get from my own physical ideal, and more I realize that the old me, the one which is evaporating, sloughing off, flaking away, is not going quietly or easily. I may be embracing the suck, but he is not. This poltergeist ain't getting exorcised quietly. He's gonna smash plates, up-end tables, spill drinks, blow out candles, and knock pictures off the wall. He's gonna crack windows and make thumping noises at three in the morning when all I want to do is sleep. Vanity is a bitch and doesn't want to be dumped. Who knows? Maybe this is a bit of a good thing. Maybe wanting to be young physically forces me to be as young, physically, as a fifty-one year old man can be. But chasing youth is a dangerous business, ultimately futile, and contains a note of tragic absurdity. The line between fighting the good fight and the cost-loss fallacy is fine, and middle-aged men don't always have the clearest or sharpest vision. It is, however, a little easier to see if you shave your head: at least the hair won't get in your eyes.
October 21, 2023
HALLOWEEN HORROR (2023) PART II
Hullo folks. It's 11:45 PM on Saturday night, I have just returned from a costume party, and since I am endeavoring to maintain the Wednesday - Saturday blogging schedule, I thought I'd pop in to regale you with my further explorations into the world of horror movies. As you know, I have vowed to watch one for every day in October, and right now I am precisely on schedule. So without further ado, here is what I've seen since last we met:
Final Prayer a.k.a The Borderlands (2013). I normally detest "found footage" films, but this small cast British movie about a small team of Vatican experts sent to a rural church to investigate, and in fact debunk, purported "miracles" is well-acted, offbeat, and comes to a thoroughly disturbing climax which is all the more disturbing for having been foreshadowed, albeit in very subtle ways. Gordon Kennedy is exceptional as an disillusioned, burned-out priest with a quick temper and a drinking problem.
Host (2020). Along with "mockumentaries" and "found footage" movies, there are now "screenlife" films which take place entirely in online formats. "Host" is just such a film. A large group of female friends, bored by Covid quarantine, hire a psychic to guide them through an online seance on Zoom, only to discover the spirit they have summoned has a definite taste for blood. I confess this was a much better film than I was expecting: it's lean, it's mean, the performances are good, and I have to respect the cleverness of the approach.
The Ritual (2017). This is a prime example of a movie which is well-made, well-acted, and has a simple but intriguing premise, yet ultimately fails to deliver. "The Ritual" is the story of four British lads who go on a hiking tour of northern Sweden, only to discover there is something in the woods hunting them, something very old and driven by a peculiar need. Seldom have I watched a horror movie this well-crafted and thoughtful, yet the payoff is lacking: it would have been more interesting had it stuck to its early explorations of friendship, grief, cowardice and courage.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023). This is a movie drawn out of a single, terrifying chapter of Bram Stoker's "Dracula," specifically the part where Dracula systematically murders the crew of the transport ship he is using to take himself from Transylvania to England. It's well crafted, and boasts the mighty Liam Cunningham in its cast, but after a fairly promising start, it runs head-first into every problem modern moviemaking throws at us: over-reliance on CGI, disrespect for the source material, wokeist themes. In the hands of a better writer and director, it could have been a kind of 19th century "Alien," but it ends up just another example of how modern writers cannot create anything, but only desecrate the work of their betters.
Crucible of Terror (1971). I confess my dumb ass found this by mistake. I was looking for the movie below, and by the time I'd figured out my blunder was too invested, timewise, to stop watching. "Terror" is a gritty, low-budget flick about a British artist who makes sculptures out of his subjects -- literally. Although not without some memorable moments and boasting some credible actors, it comes off as cheap and amateurish, a kind of sleazy knock-off of Hammer Horror, and its general air of cheesy weirdness doesn't help.
Crucible of Horror (1971). Also known simply as "The Corpse," this is a much better British flick shot in the same year which stars the normally cuddly Michael Gough as the stuffy, sadistic, misogynistic patriarch of an upper middle-class family. His long-suffering wife and daughter decide to murder him, but discover that this is a hell of a lot easier said than done. An often surreal movie full of cruel symbolism and very definite things to say about sexual and spiritual repression and their effects on the mind and soul, it resembles "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"...but with a corpse. Gough is superb as a man who clips roses, in more ways than one.
The Quiet Place (2018). While I wasn't enamored of this movie nearly as much as I expected to be given all the hype surrounding it, I found the story of a silent post-apocalyptic world where monsters hunt surviving humans by sound alone, engaging and quite well made. John Krasinski continues to show us that he can do a lot more than play Jim on "The Office," and in this film has to do it with almost no dialog at all, a challenge he accepts, and overcomes. The troublesome insistence on CGI over practical effects is increasingly tiresome to me, but in this case it's not much more than annoying.
Dog Soldiers (2002). Yet another British movie pits a squad of soldiers against a pack of slavering werewolves who have ambushed them deep in the Scottish wilderness. A fast, cleverly written, homage-laden action-horror piece with strong performances by Kevin McKidd, Sean Pertwee and Liam Cunningham, it retains a profane sense of humor throughout, but never slides too far into comedic territory to let audiences breathe easy. It's not at all scary, but damn, is it entertaining.
And that is as far as I've gotten, lads. I have ten more movies to go before Halloween night, but I have to say that with a few exceptions, the quality of the films I've seen lately is, overall, much better than those I watched last year. I make a point of mixing old ones with contemporary, and foreign flicks with American, but I never know just what the hell I'm going to encounter. And that, of course, is the essence of horror.
Final Prayer a.k.a The Borderlands (2013). I normally detest "found footage" films, but this small cast British movie about a small team of Vatican experts sent to a rural church to investigate, and in fact debunk, purported "miracles" is well-acted, offbeat, and comes to a thoroughly disturbing climax which is all the more disturbing for having been foreshadowed, albeit in very subtle ways. Gordon Kennedy is exceptional as an disillusioned, burned-out priest with a quick temper and a drinking problem.
Host (2020). Along with "mockumentaries" and "found footage" movies, there are now "screenlife" films which take place entirely in online formats. "Host" is just such a film. A large group of female friends, bored by Covid quarantine, hire a psychic to guide them through an online seance on Zoom, only to discover the spirit they have summoned has a definite taste for blood. I confess this was a much better film than I was expecting: it's lean, it's mean, the performances are good, and I have to respect the cleverness of the approach.
The Ritual (2017). This is a prime example of a movie which is well-made, well-acted, and has a simple but intriguing premise, yet ultimately fails to deliver. "The Ritual" is the story of four British lads who go on a hiking tour of northern Sweden, only to discover there is something in the woods hunting them, something very old and driven by a peculiar need. Seldom have I watched a horror movie this well-crafted and thoughtful, yet the payoff is lacking: it would have been more interesting had it stuck to its early explorations of friendship, grief, cowardice and courage.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023). This is a movie drawn out of a single, terrifying chapter of Bram Stoker's "Dracula," specifically the part where Dracula systematically murders the crew of the transport ship he is using to take himself from Transylvania to England. It's well crafted, and boasts the mighty Liam Cunningham in its cast, but after a fairly promising start, it runs head-first into every problem modern moviemaking throws at us: over-reliance on CGI, disrespect for the source material, wokeist themes. In the hands of a better writer and director, it could have been a kind of 19th century "Alien," but it ends up just another example of how modern writers cannot create anything, but only desecrate the work of their betters.
Crucible of Terror (1971). I confess my dumb ass found this by mistake. I was looking for the movie below, and by the time I'd figured out my blunder was too invested, timewise, to stop watching. "Terror" is a gritty, low-budget flick about a British artist who makes sculptures out of his subjects -- literally. Although not without some memorable moments and boasting some credible actors, it comes off as cheap and amateurish, a kind of sleazy knock-off of Hammer Horror, and its general air of cheesy weirdness doesn't help.
Crucible of Horror (1971). Also known simply as "The Corpse," this is a much better British flick shot in the same year which stars the normally cuddly Michael Gough as the stuffy, sadistic, misogynistic patriarch of an upper middle-class family. His long-suffering wife and daughter decide to murder him, but discover that this is a hell of a lot easier said than done. An often surreal movie full of cruel symbolism and very definite things to say about sexual and spiritual repression and their effects on the mind and soul, it resembles "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"...but with a corpse. Gough is superb as a man who clips roses, in more ways than one.
The Quiet Place (2018). While I wasn't enamored of this movie nearly as much as I expected to be given all the hype surrounding it, I found the story of a silent post-apocalyptic world where monsters hunt surviving humans by sound alone, engaging and quite well made. John Krasinski continues to show us that he can do a lot more than play Jim on "The Office," and in this film has to do it with almost no dialog at all, a challenge he accepts, and overcomes. The troublesome insistence on CGI over practical effects is increasingly tiresome to me, but in this case it's not much more than annoying.
Dog Soldiers (2002). Yet another British movie pits a squad of soldiers against a pack of slavering werewolves who have ambushed them deep in the Scottish wilderness. A fast, cleverly written, homage-laden action-horror piece with strong performances by Kevin McKidd, Sean Pertwee and Liam Cunningham, it retains a profane sense of humor throughout, but never slides too far into comedic territory to let audiences breathe easy. It's not at all scary, but damn, is it entertaining.
And that is as far as I've gotten, lads. I have ten more movies to go before Halloween night, but I have to say that with a few exceptions, the quality of the films I've seen lately is, overall, much better than those I watched last year. I make a point of mixing old ones with contemporary, and foreign flicks with American, but I never know just what the hell I'm going to encounter. And that, of course, is the essence of horror.
October 18, 2023
MY CATALOG AS A WRITER
At the beginning of this year I made some...predictions...about what I would accomplish this year (we all know I don't make resolutions). One of them was to make an effort to partially transition into traditional, mainstream publishing. I say "partially" because my fiction covers so many genres that I cannot possibly publish all of it under my own name using the traditional methods. Publishers, understandably, want to brand their authors with a simple, clearly understandable label -- mystery, horror, techno-thriller, fantasy, whatever -- and once branded, it is damnably hard for said authors to branch out without using a pseudonym. I am proud of my name, and proud of the work I do under it, and would prefer to avoid nom de plumes except under very specific, necessary circumstances. But at any rate, and without getting into details, I'm doing what I set out to do: I haven't succeeded, but important steps have been taken and good progress has been made. Whether the deal will be sealed is another matter entirely: you don't spend twelve and a half years slogging away in Hollywood and count any chickens -- and I mean any chickens -- before they hatch. I mention this because I'm not sure if I've ever actually sat down and discussed, with the few thousand people who read this regularly, everything that I have published to date, mostly through the microimprint One Nine Books, directly to Amazon. I am not talking about short stories I've had published in print magazines. Nor am I talking about the short stories I've made available for purchase on Amazon. Longer forms only.
So, here goes:
NOVELS
CAGE LIFE (Cage Life Series #1). This is my first novel, the story of a New York-based MMA fighter who slugs the wrong guy in a barroom brawl and ends up owing the local Mafia his physical services as a means of paying his "debt." As a former parole officer with a background in martial arts, I was able to bring a lot of personal experience, knowledge and research into this novel that made both the criminal sequences and the fight scenes pass the tests thrown at them by, well, the actual criminals, cops and fighters who actually read it. This novel is like Film Noir minus most of the moral ambiguity, and there's a love story in there, too, as my hero, Mick, struggles with temptations of the criminal life and the violence it brings, and tries to find his way back to "normal" life. CAGE LIFE was Zealot Script Magazine's "Book of the Year" in 2016 and won the Best Indie Book Award.
KNUCKLE DOWN (Cage Life Series #2). The second book in the CAGE LIFE series finds Mick returning to New York to investigate threats made against the life of his ex-girlfriend...who is now engaged to his worst enemy. Battling with his feelings for her as he delves back into the underworld he escaped, he's also embroiled in an old-school fighting tournament with a million-dollar prize. The first book was a crime thriller; this one combines thrills with a mystery which Mick must solve if he wants to save the life of his estranged beloved, and delves into the dark intersection between big business and transnational crime. KNUCKLE DOWN won the Best Indie Book Award in 2019 and was a Writer's Digest Honorable Mention.
SINNER'S CROSS (Sinner's Cross Series #1). I've studied the Second World War since I was a small boy. I have a degree in history. I've read hundreds of books on the subject (in English and German), interviewed WW2 veterans, obtained boxes' worth of original documents, the Nuremberg Trials documents, etc., etc. SINNER'S CROSS is a WW2 novel told from both the American and the German points of view, describing their lives as they fight for a worthless crossroads on the Belgian-German border during the final months of 1944. It is not a story about strategy or technology. It is a study of human beings under the most extreme psychological and physical pressures men can experience. It is a deliberate, systematic attempt to avoid cliche, propaganda, and the sort of nationalistic feelings and "greatest generation" hero worship that abound in most stories of this type. Nobody has ever told me this was an easy book to read: the violence is relentless and extreme, and I play no favorites with the characters. But SINNER'S CROSS is a hit with critics. It has won the Book Excellence Award, the Literary Titan Gold Medal, the Best Indie Book Award, and the Reader's Favorite Gold Medal, among other accolades.
THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER (Sinner's Cross Series #2). This novel picks up where SINNER'S CROSS left off; it follows the surviving characters from the Battle of the Huertgen Forest into the opening stage of the Battle of the Bulge, i.e. the Ardennes Campaign of 1944 - 1945. It retains the split perspective of Americans and Germans, but like its predecessor, intersects and weaves the fates of these men closely together in a kind of violent 6-Degrees-of-Separation-meets-the-Butterfly Effect. It also highlights a part of the famous campaign which is little known -- the Battle of the Snow Eifel, an American catastrophe. THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER has won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, the Literary Titan Gold Medal, Book Excellence Award Finalist, and is a Reader's Favorite Five Star.
COLLECTIONS
DEVILS YOU KNOW. This is a collection of thirteen short stories I wrote over a 26 year period, covering subjects as diverse as grief, the devil, Nazism, gangterism, the Civil War, dystopia, and so on; but the unifying theme is horror. A few were previously published in literary magazines, but most were purpose-built for the collection, which -- as the name implies -- explores some of the darker aspects of human motivation and existence. There is some humor, too, though it tends toward the midnight black variety. If you by some chance have an interest as to how a writer's style develops over a quarter of a century at the keys, this is also for you.
COMING SOON
EXILES: A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS (Magnus Chronicles II). My novella DEUS EX (see below) explored the idea of a dictator's downfall and attempt to escape from justice while proving -- to himself -- that he had been right all along. In writing the novella, I developed not only the world he occupied, but within my mind, the one he had destroyed in order to take power. In EXILES I explored this barely hinted-at world at length in full novel form, through the eyes of two protagonists at odds with the aspiring Tyrant. I have never had so much fun writing a book as this one, or written it as easily or in such a short time. This is part alternative history, part adventure, and part thriller. While reading DEUS EX might make the experience more enjoyable, it is not necessary, as I am not telling the story of Magnus in order, and indeed, the first entry in the series is actually its end. So spoilers are impossible. This novel will be released either later this year or early in 2024.
NOVELLAS
NOSFERATU. A non-supernatural horror story set in WW2 on the Eastern Front, it chronicles the experiences of a courageous, principled, but morally blind German officer who, after being wounded in battle, discovers the sinister origins of the means used to save his life. Winner of the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award.
SHADOWS AND GLORY. Another WW2 tale from the German perspective, it is the story of a naive, brainwashed young boy who idolizes his U-boat commander father, only to discover his hero has ideological feet of clay.
SEELENMORD. A nonmagical fantasy set in an ancient land, SEELENMORD tells of the arrival into a peaceful, pagan village of a mysterious stranger preaching a sinister new religion.
THE NUMBERS GAME. Yet another WW2 tale, from the British perspective and told in the black comic style of Evelyn Waugh and Derek Robinson, it is the story of a Hurricane pilot in the Battle of Britain whose passion for numbers, statistics and probabilities leads him to the inescapable conclusion that he can predict the exact moment of his death. A Pinnacle Book Achivement Award winner.
DEUS EX. Magnus Antonius Magnus once ruled a quarter of the Earth and was worshiped by millions as a god; now he is fleeing the ruins of his capital as his enemies close in from all sides. What went wrong? Can he escape justice? And if he does, has he learned anything from his downfall? (Alternative history)
WOLF WEATHER. A dark fantasy set in the wastes of the frozen north, finds the hero the sole survivor of an isolated fort, beset on all sides by werewolves whose plan for him is far worse than death. An exploration of what happens when wild savagery collides with iron discipline.
And that, friends and neighbors, is my catalog as of today, 10/18/23. There is, of course, more coming: if I do one thing correctly (an arguable assertion) it is get the ideas in my head onto paper. Feel free to explore all of them (save EXILES) via the links below.
October 14, 2023
HALLOWEEN HORROR (2023)
Well, here we are again in October, the day after Friday the 13th, and the time seems nigh for me to resume my habit of annoying the shit out of you by talking about horror movies again. As you may remember, last October I watched thirty-one horror movies in thirty-one days, the sole criteria being that I had never watched them before, or had watched them so long in the past I didn't remember them. I am doing this again in 2023, and as of today I am just over the halfway mark.
Why do I do this? Well, I have a childhood fondness for Halloween and all of its pomps and rituals that has lasted into adulthood, but that's not the whole answer by any means. The fact is that like many people, I am both attracted to and repelled by fright flicks, and my insistence on watching them comes partly because I am fascinated by this paradox, this emotional push-pull, and I wish to explore it. On a more practical level, as a writer, the ability to evoke emotion is very high on the list of a storyteller's necessary abilities, and while it is easy to disgust people, to frighten them, to horrify or terrify them, takes a different level of skill. When I see this done properly -- and by properly I mean by doing more than throwing stage blood around by the gallon -- it is a thing of beauty, even if the subject matter itself is unpleasant or even traumatizing. I am always looking to add tools to my literary toolbox, and a good, inspirational horror movie is as fine a way as any of the many available to do this.
Now, I should qualify this by saying that I do discriminate when it comes to horror: I am absolutely not interested in "torture porn" or anything that comes close to the definition of same. Such movies are unworthy of my time or my ink, pitched as they are to the very lowest level of human behavior, sadism, and the very lowest level of storytelling, the gross-out. So you won't be finding any of that shit on my list or any future (or past) list...unless of course I came upon it accidentally and felt compelled to drop a review in its aftermath.
The following is what I have seen so far this month. Each film is accompanied by a brief, SPOILER FREE review, just in case y'all are looking for horror movies to watch as Halloween approaches, and are tired of recycling the same old fare (now that I think of it, I actually began this practice because I had grown tired of doing just exactly that).
Caveat (2020). "Dreadful" is a much-misused word. It isn't supposed to mean awful in quality, but rather the quality of causing dread in others, and by that metric, Caveat works very well indeed. The tale of a man recuperating from a traumatic brain injury who is talked into taking care of a crazy woman in an isolated house in the English countryside, this offbeat, small-cast flick combines the mystery element of Memento with what's either a murder mystery, or a ghost story, or both. While the second half doesn't match the relentlessly building tension of the first hour, this is a thoughtful, gore-free horror movie definitely worth your time.
Halloween Ends (2022). David Gordon Green helmed all three of the (latest) new Halloween movies, intended as direct and linear sequels to the original 1978 John Carpenter classic. The first was watchable but utterly forgettable, the second viscerally violent but featuring some of the worst dialog I've ever heard in a major motion picture, and the last...well, this movie was just plain stupid. A sloppy mash-up of Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers and Friday the 13th: Part 5 (both arguably movies that should never have been made in the first place), it barely features its titular character, concentrating instead on hugely unrealistic teen drama, possession, and boring murders. While I was happy to see Jamie Lee Curtis back in harness as Laurie Strode, this series should have been handled by a better writer and director, or simply not made at all. I really hope this is the end of Halloween...but I know better.
Session 9 (2001). This low-budget, small-cast film set in an abandoned New England insane asylum was disturbing, unsettling, engaging, and has very definite things to say about the relationship between economic woe, marital dischord, spontaneous violence, unbearable grief and regret so intense it leads to madness. A small crew of asbestos removers has zero time to clean up a huge old building, but the place's disturbing history, and their own personal problems, get in the way. I'm not a fan of David Caruso generally, but I'm damned if he didn't absolutely deliver in this movie as the deteriorating protagonist's gruff-tuff best friend. The film's last line, "I live in the weak and the wounded," is an equally eloquent comment on the murderer within all of us.
Prom Night (2008). The original Prom Night was a boring horror movie remembered mainly for helping Jamie Lee Curtis build her Scream Queen resume, but otherwise utterly forgettable. The remake is more boring and even more forgettable. Idris Elba is a cliched cop trying to prevent an escaped psycho from having his way with a prom queen at her coronation, but he sucks at his job, and well, a boring villain carves up boring slasher fodder in a hotel for a couple of hours...that's all I can remember.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022). How many times are they going to try and rev up this rusty old power tool, anyway? The original was in 1974! Actually, this bloodbath is better than it has any right to be. Not good, mind you: just nowhere near as awful and stupid as I expected. The plot is meager: Some not terribly likeable twentysomethings arrive in a Texas ghost town to look at property, but piss off the wrong lunatic. Though it eschews the cannibalistic aspect that helped make the original so unsettling, it growls along at a pretty frenetic pace before it flies apart in a welter of pointless gore and dumb storytelling, and I appreciated that the female actors looked like real people and not supermodels on a rustic-themed photoshoot.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). A psychological horror movie without violence, Picnic is an early Peter Weir movie set in Australia early in the 20th century. The stern headmistress of a struggling girls' school takes her ladies for a picnic in a remote area, and when three of them go missing, the ensuing panic, rumors, and backbiting have even worse consequences for the survivors. As much an exercise in social-societal commentary as anything else, harping on class differences, frustrated female sexuality and repression generally, the movie is slow and surreal and leaves many unanswered questions, but is curiously haunting all the same.
Creature from Black Lake (1976). I watched this largely forgotten B-movie for the hell of it. It's dumb, it's silly, it's poorly paced and more comedic than anything else, but for all that, I kind of enjoyed the saga of two collegiate morons from Chicago who head to the Lousiana bayous to investigate whether Bigfoot actually exists, and find out that, yes, indeed, he does, and -- figure this -- he's not very nice. Neither is the local sheriff, who is irked at Yankees stirring up trouble and trying to bang his nubile daughter. I question why this movie was even made, but the answer seems to be, "For fun!" and fun it is: dumb fun.
Psycho II (1983). Psycho is regarded as such a sacred horror classic that this sequel was treated with violent derision before it even hit the theater. Actually, this movie ain't half bad. Shot entirely on the Universal backlot (I recognize almost every location), Psycho II is a low-budget but high-craft B-movie in which Anthony Perkins reprises Norman Bates, the knife-wielding, dress-wearing, Mom-loving murderer from Hitchcock's original film. Except Norman has been cured by psychiatrists after years in a padded cell, and is now free again to resume managing the Bates Hotel. The problem is, someone is messing with his head, and if Norman doesn't find out who it is, he may just resume his stabby, shower-intruding ways. I was quite engaged by this movie, which suffers some script and acting issues but is fast-paced, enjoyable and has some very respectable twists, along with a surprisingly deep cast which includes Robert Loggia, Vera Miles and Dennis Franz.
Dust Devil (1992). Australian films like to make use of the sheer size, wildness, and desolation of their landscape: Dust Devil was shot in Namibia, but it follows the same principle. The story of a wandering demon in human form who ritually murders his victims in hopes of escaping the curse of his fleshly existence, it is a beautifully shot, somewhat surreal movie with a strong undertone of African racial, ethnic, and societal politics: a world-weary black lawman, enforcing the white man's laws but reluctantly using black magic, hunts a (literal) white devil, albeit one with more complex motives than murder and mayhem. It's not a great movie, not even a particularly good one, and some of what happens seems completely pointless, but it is memorable and somewhat haunting, and some of the narration is beautifully written.
Crawl (2019). Barry Pepper and Kayla Scoledario star as a disgruntled father and his estranged swimmer daughter, caught beneath their Florida house during a hurricane, and besieged by large, hungry alligators freed from their swamp by the resulting flood. There's nothing special about this movie, it's utterly predictable, the writing is mediocre, our heroes sustain wounds which would easily kill them, and aside from a couple of jump scares it's forgettable: but it held my interest while it was running. That's the best, and the worst, I can say about it.
Devil (2010). Four strangers are trapped in an elevator. All four of them harbor dark secrets, and as frantic efforts to rescue them continue to fail, tensions rise, as do suspicions one of them is a murderer...or possibly Satan himself. I confess this movie caught me agreeably by surprise. There is some unnecessary cheesiness and heavy-handedness, as there always is in anything M. Night Shamylan touches even slightly, and the ending could have been better and more satisfying, but while it lasted, it was a tense, paranoid, fast-paced exercise in locked-room mystery-horror, with more than a touch of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians.
The Burrowers (2008). This horror movie set in the Old West really had my interest...for a moment: the cast was good, the acting was good, the film felt period-accurate, and the premise wasn't bad at all: but the execution sucked. Mysterious "forces" are kidnapping settlers in the West, and a local posse, naturally assuming Indians are to blame, rides into the badlands to get some justice, only to find out what did the kidnapping is much worse than the Souix or Ute natives. The pacing of this movie is terrible, nothing happens for way too long, and it seems much less interested in the story than in dragging us through the numerous social and racial injustices of the 1880s. What's more, the premise is not as cool as Tremors, a more modern Western movie it was clearly imitating to a certain degree. A similarly themed film, Bone Tomahawk, did a far superior job in 2015. It's too bad: this could have been a winner.
The Resurrected (1991). H.P. Lovecraft is often called one of the more unadaptable writers of all time. His stories relied heavily on withholding imagery, implying rather than showing horrors, and intimating there were enormous, destructive, evil forces just out of eyeshot which would drive us mad if he described them. None of this lends itself readily to screenwriters looking for easy concepts to sell to dim-witted movie executives. The Resurrected is a spirited B-movie attempt to break this curse and put one of his stories on said screen in an appealing way. It doesn't succeed, but the attempt is so spirited, so earnest, so honest and determined, that it's hard to pick over the film's many, many faults. Basically, it's the tale of an upscale gumshoe hired by a distraught wife who wants to know why her husband is always off conducting "experiments" in the guest house of their isolated New England home. The gumshoe's investigation reveals nothing serious: just that the guy is trying to bring back the dead and, well, eat the living. Mayhem ensues. If you happened to actually like Hellraiser II: Hellbound then this is for you. But not many people can say that.
Midnight Movie (2008). A spirited, almost frantic, attempt to clamp electrical leads onto the withered, blistered, burned, utterly lifeless cadaver of slasher movies. The corpse did not convert, but it did jump off the table a few times. This is a film-within-a-film about a group of people trapped in a movie theater with a homicidal maniac, whose point of view is playing up on the silver screen before them, interwoven with a 70s-style splatter flick directed by the killer himself. If that sounds like a lot, it is. The creators of the movie threw absolutely everything they could think of at the wall in hopes that something would stick: comedy, meta references, direct and indirect “homages” to other horror movies (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Psycho, Popcorn, Halloween Night, etc.) escalating violence, unexpected deaths, and all manner of horror movie tropes and clichés. Some of it works. Most of it doesn't. It's like some overflowing, spluttering play written by a caffeine-addicted, hypertensive college student with more enthusiasm and energy than talent or imagination. Slashers are, let's face it, a dead subgenre; they have been dead since Scream debuted in 1996. The whole idea of self-awareness and “meta” in horror was ultimately fatal to everything it touched. But hey, these guys tried.
Ghostwatch (1992). A British TV movie made by the BBC, this is a "mockumentary" about a TV crew sent out on Halloween night to document a poltergeist supposedly haunting a suburban London home for live audiences. Meanwhile, back at the studio, a credulous parapsychologist and a dry-witted, disbelieving show host spar over the existence of the supernatural while observing the doings of the remote crew on their monitors. Shot during the heyday of sleazy live TV gimmicks like "The Secrets of Al Capone's Vault," it starts in that exact vein, with the producers of "Ghostwatch" clearly trying to exploit a long-suffering single mum and her traumatized children for the sake of Halloween night ratings. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the ghost haunting Foxhill Drive is very real, very nasty, and has very big plans for his "audience." Ghostwatch is a very, very slow burn and requires patience and concentration, but damn, when it starts to get going, it goes. Every one of the "found footage" films that deluged us from 1999 onwards owes a heavy debt to this movie, just as it owes a debt to Orson Welles live broadcast of War of the Worlds, which also scared the shit out of millions of people who didn't know it was just make believe.
As I have often observed, it is difficult to binge watch, or even methodically examine, horror movies without wading through a considerable about of Thames mudbutter. On the other hand, this yearly orgy (somehow orgies seem more appropriate on Halloween) does introduce me to a number of flicks I have never seen which are actually decent or even pretty darn good, and given my dislike of trying new things, forcing myself to watch all this previously unseen stuff is good for my brain, even if watching people get skewered, eaten alive, and set on fire is not. In the meantime, the countdown to Halloween, when I will review the second half of my watch list, continues.
Why do I do this? Well, I have a childhood fondness for Halloween and all of its pomps and rituals that has lasted into adulthood, but that's not the whole answer by any means. The fact is that like many people, I am both attracted to and repelled by fright flicks, and my insistence on watching them comes partly because I am fascinated by this paradox, this emotional push-pull, and I wish to explore it. On a more practical level, as a writer, the ability to evoke emotion is very high on the list of a storyteller's necessary abilities, and while it is easy to disgust people, to frighten them, to horrify or terrify them, takes a different level of skill. When I see this done properly -- and by properly I mean by doing more than throwing stage blood around by the gallon -- it is a thing of beauty, even if the subject matter itself is unpleasant or even traumatizing. I am always looking to add tools to my literary toolbox, and a good, inspirational horror movie is as fine a way as any of the many available to do this.
Now, I should qualify this by saying that I do discriminate when it comes to horror: I am absolutely not interested in "torture porn" or anything that comes close to the definition of same. Such movies are unworthy of my time or my ink, pitched as they are to the very lowest level of human behavior, sadism, and the very lowest level of storytelling, the gross-out. So you won't be finding any of that shit on my list or any future (or past) list...unless of course I came upon it accidentally and felt compelled to drop a review in its aftermath.
The following is what I have seen so far this month. Each film is accompanied by a brief, SPOILER FREE review, just in case y'all are looking for horror movies to watch as Halloween approaches, and are tired of recycling the same old fare (now that I think of it, I actually began this practice because I had grown tired of doing just exactly that).
Caveat (2020). "Dreadful" is a much-misused word. It isn't supposed to mean awful in quality, but rather the quality of causing dread in others, and by that metric, Caveat works very well indeed. The tale of a man recuperating from a traumatic brain injury who is talked into taking care of a crazy woman in an isolated house in the English countryside, this offbeat, small-cast flick combines the mystery element of Memento with what's either a murder mystery, or a ghost story, or both. While the second half doesn't match the relentlessly building tension of the first hour, this is a thoughtful, gore-free horror movie definitely worth your time.
Halloween Ends (2022). David Gordon Green helmed all three of the (latest) new Halloween movies, intended as direct and linear sequels to the original 1978 John Carpenter classic. The first was watchable but utterly forgettable, the second viscerally violent but featuring some of the worst dialog I've ever heard in a major motion picture, and the last...well, this movie was just plain stupid. A sloppy mash-up of Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers and Friday the 13th: Part 5 (both arguably movies that should never have been made in the first place), it barely features its titular character, concentrating instead on hugely unrealistic teen drama, possession, and boring murders. While I was happy to see Jamie Lee Curtis back in harness as Laurie Strode, this series should have been handled by a better writer and director, or simply not made at all. I really hope this is the end of Halloween...but I know better.
Session 9 (2001). This low-budget, small-cast film set in an abandoned New England insane asylum was disturbing, unsettling, engaging, and has very definite things to say about the relationship between economic woe, marital dischord, spontaneous violence, unbearable grief and regret so intense it leads to madness. A small crew of asbestos removers has zero time to clean up a huge old building, but the place's disturbing history, and their own personal problems, get in the way. I'm not a fan of David Caruso generally, but I'm damned if he didn't absolutely deliver in this movie as the deteriorating protagonist's gruff-tuff best friend. The film's last line, "I live in the weak and the wounded," is an equally eloquent comment on the murderer within all of us.
Prom Night (2008). The original Prom Night was a boring horror movie remembered mainly for helping Jamie Lee Curtis build her Scream Queen resume, but otherwise utterly forgettable. The remake is more boring and even more forgettable. Idris Elba is a cliched cop trying to prevent an escaped psycho from having his way with a prom queen at her coronation, but he sucks at his job, and well, a boring villain carves up boring slasher fodder in a hotel for a couple of hours...that's all I can remember.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022). How many times are they going to try and rev up this rusty old power tool, anyway? The original was in 1974! Actually, this bloodbath is better than it has any right to be. Not good, mind you: just nowhere near as awful and stupid as I expected. The plot is meager: Some not terribly likeable twentysomethings arrive in a Texas ghost town to look at property, but piss off the wrong lunatic. Though it eschews the cannibalistic aspect that helped make the original so unsettling, it growls along at a pretty frenetic pace before it flies apart in a welter of pointless gore and dumb storytelling, and I appreciated that the female actors looked like real people and not supermodels on a rustic-themed photoshoot.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). A psychological horror movie without violence, Picnic is an early Peter Weir movie set in Australia early in the 20th century. The stern headmistress of a struggling girls' school takes her ladies for a picnic in a remote area, and when three of them go missing, the ensuing panic, rumors, and backbiting have even worse consequences for the survivors. As much an exercise in social-societal commentary as anything else, harping on class differences, frustrated female sexuality and repression generally, the movie is slow and surreal and leaves many unanswered questions, but is curiously haunting all the same.
Creature from Black Lake (1976). I watched this largely forgotten B-movie for the hell of it. It's dumb, it's silly, it's poorly paced and more comedic than anything else, but for all that, I kind of enjoyed the saga of two collegiate morons from Chicago who head to the Lousiana bayous to investigate whether Bigfoot actually exists, and find out that, yes, indeed, he does, and -- figure this -- he's not very nice. Neither is the local sheriff, who is irked at Yankees stirring up trouble and trying to bang his nubile daughter. I question why this movie was even made, but the answer seems to be, "For fun!" and fun it is: dumb fun.
Psycho II (1983). Psycho is regarded as such a sacred horror classic that this sequel was treated with violent derision before it even hit the theater. Actually, this movie ain't half bad. Shot entirely on the Universal backlot (I recognize almost every location), Psycho II is a low-budget but high-craft B-movie in which Anthony Perkins reprises Norman Bates, the knife-wielding, dress-wearing, Mom-loving murderer from Hitchcock's original film. Except Norman has been cured by psychiatrists after years in a padded cell, and is now free again to resume managing the Bates Hotel. The problem is, someone is messing with his head, and if Norman doesn't find out who it is, he may just resume his stabby, shower-intruding ways. I was quite engaged by this movie, which suffers some script and acting issues but is fast-paced, enjoyable and has some very respectable twists, along with a surprisingly deep cast which includes Robert Loggia, Vera Miles and Dennis Franz.
Dust Devil (1992). Australian films like to make use of the sheer size, wildness, and desolation of their landscape: Dust Devil was shot in Namibia, but it follows the same principle. The story of a wandering demon in human form who ritually murders his victims in hopes of escaping the curse of his fleshly existence, it is a beautifully shot, somewhat surreal movie with a strong undertone of African racial, ethnic, and societal politics: a world-weary black lawman, enforcing the white man's laws but reluctantly using black magic, hunts a (literal) white devil, albeit one with more complex motives than murder and mayhem. It's not a great movie, not even a particularly good one, and some of what happens seems completely pointless, but it is memorable and somewhat haunting, and some of the narration is beautifully written.
Crawl (2019). Barry Pepper and Kayla Scoledario star as a disgruntled father and his estranged swimmer daughter, caught beneath their Florida house during a hurricane, and besieged by large, hungry alligators freed from their swamp by the resulting flood. There's nothing special about this movie, it's utterly predictable, the writing is mediocre, our heroes sustain wounds which would easily kill them, and aside from a couple of jump scares it's forgettable: but it held my interest while it was running. That's the best, and the worst, I can say about it.
Devil (2010). Four strangers are trapped in an elevator. All four of them harbor dark secrets, and as frantic efforts to rescue them continue to fail, tensions rise, as do suspicions one of them is a murderer...or possibly Satan himself. I confess this movie caught me agreeably by surprise. There is some unnecessary cheesiness and heavy-handedness, as there always is in anything M. Night Shamylan touches even slightly, and the ending could have been better and more satisfying, but while it lasted, it was a tense, paranoid, fast-paced exercise in locked-room mystery-horror, with more than a touch of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians.
The Burrowers (2008). This horror movie set in the Old West really had my interest...for a moment: the cast was good, the acting was good, the film felt period-accurate, and the premise wasn't bad at all: but the execution sucked. Mysterious "forces" are kidnapping settlers in the West, and a local posse, naturally assuming Indians are to blame, rides into the badlands to get some justice, only to find out what did the kidnapping is much worse than the Souix or Ute natives. The pacing of this movie is terrible, nothing happens for way too long, and it seems much less interested in the story than in dragging us through the numerous social and racial injustices of the 1880s. What's more, the premise is not as cool as Tremors, a more modern Western movie it was clearly imitating to a certain degree. A similarly themed film, Bone Tomahawk, did a far superior job in 2015. It's too bad: this could have been a winner.
The Resurrected (1991). H.P. Lovecraft is often called one of the more unadaptable writers of all time. His stories relied heavily on withholding imagery, implying rather than showing horrors, and intimating there were enormous, destructive, evil forces just out of eyeshot which would drive us mad if he described them. None of this lends itself readily to screenwriters looking for easy concepts to sell to dim-witted movie executives. The Resurrected is a spirited B-movie attempt to break this curse and put one of his stories on said screen in an appealing way. It doesn't succeed, but the attempt is so spirited, so earnest, so honest and determined, that it's hard to pick over the film's many, many faults. Basically, it's the tale of an upscale gumshoe hired by a distraught wife who wants to know why her husband is always off conducting "experiments" in the guest house of their isolated New England home. The gumshoe's investigation reveals nothing serious: just that the guy is trying to bring back the dead and, well, eat the living. Mayhem ensues. If you happened to actually like Hellraiser II: Hellbound then this is for you. But not many people can say that.
Midnight Movie (2008). A spirited, almost frantic, attempt to clamp electrical leads onto the withered, blistered, burned, utterly lifeless cadaver of slasher movies. The corpse did not convert, but it did jump off the table a few times. This is a film-within-a-film about a group of people trapped in a movie theater with a homicidal maniac, whose point of view is playing up on the silver screen before them, interwoven with a 70s-style splatter flick directed by the killer himself. If that sounds like a lot, it is. The creators of the movie threw absolutely everything they could think of at the wall in hopes that something would stick: comedy, meta references, direct and indirect “homages” to other horror movies (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Psycho, Popcorn, Halloween Night, etc.) escalating violence, unexpected deaths, and all manner of horror movie tropes and clichés. Some of it works. Most of it doesn't. It's like some overflowing, spluttering play written by a caffeine-addicted, hypertensive college student with more enthusiasm and energy than talent or imagination. Slashers are, let's face it, a dead subgenre; they have been dead since Scream debuted in 1996. The whole idea of self-awareness and “meta” in horror was ultimately fatal to everything it touched. But hey, these guys tried.
Ghostwatch (1992). A British TV movie made by the BBC, this is a "mockumentary" about a TV crew sent out on Halloween night to document a poltergeist supposedly haunting a suburban London home for live audiences. Meanwhile, back at the studio, a credulous parapsychologist and a dry-witted, disbelieving show host spar over the existence of the supernatural while observing the doings of the remote crew on their monitors. Shot during the heyday of sleazy live TV gimmicks like "The Secrets of Al Capone's Vault," it starts in that exact vein, with the producers of "Ghostwatch" clearly trying to exploit a long-suffering single mum and her traumatized children for the sake of Halloween night ratings. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the ghost haunting Foxhill Drive is very real, very nasty, and has very big plans for his "audience." Ghostwatch is a very, very slow burn and requires patience and concentration, but damn, when it starts to get going, it goes. Every one of the "found footage" films that deluged us from 1999 onwards owes a heavy debt to this movie, just as it owes a debt to Orson Welles live broadcast of War of the Worlds, which also scared the shit out of millions of people who didn't know it was just make believe.
As I have often observed, it is difficult to binge watch, or even methodically examine, horror movies without wading through a considerable about of Thames mudbutter. On the other hand, this yearly orgy (somehow orgies seem more appropriate on Halloween) does introduce me to a number of flicks I have never seen which are actually decent or even pretty darn good, and given my dislike of trying new things, forcing myself to watch all this previously unseen stuff is good for my brain, even if watching people get skewered, eaten alive, and set on fire is not. In the meantime, the countdown to Halloween, when I will review the second half of my watch list, continues.
October 9, 2023
DRESSING THE PART
This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon...never his mind on where he was, what he was doing. -- Yoda
Today is Columbus Day, a holiday for government drudges like myself. Until recently, I would have slept in, lounged around my apartment drinking coffee and pottering around the internet until restlessness and caffeine forced me into some form of exercise, bathed, and then returned to lounging, probably dressed in a sophomoric T-shirt and jeans, or even sweats, and worn-out sneakers. At some point I'd have ordered Chinese food, or gotten a take-out pizza, and bought a six pack of beer as well. Anyone encountering me on the street would have seen an unshaven, slightly out of shape middle-aged man dressed like a college student or working-class drone, who was slicking back his diminishing wisps over his bald spot in a vain attempt to look younger. Someone easy to dismiss, or to ignore. Not a loser per se, but certainly a mediocrity. Whatever my inward level of intelligence and confidence, whatever my past accomplishments or present goals, the image I projected was unimpressive, faded, ordinary.
My ordinary circumstances have, however, changed. Today, the first thing I did was go hiking, drinking my coffee as I trampled the still, silent woods with a gallon jug of water strapped to my back. When I came home, I allowed myself a small amount of food, mostly protein, and then took a shower, shaved, and donned a fitted sweater, a suede blazer, jeans, casual dress shoes, my flashiest watch, a silver link bracelt and a silver ring with a great amber stone. I walked to the coffee shop with Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age and read for two hours over a mocha. I was not trying to look cool, whatever cool looks like, or pick up a woman. Nope. I was simply allowing my outward appearance to match my accomplishments, my ambitions...and my age.
Like most writers, I have been a Bohemian for most of my life. I have always dressed the way I pleased and not according to fashion trends -- when I conformed to a trend (good or bad) it was because it corresponded to my own existing aesthetic, not because it was "now." I have always been impulsive, irresponsible, disorganized, impractical, hot-tempered, creative, apathetic, easily bored, and alternated between periods of furious, almost manic activity and utter, sloth-like apathy and laziness. Financially I have alternated between disaster and mediocrity. In relationships I have always struggled with commitment and therefore, longevity. The future? Making plans for todayexhausted me and left me with faint feelings of resentment, even if the plans were entirely in my own best interests.
Recently, however, I began to understand that a small, tectonic shift had occurred within my mind, or perhaps my soul. A sea change had taken place almost without me realizing it. I desired, actively, to increase my value. I do not merely mean my income; I mean my value. I wanted to raise the level, the frequency, upon which I operate on a daily basis. This included my income, but it also included a whole slew of other life aspects, including my weight, my fitness, my craft, my productivity, and my appearance. It is on this last point I wish mostly to expound, because I have come to understand why appearance is important to those who wish to change for the better.
In my life, I have always equated the "need" for expensive clothing, watches, shoes, etc. with vanity and shallowness and materialism. The men I knew, even in college, who dressed more sharply and "adultly," always struck me as either comical or pompous. I have always wanted to look good, but only for the purpose of attracting women, which of course is a form of shallowness in itself: and because like most Bohemians I have a Peter Pan complex, and because I prize masculinity and toughness, I always favored either a collegiate or a "street" style: leather jackets, t-shirts, jeans, sneakers or work-type boots. And just at the time I might have taken a different course, when I was 34 years old, I moved to California, where t-shirts, shorts and flip-flops are normal wear for all ages, and "dressing up" means a polo shirt and khakis, maybe a blazer if you're at some reallyspecial event. I found validation in an adopted culture, took refuge from incipient middle age by living in the land of the Endless Summer.
There is, however, some old Army wisdom which goes, "Know your job and know the job of your immediate superior, because you may be called upon to do that job at any moment." In civilian-speak this translates as "Dress for the job you have," or, even more broadly, "Dress for the life you want." And as I entered my 40s, and then my mid-40s, I increasingly began to despair that the life I wanted would ever materialize. The last few years I spent in California were endlessly difficult and bitter. The older I got, the more it seemed as if I had failed, missed the mark, fiddled while Rome burned and was now doomed to live among its ashes. I was experiencing torschlusspanik, the fear that the gates have shut and I was on the wrong side of them when the lock clanked into place. The truth was that I had allowed myself to become infantilized: I was living the life of a surf bum (minus most of the surf) and amazed that, well, this was yielding a surf-bum's results. Women didn't take me seriously. Employers didn't take me seriously. Perspective agents, publishers, partners, and executives didn't take me seriously. And like Gordon Comstock, the hilariously self-defeating protagonist of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying, I adapted to my failure by making failure a virtue. I was not a loser: I was holding on to my integrity. I was the classic starving artist who, from his dirty, depressing garret on the Left Bank, feebly shouted, "You're all a bunch of sell-outs!" to everyone with more money than himself.
The equation of failure, or at least poverty and rejection of societal norms, to success and integrity, is something I first noticed in the punk movement in the late 70s/early 80s when I was growing up. I was never a punk myself, but I was friendly with them and perhaps their outlook rubbed off on me a bit: I think it more likely that I was merely in sympathy with it by virtue of my own nature. In any event, this was a time when I and many others also equated bodybuilding specifically and athleticism generally with stupidity: you were either a hulking beast with huge biceps but no brain, or a scrawny Poindexter with Coke-bottle glasses and a 4.2 grade point average: There was no in-between, and the idea of the Renaissance man was taken as more of a joke than as something to aspire to. I mention this because it shows how easy it is to buy into syllogistic, either/or thinking: either you're a financial success or you have personal and creative integrity. Either you're fit or you're smart. Either you're this or you're that. No in-betweens, no gray areas. And a large part of me accepted this simplistic thinking, or at least never bothered to challenge it with my actions.
A man can evolve unconsciously, however, or rather semi-consciously. When I moved back East in 2020, I did so with the stated purpose of wanting a more fully human life and a more consequential job than Hollywood could afford. Put more simply, I wanted to feel like a grown man: I wanted to put on a suit and tie and carry a briefcase and deal with important matters. And doing this every day did wonders for my self-esteem, and consequentially but not expectedly, for my creativity. But it is only in the last year that I have discovered that I want more even than this. It is no longer enough for me to simply work an important job and to dress my age between 8 and 430, Monday to Friday. I want to act my age at all times, and in the best possible way: I want to abandon the Bohemian rake image in favor of something more refined, more elegant, more stylish. I want to organize my time better. I want to manage my weight and fitness more actively and precisely. I want to calibrate my finances and act upon those calibrations. And this is exactly what I'm doing: building the ideal version of myself and giving him to the world. One brick at a time.
It isn't always easy. When you've lived life like a fratboy (which I am, as it happens), grown up life can be daunting and bewildering. Financial responsibility alone is a brutal struggle. However, I just purchased U.S. Treasury bonds, the first forward-thinking act upon those lines I have ever undertaken: what's more, I have set up a schedule to purchase fifty more over the next fifteen months. I am shortly going to buy some notes and securities and set up an IRA to supplement my 401K, too. I just fielded a second book proposal offer and am in talks with a major agent about the first one: potentially big sources of fresh income. And I intend to publicize and if possible, to monetize my trip to Miami in November, when I will accept the Reader's Digest Gold Medal: at the very least I want to do some serious networking. In short, I am trying, with some difficulty and with many minor setbacks (mostly but not entirely self-inflicted), to increase my value in the materialistic, professional and various other senses of the word. I realize that I am very long in the fang and gray in the muzzle to begin such a quest, but we all learn at different speeds, and I truly believe my tae kwon do master's adage that "when the student is ready, the master will appear."
I don't suppose I will ever entirely reconcile myself to the demands of a world that places so much import on appearance, and on materialism generally, but I am continually reminded of the words of an older fraternity brother of mine who joined the NYPD when I was still in college. He said that, while he disagreed, philosophically, with judging books by their covers, he nevertheless did it on the job, because he had to play the percentages: the guy in the business suit and briefcase was, in his experience, less likely than the punk with the spiked pink hair and jangling chains to want to take a swing at him over a traffic ticket. When I meet with an agent, or attend a convention or an expo, or even go down the street to have coffee and read Tales from the Jazz Age, I want to be consistent throughout myself, from the inner core of my thoughts and feelings, to my outward appearance, and not have the two in a self-defeating, self-limiting conflict. I want to embrace the total man, the fullness of my potentiality. I know it will be a journey fraught with every form of obstacle and that many of those obstacles will be found inside myself: we are all our own worst enemies, after all. But we are also our own best friends, our own wisest counselors, our own mentors and saviours. And for me, anyway, it's time to start savin'. I opened this essay with a quote from Yoda, who as you will remember, criticized Luke for never paying attention to the moment but rather dreaming of the future. And with all respect to the old master, I think he was only half right. It is possible to be in the moment and still keep an eye on the horizon: because the horizon, over the horizon, where we ultimately wish to be.
Today is Columbus Day, a holiday for government drudges like myself. Until recently, I would have slept in, lounged around my apartment drinking coffee and pottering around the internet until restlessness and caffeine forced me into some form of exercise, bathed, and then returned to lounging, probably dressed in a sophomoric T-shirt and jeans, or even sweats, and worn-out sneakers. At some point I'd have ordered Chinese food, or gotten a take-out pizza, and bought a six pack of beer as well. Anyone encountering me on the street would have seen an unshaven, slightly out of shape middle-aged man dressed like a college student or working-class drone, who was slicking back his diminishing wisps over his bald spot in a vain attempt to look younger. Someone easy to dismiss, or to ignore. Not a loser per se, but certainly a mediocrity. Whatever my inward level of intelligence and confidence, whatever my past accomplishments or present goals, the image I projected was unimpressive, faded, ordinary.
My ordinary circumstances have, however, changed. Today, the first thing I did was go hiking, drinking my coffee as I trampled the still, silent woods with a gallon jug of water strapped to my back. When I came home, I allowed myself a small amount of food, mostly protein, and then took a shower, shaved, and donned a fitted sweater, a suede blazer, jeans, casual dress shoes, my flashiest watch, a silver link bracelt and a silver ring with a great amber stone. I walked to the coffee shop with Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age and read for two hours over a mocha. I was not trying to look cool, whatever cool looks like, or pick up a woman. Nope. I was simply allowing my outward appearance to match my accomplishments, my ambitions...and my age.
Like most writers, I have been a Bohemian for most of my life. I have always dressed the way I pleased and not according to fashion trends -- when I conformed to a trend (good or bad) it was because it corresponded to my own existing aesthetic, not because it was "now." I have always been impulsive, irresponsible, disorganized, impractical, hot-tempered, creative, apathetic, easily bored, and alternated between periods of furious, almost manic activity and utter, sloth-like apathy and laziness. Financially I have alternated between disaster and mediocrity. In relationships I have always struggled with commitment and therefore, longevity. The future? Making plans for todayexhausted me and left me with faint feelings of resentment, even if the plans were entirely in my own best interests.
Recently, however, I began to understand that a small, tectonic shift had occurred within my mind, or perhaps my soul. A sea change had taken place almost without me realizing it. I desired, actively, to increase my value. I do not merely mean my income; I mean my value. I wanted to raise the level, the frequency, upon which I operate on a daily basis. This included my income, but it also included a whole slew of other life aspects, including my weight, my fitness, my craft, my productivity, and my appearance. It is on this last point I wish mostly to expound, because I have come to understand why appearance is important to those who wish to change for the better.
In my life, I have always equated the "need" for expensive clothing, watches, shoes, etc. with vanity and shallowness and materialism. The men I knew, even in college, who dressed more sharply and "adultly," always struck me as either comical or pompous. I have always wanted to look good, but only for the purpose of attracting women, which of course is a form of shallowness in itself: and because like most Bohemians I have a Peter Pan complex, and because I prize masculinity and toughness, I always favored either a collegiate or a "street" style: leather jackets, t-shirts, jeans, sneakers or work-type boots. And just at the time I might have taken a different course, when I was 34 years old, I moved to California, where t-shirts, shorts and flip-flops are normal wear for all ages, and "dressing up" means a polo shirt and khakis, maybe a blazer if you're at some reallyspecial event. I found validation in an adopted culture, took refuge from incipient middle age by living in the land of the Endless Summer.
There is, however, some old Army wisdom which goes, "Know your job and know the job of your immediate superior, because you may be called upon to do that job at any moment." In civilian-speak this translates as "Dress for the job you have," or, even more broadly, "Dress for the life you want." And as I entered my 40s, and then my mid-40s, I increasingly began to despair that the life I wanted would ever materialize. The last few years I spent in California were endlessly difficult and bitter. The older I got, the more it seemed as if I had failed, missed the mark, fiddled while Rome burned and was now doomed to live among its ashes. I was experiencing torschlusspanik, the fear that the gates have shut and I was on the wrong side of them when the lock clanked into place. The truth was that I had allowed myself to become infantilized: I was living the life of a surf bum (minus most of the surf) and amazed that, well, this was yielding a surf-bum's results. Women didn't take me seriously. Employers didn't take me seriously. Perspective agents, publishers, partners, and executives didn't take me seriously. And like Gordon Comstock, the hilariously self-defeating protagonist of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying, I adapted to my failure by making failure a virtue. I was not a loser: I was holding on to my integrity. I was the classic starving artist who, from his dirty, depressing garret on the Left Bank, feebly shouted, "You're all a bunch of sell-outs!" to everyone with more money than himself.
The equation of failure, or at least poverty and rejection of societal norms, to success and integrity, is something I first noticed in the punk movement in the late 70s/early 80s when I was growing up. I was never a punk myself, but I was friendly with them and perhaps their outlook rubbed off on me a bit: I think it more likely that I was merely in sympathy with it by virtue of my own nature. In any event, this was a time when I and many others also equated bodybuilding specifically and athleticism generally with stupidity: you were either a hulking beast with huge biceps but no brain, or a scrawny Poindexter with Coke-bottle glasses and a 4.2 grade point average: There was no in-between, and the idea of the Renaissance man was taken as more of a joke than as something to aspire to. I mention this because it shows how easy it is to buy into syllogistic, either/or thinking: either you're a financial success or you have personal and creative integrity. Either you're fit or you're smart. Either you're this or you're that. No in-betweens, no gray areas. And a large part of me accepted this simplistic thinking, or at least never bothered to challenge it with my actions.
A man can evolve unconsciously, however, or rather semi-consciously. When I moved back East in 2020, I did so with the stated purpose of wanting a more fully human life and a more consequential job than Hollywood could afford. Put more simply, I wanted to feel like a grown man: I wanted to put on a suit and tie and carry a briefcase and deal with important matters. And doing this every day did wonders for my self-esteem, and consequentially but not expectedly, for my creativity. But it is only in the last year that I have discovered that I want more even than this. It is no longer enough for me to simply work an important job and to dress my age between 8 and 430, Monday to Friday. I want to act my age at all times, and in the best possible way: I want to abandon the Bohemian rake image in favor of something more refined, more elegant, more stylish. I want to organize my time better. I want to manage my weight and fitness more actively and precisely. I want to calibrate my finances and act upon those calibrations. And this is exactly what I'm doing: building the ideal version of myself and giving him to the world. One brick at a time.
It isn't always easy. When you've lived life like a fratboy (which I am, as it happens), grown up life can be daunting and bewildering. Financial responsibility alone is a brutal struggle. However, I just purchased U.S. Treasury bonds, the first forward-thinking act upon those lines I have ever undertaken: what's more, I have set up a schedule to purchase fifty more over the next fifteen months. I am shortly going to buy some notes and securities and set up an IRA to supplement my 401K, too. I just fielded a second book proposal offer and am in talks with a major agent about the first one: potentially big sources of fresh income. And I intend to publicize and if possible, to monetize my trip to Miami in November, when I will accept the Reader's Digest Gold Medal: at the very least I want to do some serious networking. In short, I am trying, with some difficulty and with many minor setbacks (mostly but not entirely self-inflicted), to increase my value in the materialistic, professional and various other senses of the word. I realize that I am very long in the fang and gray in the muzzle to begin such a quest, but we all learn at different speeds, and I truly believe my tae kwon do master's adage that "when the student is ready, the master will appear."
I don't suppose I will ever entirely reconcile myself to the demands of a world that places so much import on appearance, and on materialism generally, but I am continually reminded of the words of an older fraternity brother of mine who joined the NYPD when I was still in college. He said that, while he disagreed, philosophically, with judging books by their covers, he nevertheless did it on the job, because he had to play the percentages: the guy in the business suit and briefcase was, in his experience, less likely than the punk with the spiked pink hair and jangling chains to want to take a swing at him over a traffic ticket. When I meet with an agent, or attend a convention or an expo, or even go down the street to have coffee and read Tales from the Jazz Age, I want to be consistent throughout myself, from the inner core of my thoughts and feelings, to my outward appearance, and not have the two in a self-defeating, self-limiting conflict. I want to embrace the total man, the fullness of my potentiality. I know it will be a journey fraught with every form of obstacle and that many of those obstacles will be found inside myself: we are all our own worst enemies, after all. But we are also our own best friends, our own wisest counselors, our own mentors and saviours. And for me, anyway, it's time to start savin'. I opened this essay with a quote from Yoda, who as you will remember, criticized Luke for never paying attention to the moment but rather dreaming of the future. And with all respect to the old master, I think he was only half right. It is possible to be in the moment and still keep an eye on the horizon: because the horizon, over the horizon, where we ultimately wish to be.
October 4, 2023
NIGHT SINS: DIARY OF AN OBSESSION
If you're reading this, chances are you know I'm fond of Halloween. Every year I devote several blogs -- at least -- to celebrating not only the day itself, but all the atmosphere that surrounds it, and indeed, the coming of Fall itself, which is far and away my favorite season. It seems fitting then, now that we've entered October, I begin easing into the spirit of things by discussing Night Sins, one of the guiltiest of all my many guilty pleasures.
Night Sins was originally a romantic suspense novel by Tami Hoag, published in 1995. I say "originally" because it is not the novel I intend to discuss here (though I have read it), but rather the 1997 mini-series based upon the novel, with which I have been obsessed since I happened to catch part of it on television in the winter of 2003 - 2004. Struck by what I had seen, I hunted the networks until it was broadcast again a year or two later, and managed to see yet more of it. Eventually, utilizing the darker corners of the internet, I was able to obtain bootleg DVDs of the production since it has never been streamed or released on legitimate physical media from two different sources. I even went as far as purchasing one of the 1,000 limited edition CDs of the soundtrack, directly from the website of its composer (I shouldn't be surprised if he still has the other 999). I would guess that I have watched the series somewhere between 15 - 20 times in total, and have no plans to abandon my practice of watching it once a year, usually in the fall or winter months. I simply cannot cure myself of this addiction: nor do I have the slightest desire to do so.
The real question is why.
To begin at the beginning: Night Sins was a TV movie divided into two two-hour parts -- technically a mini-series, but really a single movie. It is the story of an SBI cop named Megan O'Malley (Valerie Bertinelli), whose arrival for duty in the obscure town of Deer Lake coincides with the kidnapping of a small boy named Joshua Garrison. Megan has quite the chip on her shoulder and immediately clashes with suspiciously handsome local chief of police Mitch Holt (Harry Hamlin), who doesn't want to believe big-city-style crime can happen in his peaceful little burg. Soon, however, the pair receive taunting messages from the mysterious kidnapper, who alludes to his knowledge of "sins" committed by various townsfolk -- including the boy's parents, their friends, the chief himself, and even Megan, whose troubled psychology is exposed and dissected by the seemingly all-knowing villain. Thus commences the classic "small town with a terrible secret" story, which combines equal parts soap opera and David Lynch movie, the wrinkle being that many lesser secrets (sins) surround the much greater mystery of who kidnapped Josh Garrison, and why.
Now, let me get this out of the way: Night Sins is riddled with problems. In fact, the entire shebang is essentially a glorified "Movie of the Week." The dialog is taken almost verbatin from Hoag's spirited but somewhat slovenly novel: it overflows with vitality but translates poorly to the screen, especially when the screenwriter uses descriptive prose in dialog form, a cardinal sin of book-to-movie adaptations. This leads to outbursts of cringe-worthy acting even from a surprisingly talented cast of players which includes, aside from Bertinelli and Hamlin, Mariska Hargitay, Colm Feore, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and Jeffrey DeMunn. There are a couple of significant plot holes, too. But I have no desire to get lost in the weeds of objective criticism. That would defeat the purpose. A guilty pleasure, by definition, is immune to objective criticism, and in any event there is a good reason I take so much pleasure in it, one which ties into my love of Halloween:
Atmosphere.
Night Sins was scored by legendary composer Mark Snow, who is best known for creating the iconic theme to The X-Files but also composed the music for Starsky & Hutch, The Love Boat, T.J. Hooker, Vega$, Dynasty, Matt Houston, Millennium, Smallville, One Tree Hill and Blue Bloods to name but a few. Snow outdoes himself here, creating a brooding, elegaic score which precisely mirrors the world our characters are forced to inhabit: cold, mysterious, brooding, sinister, and yet infused with twisted religious feeling. Deer Lake's normalcy -- it is a half-picturesque, half-dull Western town without any noticeable history or distinction -- adds to the sense of violation we experience as the kidnapper peels away these prosaic American layers to reveal the secret affairs, the tortured pasts, the closeted sexualities and covered-up crimes the seemingly ordinary townsfolk have committed, their "sins in the night." This, combined with the narration -- delivered by the kidnapper in an unrecognizably genderless voice tinged with glee -- and Kevin Ackerman's snappy direction and often intimate cinematography, help establish a feeling of unease, itself exacerbated by the cold, snowy location, and the varied peformances. Despite the script issues, the actors work hard, and largely succeed, at providing both suspects and victims to the story, and writers could learn much about to differentiate characters in a large-cast mystery by watching Feore, Vince, Martin Donovan, David Marshall Grant, Karen Silas, Michael Cumpsty, and Tom DeKay (among others) vie for a place in Megan's sights. Night Sins is not horror, but it establishes a kind of horror-movie atmosphere around its central mystery that I found absolutely compelling twenty years ago when I first encountered it, and find just as compelling now.
For me, atmosphere cannot be underrated: it is what I most crave in my films and television shows, and what I most aspire to create in my own fiction. It is the sense of not merely watching or reading but actually being physically present, immersed, in the world you are visiting. It has never been enough for me to simply observe images or read words. I want to experience things. I want my senses fully engaged. I want to feel the cold, the wind, the loneliness of searching for a boy in the woods at night without any hope you will find him. I want to feel the paranoia of a cop who realizes that she can no longer trust even her fellow cops -- including the one she has taken to her bed. I wanted to feel like a pawn in a chess game, one who is deliberately going to be sacrificed to serve some twisted, unknown purpose. And somehow, in spite of its flaws, in spite of its limitations, Night Sins does this for me. Even the way it ends, with fresh mystery rather than full resolution, I find immensely satisfying rather than frustrating or a mere tease, in part because I don't want the story to end -- ever. Indeed, having read Hoag's novel, I can say without reservation that the adaptation is better than the book. The stakes are higher, the climax more satisfying, and unlike Hoag's Night Sins, which was intended to be resolved, and was resolved, with a superior sequel called Guilty as Sin, it did not have to save the best for last.
Don't mistake me. The mini-series was intended to have a sequel. The rights had been purchased, Hoag was enthusastic, and Valerie Bertinelli so thoroughly enjoyed playing the role of cop that she was more than ready to return, but it is the way of things in Hollywood that many elements must come together to make a movie, even a TV movie, and Guilty as Sin was never produced. My guess is, based on a few interviews that I've read, that the ratings success of Sins was sufficient for the network to consider skipping the second film entirely and pushing it to series, a series which would have been rather like Twin Peaks without the Lynchian weirdness; however, Harry Hamlin expressly did not wish to return to series television...and things moved on, as they tend to in my former business. Any type of success is like a moving train: jump off, even for a moment, and you may never catch up. It makes me a little sad, but then again, some mysteries were never intended to be solved. And indeed, every time I return to Deer Lake via my bootleg DVD, I find some small nuance, some hinted character moment, some revealing camera angle, which tells me slightly more about the story than I knew before. It may be a tawdry gift, it may be a silly gift, it may be a cheap gift, but it is a gift which keeps on giving. Intellectually I can rip it apart: emotionally it is irresistible to me. And I have found that these are among the best gifts to receive. Any fool can fall in love with a masterpiece. It takes a special sort of fool to fall for Night Sins. And I just keep falling.
Night Sins was originally a romantic suspense novel by Tami Hoag, published in 1995. I say "originally" because it is not the novel I intend to discuss here (though I have read it), but rather the 1997 mini-series based upon the novel, with which I have been obsessed since I happened to catch part of it on television in the winter of 2003 - 2004. Struck by what I had seen, I hunted the networks until it was broadcast again a year or two later, and managed to see yet more of it. Eventually, utilizing the darker corners of the internet, I was able to obtain bootleg DVDs of the production since it has never been streamed or released on legitimate physical media from two different sources. I even went as far as purchasing one of the 1,000 limited edition CDs of the soundtrack, directly from the website of its composer (I shouldn't be surprised if he still has the other 999). I would guess that I have watched the series somewhere between 15 - 20 times in total, and have no plans to abandon my practice of watching it once a year, usually in the fall or winter months. I simply cannot cure myself of this addiction: nor do I have the slightest desire to do so.
The real question is why.
To begin at the beginning: Night Sins was a TV movie divided into two two-hour parts -- technically a mini-series, but really a single movie. It is the story of an SBI cop named Megan O'Malley (Valerie Bertinelli), whose arrival for duty in the obscure town of Deer Lake coincides with the kidnapping of a small boy named Joshua Garrison. Megan has quite the chip on her shoulder and immediately clashes with suspiciously handsome local chief of police Mitch Holt (Harry Hamlin), who doesn't want to believe big-city-style crime can happen in his peaceful little burg. Soon, however, the pair receive taunting messages from the mysterious kidnapper, who alludes to his knowledge of "sins" committed by various townsfolk -- including the boy's parents, their friends, the chief himself, and even Megan, whose troubled psychology is exposed and dissected by the seemingly all-knowing villain. Thus commences the classic "small town with a terrible secret" story, which combines equal parts soap opera and David Lynch movie, the wrinkle being that many lesser secrets (sins) surround the much greater mystery of who kidnapped Josh Garrison, and why.
Now, let me get this out of the way: Night Sins is riddled with problems. In fact, the entire shebang is essentially a glorified "Movie of the Week." The dialog is taken almost verbatin from Hoag's spirited but somewhat slovenly novel: it overflows with vitality but translates poorly to the screen, especially when the screenwriter uses descriptive prose in dialog form, a cardinal sin of book-to-movie adaptations. This leads to outbursts of cringe-worthy acting even from a surprisingly talented cast of players which includes, aside from Bertinelli and Hamlin, Mariska Hargitay, Colm Feore, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and Jeffrey DeMunn. There are a couple of significant plot holes, too. But I have no desire to get lost in the weeds of objective criticism. That would defeat the purpose. A guilty pleasure, by definition, is immune to objective criticism, and in any event there is a good reason I take so much pleasure in it, one which ties into my love of Halloween:
Atmosphere.
Night Sins was scored by legendary composer Mark Snow, who is best known for creating the iconic theme to The X-Files but also composed the music for Starsky & Hutch, The Love Boat, T.J. Hooker, Vega$, Dynasty, Matt Houston, Millennium, Smallville, One Tree Hill and Blue Bloods to name but a few. Snow outdoes himself here, creating a brooding, elegaic score which precisely mirrors the world our characters are forced to inhabit: cold, mysterious, brooding, sinister, and yet infused with twisted religious feeling. Deer Lake's normalcy -- it is a half-picturesque, half-dull Western town without any noticeable history or distinction -- adds to the sense of violation we experience as the kidnapper peels away these prosaic American layers to reveal the secret affairs, the tortured pasts, the closeted sexualities and covered-up crimes the seemingly ordinary townsfolk have committed, their "sins in the night." This, combined with the narration -- delivered by the kidnapper in an unrecognizably genderless voice tinged with glee -- and Kevin Ackerman's snappy direction and often intimate cinematography, help establish a feeling of unease, itself exacerbated by the cold, snowy location, and the varied peformances. Despite the script issues, the actors work hard, and largely succeed, at providing both suspects and victims to the story, and writers could learn much about to differentiate characters in a large-cast mystery by watching Feore, Vince, Martin Donovan, David Marshall Grant, Karen Silas, Michael Cumpsty, and Tom DeKay (among others) vie for a place in Megan's sights. Night Sins is not horror, but it establishes a kind of horror-movie atmosphere around its central mystery that I found absolutely compelling twenty years ago when I first encountered it, and find just as compelling now.
For me, atmosphere cannot be underrated: it is what I most crave in my films and television shows, and what I most aspire to create in my own fiction. It is the sense of not merely watching or reading but actually being physically present, immersed, in the world you are visiting. It has never been enough for me to simply observe images or read words. I want to experience things. I want my senses fully engaged. I want to feel the cold, the wind, the loneliness of searching for a boy in the woods at night without any hope you will find him. I want to feel the paranoia of a cop who realizes that she can no longer trust even her fellow cops -- including the one she has taken to her bed. I wanted to feel like a pawn in a chess game, one who is deliberately going to be sacrificed to serve some twisted, unknown purpose. And somehow, in spite of its flaws, in spite of its limitations, Night Sins does this for me. Even the way it ends, with fresh mystery rather than full resolution, I find immensely satisfying rather than frustrating or a mere tease, in part because I don't want the story to end -- ever. Indeed, having read Hoag's novel, I can say without reservation that the adaptation is better than the book. The stakes are higher, the climax more satisfying, and unlike Hoag's Night Sins, which was intended to be resolved, and was resolved, with a superior sequel called Guilty as Sin, it did not have to save the best for last.
Don't mistake me. The mini-series was intended to have a sequel. The rights had been purchased, Hoag was enthusastic, and Valerie Bertinelli so thoroughly enjoyed playing the role of cop that she was more than ready to return, but it is the way of things in Hollywood that many elements must come together to make a movie, even a TV movie, and Guilty as Sin was never produced. My guess is, based on a few interviews that I've read, that the ratings success of Sins was sufficient for the network to consider skipping the second film entirely and pushing it to series, a series which would have been rather like Twin Peaks without the Lynchian weirdness; however, Harry Hamlin expressly did not wish to return to series television...and things moved on, as they tend to in my former business. Any type of success is like a moving train: jump off, even for a moment, and you may never catch up. It makes me a little sad, but then again, some mysteries were never intended to be solved. And indeed, every time I return to Deer Lake via my bootleg DVD, I find some small nuance, some hinted character moment, some revealing camera angle, which tells me slightly more about the story than I knew before. It may be a tawdry gift, it may be a silly gift, it may be a cheap gift, but it is a gift which keeps on giving. Intellectually I can rip it apart: emotionally it is irresistible to me. And I have found that these are among the best gifts to receive. Any fool can fall in love with a masterpiece. It takes a special sort of fool to fall for Night Sins. And I just keep falling.
September 30, 2023
MY LIFE AS A RECURRING CHARACTER
Sunny came home with a list of names
She didn't believe in transcendence
"And it's time for a few small repairs", she said
Sunny came home with a vengeance
-- Shawn Colvin
The other day, as I left the New Courthouse where I work in the District Attorney's Office, I was passing the Strand Theater, a handsome venue which stands a block from where I live. I saw on the "coming attractions" that Shawn Colvin is due to appear there in October. Colvin, for those unfamiliar with the name, is a singer-songwriter best known for the song quoted above, "Sunny Came Home," which won her a Grammy in 1998. As I passed the marquee on my way home, I experienced a form of deja vu seldom discussed, which is not so much a feeling that you have been there before, but rather that you have walked through a rift in time and briefly occupy a space in your own distant past.
It was suddenly not 2023 at all, but 2000. Same town. Same Office. Different District Attorney. Old Courthouse, but almost the same location (a block and a half over). My then-boss, Kim, had made a passing remark that the Shawn Colvin concert scheduled at the Strand Theater had been canceled because the people who ran the venue didn't think she was a big enough draw. Being a fan of the afformentioned song, I was extremely annoyed by this, so much so that the memory of my irrtation and disappointment were catloged and shelved somewhere within my mind, laying dormant for 23 years until, by chance or design, my gaze fell upon the marquee. It seemed that I would be getting my chance to hear Colvin sing her signature song after all.
This incident got me thinking about the curiously cyclical nature of life. In 2000, I was a recently single, 27-going-on-28 year-old man, who had just joined the District Attorney's Office from the Probation Department. I lived in a run-down one-bedroom apartment on the corner of Market and Duke Streets, kitty corner from said Old Courthouse, and my commute consisted of crossing those two streets (or just running diagonally through them). I ate my lunches at home, and had already changed, cooked dinner, and begun my first episode of The Simpsons by the time most of my colleagues were home. Regardless of any other activities, I spent an hour at the gym or the track, and often wrote into the evening. On Friday nights I went to happy hour with colleagues, friends or dates, or stayed in and watched boxing. On Saturday mornings I walked down to the Farmer's Market, drank coffee, bought groceries, and chit-chatted with various acquaintances at the food stalls. I had a neat, efficient, disciplined life, and not much changed from week to week.
Twenty years later, I returned to this city, took up employment with the same Office, and live a block from from work on Beaver Street -- next to the Farmer's Market, actually: I still spend my Saturday mornings there, and it hasn't changed (it was founded in 1888). I often pass my old apartment, my old courthouse, and the old theater which changed its name but is otherwise exactly the same as it was in 2000. It often seems to me, as I go about the business of living and working and writing, that not a helluva lot has changed. I've lost hair, I'm starting to show some age in my face, and I make more money (not a lot more, just more). My writing is certainly light-years from where it was back then, when I was struggling hard to find the formula which would allow me to finish literary projects rather than merely start them: but there are times when I feel as if the intervening period, especially the twelve years I spent in Hollywood, did not happen at all, or happened to someone else. Occasionally, when no one is looking, I crank up my IMDB page and have a go at it just to make sure that whole career actually happened, that it wasn't just a dream.
Walking around these streets, especially in the vicinity of the courthouse, reminds me so much of my first few weeks back in harness after I returned here. Twenty years had elapsed since I resigned by supervisory position in the D.A.'s Office, and I expected it would be like returning to high school as a grown man: the sights will be hauntingly familiar, but the faces? All changed. And yet that was not the case. The first day I was back on the job, walking down Market Street in the August heat, what struck me was not shock or bewilderment or surreality, but of utter normalcy. It was as if I had never left. And interestingly enough, my first day orientation was in the Old Courthouse, now painted over and repurposed to serve as an administration building. It was less starting over than picking up where I'd left off. As each day passed, I began to pick out faces which were familiar to me. There was F., a once-blond, now gray defense attorney who still smoked too much. There was L., a former prosecutor I had dated for a year, now a defense attorney herself. There was K., a stenographer I had also dated, still at her keys. There were not a lot of these faces, but there were enough of them that a curious conclusion occurred within my mind, something I'm sure very few people experience in their lives, because unlike me, they move in a linear way and don't loop backwards as I so often have.
I was a recurring character.
Did you ever watch soap operas? Do you watch them now? They are sadly no longer as popular as they used to be. But the few that remain have been on for decades, and one of the singular characteristics they exhibit is how they are forever writing off characters, only to bring them back, write them off, and bring them back again, endlessly, until at last the actor portraying them retires or dies. Take Anthony Geary, for example. He played Luke Spencer on General Hospital from 1978 - 1984; a different character in 1991; Luke again from 1993 - 2015, and made a final performance in 2017, again as Luke. There are many, many actors with similar pedigrees, but as I walked the hallways, heard the old verbiage, drank the old stationhouse coffee and heard the same annoying chimes on the desk phones, I began to realize that I was one of them. I had played a role on a soap opera called County Courthouse from 1997 - 2002, and was now reprising it. Many of my former co-stars had departed for different shows, some had remained, and a few, like me, had come and gone and returned, looking older and wearier, but also a little more surefooted, a little more relaxed, now that they knew the game so intimately, its pluses and minuses, its pitfalls and its hilltops. It is the young, hungry, ambitious actor, after all, who is so impatient, demanding, difficult to work with -- "temperamental" is the way they politely put it in Hollywood -- because he is hungry for success, hungry to be taken seriously, hungry for accolades. He feels contempt for his elders because they are still on soap operas at their age; when he is their age he will surely be a famous movie star, raking in millions and balling supermodels in his mansion in the Hills. This measly soap is not where his career will end, it is where it will begin.
It has taken me many years to recognize what an unlikeable character I really was when I was a young "actor" in my mid-late twenties, making my first appearance in "soaps." I had a fatal combination of middle-class, yougest-child entitlement, whisked in with a generous dosage of collegiate, fratnerity BMOC attitude, and sprinkled with the surefire knowledge that I had immense writing talent and was therefore a burgeoning ARTIST. Having so much sex with so many women only made things worse: a young man certain of his sexual attractiveness and prowess is often insufferably arrogant even in moments of defeat. And I was insufferable. I thought I was better than most people and took some pains to let them know it: at the same time I resented, bitterly, the inevitable hostility this attitude engendered. I do not mean I was only bad: just that I paid very little heed to how I was perceived by others, and made no attempts toward humility, no efforts to soften my edges. I wanted people to deal with me as-is. I wanted to deal with myself as-is. I wasn't interested in self-improvement, only success. Like all young "actors," I was more interested appearances than substance -- in other people, and in myself. So I was a pretty good actor, but I was also a villain, the tragi-comic element being that I did not know I was a villain, rendering all of my grievances sincere.
Well, the character of Miles Watson (played by Miles Watson) has been back on set for three years and counting now, and every day, every week I march to County Courthouse, I wonder about the curiously cyclical nature of life on a soap. I had my slick-haired bad-boy era, my self-indulgent "finding myself" era, and now, as a very middle-aged man, the era of -- what? Who is the character I play now? What role does he fill on the show? That is a deeper question, and one I ask myself on an almost hourly basis. There are times I feel like a flat-out hero, helping confused, anxious, suspicious, wounded, traumatized, often grief-stricken human beings navigate a complex, inefficient, and impersonal system; times I feel as if I am burning off a great karmic debt by placing the needs of everyone else over my own; and there are times I feel like a flat-out fraud, a kind of grinning Happy Face slapped over the same selfish, quick-tempered, salacious-minded Chad I used to be, the difference being now -- pathetically -- that I am not in much of a position to act on most of my villainous impulses. A good guy by default, by force of circumstance rather than choice...like a devil robbed of his horns and tail, but still, as INXS once said, a devil inside.
Who is this character anyway?
Miles, as portrayed by Miles, sometimes looks at the world through his windows and wonders where he will be in five years -- in two years, in six months. Life gets shorter as it goes longer and there are more days behind now than ahead. His acting career is not where he thought it would be, and the arrogance of his youth has come back to haunt him. Miles does not feel sorry for himself, but he does feel urgency: torschlusspanik as the Germans call it, the fear that the gates of life will close before he accomplishes everything he set out to do when he joined this goddamned television show. Sometimes he trembles at the immensity of his own ambitions, and all the accolades and progress he has gathered unto himself seem all the more inadquate when measured against that towering edifice of WHAT HE WANTS TO ACCOMPLISH, WHO HE WANTS TO BE, when all he actually is a recurring character on a goddamned soap.
Now, I suppose it could be argued that when you go home again, you shouldn't be surprised if someone has painted the house and moved all the furniture. Tony Geary probably found the transition from Sunset Gower Studios to Prospect Studios a bit jarring when he became Luke for the second time. Part of him probably died a little inside even as the exciting prospect of work took hold of him, because no doubt he thought he'd be polishing Oscars instead of Emmys by that point in his life. But the important thing, really, was the second chance. The second bite at the apple. Because believe me boy, you don't always get them. It may or may not just be a soap, but while you're there, it's home.
Shawn Colvin comes to the Strand (they call it the Appell now) on October 24, 2023, twenty years after I was first denied the opportunity to see her. And it will be worth the asking price just to hear her sing the lyrics which, even as a know-it-all twentysomething, gave me a curiously haunted feeling:
She says, "Days go by, I don't know why
I'm walking on a wire
I close my eyes and fly out of my mind
Into the fire"
Get the kids and bring a sweater
Dry is good and wind is better
Count the years, you always knew it
Strike a match, go on and do it
"Oh, days go by, I'm hypnotized
I'm walking on a wire
I close my eyes and fly out of my mind
Into the fire"
Oh, light the sky and hold on tight
The world is burning down
She's out there on her own, and she's all right
Sunny came home
Sunny came home
Came home
Home
She didn't believe in transcendence
"And it's time for a few small repairs", she said
Sunny came home with a vengeance
-- Shawn Colvin
The other day, as I left the New Courthouse where I work in the District Attorney's Office, I was passing the Strand Theater, a handsome venue which stands a block from where I live. I saw on the "coming attractions" that Shawn Colvin is due to appear there in October. Colvin, for those unfamiliar with the name, is a singer-songwriter best known for the song quoted above, "Sunny Came Home," which won her a Grammy in 1998. As I passed the marquee on my way home, I experienced a form of deja vu seldom discussed, which is not so much a feeling that you have been there before, but rather that you have walked through a rift in time and briefly occupy a space in your own distant past.
It was suddenly not 2023 at all, but 2000. Same town. Same Office. Different District Attorney. Old Courthouse, but almost the same location (a block and a half over). My then-boss, Kim, had made a passing remark that the Shawn Colvin concert scheduled at the Strand Theater had been canceled because the people who ran the venue didn't think she was a big enough draw. Being a fan of the afformentioned song, I was extremely annoyed by this, so much so that the memory of my irrtation and disappointment were catloged and shelved somewhere within my mind, laying dormant for 23 years until, by chance or design, my gaze fell upon the marquee. It seemed that I would be getting my chance to hear Colvin sing her signature song after all.
This incident got me thinking about the curiously cyclical nature of life. In 2000, I was a recently single, 27-going-on-28 year-old man, who had just joined the District Attorney's Office from the Probation Department. I lived in a run-down one-bedroom apartment on the corner of Market and Duke Streets, kitty corner from said Old Courthouse, and my commute consisted of crossing those two streets (or just running diagonally through them). I ate my lunches at home, and had already changed, cooked dinner, and begun my first episode of The Simpsons by the time most of my colleagues were home. Regardless of any other activities, I spent an hour at the gym or the track, and often wrote into the evening. On Friday nights I went to happy hour with colleagues, friends or dates, or stayed in and watched boxing. On Saturday mornings I walked down to the Farmer's Market, drank coffee, bought groceries, and chit-chatted with various acquaintances at the food stalls. I had a neat, efficient, disciplined life, and not much changed from week to week.
Twenty years later, I returned to this city, took up employment with the same Office, and live a block from from work on Beaver Street -- next to the Farmer's Market, actually: I still spend my Saturday mornings there, and it hasn't changed (it was founded in 1888). I often pass my old apartment, my old courthouse, and the old theater which changed its name but is otherwise exactly the same as it was in 2000. It often seems to me, as I go about the business of living and working and writing, that not a helluva lot has changed. I've lost hair, I'm starting to show some age in my face, and I make more money (not a lot more, just more). My writing is certainly light-years from where it was back then, when I was struggling hard to find the formula which would allow me to finish literary projects rather than merely start them: but there are times when I feel as if the intervening period, especially the twelve years I spent in Hollywood, did not happen at all, or happened to someone else. Occasionally, when no one is looking, I crank up my IMDB page and have a go at it just to make sure that whole career actually happened, that it wasn't just a dream.
Walking around these streets, especially in the vicinity of the courthouse, reminds me so much of my first few weeks back in harness after I returned here. Twenty years had elapsed since I resigned by supervisory position in the D.A.'s Office, and I expected it would be like returning to high school as a grown man: the sights will be hauntingly familiar, but the faces? All changed. And yet that was not the case. The first day I was back on the job, walking down Market Street in the August heat, what struck me was not shock or bewilderment or surreality, but of utter normalcy. It was as if I had never left. And interestingly enough, my first day orientation was in the Old Courthouse, now painted over and repurposed to serve as an administration building. It was less starting over than picking up where I'd left off. As each day passed, I began to pick out faces which were familiar to me. There was F., a once-blond, now gray defense attorney who still smoked too much. There was L., a former prosecutor I had dated for a year, now a defense attorney herself. There was K., a stenographer I had also dated, still at her keys. There were not a lot of these faces, but there were enough of them that a curious conclusion occurred within my mind, something I'm sure very few people experience in their lives, because unlike me, they move in a linear way and don't loop backwards as I so often have.
I was a recurring character.
Did you ever watch soap operas? Do you watch them now? They are sadly no longer as popular as they used to be. But the few that remain have been on for decades, and one of the singular characteristics they exhibit is how they are forever writing off characters, only to bring them back, write them off, and bring them back again, endlessly, until at last the actor portraying them retires or dies. Take Anthony Geary, for example. He played Luke Spencer on General Hospital from 1978 - 1984; a different character in 1991; Luke again from 1993 - 2015, and made a final performance in 2017, again as Luke. There are many, many actors with similar pedigrees, but as I walked the hallways, heard the old verbiage, drank the old stationhouse coffee and heard the same annoying chimes on the desk phones, I began to realize that I was one of them. I had played a role on a soap opera called County Courthouse from 1997 - 2002, and was now reprising it. Many of my former co-stars had departed for different shows, some had remained, and a few, like me, had come and gone and returned, looking older and wearier, but also a little more surefooted, a little more relaxed, now that they knew the game so intimately, its pluses and minuses, its pitfalls and its hilltops. It is the young, hungry, ambitious actor, after all, who is so impatient, demanding, difficult to work with -- "temperamental" is the way they politely put it in Hollywood -- because he is hungry for success, hungry to be taken seriously, hungry for accolades. He feels contempt for his elders because they are still on soap operas at their age; when he is their age he will surely be a famous movie star, raking in millions and balling supermodels in his mansion in the Hills. This measly soap is not where his career will end, it is where it will begin.
It has taken me many years to recognize what an unlikeable character I really was when I was a young "actor" in my mid-late twenties, making my first appearance in "soaps." I had a fatal combination of middle-class, yougest-child entitlement, whisked in with a generous dosage of collegiate, fratnerity BMOC attitude, and sprinkled with the surefire knowledge that I had immense writing talent and was therefore a burgeoning ARTIST. Having so much sex with so many women only made things worse: a young man certain of his sexual attractiveness and prowess is often insufferably arrogant even in moments of defeat. And I was insufferable. I thought I was better than most people and took some pains to let them know it: at the same time I resented, bitterly, the inevitable hostility this attitude engendered. I do not mean I was only bad: just that I paid very little heed to how I was perceived by others, and made no attempts toward humility, no efforts to soften my edges. I wanted people to deal with me as-is. I wanted to deal with myself as-is. I wasn't interested in self-improvement, only success. Like all young "actors," I was more interested appearances than substance -- in other people, and in myself. So I was a pretty good actor, but I was also a villain, the tragi-comic element being that I did not know I was a villain, rendering all of my grievances sincere.
Well, the character of Miles Watson (played by Miles Watson) has been back on set for three years and counting now, and every day, every week I march to County Courthouse, I wonder about the curiously cyclical nature of life on a soap. I had my slick-haired bad-boy era, my self-indulgent "finding myself" era, and now, as a very middle-aged man, the era of -- what? Who is the character I play now? What role does he fill on the show? That is a deeper question, and one I ask myself on an almost hourly basis. There are times I feel like a flat-out hero, helping confused, anxious, suspicious, wounded, traumatized, often grief-stricken human beings navigate a complex, inefficient, and impersonal system; times I feel as if I am burning off a great karmic debt by placing the needs of everyone else over my own; and there are times I feel like a flat-out fraud, a kind of grinning Happy Face slapped over the same selfish, quick-tempered, salacious-minded Chad I used to be, the difference being now -- pathetically -- that I am not in much of a position to act on most of my villainous impulses. A good guy by default, by force of circumstance rather than choice...like a devil robbed of his horns and tail, but still, as INXS once said, a devil inside.
Who is this character anyway?
Miles, as portrayed by Miles, sometimes looks at the world through his windows and wonders where he will be in five years -- in two years, in six months. Life gets shorter as it goes longer and there are more days behind now than ahead. His acting career is not where he thought it would be, and the arrogance of his youth has come back to haunt him. Miles does not feel sorry for himself, but he does feel urgency: torschlusspanik as the Germans call it, the fear that the gates of life will close before he accomplishes everything he set out to do when he joined this goddamned television show. Sometimes he trembles at the immensity of his own ambitions, and all the accolades and progress he has gathered unto himself seem all the more inadquate when measured against that towering edifice of WHAT HE WANTS TO ACCOMPLISH, WHO HE WANTS TO BE, when all he actually is a recurring character on a goddamned soap.
Now, I suppose it could be argued that when you go home again, you shouldn't be surprised if someone has painted the house and moved all the furniture. Tony Geary probably found the transition from Sunset Gower Studios to Prospect Studios a bit jarring when he became Luke for the second time. Part of him probably died a little inside even as the exciting prospect of work took hold of him, because no doubt he thought he'd be polishing Oscars instead of Emmys by that point in his life. But the important thing, really, was the second chance. The second bite at the apple. Because believe me boy, you don't always get them. It may or may not just be a soap, but while you're there, it's home.
Shawn Colvin comes to the Strand (they call it the Appell now) on October 24, 2023, twenty years after I was first denied the opportunity to see her. And it will be worth the asking price just to hear her sing the lyrics which, even as a know-it-all twentysomething, gave me a curiously haunted feeling:
She says, "Days go by, I don't know why
I'm walking on a wire
I close my eyes and fly out of my mind
Into the fire"
Get the kids and bring a sweater
Dry is good and wind is better
Count the years, you always knew it
Strike a match, go on and do it
"Oh, days go by, I'm hypnotized
I'm walking on a wire
I close my eyes and fly out of my mind
Into the fire"
Oh, light the sky and hold on tight
The world is burning down
She's out there on her own, and she's all right
Sunny came home
Sunny came home
Came home
Home
September 26, 2023
MY WEIGHT LOSS JOURNEY: PART II
A hundred and five days have passed since I decided to embark upon my weight loss journey, and as promised and threatened, here are the results as of today, with some backstory thrown in for context.
Sunday, June 13 (start): 207.5 lbs
Thursday, August 3: 196.7 lbs
Tuesday, September 26 (today): 192.6 lbs
I have also recorded a 2.2% drop in BMI, a 2% loss in body fat, a substantive increase in body water (much needed), and increased a full percentage point of skeletal muscle mass. I have also decreased by 100 calories per day my basal metabolic rate (BMR), i.e. the amount of calories my body needs to perform basic functions.
On the other hand, the losses of the last seven weeks have been very small in comparison with the losses of the first eight. I lost ten pounds in two months, but in the last two have dropped merely four. This was not unexpected and was only slightly discouraging. Whenever I lose weight, it usually begins easily enough (the very worst of the extra flab is not difficult to dismiss), but then deteriorates into a series of siege-like battles with what I call "set points" -- the points at which my body naturally digs in its heels and refuses to lose any more weight. Overcoming these set points is always a battle: I first discovered this fact in 1987 or so, when I lost weight for the first time. Destroying a set point usually means a free-fall in weight of anywhere from 5 - 10 lbs before another set point sets up shop and the fight starts all over again. Sooner or later I reach the desired set point and this becomes my new normal. It is impossible to predict with any certainty, but I expect by year's end I should have at least passed comfortably into the high 180s range. My final objective is 183 lbs. Once I've reached and sustained that for a time, I will begin the process of trying to add muscle -- an entirely different mountain to climb. In the mean time, the battle goes on.
I covered the methods I used in in Part I a few months back, so I won't repeat myself here except to say that I stuck to very simple principles:
1. Eat more protein (a hand-sized portion with every meal)
2. Drink more water (ideally 70+ ounces per day)
3. Check in periodically with my weight-loss LPN for advice
4. Weigh myself regularly but don't pay attention to daily results, only trends
5. Try to get an hour's exercise (walking is fine) just about every day.
And that's really it. The essentials anyway. I am recording all this here because frankly, reading being a sedentary pastime (like writing), it's easy to gather up a double chin or two while snacking your way through some Tolstoy or Rowling or King, and with all the conflicting noise on the internet it's often impossible to get at the simple truths we need to motivate ourselves to lead better, happier, more fulfilled, and healthier lives. I have found it a lot harder to be depressed, angry or apathetic when I have clear-cut goals and am working toward them diligently and seeing results; also, when I hold myself accountable to others, and share what I learn with them. And this applies to both writing novels and losing weight. Another reason I harbor is that I am now 51 years old, and extremely curious about what sort of shape I can achieve sans steroids, surgery, HGH, TRT, etc., etc. Middle age is a bizarre time in life, when one is demonstratably no longer young and yet at the same time possesses many of the qualities of youth, and as I explore it, I am also eager to test its limits -- and if possible, break them.
It is now just about the end of September. I plan on checking in with you again around Christmas. I say this hopefully in that I will have a gift to bring to you, and to myself: a slimmer, fitter me.
Sunday, June 13 (start): 207.5 lbs
Thursday, August 3: 196.7 lbs
Tuesday, September 26 (today): 192.6 lbs
I have also recorded a 2.2% drop in BMI, a 2% loss in body fat, a substantive increase in body water (much needed), and increased a full percentage point of skeletal muscle mass. I have also decreased by 100 calories per day my basal metabolic rate (BMR), i.e. the amount of calories my body needs to perform basic functions.
On the other hand, the losses of the last seven weeks have been very small in comparison with the losses of the first eight. I lost ten pounds in two months, but in the last two have dropped merely four. This was not unexpected and was only slightly discouraging. Whenever I lose weight, it usually begins easily enough (the very worst of the extra flab is not difficult to dismiss), but then deteriorates into a series of siege-like battles with what I call "set points" -- the points at which my body naturally digs in its heels and refuses to lose any more weight. Overcoming these set points is always a battle: I first discovered this fact in 1987 or so, when I lost weight for the first time. Destroying a set point usually means a free-fall in weight of anywhere from 5 - 10 lbs before another set point sets up shop and the fight starts all over again. Sooner or later I reach the desired set point and this becomes my new normal. It is impossible to predict with any certainty, but I expect by year's end I should have at least passed comfortably into the high 180s range. My final objective is 183 lbs. Once I've reached and sustained that for a time, I will begin the process of trying to add muscle -- an entirely different mountain to climb. In the mean time, the battle goes on.
I covered the methods I used in in Part I a few months back, so I won't repeat myself here except to say that I stuck to very simple principles:
1. Eat more protein (a hand-sized portion with every meal)
2. Drink more water (ideally 70+ ounces per day)
3. Check in periodically with my weight-loss LPN for advice
4. Weigh myself regularly but don't pay attention to daily results, only trends
5. Try to get an hour's exercise (walking is fine) just about every day.
And that's really it. The essentials anyway. I am recording all this here because frankly, reading being a sedentary pastime (like writing), it's easy to gather up a double chin or two while snacking your way through some Tolstoy or Rowling or King, and with all the conflicting noise on the internet it's often impossible to get at the simple truths we need to motivate ourselves to lead better, happier, more fulfilled, and healthier lives. I have found it a lot harder to be depressed, angry or apathetic when I have clear-cut goals and am working toward them diligently and seeing results; also, when I hold myself accountable to others, and share what I learn with them. And this applies to both writing novels and losing weight. Another reason I harbor is that I am now 51 years old, and extremely curious about what sort of shape I can achieve sans steroids, surgery, HGH, TRT, etc., etc. Middle age is a bizarre time in life, when one is demonstratably no longer young and yet at the same time possesses many of the qualities of youth, and as I explore it, I am also eager to test its limits -- and if possible, break them.
It is now just about the end of September. I plan on checking in with you again around Christmas. I say this hopefully in that I will have a gift to bring to you, and to myself: a slimmer, fitter me.
September 24, 2023
AS I PLEASE XVIII: BLOGUS INTERRUPTUS
As I sit here (very) belatedly writing this, rain is falling, and my cat Spike is perched on my shoulder, making hitting the correct keys very awkward indeed. I am in somewhat of a temper generally, and have decided to begin the process of getting this blog back on its regularly scheduled programming with an As I Please which will perhaps explain why -- why I haven't been blogging as much of late, and why I'm a grumpy sonofabitch today.
* I recently gave a lecture in these very pages about consistency. I was feeling rather smug that in addition to everything else I do, I was able to put out two blogs a week, and on specific dates (Wednesday and Saturday). Lately I have fallen away from that. I want to make excuses, blame my schedule, etc., etc., but the truth is, when it comes to blogging, I would rather publish nothing at all than a blog for the sake of blogging. Maybe that, too, is an excuse, but I don't mean it that way. What I'm driving at here is that while these posts are often fairly raw in their execution, I don't view them as mere content. I flatter myself that I do not produce mere content, but always strive to have something to say, however silly or disagreeable it might be. The actor Rick Moranis once mocked the very idea of blogging as people spewing unedited first drafts of their thoughts onto the internet, and this criticism is frankly quite valid, but I think it an incomplete assessment. Blogs are not meant to be graduate school essays, capable of withstanding academic scrutinty. They are a method somewhat akin to journaling, free-form poetry, etc. by which people can informally tackle topics that interest or concern them. That, however, is not a license to produce crap. So when I don't have a good topic, or don't have the time or the energy to address one properly, I'd just as soon stay silent. This is still an excuse, but I hope one that shades more toward the side of explanation. I will try to get back on track for a twice-weekly production of Stone Cold Prose, but if it proves too much I will surrender and resume a consistent once-a-week schedule. Honest.
* I am grumpy this rainy Sunday morning because the 200 year-old building in which I live has a wonky alarm system which tends to go off, at eardrum-destroying, nerve-shredding volume, whenever water leaks into the structure and touches the wiring. This hideous alarm, far worse than that of a crash-diving submarine or an imperiled Death Star, can only be shut off by the fire department, and because it always strikes during inclement weather, makes evacuating the building (just to get away from the damned noise) extremely unpleasant, especially when it strikes at, say, 330 AM. This vile alarm ruined a much-needed ten-day vacation of mine over the winter holidays of 2022-2023 and drove me to consult my colleagues (prosecutors all) as to whether I could criminally charge my landlord. They responded that I could. However, that very day the problem was -- I thought at the time -- finally solved and after a brief trauma-period in which I spent part of every night waiting for it to go off and thus lost a lot of additional sleep, I gradually forgot about it. Today, around 830 AM, as I sat here in sweats and a T-shirt, trying to write, it reintroduced itself to my eardrums. The old rituals took place: dialing 911, standing outside in the rain in my slippers waiting for the fire department, and fantasizing about tying my landlord to the alarm system so they can experience the full glory of its rich, full-throated song.
* Because I do not want to be grumpy on a Sunday, I will relate a story people who tune into Goodreads will find enjoyable. Yesterday it was also raining, and I took my copy of Evelyn Waugh's MEN AT ARMS to the coffee shop around the corner, sat in their courtyard beneath an awning next to a blazing old outdoor stove of orange clay, and spent the next two hours drinking coffee and reading to the sounds of the falling rain and the crackling flames. A strong smell of woodsmoke (which permeated my clothes) added to the delightful atmosphere. In one of my favorite novels, COMING UP FOR AIR, George Orwell's protagonist, George Bowling, likens the experience of being alone and losing yourself in a novel to "bliss, pure bliss." I cannot disagree. You either understand the feeling I'm talking about, or you don't, and I pity those who don't: but if you're reading this, you almost certainly do, and congratulations and bless you for it. In the world we live in, the ability to escape is more necessary than it has ever been, and we should all remind ourselves periodically that this relief is no farther away than your nearest book.
* Speaking of nearest books: my third CAGE LIFE novel, now renamed DARK TRADE, is at 62,000 words, or roughly 3/4 of the way through its first draft. I began this novel on June 15, and if I can maintain this pace -- always an open question, to say the least -- I'll be done with it by Halloween. I would be lying if I didn't say I was overjoyed by this prospect. Probably the hardest of all the many battles I've had to fight as a writer, either with myself or with others, is the battle against the open-ended project that drags on interminably, month after month, year after year, seemingly without hope of resolution, testing my own resolve to see it through. Indeed, the half-finished or quarter-finished writing project, never to be finished, was the bane of my literary existence for most of my life. I published my first short story at the age of seventeen in a Canadian literary magazine called Green's. I published my second short story in a university magazine called Eye Contact when I was thirty-seven. In the twenty year gap between those two events my sole publications consisted of two letters to the editors of boxing magazines, and I finished exactly one novel and perhaps four or five short stories at the absolute maximum. Like many writers, I was unable to maintain the blaze of enthusiasm I always had at the beginning of a story, and once I went cold, was unable to force myself to finish on sheer determination. Overcoming this tendency, this pathology of failure by virtue of incompletion, was the most difficult of all the tasks I have yet been assigned in life, and it did not happen all at once, but in stages themselves taking years. And even then, when the demon was slain and buried, I came to understand that for the real demons that haunt us, death is but a sleep easily interrupted. Complacency can revive them at any time.
* I am now readying myself for a hike in the rain. It will be muddy and laborious and I will come back soaked to the skin, but my coat smells like woodsmoke from yesterday's fire, I am soon to finish MEN AT ARMS and thus edge a little closer to meeting my (modest) yearly goal in the Goodreads Challenge for the first time in forever, and in my downtime from this downtime, I still have two more MURDER, SHE WROTE television movies to watch left on the DVD four-pack I purchased for a song on Amazon. By the standards of my younger self, this is not much to get excited about, but hey, I'm not my younger self, a fact of which I am continually reminded by photographs, mirrors, and my increasing desire to spend free time watching the television shows of my youth. Youth itself is not nostalgic, it is impatient for the future. Middle age knows the future will arrive far too soon as it is.
*...I have now returned. It was quite the excursion. The woods were entirely empty, and the rain grew more rather than less intense as I tramped through mud and ankle-deep puddles in my decidedly uncomfortable winter boots. While I marched along, I listened to Orson Welles' Mercury Theater Company adaptation of "Dracula" which was originally broadcast on July 11, 1938. It is quite good, especially considering the difficulties presented by such a sprawling story. I particularly appreciated the final sound effect, whose provenance I dug up on Wikipedia: [In a 1940 article for The New Yorker, Lucille Fletcher wrote that "his programs called for all sorts of unheard-of effects, and he could be satisfied with nothing short of perfection." For "Dracula", the CBS sound team searched for the perfect sound of a stake being driven through the heart of the vampire. They first presented a savoy cabbage and a sharpened broomstick for Welles's approval. "Much too leafy," Welles concluded. "Drill a hole in the cabbage and fill it with water. We need blood." When that sound experiment also failed to satisfy Welles, he considered a while—and asked for a watermelon. Fletcher recalled the effect: "Welles stepped from the control booth, seized a hammer, and took a crack at the melon. Even the studio audience shuddered at the sound. That night, on a coast-to-coast network, he gave millions of listeners nightmares with what, even though it be produced with a melon and hammer, is indubitably the sound a stake would make piercing the heart of an undead body.
Well. Now that I have returned and dried myself off, I must continue my middle-aged Sunday in middle-aged fashion: feed the cat, feed myself, finish MEN AT ARMS, and then decide whether to write more or lose myself in yet another MURDER, SHE WROTE television movie. Such is middle-aged life on a rainy Sunday. I guess it ain't so bad. Now if only that goddamned alarm stays silent.
* I recently gave a lecture in these very pages about consistency. I was feeling rather smug that in addition to everything else I do, I was able to put out two blogs a week, and on specific dates (Wednesday and Saturday). Lately I have fallen away from that. I want to make excuses, blame my schedule, etc., etc., but the truth is, when it comes to blogging, I would rather publish nothing at all than a blog for the sake of blogging. Maybe that, too, is an excuse, but I don't mean it that way. What I'm driving at here is that while these posts are often fairly raw in their execution, I don't view them as mere content. I flatter myself that I do not produce mere content, but always strive to have something to say, however silly or disagreeable it might be. The actor Rick Moranis once mocked the very idea of blogging as people spewing unedited first drafts of their thoughts onto the internet, and this criticism is frankly quite valid, but I think it an incomplete assessment. Blogs are not meant to be graduate school essays, capable of withstanding academic scrutinty. They are a method somewhat akin to journaling, free-form poetry, etc. by which people can informally tackle topics that interest or concern them. That, however, is not a license to produce crap. So when I don't have a good topic, or don't have the time or the energy to address one properly, I'd just as soon stay silent. This is still an excuse, but I hope one that shades more toward the side of explanation. I will try to get back on track for a twice-weekly production of Stone Cold Prose, but if it proves too much I will surrender and resume a consistent once-a-week schedule. Honest.
* I am grumpy this rainy Sunday morning because the 200 year-old building in which I live has a wonky alarm system which tends to go off, at eardrum-destroying, nerve-shredding volume, whenever water leaks into the structure and touches the wiring. This hideous alarm, far worse than that of a crash-diving submarine or an imperiled Death Star, can only be shut off by the fire department, and because it always strikes during inclement weather, makes evacuating the building (just to get away from the damned noise) extremely unpleasant, especially when it strikes at, say, 330 AM. This vile alarm ruined a much-needed ten-day vacation of mine over the winter holidays of 2022-2023 and drove me to consult my colleagues (prosecutors all) as to whether I could criminally charge my landlord. They responded that I could. However, that very day the problem was -- I thought at the time -- finally solved and after a brief trauma-period in which I spent part of every night waiting for it to go off and thus lost a lot of additional sleep, I gradually forgot about it. Today, around 830 AM, as I sat here in sweats and a T-shirt, trying to write, it reintroduced itself to my eardrums. The old rituals took place: dialing 911, standing outside in the rain in my slippers waiting for the fire department, and fantasizing about tying my landlord to the alarm system so they can experience the full glory of its rich, full-throated song.
* Because I do not want to be grumpy on a Sunday, I will relate a story people who tune into Goodreads will find enjoyable. Yesterday it was also raining, and I took my copy of Evelyn Waugh's MEN AT ARMS to the coffee shop around the corner, sat in their courtyard beneath an awning next to a blazing old outdoor stove of orange clay, and spent the next two hours drinking coffee and reading to the sounds of the falling rain and the crackling flames. A strong smell of woodsmoke (which permeated my clothes) added to the delightful atmosphere. In one of my favorite novels, COMING UP FOR AIR, George Orwell's protagonist, George Bowling, likens the experience of being alone and losing yourself in a novel to "bliss, pure bliss." I cannot disagree. You either understand the feeling I'm talking about, or you don't, and I pity those who don't: but if you're reading this, you almost certainly do, and congratulations and bless you for it. In the world we live in, the ability to escape is more necessary than it has ever been, and we should all remind ourselves periodically that this relief is no farther away than your nearest book.
* Speaking of nearest books: my third CAGE LIFE novel, now renamed DARK TRADE, is at 62,000 words, or roughly 3/4 of the way through its first draft. I began this novel on June 15, and if I can maintain this pace -- always an open question, to say the least -- I'll be done with it by Halloween. I would be lying if I didn't say I was overjoyed by this prospect. Probably the hardest of all the many battles I've had to fight as a writer, either with myself or with others, is the battle against the open-ended project that drags on interminably, month after month, year after year, seemingly without hope of resolution, testing my own resolve to see it through. Indeed, the half-finished or quarter-finished writing project, never to be finished, was the bane of my literary existence for most of my life. I published my first short story at the age of seventeen in a Canadian literary magazine called Green's. I published my second short story in a university magazine called Eye Contact when I was thirty-seven. In the twenty year gap between those two events my sole publications consisted of two letters to the editors of boxing magazines, and I finished exactly one novel and perhaps four or five short stories at the absolute maximum. Like many writers, I was unable to maintain the blaze of enthusiasm I always had at the beginning of a story, and once I went cold, was unable to force myself to finish on sheer determination. Overcoming this tendency, this pathology of failure by virtue of incompletion, was the most difficult of all the tasks I have yet been assigned in life, and it did not happen all at once, but in stages themselves taking years. And even then, when the demon was slain and buried, I came to understand that for the real demons that haunt us, death is but a sleep easily interrupted. Complacency can revive them at any time.
* I am now readying myself for a hike in the rain. It will be muddy and laborious and I will come back soaked to the skin, but my coat smells like woodsmoke from yesterday's fire, I am soon to finish MEN AT ARMS and thus edge a little closer to meeting my (modest) yearly goal in the Goodreads Challenge for the first time in forever, and in my downtime from this downtime, I still have two more MURDER, SHE WROTE television movies to watch left on the DVD four-pack I purchased for a song on Amazon. By the standards of my younger self, this is not much to get excited about, but hey, I'm not my younger self, a fact of which I am continually reminded by photographs, mirrors, and my increasing desire to spend free time watching the television shows of my youth. Youth itself is not nostalgic, it is impatient for the future. Middle age knows the future will arrive far too soon as it is.
*...I have now returned. It was quite the excursion. The woods were entirely empty, and the rain grew more rather than less intense as I tramped through mud and ankle-deep puddles in my decidedly uncomfortable winter boots. While I marched along, I listened to Orson Welles' Mercury Theater Company adaptation of "Dracula" which was originally broadcast on July 11, 1938. It is quite good, especially considering the difficulties presented by such a sprawling story. I particularly appreciated the final sound effect, whose provenance I dug up on Wikipedia: [In a 1940 article for The New Yorker, Lucille Fletcher wrote that "his programs called for all sorts of unheard-of effects, and he could be satisfied with nothing short of perfection." For "Dracula", the CBS sound team searched for the perfect sound of a stake being driven through the heart of the vampire. They first presented a savoy cabbage and a sharpened broomstick for Welles's approval. "Much too leafy," Welles concluded. "Drill a hole in the cabbage and fill it with water. We need blood." When that sound experiment also failed to satisfy Welles, he considered a while—and asked for a watermelon. Fletcher recalled the effect: "Welles stepped from the control booth, seized a hammer, and took a crack at the melon. Even the studio audience shuddered at the sound. That night, on a coast-to-coast network, he gave millions of listeners nightmares with what, even though it be produced with a melon and hammer, is indubitably the sound a stake would make piercing the heart of an undead body.
Well. Now that I have returned and dried myself off, I must continue my middle-aged Sunday in middle-aged fashion: feed the cat, feed myself, finish MEN AT ARMS, and then decide whether to write more or lose myself in yet another MURDER, SHE WROTE television movie. Such is middle-aged life on a rainy Sunday. I guess it ain't so bad. Now if only that goddamned alarm stays silent.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
- Miles Watson's profile
- 63 followers
