Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 12
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.
September 17, 2023
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "KINDRED: THE EMBRACED"
In the immortal words of Thomas Magnum, I know what you're thinking. I've already mentioned this show somewhere in my "Gone Too Soon" subseries here on Stone Cold Prose, and am now treading over already-trodden, if unhallowed, ground. This is half true. KINDRED: THE EMBRACED was indeed among the first-season cancellations I have listed and discussed in previous blogs: however, I only lightly touched upon the series, and felt the subject worthy of a fuller examination. With Halloween slowly creeping up on us, I also thought it fitting that "Memory Lane" continues to walk down the path of horror television, a surprisingly rare genre of the medium.
And now, to cases.
KINDRED: THE EMBRACED came and went so quickly in 1996 that if you blinked, you missed it. And it turned out most people did, since it was cancelled after only eight episodes. I myself remember the TV trailers and publicity stills very vividly, but I too must have "blinked" because I never saw any of the shows before they were consigned to the dustbin of TV history. In a sense, I am glad of this, because I believe I would have mourned its demise. Produced by the legendary Aaron Spelling and his less legendary, but no less important partner, E. Duke Vincent, this toothly prime-time soap opera concerned the doings of five vampire clans based in San Fransisco, who were ruled over with some difficulty by a prince named Julian Luna (Mark Frankel). In addition to contending with all sorts of grief from the clans (collectively known as "the Kindred"), Luna makes the mistake of falling for a beautiful human reporter (Kelly Rutherford) who obviously can't be let in on his secret identity, while at the same time, fending off the attentions of a revenge-obsessed cop (C. Thomas Howell), who wants to dust Julian for ordering the death of his (vampire) girlfriend.
The world of KINDRED is a very complex one, based in part off the role-playing game "Vampire: The Masquerade." The city is ruled by its prince, who keeps a counsel of "primogen," or vampire clan leaders, as his counsel. The vampires, though generally at cross-purposes with each other, are generally united in maintaining "the masquerade," i.e. the policy of hiding their existence from humans. They do this by infiltrating human agencies, such as the police, and by spreading their considerable wealth around to shut people up. (Violating the masquerade is punishable by death.) The powers of the vampires are somewhat different than in traditional vampire lore (for one, they can walk around in daylight, provided they've recently fed), and in fact each clan's vamps have somewhat different characteristics (including physical differences in the case of the monstrous Nosferatu). Stand-alone episodes aside, most of the show's drama comes from tension between Luna and his chief rival, Eddie Fiori (the ubiquitous Brian Thompson), who leads the gangsterish Brujah clan and isn't content with his role as second vampiric banana. In addition, there is a Romeo and Juliet storyline between the leader of a biker clan Gangrels, Cash (Channon Roe) and Julian's snarky neice Sasha (Brigid Brannagh) which is terribly overplayed but nevertheless adds depth to the show.
Fans of Spelling's shows will recognize all of his trademarks here – period fashion, gallons of hair gel, extraordinarily beautiful actors who nevertheless look slightly freakish, and lots and lots of soapy melodrama At its worst, this show was embarrassingly bad: the writing, and therefore the acting, were all over the place, Howell was dreadfully miscast, and the vampire makeup on the “Nosferatu” clan looked like something you'd find at the discount bin at Party City the day after Halloween. Nonetheless, I mourned the cancellation of this show: it had such a fabulous premise that it couldn't help but improve from week to week, and indeed, its eight episodes tell a nearly complete story that resolves most of the plot lines, making it satisfying to watch as a kind of unofficial mini-series. Never mind a second season: I'd have been content if this one had simply been allowed to complete its first. Unfortunately, the series' too-handsome-to-be-human star, Mark Frankel, was killed in a motorcycle accident shortly after its cancellation, preventing any possible reunion, and in any case “Kindred” died such a quick death that it has only a small cult following and is somewhat unlikely to be tapped for a reboot. Interestingly, Spelling was to try another supernaturally-themed show set in San Fransisco just two years later, and scored a big hit with CHARMED. Fans of "Kindred" will recognize that some of the shots used in the opening season of "Charmed" were actually taken from "Kindred," including the iconic "park bench overlooking the bridge." What's more, just about every (surviving) actor in the cast later appeared on "Charmed" in some capacity or other, including Stacey Haiduk, Brigid Brannagh, Channon Roe, Jeff Kober, Brian Thompson, etc. Many appeared on BUFFY (or ANGEL) as well. It must have been a bitter pill for Spelling to watch BUFFY take off like a rocket not even a full year after this show went off the air, but in fairness, BUFFY was much the superior product in every way. I just wish KINDRED had had time to mature. It was in most ways an objectively bad television show, but was already improving when it disappeared, and its world was a rich, sexy and aesthetically beautiful one. Episodes like "Nightstalker," "Live Hard, Die Young and Leave A Good-Looking Corpse," and the finale, "Cabin the Woods" showed the enormous potential it possessed. The intersection of the supernatural world and the world of cops, reporters and other ordinary people is one which has rarely been explored on television, and that brings me to the deeper end of this particular pool.
At the time of this writing, I cannot think of too many prime-time television shows which fully embraced horror thematically even if they were not striving for scares at every point, and if we set aside anthologies of the HITCHHIKER, FREDDY'S NIGHTMARES, NIGHT GALLERY, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, CHANNEL ZERO, AMERICAN HORROR STORY, etc., etc.) we immediately reduce the smallish total figure. Off the top of my head, I think of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, THE OUTER LIMITS, KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER, WEREWOLF, FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES, FOREVER KNIGHT, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, ANGEL, CHARMED, THE X-FILES, SUPERNATURAL, FRINGE and STRANGER THINGS. The various WALKING DEAD shows can be tossed in there as well along with various others, but when we compare however many the final number would be to, say cop shows, doctor shows, lawyer shows, etc., the outcome is a total massacre. What's more, many of these series have come along post X-FILES and BUFFY, making them much less risky prospects. KINDRED was a brave attempt to revive a genre of storytelling which wasn't anywhere near as popular at the time as it is today, and which was therefore a much bigger risk than, say, 90210 or MELROSE PLACE. It was rather a mess, due to various issues the producers could not or did not overcome before the pilot was shot, but its boldness should not be dismissed out of hand. Horror, as a rule, suffers more than any other genre from good ideas gone wrong: i.e. from bold conceptions which are poorly executed. A lot of this comes from the fact it is not a respected art form and therefore gets little of the time, attention, money and craft your average, generic law-firm or detective show would recieve as a matter of course. Paramount Pictures has made almost a fetish of shitting on fans of the FRIDAY THE 13TH series in part because the suits consider the franchise itself an embarrassment. The stark fact is that horror is often considered to be only a step above pornography no matter the medium by which it is disseminated, be it print or celluloid. Stephen King has railed most eloquently about this, but it hasn't changed the underlying feelings and prejudices regarding horror television.
So where does that leave us? What is the legacy of this failed and forgotten series, a quarter century down the road? And is there anything to be learned from its demise?
The most obvious bequest of KINDRED is that Spelling was undaunted enough by its failure to produce CHARMED a few years down the road, which by then had had BUFFY to blaze a trail for it. CHARMED was an enormous success and had a huge influence over a whole generation of young women, very few of whom probably knew how many of its guest stars had themselves starred on KINDRED. They were, of course, very different shows: KINDRED took itself with great seriousness, while CHARMED rarely took itself seriously at all. But it seems unlikely to me that you would have had the one without the other. Indeed, setting CHARMED in San Fransisco seems to have been a little bit of a fuck-you from Spelling, and if it was, well, more power to him.
More directly, I look at KINDRED not as a might-have-been or a cautionary tale, but an inspiration and a reminder all at once. It is an inspiration in that it was a long shot to begin with, yet enough people in the notoriously cynical and cowardly citadels of Hollywood chanced it might succeed that it actually saw -- so to speak -- the light of day. It's an inspiration in that its creators, when they knew it was going to be canceled, had the integrity to wind up the story in such as way as to leave its meager audience satisfied rather that simply dangling. And it is a reminder that those who work in the bloody medium of horror need do more than come up with interesting and intriguing concepts: they have to execute them properly. The idea of rival vampire clans secretly holding power in a major American city is a fascinating one: it should have yielded better results. Enthusiasm for an idea is all well and good, but you are judged by how you finish the race, not by how you start it. KINDRED suffered principally from a confusion over whether it was a vampire show or a soap opera with vampire themes, and that was an avoidable pitfall. The time to shake out the bugs is before you finish the pilot, not three or four episodes -- or seasons -- into a series. Some of this, of course, is impossible, but because something is impossible doesn't mean you shouldn't try: the very act will go a long way toward improving you.
Someday, I believe KINDRED will get another bite -- ha ha! -- at the throat of television via the inevitable reboot. And unlike most reboots, this prospect doesn't leave me shivering.
And now, to cases.
KINDRED: THE EMBRACED came and went so quickly in 1996 that if you blinked, you missed it. And it turned out most people did, since it was cancelled after only eight episodes. I myself remember the TV trailers and publicity stills very vividly, but I too must have "blinked" because I never saw any of the shows before they were consigned to the dustbin of TV history. In a sense, I am glad of this, because I believe I would have mourned its demise. Produced by the legendary Aaron Spelling and his less legendary, but no less important partner, E. Duke Vincent, this toothly prime-time soap opera concerned the doings of five vampire clans based in San Fransisco, who were ruled over with some difficulty by a prince named Julian Luna (Mark Frankel). In addition to contending with all sorts of grief from the clans (collectively known as "the Kindred"), Luna makes the mistake of falling for a beautiful human reporter (Kelly Rutherford) who obviously can't be let in on his secret identity, while at the same time, fending off the attentions of a revenge-obsessed cop (C. Thomas Howell), who wants to dust Julian for ordering the death of his (vampire) girlfriend.
The world of KINDRED is a very complex one, based in part off the role-playing game "Vampire: The Masquerade." The city is ruled by its prince, who keeps a counsel of "primogen," or vampire clan leaders, as his counsel. The vampires, though generally at cross-purposes with each other, are generally united in maintaining "the masquerade," i.e. the policy of hiding their existence from humans. They do this by infiltrating human agencies, such as the police, and by spreading their considerable wealth around to shut people up. (Violating the masquerade is punishable by death.) The powers of the vampires are somewhat different than in traditional vampire lore (for one, they can walk around in daylight, provided they've recently fed), and in fact each clan's vamps have somewhat different characteristics (including physical differences in the case of the monstrous Nosferatu). Stand-alone episodes aside, most of the show's drama comes from tension between Luna and his chief rival, Eddie Fiori (the ubiquitous Brian Thompson), who leads the gangsterish Brujah clan and isn't content with his role as second vampiric banana. In addition, there is a Romeo and Juliet storyline between the leader of a biker clan Gangrels, Cash (Channon Roe) and Julian's snarky neice Sasha (Brigid Brannagh) which is terribly overplayed but nevertheless adds depth to the show.
Fans of Spelling's shows will recognize all of his trademarks here – period fashion, gallons of hair gel, extraordinarily beautiful actors who nevertheless look slightly freakish, and lots and lots of soapy melodrama At its worst, this show was embarrassingly bad: the writing, and therefore the acting, were all over the place, Howell was dreadfully miscast, and the vampire makeup on the “Nosferatu” clan looked like something you'd find at the discount bin at Party City the day after Halloween. Nonetheless, I mourned the cancellation of this show: it had such a fabulous premise that it couldn't help but improve from week to week, and indeed, its eight episodes tell a nearly complete story that resolves most of the plot lines, making it satisfying to watch as a kind of unofficial mini-series. Never mind a second season: I'd have been content if this one had simply been allowed to complete its first. Unfortunately, the series' too-handsome-to-be-human star, Mark Frankel, was killed in a motorcycle accident shortly after its cancellation, preventing any possible reunion, and in any case “Kindred” died such a quick death that it has only a small cult following and is somewhat unlikely to be tapped for a reboot. Interestingly, Spelling was to try another supernaturally-themed show set in San Fransisco just two years later, and scored a big hit with CHARMED. Fans of "Kindred" will recognize that some of the shots used in the opening season of "Charmed" were actually taken from "Kindred," including the iconic "park bench overlooking the bridge." What's more, just about every (surviving) actor in the cast later appeared on "Charmed" in some capacity or other, including Stacey Haiduk, Brigid Brannagh, Channon Roe, Jeff Kober, Brian Thompson, etc. Many appeared on BUFFY (or ANGEL) as well. It must have been a bitter pill for Spelling to watch BUFFY take off like a rocket not even a full year after this show went off the air, but in fairness, BUFFY was much the superior product in every way. I just wish KINDRED had had time to mature. It was in most ways an objectively bad television show, but was already improving when it disappeared, and its world was a rich, sexy and aesthetically beautiful one. Episodes like "Nightstalker," "Live Hard, Die Young and Leave A Good-Looking Corpse," and the finale, "Cabin the Woods" showed the enormous potential it possessed. The intersection of the supernatural world and the world of cops, reporters and other ordinary people is one which has rarely been explored on television, and that brings me to the deeper end of this particular pool.
At the time of this writing, I cannot think of too many prime-time television shows which fully embraced horror thematically even if they were not striving for scares at every point, and if we set aside anthologies of the HITCHHIKER, FREDDY'S NIGHTMARES, NIGHT GALLERY, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, CHANNEL ZERO, AMERICAN HORROR STORY, etc., etc.) we immediately reduce the smallish total figure. Off the top of my head, I think of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, THE OUTER LIMITS, KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER, WEREWOLF, FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES, FOREVER KNIGHT, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, ANGEL, CHARMED, THE X-FILES, SUPERNATURAL, FRINGE and STRANGER THINGS. The various WALKING DEAD shows can be tossed in there as well along with various others, but when we compare however many the final number would be to, say cop shows, doctor shows, lawyer shows, etc., the outcome is a total massacre. What's more, many of these series have come along post X-FILES and BUFFY, making them much less risky prospects. KINDRED was a brave attempt to revive a genre of storytelling which wasn't anywhere near as popular at the time as it is today, and which was therefore a much bigger risk than, say, 90210 or MELROSE PLACE. It was rather a mess, due to various issues the producers could not or did not overcome before the pilot was shot, but its boldness should not be dismissed out of hand. Horror, as a rule, suffers more than any other genre from good ideas gone wrong: i.e. from bold conceptions which are poorly executed. A lot of this comes from the fact it is not a respected art form and therefore gets little of the time, attention, money and craft your average, generic law-firm or detective show would recieve as a matter of course. Paramount Pictures has made almost a fetish of shitting on fans of the FRIDAY THE 13TH series in part because the suits consider the franchise itself an embarrassment. The stark fact is that horror is often considered to be only a step above pornography no matter the medium by which it is disseminated, be it print or celluloid. Stephen King has railed most eloquently about this, but it hasn't changed the underlying feelings and prejudices regarding horror television.
So where does that leave us? What is the legacy of this failed and forgotten series, a quarter century down the road? And is there anything to be learned from its demise?
The most obvious bequest of KINDRED is that Spelling was undaunted enough by its failure to produce CHARMED a few years down the road, which by then had had BUFFY to blaze a trail for it. CHARMED was an enormous success and had a huge influence over a whole generation of young women, very few of whom probably knew how many of its guest stars had themselves starred on KINDRED. They were, of course, very different shows: KINDRED took itself with great seriousness, while CHARMED rarely took itself seriously at all. But it seems unlikely to me that you would have had the one without the other. Indeed, setting CHARMED in San Fransisco seems to have been a little bit of a fuck-you from Spelling, and if it was, well, more power to him.
More directly, I look at KINDRED not as a might-have-been or a cautionary tale, but an inspiration and a reminder all at once. It is an inspiration in that it was a long shot to begin with, yet enough people in the notoriously cynical and cowardly citadels of Hollywood chanced it might succeed that it actually saw -- so to speak -- the light of day. It's an inspiration in that its creators, when they knew it was going to be canceled, had the integrity to wind up the story in such as way as to leave its meager audience satisfied rather that simply dangling. And it is a reminder that those who work in the bloody medium of horror need do more than come up with interesting and intriguing concepts: they have to execute them properly. The idea of rival vampire clans secretly holding power in a major American city is a fascinating one: it should have yielded better results. Enthusiasm for an idea is all well and good, but you are judged by how you finish the race, not by how you start it. KINDRED suffered principally from a confusion over whether it was a vampire show or a soap opera with vampire themes, and that was an avoidable pitfall. The time to shake out the bugs is before you finish the pilot, not three or four episodes -- or seasons -- into a series. Some of this, of course, is impossible, but because something is impossible doesn't mean you shouldn't try: the very act will go a long way toward improving you.
Someday, I believe KINDRED will get another bite -- ha ha! -- at the throat of television via the inevitable reboot. And unlike most reboots, this prospect doesn't leave me shivering.
September 6, 2023
HAVING A GO AT THE MANOSPHERE
A week or so ago I promised to balance my fiery diatribe (is there ever an ice-cold diatribe, I wonder?) against modern feminism by making sport of the so-called "manosphere." For those unfamiliar with the term, the manosphere is defined by Wikipedia as "a group of loosely associated websites, blogs, and forums all concerned with masculinity and men's issues, and includes input from the MRM, pick-up artists, anti-feminists, and fathers' rights activists." In short, the manosphere is for men the virtual equivalent of the beauty salon used to be for women: a place to vent their frustrations, express their concerns, and seek help with their problems. It contains a vast spectrum of personalities, from the blatantly misogynistic to the gently comedic, from those nursing grievances to those seeking advice, from those looking to cash in on the loneliness and frustration of younger generations of men to those sincerely trying to guide them. In short, it's the usual Mos Eisley mix you find on the internet, neither good nor evil in itself, but containing both and everything in between. I have spent some months terminally online in the hopes of understanding its attraction to men of all ages, and I am ready to report my findings.
It's important to begin by stating that I don't want to get into the chicken-egg argument of "did the internet expose how fucked up everyone is or did it make us fucked up?" because the answer to that question is simply "...yes." The web both exposed the dark corners of our minds and managed to make them all the darker by its very existence. But even if this were not so it would be irrelevant, because we have to look at the situation as it is: how we got here, for once, is of little importance. The manosphere manifestly does not represent the views of all men, because the internet itself only represents the opinions of those who take an active part in it, and those people are often clowns, fools, hucksters or absolute shitheels; but it does provide us with answers to some of the more important questions about those who are terminally online or who draw their opinions primarily from the net and social media.
The first thing that I would say in regards to the manosphere is that there is less overt misogyny than I expected, and far more intelligent observation and criticism. This is not to say that I did not encounter misogyny: I did, and in some quantity and varying levels of intensity, from subtle and backhanded to strident and hateful. But the content creators I sampled, black and white, conservative and moderate, Gen X to Gen Z, male and yes, even female, tended more toward a defensive or even a defeatist attitude toward modern women, than to active antipathy. Their comments were generally marked by some or all of the following:
1. Loneliness.
2. Hostility toward/distrust of modern women.
3. Sexual and socio-sexual frustration.
4. A feeling that masculinity is under attack.
5. Nostalgia for clearly understood sex/gender roles.
6. Frustration over historical gaslighting.
To tackle these in order:
1. When the internet first began to make itself felt in society, there was a near-universal assumption that it would help human beings connect with each other: this assumption was well-founded and, for a time, completely validated. But like any drug, the initial, connective effect of e-mail, instant messaging and chatrooms gradually faded and became curiously isolative in nature over time: in fact, one could argue that the more connected people became with the advent of social media, cell phone apps, etc., the more isolated they became. This seems to be because birds of a feather flock together, and people who feel isolated and alone often seem to gravitate to others who are similarly lonely. This creates an environment where these qualities, and the psychological baggage that comes with them, become normative, accepted, and even lauditory. They make a fetish of their own loneliness, their own social awkwardness and inability to make flesh-and-blood friendships and sexually intimate relationships. And it is from this soil that the more radical, misogynist elements of the manosphere grew their mutated offspring. But this is not the whole or the end of the story. There are many men whose sin is to be basically average -- in looks and earning power -- and who feel as if because they are average, they are ignored by the 90% of women who are gunning for the top 10% of men. Thus they end up being rejected even by even average women. In this they have some grounds for complaint. Modern feminism has all but championed this 90/10 math, insisting that all women, regardless of their looks or attractiveness or baggage or emotional stability, can land a so-called "high-value man," when in fact the supply of such men is necessarily very low, and such men have no obvious reason to commit to any one woman. It has helped create a situation in which neither women nor men tend to ge what they want, which only fuels additional anger toward the opposite sex, and certainly does nothing to ease loneliness. Thus the whole thing has become a self-perpetuating cycle.
2. There is obviously a lot of anger in the manosphere, but it tends to come from different places. The first is rooted in a feeling that women are responsible for placating men's sex drives, the old Beavis & Butt-Head logic of "you made me horny, now do something about it." The second is men who've had bad experiences with women in the past, which some men make a religion which they preach to others who have had similar experiences or fear them. The third is a fear that women are generally only out to marry to gain access to a man's money and property; and will cheat on him, dump him, loot his bank account and take custody of his children the moment it suits their whims. There is a great deal of confirmation bias in this aspect of the manosphere.
3. Sexual frustration is a self-explanatory condition; but this oft-ridiculed issue among men is not less serious because it is the butt of jokes and gaslighting. The sex drive in young males is so intense that if it does not find expression in the act itself, it can lead to seriously distorted thinking, and consequently, to bad behavior over time -- again I reference the incels, some of whom I would categorize as functionally insane. But the real issue is socio-sexual frustration: that the below-average man has no hope of having sex or intimacy with any woman, much less one he finds attractive. That his ugliness, plainness, social awkwardness, and low earning power, are conditions have no remedy. This is, in essence, at the heart of a lot of manosphere anguish: defeatism, depression, hopelessness. This is a mirage, but it is a dangerous one because perception is reality, and the soul is dyed the color of its thoughts.
4. The manosphere definitely has a siege mentality, and it is here that I find the greatest level of justification in male anger and resentment, for there is no question that traditional masculinity has been under attack for decades, even generations, in this country and elsewhere -- George Orwell repeatedly documented how, in Britain, physical courage was subject to ridicule throughout the interwar period of the 20s - 30s, now a full century ago. The sort of man we see so often in commercials -- pale, unshaven, unmuscled, slightly flabby, not very large -- who seems fuddled, somewhat stupid, and most definitely unintimidating, and who mutters "yes dear" a lot while sipping is craft brew, is basically the modern man as modern society seems to want him to be. He is unthreatening, unassertive, unaggressive, and projects neither sexuality nor strength nor any outward sign of intelligence. I am not going to get into the nuances here -- the attack on masculinity is a curiously race-specific thing, and we will have to revisit that issue later -- but it is hard to watch contemporary television or film and not come away with the idea that the contemporary man would be acknowledged as a man by his own grandfather. In fact, men used to be rated by women for their ability to dominate: for their boldness and resourcefulness, especially in a crisis. Now they are condemned when exhibiting these qualities -- as toxic, as feral, as predatory. Obviously this siege mentality has gone too far with some men, who have retreated all the way into misogyny; but it strikes me as sheer foolishness to attack the manosphere here, at the place it is most defensible.
5. As I just mentioned, there used to be a time when men clearly understood what was expected of them and were judged by both women and other men by their ability to meet these criteria. The whole idea of "women and children first" on a sinking ship stems from the idea that the central role of a man is to protect, if need be by laying down his life: 2,900 years ago, Spartan women told their men going into battle, "Come back with your shield or on it." They would literally rather see their husbands, brothers and sons dead than know they had lacked courage on the battlefield. And it was partially to avoid being publicly or privately shamed by women that so many men volunteered for military service as late as WW2. To an only slightly lesser extent this applied to work: a man brought home the bacon for his wife and kids or he was not a man. Whatever pains he suffered on the job, whatever humiliations he had to endure, were his problem alone: to be a man, he had to meet his burdens, period, or surrender claim to manhood. If this seems like a role few people would want, consider that it has long been recognized that in life, happiness tends to stem from knowing one's place in the scheme of things -- one's roles, duties, responsibilities, privileges and powers. Ambiguity means confusion, anxiety, crisis of identity. Men used to know more or less exactly what was expected of them in life. There was a clearly defined role for them to occupy. This has been destroyed. They no longer know what the rules are. God, or nature, has designed them to do certain things, think a certain way, and now they are being told this is wrong and makes them objectively bad or primitive people. Some anger and resentment at this is understandable, because, as Jordan Peterson remarked, "It's in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life." To take away the way men define their sense of responsibility is to take away their identity and offer them nothing in return.
6. A highly divisive and controversial aspect of the 'sphere is a belief that the contributions of men to history are being erased, minimized, or rewritten in such a way as to turn positives into negatives. That men have been systematically devalued by the very people who benefit the most from the achievements of men: women. "You live in the world we built!" is common refrain among content creators, and it is not without merit. It was men who killed the enemy, cleared the land, farmed the soil, invented the tools, paved the roads, drove the cattle, built the machines, fought the wars. Yet none of this is permissible to say nowadays, because of the presumption that saying it means women did not also make contributions. Their contributions, however, were of a different sort, and to negate one side of the equation while benfitting from it is gross hypocrisy. An example of this negation might be a man saying "we tamed this land"; whereupon the response is usually of the "yes, by killing the Indians" sort -- as if the person uttering this remark were not also a direct beneficiary of that slaughter.
No discussion of the manosphere would be complete, however, if it didn't dive into its darker waters. There is misogyny in its depths, and indeed, in the shallower end of the pool as well. This manifests in ways subtle and gross. The gross disinterests me because there is no use analyzing it: when someone of the Andrew Tate stripe opens his mouth, you can generally be certain that even when what he says is objectively true, the motive for him saying it is rooted in his dislike and fear of women and his desire, even his need, to see them subjugated. The belief that women should provide "sex, silence, and sandwiches" is not worth discussing, and I suspect his embrasure of Islam has less to do with religious feeling than a desire to find spiritual validation for an indifensible position. More subtle misogyny I found in content that I often frankly enjoyed watching for its humor, insights and penetrating observations: these content creators were generally intelligent, articulate and reasonable in their arguments, but seemingly driven by motives they were not necessarily prepared to confess, or -- to be charitable -- they may not have been aware motivated them. Overall, some of the more common themes I encountered were:
1. Contempt for single mothers on the dating scene.
2. Contempt for men who date single mothers.
3. Contempt for women who are sexually promiscuous.
4. Contempt for women who regret being sexually promiscuous.
5. Contempt for men who get married.
6. Contempt for women who divorce, regardless of circumstance.
7. Contempt for women's perspectives.
8. Distrust of women's motives generally.
9. Goalpost shifting of women's value.
10. Assumption that all women want the same kind of man.
This is a lot of contempt. Some of it is easier to analyze, some of it is not, and I have no intention of tackling this point by point, because it is pointless and distasteful. However, call necessitates response, so I will touch on a few things. For example, many manosphere pundits assume that the demise of any relationship, especially marriage, must be the woman's fault, and while statistics may back this up on the subject of divorce, especially for certain populations, it glosses over the fact that the roots of divorce are often deep and tangled, and that the filing party is not necessarily the guilty one -- there may not even be a guilty one. It doesn't take a great deal of insight to grasp that men burned by divorces or terrible breakups make up a certain segment of the vlogging/podcasting population, and that their grudges and bitterness have shaped their own philosophies toward women.
Goalpost shifting is worth mentioning because it is the process by which some men -- Kevin Samuels comes to mind -- create a playing field by which a woman's value is determined solely by men (specifically "high value" men). This playing field discounts a woman's education and income in favor of her youth, looks, and willingness to submit to a man's authority ("fit, feminine, fertile, friendly"). It is not wrong as a traditionalist outlook on suitability for marriage per se, but it hardly fits the world we actually live in, and its inherent dismissiveness of accomplishment and earning power stinks of gaslight.
Assumptions that every woman secretly wants a "Chad" or "Tyrone" -- the wealthy, bad-boy stud horse -- plague the manosphere. This is a fear which stems partially, no doubt, from humiliating anecdotal evidence, but it is nonsense to say it applies to every woman. Women are as diverse in their romantic and sexual tastes as men, and not all of them are vulnerable to surface charm, bleached teeth and platinum credit cards. To assume that the behavior patterns of human females are entirely shallow, sensual and materialistic, and can be predicted in the same manner as birds, or insects, is worth taking the time to laugh at, though I would agree that the misogyny beneath the assumption is not funny at all. Stereotypes, especially negative ones, are a backhanded attempt to dehumanize people. And dehumanization is a path that leads in only one direction.
This at any rate is my takeaway from the manosphere. It is incomplete, scattershot and slovenly, but so is the manosphere. I would not agree with those who condemn it in toto or simply hang the "woman bashing" label on it and then walk away from the discussion, because much of what I found there had substance, and was at least worthy of listening to even if one totally disagrees with the arguments being presented. The internet, in its ideal form, is for discourse and the acquisition of knowledge, and men have every right to meet virtually to seek and give advice, talk about their problems, relate their anecdotes and express their fears. On the other hand, I am not in the habit of whitewashing garbage -- or crap, for that matter, and believe-you-me, there is a lot of crap in the manosphere. Some of it is harmless, but taken as a whole it has a cumulative effect, especially on men who are embittered by bad experience, or adolescents whose raging hormones and social awkwardness make them fertile soil for dangerous ideas to grow. The manosphere is probably necessary, or as necessary as anything can be in the internet era, because it serves as a kind of psychological pressure release valve for bored, frustrated, alienated, leaderless, or simply curious men. But it is not serving these men very well, and is too easily a conduit by which the most desperate of them can be radicalized into dangerous beliefs. It bears study, but it also bears watching.
It's important to begin by stating that I don't want to get into the chicken-egg argument of "did the internet expose how fucked up everyone is or did it make us fucked up?" because the answer to that question is simply "...yes." The web both exposed the dark corners of our minds and managed to make them all the darker by its very existence. But even if this were not so it would be irrelevant, because we have to look at the situation as it is: how we got here, for once, is of little importance. The manosphere manifestly does not represent the views of all men, because the internet itself only represents the opinions of those who take an active part in it, and those people are often clowns, fools, hucksters or absolute shitheels; but it does provide us with answers to some of the more important questions about those who are terminally online or who draw their opinions primarily from the net and social media.
The first thing that I would say in regards to the manosphere is that there is less overt misogyny than I expected, and far more intelligent observation and criticism. This is not to say that I did not encounter misogyny: I did, and in some quantity and varying levels of intensity, from subtle and backhanded to strident and hateful. But the content creators I sampled, black and white, conservative and moderate, Gen X to Gen Z, male and yes, even female, tended more toward a defensive or even a defeatist attitude toward modern women, than to active antipathy. Their comments were generally marked by some or all of the following:
1. Loneliness.
2. Hostility toward/distrust of modern women.
3. Sexual and socio-sexual frustration.
4. A feeling that masculinity is under attack.
5. Nostalgia for clearly understood sex/gender roles.
6. Frustration over historical gaslighting.
To tackle these in order:
1. When the internet first began to make itself felt in society, there was a near-universal assumption that it would help human beings connect with each other: this assumption was well-founded and, for a time, completely validated. But like any drug, the initial, connective effect of e-mail, instant messaging and chatrooms gradually faded and became curiously isolative in nature over time: in fact, one could argue that the more connected people became with the advent of social media, cell phone apps, etc., the more isolated they became. This seems to be because birds of a feather flock together, and people who feel isolated and alone often seem to gravitate to others who are similarly lonely. This creates an environment where these qualities, and the psychological baggage that comes with them, become normative, accepted, and even lauditory. They make a fetish of their own loneliness, their own social awkwardness and inability to make flesh-and-blood friendships and sexually intimate relationships. And it is from this soil that the more radical, misogynist elements of the manosphere grew their mutated offspring. But this is not the whole or the end of the story. There are many men whose sin is to be basically average -- in looks and earning power -- and who feel as if because they are average, they are ignored by the 90% of women who are gunning for the top 10% of men. Thus they end up being rejected even by even average women. In this they have some grounds for complaint. Modern feminism has all but championed this 90/10 math, insisting that all women, regardless of their looks or attractiveness or baggage or emotional stability, can land a so-called "high-value man," when in fact the supply of such men is necessarily very low, and such men have no obvious reason to commit to any one woman. It has helped create a situation in which neither women nor men tend to ge what they want, which only fuels additional anger toward the opposite sex, and certainly does nothing to ease loneliness. Thus the whole thing has become a self-perpetuating cycle.
2. There is obviously a lot of anger in the manosphere, but it tends to come from different places. The first is rooted in a feeling that women are responsible for placating men's sex drives, the old Beavis & Butt-Head logic of "you made me horny, now do something about it." The second is men who've had bad experiences with women in the past, which some men make a religion which they preach to others who have had similar experiences or fear them. The third is a fear that women are generally only out to marry to gain access to a man's money and property; and will cheat on him, dump him, loot his bank account and take custody of his children the moment it suits their whims. There is a great deal of confirmation bias in this aspect of the manosphere.
3. Sexual frustration is a self-explanatory condition; but this oft-ridiculed issue among men is not less serious because it is the butt of jokes and gaslighting. The sex drive in young males is so intense that if it does not find expression in the act itself, it can lead to seriously distorted thinking, and consequently, to bad behavior over time -- again I reference the incels, some of whom I would categorize as functionally insane. But the real issue is socio-sexual frustration: that the below-average man has no hope of having sex or intimacy with any woman, much less one he finds attractive. That his ugliness, plainness, social awkwardness, and low earning power, are conditions have no remedy. This is, in essence, at the heart of a lot of manosphere anguish: defeatism, depression, hopelessness. This is a mirage, but it is a dangerous one because perception is reality, and the soul is dyed the color of its thoughts.
4. The manosphere definitely has a siege mentality, and it is here that I find the greatest level of justification in male anger and resentment, for there is no question that traditional masculinity has been under attack for decades, even generations, in this country and elsewhere -- George Orwell repeatedly documented how, in Britain, physical courage was subject to ridicule throughout the interwar period of the 20s - 30s, now a full century ago. The sort of man we see so often in commercials -- pale, unshaven, unmuscled, slightly flabby, not very large -- who seems fuddled, somewhat stupid, and most definitely unintimidating, and who mutters "yes dear" a lot while sipping is craft brew, is basically the modern man as modern society seems to want him to be. He is unthreatening, unassertive, unaggressive, and projects neither sexuality nor strength nor any outward sign of intelligence. I am not going to get into the nuances here -- the attack on masculinity is a curiously race-specific thing, and we will have to revisit that issue later -- but it is hard to watch contemporary television or film and not come away with the idea that the contemporary man would be acknowledged as a man by his own grandfather. In fact, men used to be rated by women for their ability to dominate: for their boldness and resourcefulness, especially in a crisis. Now they are condemned when exhibiting these qualities -- as toxic, as feral, as predatory. Obviously this siege mentality has gone too far with some men, who have retreated all the way into misogyny; but it strikes me as sheer foolishness to attack the manosphere here, at the place it is most defensible.
5. As I just mentioned, there used to be a time when men clearly understood what was expected of them and were judged by both women and other men by their ability to meet these criteria. The whole idea of "women and children first" on a sinking ship stems from the idea that the central role of a man is to protect, if need be by laying down his life: 2,900 years ago, Spartan women told their men going into battle, "Come back with your shield or on it." They would literally rather see their husbands, brothers and sons dead than know they had lacked courage on the battlefield. And it was partially to avoid being publicly or privately shamed by women that so many men volunteered for military service as late as WW2. To an only slightly lesser extent this applied to work: a man brought home the bacon for his wife and kids or he was not a man. Whatever pains he suffered on the job, whatever humiliations he had to endure, were his problem alone: to be a man, he had to meet his burdens, period, or surrender claim to manhood. If this seems like a role few people would want, consider that it has long been recognized that in life, happiness tends to stem from knowing one's place in the scheme of things -- one's roles, duties, responsibilities, privileges and powers. Ambiguity means confusion, anxiety, crisis of identity. Men used to know more or less exactly what was expected of them in life. There was a clearly defined role for them to occupy. This has been destroyed. They no longer know what the rules are. God, or nature, has designed them to do certain things, think a certain way, and now they are being told this is wrong and makes them objectively bad or primitive people. Some anger and resentment at this is understandable, because, as Jordan Peterson remarked, "It's in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life." To take away the way men define their sense of responsibility is to take away their identity and offer them nothing in return.
6. A highly divisive and controversial aspect of the 'sphere is a belief that the contributions of men to history are being erased, minimized, or rewritten in such a way as to turn positives into negatives. That men have been systematically devalued by the very people who benefit the most from the achievements of men: women. "You live in the world we built!" is common refrain among content creators, and it is not without merit. It was men who killed the enemy, cleared the land, farmed the soil, invented the tools, paved the roads, drove the cattle, built the machines, fought the wars. Yet none of this is permissible to say nowadays, because of the presumption that saying it means women did not also make contributions. Their contributions, however, were of a different sort, and to negate one side of the equation while benfitting from it is gross hypocrisy. An example of this negation might be a man saying "we tamed this land"; whereupon the response is usually of the "yes, by killing the Indians" sort -- as if the person uttering this remark were not also a direct beneficiary of that slaughter.
No discussion of the manosphere would be complete, however, if it didn't dive into its darker waters. There is misogyny in its depths, and indeed, in the shallower end of the pool as well. This manifests in ways subtle and gross. The gross disinterests me because there is no use analyzing it: when someone of the Andrew Tate stripe opens his mouth, you can generally be certain that even when what he says is objectively true, the motive for him saying it is rooted in his dislike and fear of women and his desire, even his need, to see them subjugated. The belief that women should provide "sex, silence, and sandwiches" is not worth discussing, and I suspect his embrasure of Islam has less to do with religious feeling than a desire to find spiritual validation for an indifensible position. More subtle misogyny I found in content that I often frankly enjoyed watching for its humor, insights and penetrating observations: these content creators were generally intelligent, articulate and reasonable in their arguments, but seemingly driven by motives they were not necessarily prepared to confess, or -- to be charitable -- they may not have been aware motivated them. Overall, some of the more common themes I encountered were:
1. Contempt for single mothers on the dating scene.
2. Contempt for men who date single mothers.
3. Contempt for women who are sexually promiscuous.
4. Contempt for women who regret being sexually promiscuous.
5. Contempt for men who get married.
6. Contempt for women who divorce, regardless of circumstance.
7. Contempt for women's perspectives.
8. Distrust of women's motives generally.
9. Goalpost shifting of women's value.
10. Assumption that all women want the same kind of man.
This is a lot of contempt. Some of it is easier to analyze, some of it is not, and I have no intention of tackling this point by point, because it is pointless and distasteful. However, call necessitates response, so I will touch on a few things. For example, many manosphere pundits assume that the demise of any relationship, especially marriage, must be the woman's fault, and while statistics may back this up on the subject of divorce, especially for certain populations, it glosses over the fact that the roots of divorce are often deep and tangled, and that the filing party is not necessarily the guilty one -- there may not even be a guilty one. It doesn't take a great deal of insight to grasp that men burned by divorces or terrible breakups make up a certain segment of the vlogging/podcasting population, and that their grudges and bitterness have shaped their own philosophies toward women.
Goalpost shifting is worth mentioning because it is the process by which some men -- Kevin Samuels comes to mind -- create a playing field by which a woman's value is determined solely by men (specifically "high value" men). This playing field discounts a woman's education and income in favor of her youth, looks, and willingness to submit to a man's authority ("fit, feminine, fertile, friendly"). It is not wrong as a traditionalist outlook on suitability for marriage per se, but it hardly fits the world we actually live in, and its inherent dismissiveness of accomplishment and earning power stinks of gaslight.
Assumptions that every woman secretly wants a "Chad" or "Tyrone" -- the wealthy, bad-boy stud horse -- plague the manosphere. This is a fear which stems partially, no doubt, from humiliating anecdotal evidence, but it is nonsense to say it applies to every woman. Women are as diverse in their romantic and sexual tastes as men, and not all of them are vulnerable to surface charm, bleached teeth and platinum credit cards. To assume that the behavior patterns of human females are entirely shallow, sensual and materialistic, and can be predicted in the same manner as birds, or insects, is worth taking the time to laugh at, though I would agree that the misogyny beneath the assumption is not funny at all. Stereotypes, especially negative ones, are a backhanded attempt to dehumanize people. And dehumanization is a path that leads in only one direction.
This at any rate is my takeaway from the manosphere. It is incomplete, scattershot and slovenly, but so is the manosphere. I would not agree with those who condemn it in toto or simply hang the "woman bashing" label on it and then walk away from the discussion, because much of what I found there had substance, and was at least worthy of listening to even if one totally disagrees with the arguments being presented. The internet, in its ideal form, is for discourse and the acquisition of knowledge, and men have every right to meet virtually to seek and give advice, talk about their problems, relate their anecdotes and express their fears. On the other hand, I am not in the habit of whitewashing garbage -- or crap, for that matter, and believe-you-me, there is a lot of crap in the manosphere. Some of it is harmless, but taken as a whole it has a cumulative effect, especially on men who are embittered by bad experience, or adolescents whose raging hormones and social awkwardness make them fertile soil for dangerous ideas to grow. The manosphere is probably necessary, or as necessary as anything can be in the internet era, because it serves as a kind of psychological pressure release valve for bored, frustrated, alienated, leaderless, or simply curious men. But it is not serving these men very well, and is too easily a conduit by which the most desperate of them can be radicalized into dangerous beliefs. It bears study, but it also bears watching.
September 1, 2023
SINNER'S CROSS: READER'S FAVORITE GOLD MEDAL
Every writer has a secret favorite from among his works, a fair-haired boy (or daddy's little girl), but at any rate, one story which is the apple of his eye. For me, that book is undoubtedly Sinner's Cross, my third novel, and the first full-scale exploration into historical fiction that I ever attempted. It was the culmination of a lifetime of interest in the Second World War, running head-on into everything I had ever learned about the craft, and the art, of writing. Like most authors, I am a harsh, even a cruel critic of my own work (nothing that has been said of me by others is half as bad as what I routinely say about myself) but this one seemed special to me from the jump. Of course, I am just a touch biased, but as of yesterday there was some acclamation to justify this feeling. Sinner's Cross earned the following:
WINNER, BEST INDIE BOOK AWARD - HISTORICAL FICTION - 2019 WINNER, BOOK EXCELLENCE AWARD - ACTION - 2020
WINNER, LITERARY TITAN BOOK AWARD GOLD MEDAL - 2020
FINALIST, INDEPENDENT AUTHOR NETWORK AWARDS - 2020
READERS' FAVORITE FIVE STARS - 2021
Well, this morning -- which I happened to take off from work after being mentally and morally exhausted by the murder trial I was involved with yesterday -- I got the news that said novel is now a Reader's Favorite Gold Medal Winner in the category of historical fiction. This is probably the most important of the awards I have won, since it involves, for one, flying to Miami this November to accept the medal in person. I mention this in large part because authors, especially authors in the lowest and most ragged edge of the lower middle class of the profession like yours truly, often spend most of our careers struggling in obscurity. These morsels of recognition, which usually come without a corresponding paycheck, are much of what sustains us through the bleak periods when no one is buying the books, no one is publishing reviews or ratings, and in general, the world seems not to give a shit. If you've learned anything from my scribblings here over the years, it's that the whole of the poor, the working class, and the lower middle class of authors -- in other words, the vast majority -- are people who cannot afford to quit their day jobs, and often lose money or or just barely make a profit at what they do. Even the middle class, which many of my colleagues occupy, pays rather poorly and demands the utmost patience with agents and publishers and the snail-like pace with which they hand out checks and block release dates. In short, writing can be a castiron bitch, and while we do not deserve pity or even sympathy, it is important to understand that when we crow a bit about our occasional strokes of good fortune, it is not vainglory or boasting: it is celebration.
My own writing career has been moving steadily in the right direction for the last two of the seven total years I have officially been in the game: but steadily does not mean quickly, and with this award I hope the pressure on the accelerator increases. In the mean time, here is the review that started it all, written by the author Grant Leishman for Readers’ Favorite on New Year's Day, 2021:
Sinner’s Cross: A Novel of the Second World War by Miles Watson is a no-holds-barred account of one of the lesser-known actions in Europe of the Second World War. Prior to the well-publicized and dramatized Battle of the Bulge in the Ardenne Forest, an equally violent and deadly encounter took place in the forests of Hürtgen on the German/Belgian border, from September 19, 1944, to February 10, 1045. American and German troops faced each other in the dense forests of Hürtgen as the winter of 1944-45 descended, where the flower of both country’s youth was sacrificed in a futile battle over an unknown and unwanted piece of land. The author introduces us to both sides of this titanic and bloody conflict. Half the story is dedicated to a group of American G.I.s led by the inexperienced and terrified Lieutenant Breese, facing off against one of the most formidable of Germany’s units, the Paratroopers, led by multi-decorated and seemingly fearless Major Zenger, affectionately known to his troops as Papa. The author takes us deep inside the psyche of these terrified, mud-splattered, and intensely uncomfortable men as they prepare, yet again, for a counter-offensive, which like so many of them seems rooted in both pointlessness and failure. In this maelstrom of battle, blood, and gore, each man must face up to his own personal demons, fears, and horrors and either overcome them or walk away.
Sinner’s Cross is without a doubt one of the most powerful anti-war novels I have ever read. Miles Watson’s incredibly descriptive narrative takes us right into the infernal “hot zone” of the battle and describes the actions and the reactions of the soldiers with sharp, incisive, and incredibly descriptive prose. It is powerful and compelling, as much as it is sickening. What I particularly liked about this book was that the author showed the battle from both sides of the fence. His description of what occurred in the mind of Major Zenger was a clear attempt to remind us that the enemy soldiers were just human beings long before they were Nazis. The German troops were just as horrified, terrified, and tired of the endless battles as the Americans. He did a wonderful job of outlining the different perceptions of war from the psychological makeup of each individual soldier, his needs, wants, and fears. No-one can possibly read this book and conclude that war is, in some way, heroic or worthy of honor. The reality is clearly displayed in the crushed, broken, dismembered, and devastated bodies that would forever lie in the forgotten forests of Hürtgen. A truly powerful novel but one that left me drained by the end of it.
Sinner's Cross
WINNER, BEST INDIE BOOK AWARD - HISTORICAL FICTION - 2019 WINNER, BOOK EXCELLENCE AWARD - ACTION - 2020
WINNER, LITERARY TITAN BOOK AWARD GOLD MEDAL - 2020
FINALIST, INDEPENDENT AUTHOR NETWORK AWARDS - 2020
READERS' FAVORITE FIVE STARS - 2021
Well, this morning -- which I happened to take off from work after being mentally and morally exhausted by the murder trial I was involved with yesterday -- I got the news that said novel is now a Reader's Favorite Gold Medal Winner in the category of historical fiction. This is probably the most important of the awards I have won, since it involves, for one, flying to Miami this November to accept the medal in person. I mention this in large part because authors, especially authors in the lowest and most ragged edge of the lower middle class of the profession like yours truly, often spend most of our careers struggling in obscurity. These morsels of recognition, which usually come without a corresponding paycheck, are much of what sustains us through the bleak periods when no one is buying the books, no one is publishing reviews or ratings, and in general, the world seems not to give a shit. If you've learned anything from my scribblings here over the years, it's that the whole of the poor, the working class, and the lower middle class of authors -- in other words, the vast majority -- are people who cannot afford to quit their day jobs, and often lose money or or just barely make a profit at what they do. Even the middle class, which many of my colleagues occupy, pays rather poorly and demands the utmost patience with agents and publishers and the snail-like pace with which they hand out checks and block release dates. In short, writing can be a castiron bitch, and while we do not deserve pity or even sympathy, it is important to understand that when we crow a bit about our occasional strokes of good fortune, it is not vainglory or boasting: it is celebration.
My own writing career has been moving steadily in the right direction for the last two of the seven total years I have officially been in the game: but steadily does not mean quickly, and with this award I hope the pressure on the accelerator increases. In the mean time, here is the review that started it all, written by the author Grant Leishman for Readers’ Favorite on New Year's Day, 2021:
Sinner’s Cross: A Novel of the Second World War by Miles Watson is a no-holds-barred account of one of the lesser-known actions in Europe of the Second World War. Prior to the well-publicized and dramatized Battle of the Bulge in the Ardenne Forest, an equally violent and deadly encounter took place in the forests of Hürtgen on the German/Belgian border, from September 19, 1944, to February 10, 1045. American and German troops faced each other in the dense forests of Hürtgen as the winter of 1944-45 descended, where the flower of both country’s youth was sacrificed in a futile battle over an unknown and unwanted piece of land. The author introduces us to both sides of this titanic and bloody conflict. Half the story is dedicated to a group of American G.I.s led by the inexperienced and terrified Lieutenant Breese, facing off against one of the most formidable of Germany’s units, the Paratroopers, led by multi-decorated and seemingly fearless Major Zenger, affectionately known to his troops as Papa. The author takes us deep inside the psyche of these terrified, mud-splattered, and intensely uncomfortable men as they prepare, yet again, for a counter-offensive, which like so many of them seems rooted in both pointlessness and failure. In this maelstrom of battle, blood, and gore, each man must face up to his own personal demons, fears, and horrors and either overcome them or walk away.
Sinner’s Cross is without a doubt one of the most powerful anti-war novels I have ever read. Miles Watson’s incredibly descriptive narrative takes us right into the infernal “hot zone” of the battle and describes the actions and the reactions of the soldiers with sharp, incisive, and incredibly descriptive prose. It is powerful and compelling, as much as it is sickening. What I particularly liked about this book was that the author showed the battle from both sides of the fence. His description of what occurred in the mind of Major Zenger was a clear attempt to remind us that the enemy soldiers were just human beings long before they were Nazis. The German troops were just as horrified, terrified, and tired of the endless battles as the Americans. He did a wonderful job of outlining the different perceptions of war from the psychological makeup of each individual soldier, his needs, wants, and fears. No-one can possibly read this book and conclude that war is, in some way, heroic or worthy of honor. The reality is clearly displayed in the crushed, broken, dismembered, and devastated bodies that would forever lie in the forgotten forests of Hürtgen. A truly powerful novel but one that left me drained by the end of it.
Sinner's Cross
August 31, 2023
WHAT MEN REALLY THINK ABOUT FEMINISM
George Orwell once remarked that the word "fascism" had, in his era, been so overused that it had lost all meaning and devolved to the level of a mere insult. If you didn't like someone's political opinions or personal behavior, you called them a fascist. Fifty years after Orwell's death, I happened to be physically present when Bill Maher shouted that very word at one of his guests on the show Politically Incorrect, and even in the context of the conversation, it was clear that he meant it as an insult and not as an identification. Old George had been right again.
The casual overuse of certain words, especially words with complex or unclear meanings, often leads to a further unclarity, which, in time, renders them effectively meaningless. I say that a word is effectively meaningless when its use necessitates an explanation of the word itself, i.e. the word cannot be defined in mere self-context, it must be defined fully after its use with, you guessed it, yet more words. If I say "barn" or "shark" or "green" or "exhausted," these words require no further explanation. Each brings its definition clearly to mind. But if I say "fascist," "socialist," or "capitalist" -- to give but a few examples -- well, these words have been so debased over time that they have lost their definitions entirely: a right-winger and a left-winger are talking about very different things when they say "socialism," just as a right-winger and a left-winger are talking about very different things when they use the word "nationalist," "patriot," or even "freedom."
"Feminism" is a word which, in the last few decades, has lost any meaning it had when it came into common coinage some decades ago. One definition is "the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes," which seems clear-cut enough...until you ask what "equality" actually means, whereupon the entire definition instantly becomes meaningless, because "equality" is also a term which requires further explanation, or at least context.
To be sure, feminism has changed markedly since the Women's Liberation movement came about during my childhood. The feminists of my early youth were fighting and arguing for things which were fairly easy to understand whether you agreed with their aims or not. I myself agreed with their aims insomuch as I understood them as a boy, and later, as a hormone-addled teenager. And what those aims boiled down to in my mind anyway was simply this: "We want all the rights and privileges presently accorded to men. We don't want any bars to education or business or anything else simply because we are the opposite sex. We want the freedom to choose whether we stay in the home as wives and mothers or pursue careers in professions and vocations traditionally reserved or dominated by men, and not be held back in those trades by anything except our level of ability." That at any rate is how I defined feminism in, say, 1985 or 2001. It is also how most of the men of my generation -- X -- would have defined it if you'd asked them to do so. Some might have been angry about it if they themselves favored the traditional male-female roles Women's Liberation was in rebellion against, but they would have been fairly clear about its actual goals.
I can however break this down even more simply. The feminism that I understood and agreed with meant:
1. Equality of opportunity.
2. Freedom of choice.
3. Equivalency.
4. Logic.
I could get down with that. I still can. Most men of my era did, and do, whatever jokes we may have made in arguments with our mothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends, friends, or co-workers. As Orwell once pointed out, the sex war is at bottom a joke. We don't really take it seriously because we understand that at the end of the day, men and women are two peas sharing a pod. We need each other, and that means growing with each others' needs. All the insults, name-calling, and crude remarks men make about women, and women about men, are a form of kabuki, of theater, designed to disguise this obvious fact. The sex war is little more than a junior high school dance, with buffoonery and bravado disguising intense feelings of interest and excitement.
Please understand: I am not pretending I didn't have some reservations and questions about feminism in its older guise. "Equality" between men and women is not a physical reality, after all, because the sexes are physically different and therefore unequal. We have different hormones, different musculatures, different organs: facts which, incredibly enough, it is unpopular to say in this mentally challenged age. But I had no problem with female firefighters, policemen or soldiers, provided they could meet the same physical standards the men had to meet: on the other hand, I did not want the standards lowered simply to accomodate women. And to their credit, most women didn't seem to want the standards lowered, either, because up until about a decade ago feminism accepted the idea that inequality did not mean injustice: it was simply an acknowledgement of black-and-white biological facts. Hence the pre-modern feminist slogan which went, "Equal pay for equal work? NO! Equal pay for EQUIVALENT work." This was logic in action: acknowledging the differences between the sexes but refusing to accept them as the basis for a misogynistic culture which places impassable barriers on social, educational, and economic opportunities. Again, it was something I could get behind. A woman might not, for example, meet the physical requirements of a regular combat infantryman, but she could serve ably as a sniper or a fighter pilot. This is what I mean by "equivalency."
Having recently emerged from a very deep dive on the internet, during which I studied for some months both the "modern male" and "modern female" perspectives, I would say this unequivocally about the word "feminism" today -- and I hasten to add that I believe my views are shared by most of the men I know in my own rough age bracket, nearly all of the men in the bracket above mine, and many some years below us both:
I hate it.
I hate it, friends and neighbors, because if I had to boil it down to its substance, it stands for:
1. Equality of outcome.
2. Freedom from responsibility.
3. Misandry.
4. Mysticism.
5. University socialism.
The first category is called "equity" today. "Equity" has a lovely sound to it, but what it means in practice is that any oucome which denies the pure physical equality of men and women must be altered via legal or procedural processes to produce the ideologically sound result. Hence the sight of the U.S. Army Rangers lowering their brutally difficult standards so women can earn the coveted "Ranger" tab -- and this, in the face of explicit recommendations from the senior NCOs in the Pentagon, warning our leaders not to do this: not out of misogyny, but concern for what lowered standards will do in real-world future terms, also known as "consequences."
This brings me to #2, the idea that freedom of choice carries with it freedom from responsibility. Perhaps the most common attack made on women by men on the internet today is "accountability is women's kryptonite." At first I dismissed this as mere misogyny, but when applied to many modern feminists, it is true. Indeed, the one serious problem I have, retroactively, with the feminism I grew up with and still support is that it sold women a deliberate lie, to wit, that it is possible for a woman to be both a traditional wife and mother on the one hand, and a successful corporarte businessperson on the other, without consequences. Many very successful corporate women have come out in recent years admitting that they accepted this lie and paid for it dearly in terms of broken marriages and estranged children. The old arrangement -- man brings home bacon, woman cooks it -- was primitive and restrictive, but it had the advantage of laying down clearly-defined expectations and responsibilities. It also tacitly acknowledged that life was heavy, and required two people to handle the load. Divide the responsibilities differently, a la "Mr. Mom," and the burden was still lighter for both partners. What mattered was not how the labor was divided but that it was divided. Yet a very common refrain on the female side of the internet is "I don't need a man" -- the "boss babe/diva/slay queen mantra" of the "strong, independent woman."
As a guy who grew up and came up with Princess Leia, the many Angels of Charlie, the Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, Sarah Connor, Ellen Ripley and Buffy Summers, I never had problem one with strong women. I daresay I was more than a little turned on by a badass, fast-lipped, physically capable lady, even as a small boy. Independence was another matter. To stand on one's own in life is very difficult and often quite needless. Just as Leia had her Han Solo, Sarah Connor her Kyle Reese, and Buffy Summers her Angel, I became confused by this need to insist that men were useless adjuncts to a woman's life, basically ornaments or pets, or even further (these are very common sentiments among men who are misogynists, incidentally) that men were garbage, scum, trash, filth, villains through and through. This latter sentiment is a direct result of modern women believing #2, that actions do not have consequences, that you can chase Chad for years and then, when the chlamydia and unwanted pregnancies finally take their toll, suddenly find a nice, safe, well-heeled, boring man to venerate and marry you. Discovery that this is not the case, that if you burn your 20s partying ceaselessly and sleeping with all and sundry, that Mr. Right will not be waiting for you with a ring and a bouquet of roses on the other side of 30, seems to come to some of these slay queens as a terrifying, rage-inducing shock. The late Kevin Samuels used to deride what he called the "Tyler Perry/Sex and the City fantasy," and this was in part what he was talking about.
Now, as someone with libertarian leanings, I am all for personal freedoms, and that includes sexual freedom: but sexual freedom, like every other kind of freedom, comes with consequences. Equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcome, and freedom of choice does not mean freedom from consequence. The cognative dissonance, emotional upheaval and dissatisfaction of so many women I see railing on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc., etc. seems to come directly from the idea that feminism means a happy ending regardless of how you choose to behave. It expressly does not. What it means in either its older or newer guise is simply a wider set of possible outcomes for your wider set of choices. And many of those possible outcomes are bad. The older generation of feminists did largely undertsand this. When the Equal Rights Amendment was being proposed in the late 70s/early 80s, it explicitly stated that women would have to register for the draft. In essence, it beat its breast and said, "We want equivalent status in society, and we will take the equivalent consequences that result from that status." In practical terms that meant death on the battlefield, or at least years of harsh military service. That is a healthy, adult view of life. Modern feminism, or what passes for it, takes the direct opposite view, a spoiled-brat position that "I want what I want when I want it and will never have to pay for it, because nothing is my fault."
Another knock on modern feminism is its obvious misandry, its shrill insistence that men are the source of all of women's problems, when in fact it is the poor choices many women make in regards to men that is the source of their personal woe. The cry of "where are all the good men?" tends to come loudest from women who have deliberately allowed themselves to be used by the worst manhood has to offer, over and over again; meanwhile, the good men they claim to want are the same ones they yawn off, year after year. The internet has apparently convinced millions of women that they deserve a man who is 6'3," built like an athlete, hung like a porn star, and earns a minimum of six figures. This is as moronic -- and unrealistic -- as the belief I see among incels and deluded, misogynistic men, that they somehow deserve beautiful, voluptuous, virginal, submissive women despite being out of shape, jobless, living with their folks, lacking social skills, etc., etc. The critical difference, however, is that women control access to sex. An incel is just that: involuntarily celibate. He wants to get laid, but cannot, usually for the reasons I just mentioned. Very, very few women legitimately fall in this category. It is merely that their standards don't correspond with reality, and having embraced an ideology that tells them they can have anything they desire simply because they desire it, a violent cognative and emotional dissonance ensues.
This brings me to #4 of modern feminism, which is mysticism. Being something of a pagan at heart, I rather enjoy studying and practicing mysticism, but like everything else in life it comes with consequences, especially when one neglects the fact we live in the real world, a world of solid objects, harsh realities, and unbreakable scientific laws. Mysticism plays out nowadays largely in terms of the belief that what we most want in life is available to us if we simply wish for it hard enough -- we can manifest reality through desire alone. Never mind planning and executing; just want something bad enough and the universe will give it to you. For whatever reason, this idea has taken a much deeper root with young women than with young men, who seem to take an opposite view (you get nothing in life you really want). But the consequences of all this talk about "manifesting" things are painfully apparent, in that it too discourages accountability. You may have done nothing to improve yourself or your life, but somehow, magically, it will land in your lap, via the power of manifestation. And because this is so, there is no need for introspection or self-improvement or even hard work. You are free to ignore, and even to fetishize, your negative traits, personality disorders, or mental illness. Why not? Past is not prologue, and what failed yesterday, and for the previous 28 years, will somehow succeed tomorrow. You can manifest it! It goes without saying (though I will say it anyway) that this is irresponsibility at its most refined. It once again discourages any idea of consequence or accountability, especially for the failure to act, to plan, to be honest with oneself. It throws out logic and science in favor of a Disney-style happy ending which, for most women, is not coming. It cannot come, because for every Prince Charming, there are nine potential princesses. By definition, eight of them must be left out in the cold.
The last category is what I call "university socialism." I mean that feminism is now bound up with a curious type of quasi-socialist propaganda being taught at universities, which lays all blame for all inequality, injustice, misogyny, etc., etc. at the feet of capitalism and Western civilization as a whole, but specifically, men, and even more specifically, white men. This is mere misandry buried under a blizzard of pseudoscientific, neo-Marxist verbiage designed to give it credence and weight. It also serves the dual purpose of taking away any lingering sense of personal responsibility its adherents might be tempted to feel about their own decisions. They are now armed with a system of belief which absolves them of everything.
By now many of you are dismissing me as a misogynist myself, a wolf in sheep's clothing. I would counter that by asking a question. How many women who have fully embraced the form of "feminism" I am describing here do you know who are actually happy? Now ask yourself how many do you know who are taking antidepressants, antianxiety medication, seeing therapists, and/or seem to be angry, lonely, bitter or frustrated much of the time? I happen to have a very large circle of female friends, from the ages of 58 to 23 years of age, with the majority falling in the sub-30 category. The ones who are happiest, or seem happiest anyway, are almost entirely those whose definition of feminism falls in the "older" category, the one which believed in equality of opportunity and freedom of choice, accepted personal responsibility, and rejected misandry in the same way they rejected misogyny. And yes, what's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose: the many younger men who I see embracing misogyny (and I will discuss this in a separate blog) are even more miserable than their female counterparts. They are men (I use the term generously) who have lost all joy and hope in life and exist in a purely negative space which is half-delusional, half-real, with the real half being, ironically, self-created. The general, paradoxical attitude of despair and entitlement, victimhood and arrogance, cuts across the sexual line: it applies equally, though in different ways, to both men and women. But this article is about feminism in its modern guise, and these are the thoughts of a 50 year-old man who has watched it devolve from a positive to a negative in his own lifetime, and who would like to see it rise up from its own ashes into the liberating, empowering force it was meant to be. In short, I attack modern feminism because I am a feminist. The freedom to try is perhaps the most precious freedom there is: no one should be denied that. But no one can be guaranteed success, either, and as Wesley said in The Princess Bride, "Anyone who says different is selling you something."
As for modern men, I will have a go at them come Saturday, and rest assured, I will pull no punches there, either.
The casual overuse of certain words, especially words with complex or unclear meanings, often leads to a further unclarity, which, in time, renders them effectively meaningless. I say that a word is effectively meaningless when its use necessitates an explanation of the word itself, i.e. the word cannot be defined in mere self-context, it must be defined fully after its use with, you guessed it, yet more words. If I say "barn" or "shark" or "green" or "exhausted," these words require no further explanation. Each brings its definition clearly to mind. But if I say "fascist," "socialist," or "capitalist" -- to give but a few examples -- well, these words have been so debased over time that they have lost their definitions entirely: a right-winger and a left-winger are talking about very different things when they say "socialism," just as a right-winger and a left-winger are talking about very different things when they use the word "nationalist," "patriot," or even "freedom."
"Feminism" is a word which, in the last few decades, has lost any meaning it had when it came into common coinage some decades ago. One definition is "the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes," which seems clear-cut enough...until you ask what "equality" actually means, whereupon the entire definition instantly becomes meaningless, because "equality" is also a term which requires further explanation, or at least context.
To be sure, feminism has changed markedly since the Women's Liberation movement came about during my childhood. The feminists of my early youth were fighting and arguing for things which were fairly easy to understand whether you agreed with their aims or not. I myself agreed with their aims insomuch as I understood them as a boy, and later, as a hormone-addled teenager. And what those aims boiled down to in my mind anyway was simply this: "We want all the rights and privileges presently accorded to men. We don't want any bars to education or business or anything else simply because we are the opposite sex. We want the freedom to choose whether we stay in the home as wives and mothers or pursue careers in professions and vocations traditionally reserved or dominated by men, and not be held back in those trades by anything except our level of ability." That at any rate is how I defined feminism in, say, 1985 or 2001. It is also how most of the men of my generation -- X -- would have defined it if you'd asked them to do so. Some might have been angry about it if they themselves favored the traditional male-female roles Women's Liberation was in rebellion against, but they would have been fairly clear about its actual goals.
I can however break this down even more simply. The feminism that I understood and agreed with meant:
1. Equality of opportunity.
2. Freedom of choice.
3. Equivalency.
4. Logic.
I could get down with that. I still can. Most men of my era did, and do, whatever jokes we may have made in arguments with our mothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends, friends, or co-workers. As Orwell once pointed out, the sex war is at bottom a joke. We don't really take it seriously because we understand that at the end of the day, men and women are two peas sharing a pod. We need each other, and that means growing with each others' needs. All the insults, name-calling, and crude remarks men make about women, and women about men, are a form of kabuki, of theater, designed to disguise this obvious fact. The sex war is little more than a junior high school dance, with buffoonery and bravado disguising intense feelings of interest and excitement.
Please understand: I am not pretending I didn't have some reservations and questions about feminism in its older guise. "Equality" between men and women is not a physical reality, after all, because the sexes are physically different and therefore unequal. We have different hormones, different musculatures, different organs: facts which, incredibly enough, it is unpopular to say in this mentally challenged age. But I had no problem with female firefighters, policemen or soldiers, provided they could meet the same physical standards the men had to meet: on the other hand, I did not want the standards lowered simply to accomodate women. And to their credit, most women didn't seem to want the standards lowered, either, because up until about a decade ago feminism accepted the idea that inequality did not mean injustice: it was simply an acknowledgement of black-and-white biological facts. Hence the pre-modern feminist slogan which went, "Equal pay for equal work? NO! Equal pay for EQUIVALENT work." This was logic in action: acknowledging the differences between the sexes but refusing to accept them as the basis for a misogynistic culture which places impassable barriers on social, educational, and economic opportunities. Again, it was something I could get behind. A woman might not, for example, meet the physical requirements of a regular combat infantryman, but she could serve ably as a sniper or a fighter pilot. This is what I mean by "equivalency."
Having recently emerged from a very deep dive on the internet, during which I studied for some months both the "modern male" and "modern female" perspectives, I would say this unequivocally about the word "feminism" today -- and I hasten to add that I believe my views are shared by most of the men I know in my own rough age bracket, nearly all of the men in the bracket above mine, and many some years below us both:
I hate it.
I hate it, friends and neighbors, because if I had to boil it down to its substance, it stands for:
1. Equality of outcome.
2. Freedom from responsibility.
3. Misandry.
4. Mysticism.
5. University socialism.
The first category is called "equity" today. "Equity" has a lovely sound to it, but what it means in practice is that any oucome which denies the pure physical equality of men and women must be altered via legal or procedural processes to produce the ideologically sound result. Hence the sight of the U.S. Army Rangers lowering their brutally difficult standards so women can earn the coveted "Ranger" tab -- and this, in the face of explicit recommendations from the senior NCOs in the Pentagon, warning our leaders not to do this: not out of misogyny, but concern for what lowered standards will do in real-world future terms, also known as "consequences."
This brings me to #2, the idea that freedom of choice carries with it freedom from responsibility. Perhaps the most common attack made on women by men on the internet today is "accountability is women's kryptonite." At first I dismissed this as mere misogyny, but when applied to many modern feminists, it is true. Indeed, the one serious problem I have, retroactively, with the feminism I grew up with and still support is that it sold women a deliberate lie, to wit, that it is possible for a woman to be both a traditional wife and mother on the one hand, and a successful corporarte businessperson on the other, without consequences. Many very successful corporate women have come out in recent years admitting that they accepted this lie and paid for it dearly in terms of broken marriages and estranged children. The old arrangement -- man brings home bacon, woman cooks it -- was primitive and restrictive, but it had the advantage of laying down clearly-defined expectations and responsibilities. It also tacitly acknowledged that life was heavy, and required two people to handle the load. Divide the responsibilities differently, a la "Mr. Mom," and the burden was still lighter for both partners. What mattered was not how the labor was divided but that it was divided. Yet a very common refrain on the female side of the internet is "I don't need a man" -- the "boss babe/diva/slay queen mantra" of the "strong, independent woman."
As a guy who grew up and came up with Princess Leia, the many Angels of Charlie, the Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, Sarah Connor, Ellen Ripley and Buffy Summers, I never had problem one with strong women. I daresay I was more than a little turned on by a badass, fast-lipped, physically capable lady, even as a small boy. Independence was another matter. To stand on one's own in life is very difficult and often quite needless. Just as Leia had her Han Solo, Sarah Connor her Kyle Reese, and Buffy Summers her Angel, I became confused by this need to insist that men were useless adjuncts to a woman's life, basically ornaments or pets, or even further (these are very common sentiments among men who are misogynists, incidentally) that men were garbage, scum, trash, filth, villains through and through. This latter sentiment is a direct result of modern women believing #2, that actions do not have consequences, that you can chase Chad for years and then, when the chlamydia and unwanted pregnancies finally take their toll, suddenly find a nice, safe, well-heeled, boring man to venerate and marry you. Discovery that this is not the case, that if you burn your 20s partying ceaselessly and sleeping with all and sundry, that Mr. Right will not be waiting for you with a ring and a bouquet of roses on the other side of 30, seems to come to some of these slay queens as a terrifying, rage-inducing shock. The late Kevin Samuels used to deride what he called the "Tyler Perry/Sex and the City fantasy," and this was in part what he was talking about.
Now, as someone with libertarian leanings, I am all for personal freedoms, and that includes sexual freedom: but sexual freedom, like every other kind of freedom, comes with consequences. Equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcome, and freedom of choice does not mean freedom from consequence. The cognative dissonance, emotional upheaval and dissatisfaction of so many women I see railing on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc., etc. seems to come directly from the idea that feminism means a happy ending regardless of how you choose to behave. It expressly does not. What it means in either its older or newer guise is simply a wider set of possible outcomes for your wider set of choices. And many of those possible outcomes are bad. The older generation of feminists did largely undertsand this. When the Equal Rights Amendment was being proposed in the late 70s/early 80s, it explicitly stated that women would have to register for the draft. In essence, it beat its breast and said, "We want equivalent status in society, and we will take the equivalent consequences that result from that status." In practical terms that meant death on the battlefield, or at least years of harsh military service. That is a healthy, adult view of life. Modern feminism, or what passes for it, takes the direct opposite view, a spoiled-brat position that "I want what I want when I want it and will never have to pay for it, because nothing is my fault."
Another knock on modern feminism is its obvious misandry, its shrill insistence that men are the source of all of women's problems, when in fact it is the poor choices many women make in regards to men that is the source of their personal woe. The cry of "where are all the good men?" tends to come loudest from women who have deliberately allowed themselves to be used by the worst manhood has to offer, over and over again; meanwhile, the good men they claim to want are the same ones they yawn off, year after year. The internet has apparently convinced millions of women that they deserve a man who is 6'3," built like an athlete, hung like a porn star, and earns a minimum of six figures. This is as moronic -- and unrealistic -- as the belief I see among incels and deluded, misogynistic men, that they somehow deserve beautiful, voluptuous, virginal, submissive women despite being out of shape, jobless, living with their folks, lacking social skills, etc., etc. The critical difference, however, is that women control access to sex. An incel is just that: involuntarily celibate. He wants to get laid, but cannot, usually for the reasons I just mentioned. Very, very few women legitimately fall in this category. It is merely that their standards don't correspond with reality, and having embraced an ideology that tells them they can have anything they desire simply because they desire it, a violent cognative and emotional dissonance ensues.
This brings me to #4 of modern feminism, which is mysticism. Being something of a pagan at heart, I rather enjoy studying and practicing mysticism, but like everything else in life it comes with consequences, especially when one neglects the fact we live in the real world, a world of solid objects, harsh realities, and unbreakable scientific laws. Mysticism plays out nowadays largely in terms of the belief that what we most want in life is available to us if we simply wish for it hard enough -- we can manifest reality through desire alone. Never mind planning and executing; just want something bad enough and the universe will give it to you. For whatever reason, this idea has taken a much deeper root with young women than with young men, who seem to take an opposite view (you get nothing in life you really want). But the consequences of all this talk about "manifesting" things are painfully apparent, in that it too discourages accountability. You may have done nothing to improve yourself or your life, but somehow, magically, it will land in your lap, via the power of manifestation. And because this is so, there is no need for introspection or self-improvement or even hard work. You are free to ignore, and even to fetishize, your negative traits, personality disorders, or mental illness. Why not? Past is not prologue, and what failed yesterday, and for the previous 28 years, will somehow succeed tomorrow. You can manifest it! It goes without saying (though I will say it anyway) that this is irresponsibility at its most refined. It once again discourages any idea of consequence or accountability, especially for the failure to act, to plan, to be honest with oneself. It throws out logic and science in favor of a Disney-style happy ending which, for most women, is not coming. It cannot come, because for every Prince Charming, there are nine potential princesses. By definition, eight of them must be left out in the cold.
The last category is what I call "university socialism." I mean that feminism is now bound up with a curious type of quasi-socialist propaganda being taught at universities, which lays all blame for all inequality, injustice, misogyny, etc., etc. at the feet of capitalism and Western civilization as a whole, but specifically, men, and even more specifically, white men. This is mere misandry buried under a blizzard of pseudoscientific, neo-Marxist verbiage designed to give it credence and weight. It also serves the dual purpose of taking away any lingering sense of personal responsibility its adherents might be tempted to feel about their own decisions. They are now armed with a system of belief which absolves them of everything.
By now many of you are dismissing me as a misogynist myself, a wolf in sheep's clothing. I would counter that by asking a question. How many women who have fully embraced the form of "feminism" I am describing here do you know who are actually happy? Now ask yourself how many do you know who are taking antidepressants, antianxiety medication, seeing therapists, and/or seem to be angry, lonely, bitter or frustrated much of the time? I happen to have a very large circle of female friends, from the ages of 58 to 23 years of age, with the majority falling in the sub-30 category. The ones who are happiest, or seem happiest anyway, are almost entirely those whose definition of feminism falls in the "older" category, the one which believed in equality of opportunity and freedom of choice, accepted personal responsibility, and rejected misandry in the same way they rejected misogyny. And yes, what's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose: the many younger men who I see embracing misogyny (and I will discuss this in a separate blog) are even more miserable than their female counterparts. They are men (I use the term generously) who have lost all joy and hope in life and exist in a purely negative space which is half-delusional, half-real, with the real half being, ironically, self-created. The general, paradoxical attitude of despair and entitlement, victimhood and arrogance, cuts across the sexual line: it applies equally, though in different ways, to both men and women. But this article is about feminism in its modern guise, and these are the thoughts of a 50 year-old man who has watched it devolve from a positive to a negative in his own lifetime, and who would like to see it rise up from its own ashes into the liberating, empowering force it was meant to be. In short, I attack modern feminism because I am a feminist. The freedom to try is perhaps the most precious freedom there is: no one should be denied that. But no one can be guaranteed success, either, and as Wesley said in The Princess Bride, "Anyone who says different is selling you something."
As for modern men, I will have a go at them come Saturday, and rest assured, I will pull no punches there, either.
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.
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