Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 15
May 28, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: SUNDAY EDITION, AGAIN
Last week I was attending a national crimes conference in Dallas, TX, and was thus unable to make my bi-weekly contributions to this blog. Since I have promised to be consistent in this regard, and in fact have been for many months now, I feel it necessary to kick off by making this explanation/excuse. There, I've done it. Moving on.
Having just traveled by aircraft for only the second time since late 2019, I feel compelled to make a few comments about what the experience told me about the state of the travel industry, and writ much larger, on the state of us, people living in today's post-Covid world. This path gets a little twisted and rambling, even by my standards, but if you can reach the end without rolling your eyes too hard, you may find yourself in agreement with me.
When I was a kid, back in the last century, I looked forward to any family engagement which involved flying. I did this in spite of the fact that my father invariably had us at the airport hellishly early, often up to four hours before the flight. This was pointless and unnecessary, but reflected his obsession with wanting every detail of a vacation planned down to its finest particular, with numerous contingency plans and built-in safety margins. In any event, flying was still quite enjoyable in those days. First and foremost, the airports were not as crowded, and the flights often had numerous empty seats. There was no TSA, just routine security, and airport employees were much friendlier and less harassed and put-upon. Checking luggage was free. On the flights themselves, proper meals were served -- not snacks, but actual meals that came in segmented trays. The food was bad, of course (I remember in particular one compartment filled with eggs so spongy you could have bounded a lead weight off of them), but it was actual food.
In the post-9/11 era, the nature of flying changed dramatically. It became much more of a hassle. Security lines dragged on, sometimes for hours, and passing through TSA checkpoints was like entering a minumum-security prison...as an inmate. Airports began to treat the people coming through them more like a potential threat than as customers. Airlines began to seek ways to squeeze the maximum amount of money out of passengers while reducing their comforts: seats got smaller, leg room shrank, food service was canceled, flights were deliberately overbooked, and customer services were slashed or carried out with such ill grace that "air rage" became a problem worthy of magazine covers. It's typical of how the press carries the ball for corporations that this phenomenon was blamed upon "entitled passengers" and not on the airlines themselves: on two occasions in the past I can clearly recall having to overmaster strong desires to smash an airport employee in the face. This was not entitlement. I was the natural response of a tired, stressed-out human being who had been treated with deliberate disrespect.
I know there is a tendency, bordering on mania, for people who have lived long enough to unfavorably compare the present with the past. I am definitely guilty of this sometimes, and have been so even in this blog. That having been said, I am not remembering my 20th century travel experiences "with advantages." No human enterprise is ever consistently excellent. Things did go wrong: bags got mislaid, flights got delayed, connections were missed, et cetera and so on. But the overall experience was more one of adventure than endurance. It wasn't until the 2000s that everything began its slide to the present, expensive and uncomfortable nadir.
Now, some would say that me even talking about this subject reflects that dreaded and previously used word: entitlement. First world problems, anyone? After all, if I have to endure some discomfort and boredom and humiliation to travel across a continent in six hours, what of it? Why should anyone care?
My answer to that question, which seems like a side-step into another subject entirely but really isn't, goes like this:
The idea that aspects of society are getting worse rather than better with the passage of time flies in the face of the faith we have generally placed in technology. After all, technology exists for one purpose: to make human lives better. And if we accept that as true, then logically it follows that every technological advancement should improve life. But in my own lifetime, the experience of flying has become noticeably worse and more expensive, and while technology has softened some of the sharper edges of travel, it hasn't compensated for the general decline in comfort or the increase in cost. In short, travel is simply a bellweather for the curious backwards trend of society as a whole.
I would say the same phenomenon applies to many aspects of modern life, most noticeably in terms of the internet. When the internet first emerged as a readily available tool back in the late 90s, it seemed to have very little downside (slow, screeching, 56K modems aside). And it developed in a positive way for perhaps as long as ten years afterwards, becoming increasingly efficient while providing more and more expansive services. In the later 00s, however, the ascent of Facebook and the advent of Twitter sharply changed the trajectory of how the internet influenced our lives. The years following this have seen an increasingly negative, combative, destructive relationship between the humans who created what we used to call "the worldwide web" and the web itself. What was intended to spread knowledge now spreads disinformation. What was intended to provide service has led to a vast increase in entitlement. What was intended to unite the human race has savagely divided it. For the generation born around 2000 or so, the psychological and spiritual costs of growing up online are now becoming clearly evident. Depression, anxiety, loneliness, and misanthropy are exploding, especially among younger people. Everything from body dysmorphia to dopamine addiction to destructive narcissism, murderous fantasies and suicidal ideation have become commonplace. This is not what was supposed to happen.
As a final example, we have the present writer's strike in Hollywood. This strike was caused by, of all things, the looming threat that Artificial Intelligence poses to the creative sphere. These self-refining programs are now coming dangerously close to replacing humans in the one area of activity which we all believed safe from intrusion by technology: art. Our machines can now not only paint for us, they can write scripts and compose music. And while their first efforts were comically poor, the very nature of algorithms allows them to improve with each effort. A great deal of what defines humanity is about to be appropriated by machines we designed to make our lives easier. Except that these machines are now poised to render writers, artists, musicians and even actors and directors as surplus to requirements as saddlers were in the age of the automobile. And this goes all across the board. From the self-driving car to the unmanned naval vessel, from the essay-writing program to the robot on the production line, we are increasingly allowing our own tools to render us redundant, all while lowering rather than raising our quality of life itself. Everything is faster, but everything is also more expensive and less pleasurable. In every aspect of our existence, the technology which we rely on to help us live longer and better is conspiring against us, driven by greed and a more difficult to define motive, best summed by Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park: "Just because we could doesn't mean we should."
Orwell, who I quote so often in these pages, once remarked that the human instinct to make continuous refinements in tools was a new instinct in the species, and a very dangerous one, since it often occurred for its own sake, without regards to consequences. He predicted that the endpoint of a fully mechanized society was a human being who was little more than "a brain in a bottle." He might have added that a being in a mechanical body might eventually ditch the brain, too: why rely on a sticky, foible-prone lump of organic tissue when a neat little hueristic algorithm can take its place?
Human beings are remarkable things. We seem to have an inborn ability both to innovate and to refine, both to imagine the impossible and then, somehow, to achieve it. Alone among God's creatures we have the power to shape our environment in a truly meaningful way. Yet hand in hand with these gifts comes our ability to turn a positive into a negative: the caveman who learned to sharpen the first stick probably used it to spear his neighbor before he did anything else, and his civilized descendant spends a lot of the spare time civilization has given him finding ways to cheat those around him. We have a two-faced gene which compels us to make miracles, and then promptly screw them up. And I don't know if there is a solution to this problem. That is to say, I don't know if the only possible solution will ever be embraced or seriously considered before it's too late.
What is the solution? It seems to me it rests in changing our relationship not only with technology, but innovation itself. With the idea that some areas of technology simply need not be explored, not at least outside a laboratory, and that "just because we can doesn't mean we should." With the notion that tech exists to serve us, and must do so in a controlled rather than an uncontrolled manner. If we begin to think of technology in the same way we think of pharmaceutical drugs, we would surely experiment with any new tech for years before allowing it to flood the market. First, we examine potential consequences, then we package it for sale. But only then.
This idea is not quite as naive as it sounds. Scientists and economists from Adam Smith to Gerard K. O'Neill have posited variations on the idea of the"steady state society" and "steady state economy" since the 1700s. This subject is far too complicated to discuss in depth here, but a modern take on it would be a society in which resource-use was strictly monitored so as to eliminate all unchecked growth. A kind of governmental and economic thermostat which regulated humanity at a level and pace which preserved both the species and the planet.
Such a society raises the specter of authoritarianism and the dreaded "world government" so cherished by conspiracy theorists, but it also provides our species way out of the seemingly insurmountable problems which unchecked technological growth have created. If nothing else, it's food for thought -- because God knows you won't be getting any of the former on your next flight.
Having just traveled by aircraft for only the second time since late 2019, I feel compelled to make a few comments about what the experience told me about the state of the travel industry, and writ much larger, on the state of us, people living in today's post-Covid world. This path gets a little twisted and rambling, even by my standards, but if you can reach the end without rolling your eyes too hard, you may find yourself in agreement with me.
When I was a kid, back in the last century, I looked forward to any family engagement which involved flying. I did this in spite of the fact that my father invariably had us at the airport hellishly early, often up to four hours before the flight. This was pointless and unnecessary, but reflected his obsession with wanting every detail of a vacation planned down to its finest particular, with numerous contingency plans and built-in safety margins. In any event, flying was still quite enjoyable in those days. First and foremost, the airports were not as crowded, and the flights often had numerous empty seats. There was no TSA, just routine security, and airport employees were much friendlier and less harassed and put-upon. Checking luggage was free. On the flights themselves, proper meals were served -- not snacks, but actual meals that came in segmented trays. The food was bad, of course (I remember in particular one compartment filled with eggs so spongy you could have bounded a lead weight off of them), but it was actual food.
In the post-9/11 era, the nature of flying changed dramatically. It became much more of a hassle. Security lines dragged on, sometimes for hours, and passing through TSA checkpoints was like entering a minumum-security prison...as an inmate. Airports began to treat the people coming through them more like a potential threat than as customers. Airlines began to seek ways to squeeze the maximum amount of money out of passengers while reducing their comforts: seats got smaller, leg room shrank, food service was canceled, flights were deliberately overbooked, and customer services were slashed or carried out with such ill grace that "air rage" became a problem worthy of magazine covers. It's typical of how the press carries the ball for corporations that this phenomenon was blamed upon "entitled passengers" and not on the airlines themselves: on two occasions in the past I can clearly recall having to overmaster strong desires to smash an airport employee in the face. This was not entitlement. I was the natural response of a tired, stressed-out human being who had been treated with deliberate disrespect.
I know there is a tendency, bordering on mania, for people who have lived long enough to unfavorably compare the present with the past. I am definitely guilty of this sometimes, and have been so even in this blog. That having been said, I am not remembering my 20th century travel experiences "with advantages." No human enterprise is ever consistently excellent. Things did go wrong: bags got mislaid, flights got delayed, connections were missed, et cetera and so on. But the overall experience was more one of adventure than endurance. It wasn't until the 2000s that everything began its slide to the present, expensive and uncomfortable nadir.
Now, some would say that me even talking about this subject reflects that dreaded and previously used word: entitlement. First world problems, anyone? After all, if I have to endure some discomfort and boredom and humiliation to travel across a continent in six hours, what of it? Why should anyone care?
My answer to that question, which seems like a side-step into another subject entirely but really isn't, goes like this:
The idea that aspects of society are getting worse rather than better with the passage of time flies in the face of the faith we have generally placed in technology. After all, technology exists for one purpose: to make human lives better. And if we accept that as true, then logically it follows that every technological advancement should improve life. But in my own lifetime, the experience of flying has become noticeably worse and more expensive, and while technology has softened some of the sharper edges of travel, it hasn't compensated for the general decline in comfort or the increase in cost. In short, travel is simply a bellweather for the curious backwards trend of society as a whole.
I would say the same phenomenon applies to many aspects of modern life, most noticeably in terms of the internet. When the internet first emerged as a readily available tool back in the late 90s, it seemed to have very little downside (slow, screeching, 56K modems aside). And it developed in a positive way for perhaps as long as ten years afterwards, becoming increasingly efficient while providing more and more expansive services. In the later 00s, however, the ascent of Facebook and the advent of Twitter sharply changed the trajectory of how the internet influenced our lives. The years following this have seen an increasingly negative, combative, destructive relationship between the humans who created what we used to call "the worldwide web" and the web itself. What was intended to spread knowledge now spreads disinformation. What was intended to provide service has led to a vast increase in entitlement. What was intended to unite the human race has savagely divided it. For the generation born around 2000 or so, the psychological and spiritual costs of growing up online are now becoming clearly evident. Depression, anxiety, loneliness, and misanthropy are exploding, especially among younger people. Everything from body dysmorphia to dopamine addiction to destructive narcissism, murderous fantasies and suicidal ideation have become commonplace. This is not what was supposed to happen.
As a final example, we have the present writer's strike in Hollywood. This strike was caused by, of all things, the looming threat that Artificial Intelligence poses to the creative sphere. These self-refining programs are now coming dangerously close to replacing humans in the one area of activity which we all believed safe from intrusion by technology: art. Our machines can now not only paint for us, they can write scripts and compose music. And while their first efforts were comically poor, the very nature of algorithms allows them to improve with each effort. A great deal of what defines humanity is about to be appropriated by machines we designed to make our lives easier. Except that these machines are now poised to render writers, artists, musicians and even actors and directors as surplus to requirements as saddlers were in the age of the automobile. And this goes all across the board. From the self-driving car to the unmanned naval vessel, from the essay-writing program to the robot on the production line, we are increasingly allowing our own tools to render us redundant, all while lowering rather than raising our quality of life itself. Everything is faster, but everything is also more expensive and less pleasurable. In every aspect of our existence, the technology which we rely on to help us live longer and better is conspiring against us, driven by greed and a more difficult to define motive, best summed by Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park: "Just because we could doesn't mean we should."
Orwell, who I quote so often in these pages, once remarked that the human instinct to make continuous refinements in tools was a new instinct in the species, and a very dangerous one, since it often occurred for its own sake, without regards to consequences. He predicted that the endpoint of a fully mechanized society was a human being who was little more than "a brain in a bottle." He might have added that a being in a mechanical body might eventually ditch the brain, too: why rely on a sticky, foible-prone lump of organic tissue when a neat little hueristic algorithm can take its place?
Human beings are remarkable things. We seem to have an inborn ability both to innovate and to refine, both to imagine the impossible and then, somehow, to achieve it. Alone among God's creatures we have the power to shape our environment in a truly meaningful way. Yet hand in hand with these gifts comes our ability to turn a positive into a negative: the caveman who learned to sharpen the first stick probably used it to spear his neighbor before he did anything else, and his civilized descendant spends a lot of the spare time civilization has given him finding ways to cheat those around him. We have a two-faced gene which compels us to make miracles, and then promptly screw them up. And I don't know if there is a solution to this problem. That is to say, I don't know if the only possible solution will ever be embraced or seriously considered before it's too late.
What is the solution? It seems to me it rests in changing our relationship not only with technology, but innovation itself. With the idea that some areas of technology simply need not be explored, not at least outside a laboratory, and that "just because we can doesn't mean we should." With the notion that tech exists to serve us, and must do so in a controlled rather than an uncontrolled manner. If we begin to think of technology in the same way we think of pharmaceutical drugs, we would surely experiment with any new tech for years before allowing it to flood the market. First, we examine potential consequences, then we package it for sale. But only then.
This idea is not quite as naive as it sounds. Scientists and economists from Adam Smith to Gerard K. O'Neill have posited variations on the idea of the"steady state society" and "steady state economy" since the 1700s. This subject is far too complicated to discuss in depth here, but a modern take on it would be a society in which resource-use was strictly monitored so as to eliminate all unchecked growth. A kind of governmental and economic thermostat which regulated humanity at a level and pace which preserved both the species and the planet.
Such a society raises the specter of authoritarianism and the dreaded "world government" so cherished by conspiracy theorists, but it also provides our species way out of the seemingly insurmountable problems which unchecked technological growth have created. If nothing else, it's food for thought -- because God knows you won't be getting any of the former on your next flight.
May 20, 2023
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "MATT HOUSTON"
Better cock your pistols. -- C.J. Parsons
Way back in the 1980s, there was a tall, handsome, mustachioe'd private eye with a flashy lifestyle, a taste for danger, a tendency to bumble, and a way with women. This Vietnam vet was was tough, but tender: occasionally immature, but also deeply committed. A terrific friend, but a terrifying enemy. He sleuthed, fist-fought, romanced, cheesed off the cops, sped down highways in a vintage auto to bombastic music, and generally reminded us how lame we were in comparison with him...somehow without ever once making us dislike him. His more Mary Sue characteristics were offset by enough flaws, foibles and quirks to be relatable, even as he dodged shotgun blasts and got thrown off cars. He gave the ladies something to look at and the men something to admire.
Am I talking about Thomas Magnum? Oh no. No no no. I'm talking about Matt Houston. You know, Matt Houston? Surely you remember Matlock Houston! In 1982 he was as inescapable as American flags on the Fourth of July, and nearly as American. Just the sort of rough-and-tumble (yet suave) hero this nation required during those shaky first years of the Reagan presidency, when we were all desperate for a distraction from seemingly imminent nuclear destruction.
When HOUSTON made its debut in 1982, MAGNUM, P.I. was already a worldwide phenomenon, the show every other action-adventure-cop-private-eye show wanted to be. In Hollywood, imitation is the highest form of flattery, and other networks (and even the same network) did their level best to try and imitate what the legendary Donald P. Bellisario had created: but none were so brazen in their imitation as the equally legendary Aaron Spelling. His intention from the start seemed to be to out-Magnum MAGNUM in every possible way. What he came up with was this:
Matlock Houston (Lee Horsley) was the only son of a famous Texas oil baron. An outstanding collegiate athlete who served in Vietnam as an intelligence officer, Matt -- "Houston" to his friends -- was supposed to follow in his dad's footsteps in the Lone Star State. Instead, he decamped to Los Angeles, ostensibly to supervise the family's offshore drilling assets, but in reality to indulge his true passion: working as a private detective. Houston flew his own helicopter from his West Side ranch to his penthouse office in downtown L.A.: drove his open-topped Sparks Roadster around town; and wore Western suits with cowboy boots and a gold belt buckle, and was accompanied at all times by his best friend and lawyer, the lovely C.J. Parsons (Pamela Hensley). For background information, Houston relied on "Baby," his sophisticated Apple III computer, which was basically just a modern internet connection as it was imagined in 1982. For help with the cops, he had his friend Lt. Vince Novelli (John Aprea). For financial dope, he had his anxiety-riddled accountant Murray (George Wydner). There were a number of other ancillary characters as well, and thereby we come to what initially made MATT HOUSTON interesting to potential viewers.
Noise.
As concieved and initially executed, MATT HOUSTON never attempted subtlety. It never attempted nuance. It never attempted depth. From its relentlessly bombastic score to the utter improbability of its central concept, from its tongue-in-cheek humor to its equally cheeky departure from any sense of realism, this show was a fifty-piece marching band complete with elephants and fireworks, advertising what amounted to a new flavor of gum. It was boldly ridiculous: garishly, cheesily up in your face, like a harmless but demented rodeo clown. It was a ton of energy circling not a helluva lot of substance. Even at the time, it was considered to be vulgar in a literal sense.
HOUSTON's early structure went like this. Some friend or former flame of Houston, accused of murder or threatened by evildoers, would reach out to him for help. Houston would investigate the suspects, usually composed at least in part of faded stars of yesteryear such as Alan Hale, Janet Leigh, Cesar Romero, Chuck Connors, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Wilhem Klemperer, etc., as well as various reliable character actors (think Bradford Dillman and Vic Tayback) and hot bikini-babes. Houston would quickly become targeted by the unknown bad guy, leading to chases on foot and chases by car, fisticuffs, and inevitable scene where Houston gets thrown off a moving car. Finally, after a drawing-room confrontation in which Houston exposed the killer or bad guy, there would be a final chase & fistfight, followed by a last snort of humor before the credits rolled.
You will note I said "fistfight." One of the peculiar qualities of early HOUSTON is that he never, or almost never, carried a gun. Nor, for a single, handsome, virile young man worth millions, did he make a fetish of bedding his damsels in distress. Houston existed as a man out of time, an idealized Old West hero, occasionally with the horse, but always minus the six guns. Like the Duke Boys, he'd sock you on the jaw if you had it coming, but he'd never kick you when you were down. The show even referenced "The Cowboy Code," an actual code of behavior sometimes referred to as The Code of the West, which was Houston's guiding moral star.
The series was also notable for its sense of humor. A running gag which took center stage in the credits was Houston's inability to knock down a door with his shoulder, but the fact is Houston was the butt of at least three-quarters of the shows physical comedy, one-liners and comebacks. In this regard Lee Horsely, a real-life Texan who really does embody the Cowboy Code, was the perfect choice for the role. He could play tough and dramatic when the role called for it, but seemed to be at his best when playing for laughs. HOUSTON was often absurd (radio-controlled sharks, killer robots, little green men) but it wasn't the sort of absurd show that cringe-inducingly takes itself seriously. There was a wink-wink quality to (most of) its early episodes, a clear understanding that the viewer had voluntarily entered the theater of the ridiculous.
All shows undergo refinements and changes as they progress: MATT HOUSTON suffered massive overalls, probably as the result of critical attacks and wobbly ratings. The changes started subtly, by getting rid of C.J.'s horrible Texas accent and the equally dumb expositive narration, which only served to slop words into plot holes best left to the audience's indifferent shrugs (who watches shit like this for the plots?). Then the side-character massacre began: two pointless, painfully stupid cowboy sidekicks were dispatched without ceremony, followed eventually by Novelli's annoying Italian sterotype of a mother, who ran (of course) an Italian restaurant and was forever cartoonishly berating her son in Italian. Murray, the one side guy who really worked well, was reduced to recurring status. And a few episodes -- "Get Houston" and "The Hunted" -- jaggedly changed the tone from lighthearted and comedic to dark-as-death in an eyeblink.
HOUSTON's second season permanently changed the tone of the series. Gone was the sense of humor. Gone too, were the Western suits, gold buckles, cowboy boots and Sparks Roadster. The parade of faded guest stars ended, and so too did the big, set-piece drawing-room confrontations. Houston wore a Member's Only jacket, carried a Walther PPK (later upgraded to a big old .45) which used frequently, and drove a contemporary sportscar. He was also quick to bed with his hot female co-stars. In short, the quirky, noisy, over-the-top, G-rated ridiculousness had been thrown out in favor of a grimly generic TV detective show, indistinguishable from most others. This didn't particularly suit the modest audience, so its third season tried to revive a little of the razzamatazz and humor of the first, and brought in Buddy Ebsen (famous for BARNABY JONES) as a series regular, to no avail. MATT HOUSTON crossed its finish line with 69 episodes beneath its (no longer) Western-buckled belt, and was promptly forgotten, except by a small core of devotees and, of course, the mostly female fans of Lee Horsley. It is now a footnote in television history.
So where does MATT HOUSTON stand in retrospect? Why am I even bothering to talk about a poorly-written, derivative knock-off of a much more successful series? Why write about a show which limped through three seasons before it was canceled with absolutely no fanfare? Why spill ink over what one IMDB commentator referred to as "the show you flipped to when the show you were watching was on a commercial"?
One word: fun
The first season -- only the first, really, but with the occasional lark in seasons two and three -- was just plain old silly fun, of the sort I so rarely encounter nowadays that it seems to me completely extinct. Houston's banter with C.J. was not exactly Shakespearian, but they had a wonderful comedic chemistry, and as I said above, Houston himself was often a source of humor simply through his outre facial expressions and bullet-induced pratfalls. Even in the 1980s, there was a place for prime-time detective dramas which were thoughtfully written and skillfully acted, like SIMON & SIMON, and there is also a place for entertaining nonsense. Even as a boy of ten, I grasped that sometimes you want prime rib, and sometimes a McDonald's hamburger. It's a question of mood, of what level of engagement feels right for you in the moment. An episode like MAGNUM, P.I.'s "Did You See The Sunrise?" demanded the maximum from its viewer: it was a brutally violent, intricately plotted, tragic and finally shocking story that changed the course of television history. (The first time I saw it, I felt as if I'd aged a year overnight.) The average episode of MATT HOUSTON, in comparison, was about as demanding as putting a quarter in the slot of a bubblegum machine. But who doesn't like a fistfull of brightly-colored bubblegum?
There is a second word I'd like to employ: hero.
Yesterday I saw a preview for Fast X, the tenth and, I hope, last installment of the FAST AND FURIOUS franchise. Watching this slickly produced trailer consecrated to the monstrous ego of Vin Diesel just served to remind me of how the very idea of heroism is dead, buried and mummified in the mind of modern Hollywood. And while I understand the difference between a protagonist and a hero, I also grasp what the near-complete lack of heroes in film and television today says about us as a society. A country that regards traditional heroes as unrealistic, saccharine, hokey, dumb, dated, fake, unbearable -- that is a country which is on its last legs, has already filed for emotional bankruptcy and is just awaiting liquidation. Matlock Houston, in his Season 1.0 form, was a dyed-in-the-wool hero, falling short of Mary Sue status only because of his eccentricities and foibles, and his tendency to get knocked unconscious. He felt fear, but always overcame it: the quality we call courage. He lusted after beautiful women but did not take advantage of them: the quality we call character. He'd beat the hell out of a bad guy but wouldn't kill him: the quality we call morality. He'd stick by a friend come hell or high water: the quality we call loyalty, and he'd also stick by the little guy, treating the janitor with the same respect as a CEO, the quality we call decency. In short, he had a code, the cowboy code, and he stuck to it unfailingly no matter how badly he wanted to shoot the evildoer or get double-teamed by the bikini babes who came onto him in the middle of a foot chase. It wasn't exactly realistic (the babes were far more appealing than the foot chase), but it was refreshing, and in any case, who the hell watches television for realism?
What we want -- what we ought to want -- in our entertainment is a broad variety of central characters. There is absolutely a place for Vic Mackie, Walter White and Frank Underwood in our pantheon of protagonists, but there is also a place for Matt Houston, for the Matt Houstons of the celluloid world. People who treat their word as bond, who won't shoot a man in the back or cheat at cards, and who will tip their hats to a lady. Even as a child I understood the need for this sort of thing, and I have always viewed people who lack that need as weak, malformed, and sickly. People who are repulsed by light because, like mushrooms, they are more comfortable sitting in the dark and eating shit.
As I have said, MATT HOUSTON is largely forgotten today, and after rewatching the series, I can't say that I entirely blame audiences, even audiences who grew up in the 80s, for forgetting it. In terms of objective quality, it hovered somewhere at the level of T.J. HOOKER...but like T.J. HOOKER, it also took (at least initially) a firm moral stance, which, even when weighed against all of its silliness and shortcomings, seems to count more in this age of moral terpitude than it ought to.
Way back in the 1980s, there was a tall, handsome, mustachioe'd private eye with a flashy lifestyle, a taste for danger, a tendency to bumble, and a way with women. This Vietnam vet was was tough, but tender: occasionally immature, but also deeply committed. A terrific friend, but a terrifying enemy. He sleuthed, fist-fought, romanced, cheesed off the cops, sped down highways in a vintage auto to bombastic music, and generally reminded us how lame we were in comparison with him...somehow without ever once making us dislike him. His more Mary Sue characteristics were offset by enough flaws, foibles and quirks to be relatable, even as he dodged shotgun blasts and got thrown off cars. He gave the ladies something to look at and the men something to admire.
Am I talking about Thomas Magnum? Oh no. No no no. I'm talking about Matt Houston. You know, Matt Houston? Surely you remember Matlock Houston! In 1982 he was as inescapable as American flags on the Fourth of July, and nearly as American. Just the sort of rough-and-tumble (yet suave) hero this nation required during those shaky first years of the Reagan presidency, when we were all desperate for a distraction from seemingly imminent nuclear destruction.
When HOUSTON made its debut in 1982, MAGNUM, P.I. was already a worldwide phenomenon, the show every other action-adventure-cop-private-eye show wanted to be. In Hollywood, imitation is the highest form of flattery, and other networks (and even the same network) did their level best to try and imitate what the legendary Donald P. Bellisario had created: but none were so brazen in their imitation as the equally legendary Aaron Spelling. His intention from the start seemed to be to out-Magnum MAGNUM in every possible way. What he came up with was this:
Matlock Houston (Lee Horsley) was the only son of a famous Texas oil baron. An outstanding collegiate athlete who served in Vietnam as an intelligence officer, Matt -- "Houston" to his friends -- was supposed to follow in his dad's footsteps in the Lone Star State. Instead, he decamped to Los Angeles, ostensibly to supervise the family's offshore drilling assets, but in reality to indulge his true passion: working as a private detective. Houston flew his own helicopter from his West Side ranch to his penthouse office in downtown L.A.: drove his open-topped Sparks Roadster around town; and wore Western suits with cowboy boots and a gold belt buckle, and was accompanied at all times by his best friend and lawyer, the lovely C.J. Parsons (Pamela Hensley). For background information, Houston relied on "Baby," his sophisticated Apple III computer, which was basically just a modern internet connection as it was imagined in 1982. For help with the cops, he had his friend Lt. Vince Novelli (John Aprea). For financial dope, he had his anxiety-riddled accountant Murray (George Wydner). There were a number of other ancillary characters as well, and thereby we come to what initially made MATT HOUSTON interesting to potential viewers.
Noise.
As concieved and initially executed, MATT HOUSTON never attempted subtlety. It never attempted nuance. It never attempted depth. From its relentlessly bombastic score to the utter improbability of its central concept, from its tongue-in-cheek humor to its equally cheeky departure from any sense of realism, this show was a fifty-piece marching band complete with elephants and fireworks, advertising what amounted to a new flavor of gum. It was boldly ridiculous: garishly, cheesily up in your face, like a harmless but demented rodeo clown. It was a ton of energy circling not a helluva lot of substance. Even at the time, it was considered to be vulgar in a literal sense.
HOUSTON's early structure went like this. Some friend or former flame of Houston, accused of murder or threatened by evildoers, would reach out to him for help. Houston would investigate the suspects, usually composed at least in part of faded stars of yesteryear such as Alan Hale, Janet Leigh, Cesar Romero, Chuck Connors, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Wilhem Klemperer, etc., as well as various reliable character actors (think Bradford Dillman and Vic Tayback) and hot bikini-babes. Houston would quickly become targeted by the unknown bad guy, leading to chases on foot and chases by car, fisticuffs, and inevitable scene where Houston gets thrown off a moving car. Finally, after a drawing-room confrontation in which Houston exposed the killer or bad guy, there would be a final chase & fistfight, followed by a last snort of humor before the credits rolled.
You will note I said "fistfight." One of the peculiar qualities of early HOUSTON is that he never, or almost never, carried a gun. Nor, for a single, handsome, virile young man worth millions, did he make a fetish of bedding his damsels in distress. Houston existed as a man out of time, an idealized Old West hero, occasionally with the horse, but always minus the six guns. Like the Duke Boys, he'd sock you on the jaw if you had it coming, but he'd never kick you when you were down. The show even referenced "The Cowboy Code," an actual code of behavior sometimes referred to as The Code of the West, which was Houston's guiding moral star.
The series was also notable for its sense of humor. A running gag which took center stage in the credits was Houston's inability to knock down a door with his shoulder, but the fact is Houston was the butt of at least three-quarters of the shows physical comedy, one-liners and comebacks. In this regard Lee Horsely, a real-life Texan who really does embody the Cowboy Code, was the perfect choice for the role. He could play tough and dramatic when the role called for it, but seemed to be at his best when playing for laughs. HOUSTON was often absurd (radio-controlled sharks, killer robots, little green men) but it wasn't the sort of absurd show that cringe-inducingly takes itself seriously. There was a wink-wink quality to (most of) its early episodes, a clear understanding that the viewer had voluntarily entered the theater of the ridiculous.
All shows undergo refinements and changes as they progress: MATT HOUSTON suffered massive overalls, probably as the result of critical attacks and wobbly ratings. The changes started subtly, by getting rid of C.J.'s horrible Texas accent and the equally dumb expositive narration, which only served to slop words into plot holes best left to the audience's indifferent shrugs (who watches shit like this for the plots?). Then the side-character massacre began: two pointless, painfully stupid cowboy sidekicks were dispatched without ceremony, followed eventually by Novelli's annoying Italian sterotype of a mother, who ran (of course) an Italian restaurant and was forever cartoonishly berating her son in Italian. Murray, the one side guy who really worked well, was reduced to recurring status. And a few episodes -- "Get Houston" and "The Hunted" -- jaggedly changed the tone from lighthearted and comedic to dark-as-death in an eyeblink.
HOUSTON's second season permanently changed the tone of the series. Gone was the sense of humor. Gone too, were the Western suits, gold buckles, cowboy boots and Sparks Roadster. The parade of faded guest stars ended, and so too did the big, set-piece drawing-room confrontations. Houston wore a Member's Only jacket, carried a Walther PPK (later upgraded to a big old .45) which used frequently, and drove a contemporary sportscar. He was also quick to bed with his hot female co-stars. In short, the quirky, noisy, over-the-top, G-rated ridiculousness had been thrown out in favor of a grimly generic TV detective show, indistinguishable from most others. This didn't particularly suit the modest audience, so its third season tried to revive a little of the razzamatazz and humor of the first, and brought in Buddy Ebsen (famous for BARNABY JONES) as a series regular, to no avail. MATT HOUSTON crossed its finish line with 69 episodes beneath its (no longer) Western-buckled belt, and was promptly forgotten, except by a small core of devotees and, of course, the mostly female fans of Lee Horsley. It is now a footnote in television history.
So where does MATT HOUSTON stand in retrospect? Why am I even bothering to talk about a poorly-written, derivative knock-off of a much more successful series? Why write about a show which limped through three seasons before it was canceled with absolutely no fanfare? Why spill ink over what one IMDB commentator referred to as "the show you flipped to when the show you were watching was on a commercial"?
One word: fun
The first season -- only the first, really, but with the occasional lark in seasons two and three -- was just plain old silly fun, of the sort I so rarely encounter nowadays that it seems to me completely extinct. Houston's banter with C.J. was not exactly Shakespearian, but they had a wonderful comedic chemistry, and as I said above, Houston himself was often a source of humor simply through his outre facial expressions and bullet-induced pratfalls. Even in the 1980s, there was a place for prime-time detective dramas which were thoughtfully written and skillfully acted, like SIMON & SIMON, and there is also a place for entertaining nonsense. Even as a boy of ten, I grasped that sometimes you want prime rib, and sometimes a McDonald's hamburger. It's a question of mood, of what level of engagement feels right for you in the moment. An episode like MAGNUM, P.I.'s "Did You See The Sunrise?" demanded the maximum from its viewer: it was a brutally violent, intricately plotted, tragic and finally shocking story that changed the course of television history. (The first time I saw it, I felt as if I'd aged a year overnight.) The average episode of MATT HOUSTON, in comparison, was about as demanding as putting a quarter in the slot of a bubblegum machine. But who doesn't like a fistfull of brightly-colored bubblegum?
There is a second word I'd like to employ: hero.
Yesterday I saw a preview for Fast X, the tenth and, I hope, last installment of the FAST AND FURIOUS franchise. Watching this slickly produced trailer consecrated to the monstrous ego of Vin Diesel just served to remind me of how the very idea of heroism is dead, buried and mummified in the mind of modern Hollywood. And while I understand the difference between a protagonist and a hero, I also grasp what the near-complete lack of heroes in film and television today says about us as a society. A country that regards traditional heroes as unrealistic, saccharine, hokey, dumb, dated, fake, unbearable -- that is a country which is on its last legs, has already filed for emotional bankruptcy and is just awaiting liquidation. Matlock Houston, in his Season 1.0 form, was a dyed-in-the-wool hero, falling short of Mary Sue status only because of his eccentricities and foibles, and his tendency to get knocked unconscious. He felt fear, but always overcame it: the quality we call courage. He lusted after beautiful women but did not take advantage of them: the quality we call character. He'd beat the hell out of a bad guy but wouldn't kill him: the quality we call morality. He'd stick by a friend come hell or high water: the quality we call loyalty, and he'd also stick by the little guy, treating the janitor with the same respect as a CEO, the quality we call decency. In short, he had a code, the cowboy code, and he stuck to it unfailingly no matter how badly he wanted to shoot the evildoer or get double-teamed by the bikini babes who came onto him in the middle of a foot chase. It wasn't exactly realistic (the babes were far more appealing than the foot chase), but it was refreshing, and in any case, who the hell watches television for realism?
What we want -- what we ought to want -- in our entertainment is a broad variety of central characters. There is absolutely a place for Vic Mackie, Walter White and Frank Underwood in our pantheon of protagonists, but there is also a place for Matt Houston, for the Matt Houstons of the celluloid world. People who treat their word as bond, who won't shoot a man in the back or cheat at cards, and who will tip their hats to a lady. Even as a child I understood the need for this sort of thing, and I have always viewed people who lack that need as weak, malformed, and sickly. People who are repulsed by light because, like mushrooms, they are more comfortable sitting in the dark and eating shit.
As I have said, MATT HOUSTON is largely forgotten today, and after rewatching the series, I can't say that I entirely blame audiences, even audiences who grew up in the 80s, for forgetting it. In terms of objective quality, it hovered somewhere at the level of T.J. HOOKER...but like T.J. HOOKER, it also took (at least initially) a firm moral stance, which, even when weighed against all of its silliness and shortcomings, seems to count more in this age of moral terpitude than it ought to.
May 17, 2023
HIRAETH
No man ever thinks of himself as anything but twenty-five years old. -- Robert D. MacDougal
Hiraeth is a Welsh word which translates rather poorly into English. It is often defined as mere sentimentality or nostalgia, but it goes quite a bit deeper than that. Deeper definitions would start here:
A blend of homesickness, nostalgia and longing, "hiraeth" is a pull on the heart that conveys a distinct feeling of missing something irretrievably lost.
Not bad, but not deep enough. Let's try again:
Homesickness for a home to which you can never return, a home which maybe never was. A nostalgia, a yearning, a grief for the lost places of your past.
Very good. Perfect perhaps. But note the caveat: "which maybe never was." The human heart is an infinite mystery, but few of its secrets are more, well, mysterious than the longing for something which perhaps never existed.
I was thinking a lot of hiraeth today. It was an absolutely lovely evening, temperature in the sixties, cool breeze, fiery orange sunset in a sky of pale, dusty pink. I came home from my evening hike, ate pork tenderloin and green beans, and watched a few episodes of Millennium, a half-forgotten jewel of a television show created by Chris (X-Files) Carter, which ran from 1996-1999. I will visit this show in my Memory Lanes series at some point in the future, but for now I wish to explore the feelings that revisiting this series kindled within me.
To begin with, what initially stood out was how little the world of the late 1990s differed from the world of today. I saw no egregious changes in fashion, be it clothing, makeup, hairstyles or automobile design. The technology was recognizably the same -- cell phones, computers -- just clunkier in design. Pop cultural references were infrequent and did not seem the least bit dated. There was a decided (and wonderful) absence of references to the yet-unborn phenomenon of social media, but this was noticeable only by said absence: it was not obtrusive. In short, Millennium has aged superbly well, and for all gross intents and purposes, might have been filmed last week.
Nevertheless, when I watched, what struck me was the keen, piercing sense of nostalgia, of yearing, of longing I felt for the time period in which it was shot and appeared on TV: the 1990s. I am somewhat sentimental by nature, but the intensity of the emotion rattled my cage to the bruising point. After all, what were the 90s to me? A seemingly endless, often troubled ramble through college (several colleges, actually). A professional job I strongly disliked, which led to a different professional job I soon actively hated. A period of extreme financial hardship that included privation and hunger. A relationship that crashed and burned like thermite just as the decade drew to a close. So despite the manifold experiences, the occasional dizzying triumph, many wonderful individual memories -- and let's face it -- some spectacular sexcapades, it was hardly a period of unblemished joy.
I noted above that I am prone to nostalgia, and nostalgia has been defined as a form of self-pity. If that is true, why was watching the grim, stylishly written, atmospherically-lighted investigations of Frank Black such an emotional tumult for me? Why did it make me feel sorry for myself?
I came to a realization as I watched the sun burn down over the three-way streetsign this evening. As much as I like the show, it isn't about Millennium. And it isn't about the 90s, either, because clearly the past I was yearning for did not exist in the way my emotions insist upon remembering it. No, it's not about the decade, folks: it's about who I was in the decade. Who I used to be.
I don't mean in a creative sense. Creatively I was frustrated beyond belief, a "writer" who couldn't write anything. Nor do I mean as a human being: I began the decade callow, selfish and superficial, and ended it battered, embittered and even more selfish, albeit in a more refined way. The fact is that my hiraeth is rooted simply a longing for the physical properties of youth, i.e. the lost places of my path. My mother recently found a picture of me from 1990. When I showed it to a female co-worker half my age, she signed and murmured, "A young Rob Lowe." That is an exaggeration, but not by much. I was imperially slim. I had an impossibly thick head of hair, a Hollywood jawline, and a twenty-nine inch waist. I tipped the scales at 155 lbs. Now, when I catch glimpses of myself in mirrored surfaces, what I see is someone who could be that boy's father. Indeed, I see more of my father (and my uncle) in my 2023 face than I do myself. The boy has been consumed by the man. And not to put too fine a point on it, and though I have lost eight pounds since last December, I also note that the boy could fit inside the man with room to spare.
Now, I'm not as stupid as I probably come off in some of these blogs, and I am not exactly stunned by the fact that, as a man of fifty, I feel a certain jealousy toward who I used to be, phyisically. Nobody likes to be shown up, nobody likes competitions they can't win, and nobody likes to be the butt of dad jokes when one is not even a dad and still thinks of themselves as being firmly in the game. In short, nobody likes to watch Millennium and remember exactly what you looked like when you first saw episode such-and-such in 1999. Because to do so just reminds you of all the follicles you've lost and all the pounds you have gained. And yet there is comfort in hiraeth, too, because this intense longing for the past is mercifully bound up by a cold awareness of just how shitty the past was to Miles Watson. 1999 sucked. The full head of hair, the flashing smile, the leading-man jawline and unquenchable sex drive masked tempestuous inner turmoil and pain. I was unfulfilled, frustrated, constricted, cramped. A big fish in a small pond, swimming in futile circles. And I was permeated with fear: the fear that I would never do anything, never amount to anything, never achieve any of my goals, ambitions, dreams. I looked good, but I often felt rotten. And in a sense, I was. Every young man is. Outside is muscle and white teeth. Inside is Hamlet, stuck on repeat.
As you grow older, and thoughts turn to such things as "I need reading glasses" and "I'm shaving my head because women like that better than a fucking combover," you also realize that as false as ordinary memories can play you, emotional memories can be even more brutally dishonest. They attack suddenly and piercingly, and fill you with longings which, upon close examination, do not always hold water. The quote with which I began this missive was delivered to me many years ago by a World War Two veteran who was well into his eighties when I interviewed him about his life. During our conversation, he casually dropped that remark, which I have never forgotten. At the time, of course, it meant something very different to me than it does now, when I realize that it was aimed at me personally -- not the man he was speaking to, but his future self, the self that sits here now, writing this. "No man sees himself as anything but twenty five" is literally true, and a rather eloquent comment on the male mind, but it's also an explicit warning against the perils of self-competition. And it's a warning I'll be thinking about tomorrow, when my barber shaves my head, and with it, the last remnants of 1999.
Hiraeth is a Welsh word which translates rather poorly into English. It is often defined as mere sentimentality or nostalgia, but it goes quite a bit deeper than that. Deeper definitions would start here:
A blend of homesickness, nostalgia and longing, "hiraeth" is a pull on the heart that conveys a distinct feeling of missing something irretrievably lost.
Not bad, but not deep enough. Let's try again:
Homesickness for a home to which you can never return, a home which maybe never was. A nostalgia, a yearning, a grief for the lost places of your past.
Very good. Perfect perhaps. But note the caveat: "which maybe never was." The human heart is an infinite mystery, but few of its secrets are more, well, mysterious than the longing for something which perhaps never existed.
I was thinking a lot of hiraeth today. It was an absolutely lovely evening, temperature in the sixties, cool breeze, fiery orange sunset in a sky of pale, dusty pink. I came home from my evening hike, ate pork tenderloin and green beans, and watched a few episodes of Millennium, a half-forgotten jewel of a television show created by Chris (X-Files) Carter, which ran from 1996-1999. I will visit this show in my Memory Lanes series at some point in the future, but for now I wish to explore the feelings that revisiting this series kindled within me.
To begin with, what initially stood out was how little the world of the late 1990s differed from the world of today. I saw no egregious changes in fashion, be it clothing, makeup, hairstyles or automobile design. The technology was recognizably the same -- cell phones, computers -- just clunkier in design. Pop cultural references were infrequent and did not seem the least bit dated. There was a decided (and wonderful) absence of references to the yet-unborn phenomenon of social media, but this was noticeable only by said absence: it was not obtrusive. In short, Millennium has aged superbly well, and for all gross intents and purposes, might have been filmed last week.
Nevertheless, when I watched, what struck me was the keen, piercing sense of nostalgia, of yearing, of longing I felt for the time period in which it was shot and appeared on TV: the 1990s. I am somewhat sentimental by nature, but the intensity of the emotion rattled my cage to the bruising point. After all, what were the 90s to me? A seemingly endless, often troubled ramble through college (several colleges, actually). A professional job I strongly disliked, which led to a different professional job I soon actively hated. A period of extreme financial hardship that included privation and hunger. A relationship that crashed and burned like thermite just as the decade drew to a close. So despite the manifold experiences, the occasional dizzying triumph, many wonderful individual memories -- and let's face it -- some spectacular sexcapades, it was hardly a period of unblemished joy.
I noted above that I am prone to nostalgia, and nostalgia has been defined as a form of self-pity. If that is true, why was watching the grim, stylishly written, atmospherically-lighted investigations of Frank Black such an emotional tumult for me? Why did it make me feel sorry for myself?
I came to a realization as I watched the sun burn down over the three-way streetsign this evening. As much as I like the show, it isn't about Millennium. And it isn't about the 90s, either, because clearly the past I was yearning for did not exist in the way my emotions insist upon remembering it. No, it's not about the decade, folks: it's about who I was in the decade. Who I used to be.
I don't mean in a creative sense. Creatively I was frustrated beyond belief, a "writer" who couldn't write anything. Nor do I mean as a human being: I began the decade callow, selfish and superficial, and ended it battered, embittered and even more selfish, albeit in a more refined way. The fact is that my hiraeth is rooted simply a longing for the physical properties of youth, i.e. the lost places of my path. My mother recently found a picture of me from 1990. When I showed it to a female co-worker half my age, she signed and murmured, "A young Rob Lowe." That is an exaggeration, but not by much. I was imperially slim. I had an impossibly thick head of hair, a Hollywood jawline, and a twenty-nine inch waist. I tipped the scales at 155 lbs. Now, when I catch glimpses of myself in mirrored surfaces, what I see is someone who could be that boy's father. Indeed, I see more of my father (and my uncle) in my 2023 face than I do myself. The boy has been consumed by the man. And not to put too fine a point on it, and though I have lost eight pounds since last December, I also note that the boy could fit inside the man with room to spare.
Now, I'm not as stupid as I probably come off in some of these blogs, and I am not exactly stunned by the fact that, as a man of fifty, I feel a certain jealousy toward who I used to be, phyisically. Nobody likes to be shown up, nobody likes competitions they can't win, and nobody likes to be the butt of dad jokes when one is not even a dad and still thinks of themselves as being firmly in the game. In short, nobody likes to watch Millennium and remember exactly what you looked like when you first saw episode such-and-such in 1999. Because to do so just reminds you of all the follicles you've lost and all the pounds you have gained. And yet there is comfort in hiraeth, too, because this intense longing for the past is mercifully bound up by a cold awareness of just how shitty the past was to Miles Watson. 1999 sucked. The full head of hair, the flashing smile, the leading-man jawline and unquenchable sex drive masked tempestuous inner turmoil and pain. I was unfulfilled, frustrated, constricted, cramped. A big fish in a small pond, swimming in futile circles. And I was permeated with fear: the fear that I would never do anything, never amount to anything, never achieve any of my goals, ambitions, dreams. I looked good, but I often felt rotten. And in a sense, I was. Every young man is. Outside is muscle and white teeth. Inside is Hamlet, stuck on repeat.
As you grow older, and thoughts turn to such things as "I need reading glasses" and "I'm shaving my head because women like that better than a fucking combover," you also realize that as false as ordinary memories can play you, emotional memories can be even more brutally dishonest. They attack suddenly and piercingly, and fill you with longings which, upon close examination, do not always hold water. The quote with which I began this missive was delivered to me many years ago by a World War Two veteran who was well into his eighties when I interviewed him about his life. During our conversation, he casually dropped that remark, which I have never forgotten. At the time, of course, it meant something very different to me than it does now, when I realize that it was aimed at me personally -- not the man he was speaking to, but his future self, the self that sits here now, writing this. "No man sees himself as anything but twenty five" is literally true, and a rather eloquent comment on the male mind, but it's also an explicit warning against the perils of self-competition. And it's a warning I'll be thinking about tomorrow, when my barber shaves my head, and with it, the last remnants of 1999.
May 13, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: TOLSTOY THE LESSER AND THE DANGERS OF WOKEISM IN ART
Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore. -- George Orwell
The other day I was listening to James O'Brien on "Leading Britain's Conversation," and came across a remarkable exchange between the laconic but sharp-tongued O'Brien, a dyed-in-the-wool leftist, and a caller who was undoubtedly a card-carrying Tory. The caller was railing against Wokeism, and O'Brien destroyed him rather effortlessly by asking the poor sod to define what Wokeism truly is. To say the caller failed in this simple request is an understatement, and anyone watching or listening would have come away from it believing that Wokeism is simply a phantom, a substanceless boogeyman conjured by the political right as in insult to anyone who disagrees with their politics. As a rule, most conservatives -- be they American, British, Canadian or what have you -- fail in much the same way when pressed to detail what this Wokeist thing really is or why it is so wicked. Their responses boil down to "I can't say, but I know it when I see it."
It so happens that in relation to art, I can define Wokeism. I can also admit that hate it and fear it: not blindly, but with the intense, clear-eyed sort of hate-fear one feels when one sees an existential threat slithering toward one through the tall grass. I could do what everyone else with a YouTube channel is doing and pitch into it there via a slickly produced video full of cheaply clever arguments, but since this is Goodreads, a place where the population actually knows how to read, thought I would approach the problem from a completely different angle, the intellectual-historical.
Let me begin by giving you my personal definition for Wokeism as it pertains to art.. I am not talking about the Left's definition of Wokeism ["Sensitivity to racism and societal hypocrisy"], or the Right's (they don't seem to have one), or even how an objective analyst would try to define it as a broad cultural phenomenon. I am strictly and selfishly interested in how it relates to my chosen field, the creation of fiction, and the other artistic fields which require creativity. This definition is simple, direct and easy to understand. Ready? Here we go.
Wokeism occurs when the art of storytelling is perverted, bastardized, marginalized or abandoned altogether for the sake of an ideological narrative. It occurs when something is packaged, advertised and sold as entertainment but in reality is nothing more than political propaganda. When it is concieved and executed with the express intent of indoctrinating its consumer with a certain political belief (the active approach), or at the least is written in such a way to avoid offending or challenging people who hold those beliefs (the passive approach). That's it. That's Wokeism in art - "art" in this case meaning television, radio, film, music, literature, and anything else that falls under the broad banner of entertainment.
To quote Thomas Magnum: I know what you're thinking. Didn't George Orwell say all art is propaganda? Isn't just about every novel, teleplay, script, or song influenced by its creator's political leanings? What's the difference between letting your opinions seep into your work, or soaking them in it?
Actually the difference is not subtle at all, and therefore not difficult to detect. A true artist will generally follow two rules in this regard.
1. If they are attempting to push a political narrative, they do it with the cards on the table. There is no "bait and switch," nor is there any attempt at subliminal messaging.
2. The artist will never under any circumstances let their politico-ideological message get in the way of their storytelling. The basic principles of storytelling will be respected at all times and any politics will be seasoning -- OK, in some cases, marinate, but nonetheless merely an addition to an existing tale.
At the risk of over-explaining this, a fatal tendency of mine, I would argue that Wokeist "art" follows these two rules in reverse:
1. All, or nearly all, Wokeist creative projects are issued as simple entertainment but hide their true motive, political indoctrination.
2. Storytelling is at bestsecondary to political messaging, possibly tertiary, and in many cases altogether irrelevant.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I'd like to get us back on track, and explore why I find this sort of thing so dangerous, so montrous, so shocking to the creative conscience that people of all political stripes must come together to destroy it before it destroys art as we know and love it.
George Orwell once referred to Alexi Tolstoy as "a literary prostitute." This was rather a cruel remark to make, but from Orwell's point of view it was probably justified. During the time of Stalin, Alexi (1883-1945), cousin of the much more famous Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910), wrote a trilogy of thick historical novels collectively known as THE ROAD TO CAVALRY. The trilogy followed a vast group of characters through the last years of the Russian Empire, through its overthrow and subsequent Civil War, to the final triumph of Communism. In every way it was the definition of a historical epic: grandiose, sweeping, full of drama and romance, striving at all times to keep its canvas large and its characters suffering (hence the Christ-like reference to Calvary). The books were awarded the most prestigious literary honor in the USSR, the Stalin Prize, and became quite famous in their day, though they are now long out of print and semi-forgotten. I had occasion to read the trilogy a few years ago, and found them quite entertaining and well-written: Alexi clearly inherited some of Leo's famous descriptive powers, as well as his relish for novels with vast scope. They were marked, however, by a curious, hard-to-define feeling that the writer was operating a disadvantage, like a stage actor with an injured jaw or a clever boxer whose shoulder injury prevents him from throwing a jab. It was nothing I could immediately put my finger on, but as I waded deeper and deeper into the 1,000+ pages of the story, I was persistently haunted by this feeling. And of course the fact is that Alexi wrote THE ROAD TO CAVALRY under the watchful eye of Stalin's secret police. Like all writers and artists living under dictatorship, especially one as thoroughly totalitarian and capriciously vicious as Stalin's, Tolstoy had to operate under constraints which few in the West can imagine or comprehend. To offend Stalin or the Party meant instant death or, perhaps worse, a one-way trip to the slave gulags of far Siberia, and as a bearer of Russia's proudest literary name, Tolstoy was no doubt fully conscious that anything he wrote would be subjected to merciless scrutiny from first word to final period. Put simply, he had to please his masters: thus, THE ROAD TO CALVARY, enjoyable as it will be to Russophiles, fans of historical fiction, and lovers of the epic novel, is hardly free of the shadow of the totalitarian nightmare-state whose birth it chronicles. Tolstoy does not write a single syllable anywhere in this 1,300 page odyssey that could be regarded as even mildly critical of Communism or its Trinty of Marx, Lenin and Stalin: indeed, he goes to enormous lengths to eschew even using their names. To a degree that I found difficult to believe, he managed to write around everything that might have gotten him in trouble, and it is for this reason that Orwell's charges of "prostitute" and "whore" have a great degree of merit.
What does this have to do with Wokeism, you ask? The answer is fairly simple. Tyrants and tyrannies are well aware of the power of art and entertainment, and move readily to crush, or at least to control it, when they take power. They want all art to either actively serve their interests (as propaganda) or passively serve them by becoming so apolitical as to be harmless. To do this they must terrorize artists into conformity with their political or theological ideals. When one has secret police, slave camps, psychiatric prisons and firing squads at one's disposal, it is not terribly difficult to achieve this end. But while it is much harder in a democracy, it is by no means impossible. With the rise of political correctness in the 90s, we saw for the first time (in my life, anyway) a situation in which attacks on freedom of speech, expression and thought were touted as possessing civil and moral virtue in and of themselves. But political correctness was only a wedge: it only sought people to self-censor, and in that sense was somewhat passive. Wokeism is a different animal entirely.
Wokeism, as I have defined it in relation to art, is an attempt to subvert all art into mere propaganda: and more than that, to control all artistic mediums by telling the creators what they can, and cannot do within their chosen mediums. It is essentially a doctrine of totalitarianism, albeit one whose fangs are not as sharp as they want to be because they do not bite in a totalitarian society. As of now, you will not be shot for producing a work of art which runs contrary to Wokeist principles, but you can be economically destroyed for doing this, and in places like Canada, where some are openly demanding fines or imprisonment for "misgendering" people, we see that being put against the wall is not out of the question somewhere down the road if the present trend continues. (If that sounds alarmist or ridiculous, consider how Roe vs. Wade, the bedrock of reproductive rights, was shattered with the stroke of a pen.) But even if you don't believe me on that score, I know for a fact as a modestly successful writer, and as a man who worked for 12 1/2 years in Hollywood, that the fangs are there, they are poisonous, and they do sting. The creator of art, and to some extent even "content," which is not really art but certainly qualifies as entertainment, must shape what he or she creates to conform to the prevailing religion of DEI and ESG, or face exclusion or extinction. You don't need to take the unwoke screenwriter out and shoot him: you can starve him to death by simply not buying his scripts. Or you can turn him into in an unwilling tool of your own ends by buying his scripts, and then rewriting and casting them in such a way as to make complete nonsense of his original, artistic aims.
There is of course a more practical, immediate consequence of Wokeism which must be addressed. THE ROAD TO CALVARY, though written under severe constraints, was admittedly entertaining. But it is impossible to write anything truly great-with-a-capital-G when one must twist one's depictions to flatter the ruling party. Storytelling is a science and its principles cannot be violated with impunity. And in order to stick to those principles, the writer must be free from fear. He must not have to wonder if what he is going to produce will come back to ruin him. His only thought should be on telling the best possible tale. But in a Wokeist environment, this is literally is last his concern. Writers must eat, to eat they must get paid, and to get paid they must deliver a product acceptable to those in power. Tolstoy's fear of offending the memory of Lenin or the actuality of Stalin warped his depictions of them to the degree that even in the few scenes in which they are glimpsed from a distance, he avoids using their names if humanly possible. Likewise, he handles the Judas/Lucifer figure of Trotsky as if he were not so much a hot potato but a live coal. Tolstoy is compelled to paint him, in a rather slapdash and hurried way, as someone half-incompetent and half-treasonous who very nearly lost the Russian Civil War before he was found out and cast down. The fact that Trotsky's organizational genius is what created the Red Army in the first place (without whom that war could not even have been fought, much less won), and allowed it to fight a successful multi-front campaign against numerous enemies, is conveniently left out of the picture. But the bitterest irony probably comes in the form of the trilogy's most interesting character, Roschin.
THE ROAD TO CALVARY had many point of view characters. Roschin begins the tale as an officer in the Imperial Army, and after the Russian Revolution, he joins the Whites and participates in many battles, rising through the ranks and becoming a hero of the anti-communist movement. However, after witnessing their cruelty firsthand, he wavers in his loyalties, and eventually jumps ship and joins the Reds. At the end of the novel is he happily hitched to another POV character, and looking forward to a bright future in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. No sooner had I closed the book than it occurred to me that as a former White officer, Roschin would certainly have been murdered in one of Stalin's many blood-drenched purges at some point after the events of the book conclude in 1920. Indeed, my final thought, when I crossed the finish line of the last act, was to think, "I wonder how many of these characters would still be alive by the end of the 30s?" Tolstoy's very legitimate fears (and who knows, perhaps his own loyalty to Marxist principles, which call for a certain...flexibility...where objective truth is involved) are the devil in every detail. And this devil wields an almighty big pitchfork. It serves as a warning to all of us: Dishonesty and cowardice do have to be paid for, and the first installment is our artistic, our creative freedom. There can be no more fundamental freedom to lose.
The other day I was listening to James O'Brien on "Leading Britain's Conversation," and came across a remarkable exchange between the laconic but sharp-tongued O'Brien, a dyed-in-the-wool leftist, and a caller who was undoubtedly a card-carrying Tory. The caller was railing against Wokeism, and O'Brien destroyed him rather effortlessly by asking the poor sod to define what Wokeism truly is. To say the caller failed in this simple request is an understatement, and anyone watching or listening would have come away from it believing that Wokeism is simply a phantom, a substanceless boogeyman conjured by the political right as in insult to anyone who disagrees with their politics. As a rule, most conservatives -- be they American, British, Canadian or what have you -- fail in much the same way when pressed to detail what this Wokeist thing really is or why it is so wicked. Their responses boil down to "I can't say, but I know it when I see it."
It so happens that in relation to art, I can define Wokeism. I can also admit that hate it and fear it: not blindly, but with the intense, clear-eyed sort of hate-fear one feels when one sees an existential threat slithering toward one through the tall grass. I could do what everyone else with a YouTube channel is doing and pitch into it there via a slickly produced video full of cheaply clever arguments, but since this is Goodreads, a place where the population actually knows how to read, thought I would approach the problem from a completely different angle, the intellectual-historical.
Let me begin by giving you my personal definition for Wokeism as it pertains to art.. I am not talking about the Left's definition of Wokeism ["Sensitivity to racism and societal hypocrisy"], or the Right's (they don't seem to have one), or even how an objective analyst would try to define it as a broad cultural phenomenon. I am strictly and selfishly interested in how it relates to my chosen field, the creation of fiction, and the other artistic fields which require creativity. This definition is simple, direct and easy to understand. Ready? Here we go.
Wokeism occurs when the art of storytelling is perverted, bastardized, marginalized or abandoned altogether for the sake of an ideological narrative. It occurs when something is packaged, advertised and sold as entertainment but in reality is nothing more than political propaganda. When it is concieved and executed with the express intent of indoctrinating its consumer with a certain political belief (the active approach), or at the least is written in such a way to avoid offending or challenging people who hold those beliefs (the passive approach). That's it. That's Wokeism in art - "art" in this case meaning television, radio, film, music, literature, and anything else that falls under the broad banner of entertainment.
To quote Thomas Magnum: I know what you're thinking. Didn't George Orwell say all art is propaganda? Isn't just about every novel, teleplay, script, or song influenced by its creator's political leanings? What's the difference between letting your opinions seep into your work, or soaking them in it?
Actually the difference is not subtle at all, and therefore not difficult to detect. A true artist will generally follow two rules in this regard.
1. If they are attempting to push a political narrative, they do it with the cards on the table. There is no "bait and switch," nor is there any attempt at subliminal messaging.
2. The artist will never under any circumstances let their politico-ideological message get in the way of their storytelling. The basic principles of storytelling will be respected at all times and any politics will be seasoning -- OK, in some cases, marinate, but nonetheless merely an addition to an existing tale.
At the risk of over-explaining this, a fatal tendency of mine, I would argue that Wokeist "art" follows these two rules in reverse:
1. All, or nearly all, Wokeist creative projects are issued as simple entertainment but hide their true motive, political indoctrination.
2. Storytelling is at bestsecondary to political messaging, possibly tertiary, and in many cases altogether irrelevant.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I'd like to get us back on track, and explore why I find this sort of thing so dangerous, so montrous, so shocking to the creative conscience that people of all political stripes must come together to destroy it before it destroys art as we know and love it.
George Orwell once referred to Alexi Tolstoy as "a literary prostitute." This was rather a cruel remark to make, but from Orwell's point of view it was probably justified. During the time of Stalin, Alexi (1883-1945), cousin of the much more famous Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910), wrote a trilogy of thick historical novels collectively known as THE ROAD TO CAVALRY. The trilogy followed a vast group of characters through the last years of the Russian Empire, through its overthrow and subsequent Civil War, to the final triumph of Communism. In every way it was the definition of a historical epic: grandiose, sweeping, full of drama and romance, striving at all times to keep its canvas large and its characters suffering (hence the Christ-like reference to Calvary). The books were awarded the most prestigious literary honor in the USSR, the Stalin Prize, and became quite famous in their day, though they are now long out of print and semi-forgotten. I had occasion to read the trilogy a few years ago, and found them quite entertaining and well-written: Alexi clearly inherited some of Leo's famous descriptive powers, as well as his relish for novels with vast scope. They were marked, however, by a curious, hard-to-define feeling that the writer was operating a disadvantage, like a stage actor with an injured jaw or a clever boxer whose shoulder injury prevents him from throwing a jab. It was nothing I could immediately put my finger on, but as I waded deeper and deeper into the 1,000+ pages of the story, I was persistently haunted by this feeling. And of course the fact is that Alexi wrote THE ROAD TO CAVALRY under the watchful eye of Stalin's secret police. Like all writers and artists living under dictatorship, especially one as thoroughly totalitarian and capriciously vicious as Stalin's, Tolstoy had to operate under constraints which few in the West can imagine or comprehend. To offend Stalin or the Party meant instant death or, perhaps worse, a one-way trip to the slave gulags of far Siberia, and as a bearer of Russia's proudest literary name, Tolstoy was no doubt fully conscious that anything he wrote would be subjected to merciless scrutiny from first word to final period. Put simply, he had to please his masters: thus, THE ROAD TO CALVARY, enjoyable as it will be to Russophiles, fans of historical fiction, and lovers of the epic novel, is hardly free of the shadow of the totalitarian nightmare-state whose birth it chronicles. Tolstoy does not write a single syllable anywhere in this 1,300 page odyssey that could be regarded as even mildly critical of Communism or its Trinty of Marx, Lenin and Stalin: indeed, he goes to enormous lengths to eschew even using their names. To a degree that I found difficult to believe, he managed to write around everything that might have gotten him in trouble, and it is for this reason that Orwell's charges of "prostitute" and "whore" have a great degree of merit.
What does this have to do with Wokeism, you ask? The answer is fairly simple. Tyrants and tyrannies are well aware of the power of art and entertainment, and move readily to crush, or at least to control it, when they take power. They want all art to either actively serve their interests (as propaganda) or passively serve them by becoming so apolitical as to be harmless. To do this they must terrorize artists into conformity with their political or theological ideals. When one has secret police, slave camps, psychiatric prisons and firing squads at one's disposal, it is not terribly difficult to achieve this end. But while it is much harder in a democracy, it is by no means impossible. With the rise of political correctness in the 90s, we saw for the first time (in my life, anyway) a situation in which attacks on freedom of speech, expression and thought were touted as possessing civil and moral virtue in and of themselves. But political correctness was only a wedge: it only sought people to self-censor, and in that sense was somewhat passive. Wokeism is a different animal entirely.
Wokeism, as I have defined it in relation to art, is an attempt to subvert all art into mere propaganda: and more than that, to control all artistic mediums by telling the creators what they can, and cannot do within their chosen mediums. It is essentially a doctrine of totalitarianism, albeit one whose fangs are not as sharp as they want to be because they do not bite in a totalitarian society. As of now, you will not be shot for producing a work of art which runs contrary to Wokeist principles, but you can be economically destroyed for doing this, and in places like Canada, where some are openly demanding fines or imprisonment for "misgendering" people, we see that being put against the wall is not out of the question somewhere down the road if the present trend continues. (If that sounds alarmist or ridiculous, consider how Roe vs. Wade, the bedrock of reproductive rights, was shattered with the stroke of a pen.) But even if you don't believe me on that score, I know for a fact as a modestly successful writer, and as a man who worked for 12 1/2 years in Hollywood, that the fangs are there, they are poisonous, and they do sting. The creator of art, and to some extent even "content," which is not really art but certainly qualifies as entertainment, must shape what he or she creates to conform to the prevailing religion of DEI and ESG, or face exclusion or extinction. You don't need to take the unwoke screenwriter out and shoot him: you can starve him to death by simply not buying his scripts. Or you can turn him into in an unwilling tool of your own ends by buying his scripts, and then rewriting and casting them in such a way as to make complete nonsense of his original, artistic aims.
There is of course a more practical, immediate consequence of Wokeism which must be addressed. THE ROAD TO CALVARY, though written under severe constraints, was admittedly entertaining. But it is impossible to write anything truly great-with-a-capital-G when one must twist one's depictions to flatter the ruling party. Storytelling is a science and its principles cannot be violated with impunity. And in order to stick to those principles, the writer must be free from fear. He must not have to wonder if what he is going to produce will come back to ruin him. His only thought should be on telling the best possible tale. But in a Wokeist environment, this is literally is last his concern. Writers must eat, to eat they must get paid, and to get paid they must deliver a product acceptable to those in power. Tolstoy's fear of offending the memory of Lenin or the actuality of Stalin warped his depictions of them to the degree that even in the few scenes in which they are glimpsed from a distance, he avoids using their names if humanly possible. Likewise, he handles the Judas/Lucifer figure of Trotsky as if he were not so much a hot potato but a live coal. Tolstoy is compelled to paint him, in a rather slapdash and hurried way, as someone half-incompetent and half-treasonous who very nearly lost the Russian Civil War before he was found out and cast down. The fact that Trotsky's organizational genius is what created the Red Army in the first place (without whom that war could not even have been fought, much less won), and allowed it to fight a successful multi-front campaign against numerous enemies, is conveniently left out of the picture. But the bitterest irony probably comes in the form of the trilogy's most interesting character, Roschin.
THE ROAD TO CALVARY had many point of view characters. Roschin begins the tale as an officer in the Imperial Army, and after the Russian Revolution, he joins the Whites and participates in many battles, rising through the ranks and becoming a hero of the anti-communist movement. However, after witnessing their cruelty firsthand, he wavers in his loyalties, and eventually jumps ship and joins the Reds. At the end of the novel is he happily hitched to another POV character, and looking forward to a bright future in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. No sooner had I closed the book than it occurred to me that as a former White officer, Roschin would certainly have been murdered in one of Stalin's many blood-drenched purges at some point after the events of the book conclude in 1920. Indeed, my final thought, when I crossed the finish line of the last act, was to think, "I wonder how many of these characters would still be alive by the end of the 30s?" Tolstoy's very legitimate fears (and who knows, perhaps his own loyalty to Marxist principles, which call for a certain...flexibility...where objective truth is involved) are the devil in every detail. And this devil wields an almighty big pitchfork. It serves as a warning to all of us: Dishonesty and cowardice do have to be paid for, and the first installment is our artistic, our creative freedom. There can be no more fundamental freedom to lose.
May 10, 2023
AS I PLEASE XIII: NATURE CALLS
Nature is not a place to visit, it is home. -- Gary Snyder
Today is Wednesday, and nothing says Wednesday like a series of rambling observations delivered in the As I Please format. I am overdue for a really deep, insightful, well-organized blog which requires a lot of time, energy, thought and research, and perhaps come Saturday I will have such a thing ready for your reading pleasure, but in the mean time you're stuck with more stream of consciousness scribbling from a man whose brain not only can't stay on track, it often seems to lack the very existence of a track. Today said rambling is inspired by my walks in the woods -- specifically the living things I encounter during same.
* Today, on my after-work hike, I spied two foxes some yards down the wooded path. I went fifty years without seeing a live fox, and in the last week I have spied no less than four. I don't know if this means the fox population in Pennsylvania is enjoying a resurgence, or whether it is simply luck of the draw, but I am enjoying catching glimpses of these elusive, beautiful beasts.
* Encountering the foxes reminded me of how, in Los Angeles, I went ages without seeing a lynx (bobcat), and then, in a relatively short period, saw three or four, including one of startling size at the Hollywood reservoir. It also reminded me of a story my mother likes to tell, about how my brother saw a silver fox in the front yard of their Evanston, Illinois home, and shouted at her to come running, but she thought he was lying and yelled at him instead.
* Whenever the subject of foxes comes up, I am reminded that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's nickname was "The Desert Fox." It is not widely known, but when he was a young lieutenant serving in the First World War, Rommel kept a fox as a pet. I sometimes wonder if this is just a meaningless coincidence, or if the natural slyness of foxes rubbed off on him.
* The tail of a fox is long, stiff, and bottlebrush in texture. It is precisely the opposite of a bobcat's tail, which is bobbed just like its ears, and even more opposite than the tightly curled, frizzy tail of a coyote.
* I saw my first coyote in Arizona about fifteen years ago, running over an airport access road in a red flash. I saw many more once I moved to California, and what struck me about the beasts was how remarkably narrow they are. I mean they are slat-thin. A coyote looks almost two-dimensional. Coyotes are scruffy, mangy looking animals but they are incredibly intelligent and extremely agile. They also kill racoons. Prior to the coyote invasion of Burbank, raccoons were everywhere: they traveled in literal packs, like gangs complete with Old West style eye-masks. Once the coyotes started hunting our streets at night, I rarely saw a racoon again.
* When the gang of raccoons that lived up in the palm trees in the alley behind my house was still operating, they were bold rascals indeed. One morning, a fellow make up effects artist and I were gearing up to go to work when the entire possee thundered down out of the palms and ran down the alley in formation into the mist. We stared at each other and burst out laughing. If they'd had six guns and little cowboy hats they could not have looked more like small, furry criminals.
* The gang's boldest robbery was of my neighbor's chicken coop. One night they scaled the fence, forced open the chain-link enclosure and attacked the hens my neighbors kept to lay eggs. I have never heard such a commotion, such God-awful screaming, as I heard that night. It was about three in the morning and rest assured, my 9mm pistol was in my hand when I went to the window to find out what the hell was happening. The coons managed to kill and eat several of the hens before they made good their escape.
* Depending on where I go hiking, and when, I have some idea of the wildlife I'll encounter on my travels. The Old Field trail has a healthy turtle population (in the pond, of course), and abounds with rabbits and deer. I see white cranes there sometimes as well, and believe me, you don't want those things to yell at you -- it sounds like a madman screaming bloody murder. The Rail Trail, on the other hand, has a family of feral cats (in the scrapyard), a wandering clan of enormous and very noisy wild geese (the kind with the knobs on top of their their beaks), and remarkably fat groundhogs. One thing I seldom see is snakes. Wrong climate, I suppose.
* In California, snakes abound. At Pico Canyon and Cahuenga Peak, I saw rattlesnakes on a regular basis, including some truly large specimens who let me know they weren't too terribly pleased to see me. Rattlers are not scary in person, because they come with their own alarm systems to let you know where they are and what mood they are in, but damn, if you hear that rattle and you can't see the snake, you're in some trouble.
* Startling wild animals can be entertaining. I would never do it on purpose, but accidents happen. I once blundered into a huge red-tailed hawk reposing in a six-foot sapling just a yard or two away. The bird took wing, and its talons missed my scalp by a few inches. Otherwise I wouldn't have one. That was one pissed-off bird, and I'm just glad she wasn't guarding a nest. A few months ago here in PA, I was nearly run over by a large doe who somehow didn't hear me coming until I was a few feet away: hidden from me by thick green bushes, she burst forth and missed me by about a yard. I'd have had a tough time explaining those bruises.
* People do not associate Hollywood with deer, but I have seen many a deer around the Hollywood reservoir, actually entire families of them at a time. I once even saw a doe and a buck grazing on a steep hillside, crowned with mansions, in front of the 101 Freeway. Probably the lack of vegetation keeps the deer population in SoCal down more or less naturally, so you don't see Angelinos opening fire on them with Uzis from the windows of their Teslas. In Pennsylvania they are shot in huge numbers. 442,960 white-tailed deer were shot in the 2022-2023 hunting season. That is a fuck-ton of venison.
* I recently worked a criminal case in which several people of astonishing stupidity jacklighted (illegally shot) three or four large deer, backstrapped them (harvested the choicest meat only, running along the spine, and left the rest), dragged the corpses a few yards off their property into the woods, and left them to rot, without even bothering to wash the blood off their pickup trucks parked nearby. The game warden did not have to overexert himself cracking this case. It's always comforting to know people with two-digit IQs can own high-powered rifles.
* When I visit my mom in Maryland, I occasionally revisit the C & O Canal trail, where I spent much time as a boy. That is a very wild place. It was there I was chased by my first goose (they hiss when angry, and they are easily angered), saw my first turkey vulture (seldom has so formiddable a bird from below the neck been so ridiculous above: they have tiny heads that look exactly like those of old, bald men), and encountered a snapping turtle of such monstrous size (larger than a toilet seat) that its tail looked crocodilian. I also see a lot of cranes fishing patiently on the banks, as the canal positively teems with fish, some of them up to about eighteen inches in length or even better.
* I know very little about birds, but today I saw a woodpecker in full glory, complete with mohawk, and even better, some jet-black birds with gorgeous fire-engine red plumage on their wings, rather like the national markings you see on military aircraft. In Burbank, about once a year, there would appear masses of gorgeous pale green birds with yellow-and-red flame-like markings on their wings and tails, birds so exotic they looked as if they might have flown from South America. There were also two very fat, black-eyed birds with stiff tufts above their skulls, like spiked hair, who made a nest in the eaves of my neighbor's garage. My cat took great interest in these two, but they were not having it: one day they dive bombed him so relentlessly that he soon gave up all pretense of fighting back and made a cowardly retreat back into my home, where he was mocked and shamed for not standing his ground.
* My cat is not wild, but in my yard you'd never have known it. He attacked anything and everything, killing small garden lizards by the score, fighting skinks, punching one of the neighbor's unfortunate hens right in its beak, swatting another neighbor's German shepherd puppy on the nose, battling trespassing cats, murdering a large brown rat, and even terrorizing a possum into playing dead. It is often said that human beings are the only animals who kill for pleasure rather than necessity, but anyone who saw ole Spike in action in that yard between 2013 - 2020 might argue differently.
As you can see, I am an outdoorsy type, but not exactly an expert on nature. I grew up in a leafy suburb on the edge of a swamp, and spent most of my childhood with mud on my knees and under my fingernails: but the wildest things I generally saw as a boy were generally squirrels. I will always find animal encounters of any kind to be worthy of note, and also a source of some pleasure. For when I spy tadpoles swarming in clear and shallow water, dime-sized toads with beautiful gray-green camouflage trembling upon leaves at edge of a pond, deer families munching grass on the edge of a farmer's field, comically porky hedgehogs power-waddling across country lanes, or flocks of geese strutting and honking by train tracks, I feel a great sense of relief that we haven't yet exterminated all forms of life around us, nor paved everything over, nor cut everything down. We may yet get to that point within my lifetime, but if my hikes and walks and rambles through woods, hills and mountains have taught me anything, it's that nature is incredibly resilient, and given a quarter of a chance, will return to full verdancy with astonishing speed. Whether its lively moss growing over a knocked-down tree, or green shoots springing forth from fire-blackened stumps, life tends to find a way. I just hope to hell we go along for the ride.
Today is Wednesday, and nothing says Wednesday like a series of rambling observations delivered in the As I Please format. I am overdue for a really deep, insightful, well-organized blog which requires a lot of time, energy, thought and research, and perhaps come Saturday I will have such a thing ready for your reading pleasure, but in the mean time you're stuck with more stream of consciousness scribbling from a man whose brain not only can't stay on track, it often seems to lack the very existence of a track. Today said rambling is inspired by my walks in the woods -- specifically the living things I encounter during same.
* Today, on my after-work hike, I spied two foxes some yards down the wooded path. I went fifty years without seeing a live fox, and in the last week I have spied no less than four. I don't know if this means the fox population in Pennsylvania is enjoying a resurgence, or whether it is simply luck of the draw, but I am enjoying catching glimpses of these elusive, beautiful beasts.
* Encountering the foxes reminded me of how, in Los Angeles, I went ages without seeing a lynx (bobcat), and then, in a relatively short period, saw three or four, including one of startling size at the Hollywood reservoir. It also reminded me of a story my mother likes to tell, about how my brother saw a silver fox in the front yard of their Evanston, Illinois home, and shouted at her to come running, but she thought he was lying and yelled at him instead.
* Whenever the subject of foxes comes up, I am reminded that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's nickname was "The Desert Fox." It is not widely known, but when he was a young lieutenant serving in the First World War, Rommel kept a fox as a pet. I sometimes wonder if this is just a meaningless coincidence, or if the natural slyness of foxes rubbed off on him.
* The tail of a fox is long, stiff, and bottlebrush in texture. It is precisely the opposite of a bobcat's tail, which is bobbed just like its ears, and even more opposite than the tightly curled, frizzy tail of a coyote.
* I saw my first coyote in Arizona about fifteen years ago, running over an airport access road in a red flash. I saw many more once I moved to California, and what struck me about the beasts was how remarkably narrow they are. I mean they are slat-thin. A coyote looks almost two-dimensional. Coyotes are scruffy, mangy looking animals but they are incredibly intelligent and extremely agile. They also kill racoons. Prior to the coyote invasion of Burbank, raccoons were everywhere: they traveled in literal packs, like gangs complete with Old West style eye-masks. Once the coyotes started hunting our streets at night, I rarely saw a racoon again.
* When the gang of raccoons that lived up in the palm trees in the alley behind my house was still operating, they were bold rascals indeed. One morning, a fellow make up effects artist and I were gearing up to go to work when the entire possee thundered down out of the palms and ran down the alley in formation into the mist. We stared at each other and burst out laughing. If they'd had six guns and little cowboy hats they could not have looked more like small, furry criminals.
* The gang's boldest robbery was of my neighbor's chicken coop. One night they scaled the fence, forced open the chain-link enclosure and attacked the hens my neighbors kept to lay eggs. I have never heard such a commotion, such God-awful screaming, as I heard that night. It was about three in the morning and rest assured, my 9mm pistol was in my hand when I went to the window to find out what the hell was happening. The coons managed to kill and eat several of the hens before they made good their escape.
* Depending on where I go hiking, and when, I have some idea of the wildlife I'll encounter on my travels. The Old Field trail has a healthy turtle population (in the pond, of course), and abounds with rabbits and deer. I see white cranes there sometimes as well, and believe me, you don't want those things to yell at you -- it sounds like a madman screaming bloody murder. The Rail Trail, on the other hand, has a family of feral cats (in the scrapyard), a wandering clan of enormous and very noisy wild geese (the kind with the knobs on top of their their beaks), and remarkably fat groundhogs. One thing I seldom see is snakes. Wrong climate, I suppose.
* In California, snakes abound. At Pico Canyon and Cahuenga Peak, I saw rattlesnakes on a regular basis, including some truly large specimens who let me know they weren't too terribly pleased to see me. Rattlers are not scary in person, because they come with their own alarm systems to let you know where they are and what mood they are in, but damn, if you hear that rattle and you can't see the snake, you're in some trouble.
* Startling wild animals can be entertaining. I would never do it on purpose, but accidents happen. I once blundered into a huge red-tailed hawk reposing in a six-foot sapling just a yard or two away. The bird took wing, and its talons missed my scalp by a few inches. Otherwise I wouldn't have one. That was one pissed-off bird, and I'm just glad she wasn't guarding a nest. A few months ago here in PA, I was nearly run over by a large doe who somehow didn't hear me coming until I was a few feet away: hidden from me by thick green bushes, she burst forth and missed me by about a yard. I'd have had a tough time explaining those bruises.
* People do not associate Hollywood with deer, but I have seen many a deer around the Hollywood reservoir, actually entire families of them at a time. I once even saw a doe and a buck grazing on a steep hillside, crowned with mansions, in front of the 101 Freeway. Probably the lack of vegetation keeps the deer population in SoCal down more or less naturally, so you don't see Angelinos opening fire on them with Uzis from the windows of their Teslas. In Pennsylvania they are shot in huge numbers. 442,960 white-tailed deer were shot in the 2022-2023 hunting season. That is a fuck-ton of venison.
* I recently worked a criminal case in which several people of astonishing stupidity jacklighted (illegally shot) three or four large deer, backstrapped them (harvested the choicest meat only, running along the spine, and left the rest), dragged the corpses a few yards off their property into the woods, and left them to rot, without even bothering to wash the blood off their pickup trucks parked nearby. The game warden did not have to overexert himself cracking this case. It's always comforting to know people with two-digit IQs can own high-powered rifles.
* When I visit my mom in Maryland, I occasionally revisit the C & O Canal trail, where I spent much time as a boy. That is a very wild place. It was there I was chased by my first goose (they hiss when angry, and they are easily angered), saw my first turkey vulture (seldom has so formiddable a bird from below the neck been so ridiculous above: they have tiny heads that look exactly like those of old, bald men), and encountered a snapping turtle of such monstrous size (larger than a toilet seat) that its tail looked crocodilian. I also see a lot of cranes fishing patiently on the banks, as the canal positively teems with fish, some of them up to about eighteen inches in length or even better.
* I know very little about birds, but today I saw a woodpecker in full glory, complete with mohawk, and even better, some jet-black birds with gorgeous fire-engine red plumage on their wings, rather like the national markings you see on military aircraft. In Burbank, about once a year, there would appear masses of gorgeous pale green birds with yellow-and-red flame-like markings on their wings and tails, birds so exotic they looked as if they might have flown from South America. There were also two very fat, black-eyed birds with stiff tufts above their skulls, like spiked hair, who made a nest in the eaves of my neighbor's garage. My cat took great interest in these two, but they were not having it: one day they dive bombed him so relentlessly that he soon gave up all pretense of fighting back and made a cowardly retreat back into my home, where he was mocked and shamed for not standing his ground.
* My cat is not wild, but in my yard you'd never have known it. He attacked anything and everything, killing small garden lizards by the score, fighting skinks, punching one of the neighbor's unfortunate hens right in its beak, swatting another neighbor's German shepherd puppy on the nose, battling trespassing cats, murdering a large brown rat, and even terrorizing a possum into playing dead. It is often said that human beings are the only animals who kill for pleasure rather than necessity, but anyone who saw ole Spike in action in that yard between 2013 - 2020 might argue differently.
As you can see, I am an outdoorsy type, but not exactly an expert on nature. I grew up in a leafy suburb on the edge of a swamp, and spent most of my childhood with mud on my knees and under my fingernails: but the wildest things I generally saw as a boy were generally squirrels. I will always find animal encounters of any kind to be worthy of note, and also a source of some pleasure. For when I spy tadpoles swarming in clear and shallow water, dime-sized toads with beautiful gray-green camouflage trembling upon leaves at edge of a pond, deer families munching grass on the edge of a farmer's field, comically porky hedgehogs power-waddling across country lanes, or flocks of geese strutting and honking by train tracks, I feel a great sense of relief that we haven't yet exterminated all forms of life around us, nor paved everything over, nor cut everything down. We may yet get to that point within my lifetime, but if my hikes and walks and rambles through woods, hills and mountains have taught me anything, it's that nature is incredibly resilient, and given a quarter of a chance, will return to full verdancy with astonishing speed. Whether its lively moss growing over a knocked-down tree, or green shoots springing forth from fire-blackened stumps, life tends to find a way. I just hope to hell we go along for the ride.
May 7, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: SUNDAY EDITION
On Saturday I went hiking in Swatara State Park, and the hike was of sufficient length to leave me in a state of complete exhaustion for the rest of the day. I spent it on the couch, watching Murder, She Wrote and various other low-energy pursuits which in no way involved writing my Saturday blog. For those of you who care, assuming such creatures exist, you have my apologies. While I have greatly enjoyed putting out two blogs a week, every week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, there are times when life just gets the best of me and I can't make my deadlines, self-imposed or otherwise.
It is now 10:33 PM on Sunday night, and I am sitting here by the light of a red lamp and a single candle, sipping whiskey on the rocks. I have been a busy boy since I knocked off work on Friday, and am almost relieved to be returning to the grind of what I sometimes refer to as "my day job" tomorrow morning. In recent weeks I've made a point of being more productive in my personal life, i.e. doing more and breaking out of my ordinary ruts and routines, and while it has been rewarding, it has also been exhausting. I once took a personality quiz which told me I am an "extroverted introvert," and one of the characteristics of this beast is that while he enjoys socializing, it costs him a great deal of energy which can only be replenished in solitude. Today was a solitary day, and it gave me time to recharge my batteries, all the while plotting further adventures.
For people like me, who have to force themselves into action, and who are at any rate disorganized and procratinatory by nature, it's a big deal to make plans, and an even bigger deal to keep them. I have been working harder than I would have believed to notch as much travel as I can this year, but haven't gone anywhere farther than 100 miles from my home. That will change in a few weeks when I go to Dallas. Aside from driving through the North Texas "funnel" and stopping for gas, I've never actually been to Texas, so that will be an experience. I am also currently in the finer details of a weeklong excursion to Canada in the summer, during which I hope to see Toronto, Ottowa, Montreal and Quebec City, or at least some combination of the same. I am also hopeful of seeing Los Angeles again by the fall, and plan a long weekend getaway to the Jacksonville area before too long. How much of this will actually come off I can't yet say: travel is terribly expensive nowadays, and that got me thinking about a rather sore subject: the cost of living.
I am not referring to the ordinary cost of living as it is defined by the government. I mean the literal cost of living -- the fact that we must pay to simply exist. When you really think about it, there is nothing, literally nothing, in modern life which does not require money. Food, shelter, drinking and bathing water, clothing, transportation, education, recreation, procreation -- it all has to be paid for in hard cash. We do not actually have to hand over money for the air we breathe, but I am convinced that if corporations could find a way to charge us for our O2, they would happily do so. Whenever I see films or documentaries on tribal societies, or even the settlers of the Old West, what strikes me is their actual, physical freedom in the literal sense of the word. They are not free from disease or hard work, but they are free from the taxman. They are free from the landlord. They are free from the bureacrat, the functionary, the lawyer and the sheriff. They do not pay for their food or clothing and they do not ask permission to move their residence. No one is telling them what to do: what they do is driven by necessity, and to a much smaller extent, by whim and desire. They have the awesome responsibility of taking care of themselves, and answering to almost no one.
Nowadays, we are locked into a pattern of existence quite the opposite of the one for which we were genetically designed. Our tribal groupings have been destroyed, and we no longer experience freedom in any meaningful sense. We cannot, for example, just decide to go live in the woods, because the woods are now someone else's property. Thanks to corporations, in some states we cannot even live off the grid without breaking the law: to collect rainwater, for example, or generate your own electricity, will land you in jail, for the simple reason that corporations can't profit off you if you aren't paying for their services. From the moment we are born, we are numbered, registered, logged, booked, and tracked. We are also governed by a staggering number of laws, rules, and regulations, which grow in number every year. What's more, we must pay agencies we never really see for the privilege of living anywhere at all. Somehow "they" -- this strange conglomeration of governments and banks and wealthy individuals -- own everything, and they make us pay out the nose to have anything. This requires most of us to work at exhausting, mind-numbing jobs which do not really produce anything and have little justification for their existence, so we can make a barely sufficient paycheck to cover our rent.
Think on that for a moment. How much more freedom would you have if you did not have to pay rent, or a mortgage? Most people's lives would change immeasurably for the better. I myself would live a completely different lifestyle, be free from the vast majority of my worries, and be able not only to enjoy myself more fully, but also help others less fortunate than myself. The few times in life I was rent-free, my bank account swole to outrageous proportions (relatively speaking) in a very short period of time. Yet most of us not only have rent/mortage, utilities, food, etc. to pay for, we also must pay student loans, credit card bills, and suchlike. The focus of our lives -- the best parts of our lives, physically and mentally -- is making money to have the necessities of life. Not to get ahead. Not to live our dreams. But simply to tread water, to stay afloat. And it is a struggle many people are losing. Right now, everything from gasoline to electricity to food to hotel rooms are all outrageously expensive. When I was in college, a gallon of gas cost 99 cents. It is now about $3.50 - $4.00. People shrug and say "inflation," as if that were a natural and not an artificial process: they also point out that people make more money now than they did then. And this is true. But do they make 350 - 400% more money? It seems to me that we are in a race we cannot win. That we are dying, economically, by inches. That every decade takes a little more actual freedom away from us. And I don't just mean economic freedom. I mean freedom from fear. Money, in the last extremity, does not buy us goods and services: it shields us from fear. If I took a straw poll about the worries of the ordinary person in this country, I am 100% confident that their fears have a hell of a lot less to do with the war in Ukraine, or the environment, or China, than they have to do with the price of bread and electricity. Everything keeps going up, up, up, and with that "up," down goes freedom.
When I was a child, I used to ask my father why people couldn't choose their nationality, or simply choose not to have one. Why they simply couldn't opt out of modern life and go live on a boat in the ocean or in the woods, so long as they were willing to accept the consequences of self-exile. He never really gave me an answer I could accept. Decades later I am still wondering. Why is it that we have no really meaningful say in the lives we lead, why are most of the choices offered to us are as meaningless as whether our car is silver or red? Why our are destinies written for us by accidents of birth? Why can't we walk away, and try some other way of life which doesn't involve the rat race, the energy drinks, the anxiety and insomnia and doom-scrolling depression? Is this all simply a terrible accident, a result of one too many bad decisions by our ancestors, or does it conform to someone's wicked master plan? Why, oh why, does every vacation, every moment of real spiritual and psychological pleasure, development or growth, even love itself, have to be paid for by cold, hard cash?
I have answers to none of these questions. In some cases I don't even have any theories. Like you, I'm stuck on the treadmill, the grindstone, the hamster wheel, trying to push the fucking thing along with one hand and snatch crumbs of prosperity with the other. I don't often have time or energy to philosophize. But every now and again, when the whiskey is close to hand and the candle flickers, I dream of freedom. Of taking a long ride in a glass-topped train through the snow-encumbered Canadian rockies while the sun blazes overhead -- until it doesn't, and the Northern Lights fill the night sky. Such trips are available. Such freedom is available.
But it costs $8,000.
It is now 10:33 PM on Sunday night, and I am sitting here by the light of a red lamp and a single candle, sipping whiskey on the rocks. I have been a busy boy since I knocked off work on Friday, and am almost relieved to be returning to the grind of what I sometimes refer to as "my day job" tomorrow morning. In recent weeks I've made a point of being more productive in my personal life, i.e. doing more and breaking out of my ordinary ruts and routines, and while it has been rewarding, it has also been exhausting. I once took a personality quiz which told me I am an "extroverted introvert," and one of the characteristics of this beast is that while he enjoys socializing, it costs him a great deal of energy which can only be replenished in solitude. Today was a solitary day, and it gave me time to recharge my batteries, all the while plotting further adventures.
For people like me, who have to force themselves into action, and who are at any rate disorganized and procratinatory by nature, it's a big deal to make plans, and an even bigger deal to keep them. I have been working harder than I would have believed to notch as much travel as I can this year, but haven't gone anywhere farther than 100 miles from my home. That will change in a few weeks when I go to Dallas. Aside from driving through the North Texas "funnel" and stopping for gas, I've never actually been to Texas, so that will be an experience. I am also currently in the finer details of a weeklong excursion to Canada in the summer, during which I hope to see Toronto, Ottowa, Montreal and Quebec City, or at least some combination of the same. I am also hopeful of seeing Los Angeles again by the fall, and plan a long weekend getaway to the Jacksonville area before too long. How much of this will actually come off I can't yet say: travel is terribly expensive nowadays, and that got me thinking about a rather sore subject: the cost of living.
I am not referring to the ordinary cost of living as it is defined by the government. I mean the literal cost of living -- the fact that we must pay to simply exist. When you really think about it, there is nothing, literally nothing, in modern life which does not require money. Food, shelter, drinking and bathing water, clothing, transportation, education, recreation, procreation -- it all has to be paid for in hard cash. We do not actually have to hand over money for the air we breathe, but I am convinced that if corporations could find a way to charge us for our O2, they would happily do so. Whenever I see films or documentaries on tribal societies, or even the settlers of the Old West, what strikes me is their actual, physical freedom in the literal sense of the word. They are not free from disease or hard work, but they are free from the taxman. They are free from the landlord. They are free from the bureacrat, the functionary, the lawyer and the sheriff. They do not pay for their food or clothing and they do not ask permission to move their residence. No one is telling them what to do: what they do is driven by necessity, and to a much smaller extent, by whim and desire. They have the awesome responsibility of taking care of themselves, and answering to almost no one.
Nowadays, we are locked into a pattern of existence quite the opposite of the one for which we were genetically designed. Our tribal groupings have been destroyed, and we no longer experience freedom in any meaningful sense. We cannot, for example, just decide to go live in the woods, because the woods are now someone else's property. Thanks to corporations, in some states we cannot even live off the grid without breaking the law: to collect rainwater, for example, or generate your own electricity, will land you in jail, for the simple reason that corporations can't profit off you if you aren't paying for their services. From the moment we are born, we are numbered, registered, logged, booked, and tracked. We are also governed by a staggering number of laws, rules, and regulations, which grow in number every year. What's more, we must pay agencies we never really see for the privilege of living anywhere at all. Somehow "they" -- this strange conglomeration of governments and banks and wealthy individuals -- own everything, and they make us pay out the nose to have anything. This requires most of us to work at exhausting, mind-numbing jobs which do not really produce anything and have little justification for their existence, so we can make a barely sufficient paycheck to cover our rent.
Think on that for a moment. How much more freedom would you have if you did not have to pay rent, or a mortgage? Most people's lives would change immeasurably for the better. I myself would live a completely different lifestyle, be free from the vast majority of my worries, and be able not only to enjoy myself more fully, but also help others less fortunate than myself. The few times in life I was rent-free, my bank account swole to outrageous proportions (relatively speaking) in a very short period of time. Yet most of us not only have rent/mortage, utilities, food, etc. to pay for, we also must pay student loans, credit card bills, and suchlike. The focus of our lives -- the best parts of our lives, physically and mentally -- is making money to have the necessities of life. Not to get ahead. Not to live our dreams. But simply to tread water, to stay afloat. And it is a struggle many people are losing. Right now, everything from gasoline to electricity to food to hotel rooms are all outrageously expensive. When I was in college, a gallon of gas cost 99 cents. It is now about $3.50 - $4.00. People shrug and say "inflation," as if that were a natural and not an artificial process: they also point out that people make more money now than they did then. And this is true. But do they make 350 - 400% more money? It seems to me that we are in a race we cannot win. That we are dying, economically, by inches. That every decade takes a little more actual freedom away from us. And I don't just mean economic freedom. I mean freedom from fear. Money, in the last extremity, does not buy us goods and services: it shields us from fear. If I took a straw poll about the worries of the ordinary person in this country, I am 100% confident that their fears have a hell of a lot less to do with the war in Ukraine, or the environment, or China, than they have to do with the price of bread and electricity. Everything keeps going up, up, up, and with that "up," down goes freedom.
When I was a child, I used to ask my father why people couldn't choose their nationality, or simply choose not to have one. Why they simply couldn't opt out of modern life and go live on a boat in the ocean or in the woods, so long as they were willing to accept the consequences of self-exile. He never really gave me an answer I could accept. Decades later I am still wondering. Why is it that we have no really meaningful say in the lives we lead, why are most of the choices offered to us are as meaningless as whether our car is silver or red? Why our are destinies written for us by accidents of birth? Why can't we walk away, and try some other way of life which doesn't involve the rat race, the energy drinks, the anxiety and insomnia and doom-scrolling depression? Is this all simply a terrible accident, a result of one too many bad decisions by our ancestors, or does it conform to someone's wicked master plan? Why, oh why, does every vacation, every moment of real spiritual and psychological pleasure, development or growth, even love itself, have to be paid for by cold, hard cash?
I have answers to none of these questions. In some cases I don't even have any theories. Like you, I'm stuck on the treadmill, the grindstone, the hamster wheel, trying to push the fucking thing along with one hand and snatch crumbs of prosperity with the other. I don't often have time or energy to philosophize. But every now and again, when the whiskey is close to hand and the candle flickers, I dream of freedom. Of taking a long ride in a glass-topped train through the snow-encumbered Canadian rockies while the sun blazes overhead -- until it doesn't, and the Northern Lights fill the night sky. Such trips are available. Such freedom is available.
But it costs $8,000.
May 3, 2023
RAINN WILSON AND STRANGE FATE
A few days ago I went to the Strand Theater to see Rainn Wilson -- best known as Dwight on THE OFFICE -- give a talk on his new book, Soul Boom: Why We Need A Spiritual Revolution. I don't often use the word "delightful" but it was a delightful experience. In person, Wilson is everything you hoped he would be: funny, articulate, offbeat, and down to earth. The hour he was on stage went by in a flash, and when I spoke briefly with him afterwards, I was struck by the earnestness with which he insisted that I actually read the copy of the book I had been given as part of my "meet and greet" ticket package. I replied that I would not only read the book, I would review it, which is the highest compliment an author can recieve: being an author myself (on a much lower level, of course), I know this to be true. Wilson had many others to "meet and greet," but I think this remark affected him, if only momentarily. He's a wealthy man, and a successful one in ways that have nothing to do with wealth, but he values things that matter, and a sincere remark is tough to come by in the acting world.
When I first arrived in La La Land, I lived in Sherman Oaks, on the very edge of Van Nuys, where they were shooting THE OFFICE, and over the course of the first few years I lived there, I ran into B.J. Novak (Ryan), Mindy Kaling (Kelly) and Katherine Flannery (Meredith) on the street. I'm pretty sure I spotted Brian Baumgartner (Kevin), too -- on a donut line, no less. However, I never ran into, or even glimpsed, Rainn Wilson, who played the infamous Dwight Shrute. It was a small sore point with me. I admired his acting, and wanted to tell him so, even if it violated the "L.A. Code" of never stepping to famous people when you randomly encountered them. If you'd told me then that I would have to quit Los Angeles and move 3,000 miles away to a modest Pennsylvania town to encounter him at last, I'd have laughed in your face (at very least, I'd have laughed after you left the room). But that's what went down, strange as it was. Like the ancient saying goes, you often encounter your destiny on the road you take to avoid it.
I mention this because as I get older (and older still), I realize that while it is necessary and often wonderful to have life plans and long-term strategies, Moltke was right when he said that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Man proposes, but God disposes. Sometimes the very act of letting go of a dream is sufficient to make the dream come true, just as the very act of pursuing a goal -- or a person -- can drive it away. I'm no expert on Eastern philosophy (or Western philosophy, for that matter), but I do agree with Bruce Lee when he said that "the greatest hindrance to the execution of all physical action is knowledge of the self." The more self-aware, the more self-conscious, we are, the harder it is to do anything of a physical nature. But when we are in "the Zone," in a Zen state, conscious but unconscious, just acting without thinking, just being we are often flawless. It is ironic and paradoxical at the same time. Humans are marked and defined by their brains, their self-awareness, but they are also inhibited by them. We get in our own way. All of our elaborate plans and schemes and our intrigues and plots often obscure the simple necessity of letting go from time to time: of simply allowing life to happen, and bring us what it will.
When I was in "Hollywood," meaning both town and industry, I was too caught up in the frantic struggle to "make good" to ever truly relax and open myself up to the random opportunities that often float silently past us down life's curious currents. I don't like to think about what I missed while I was busy trying so hard to catch, but I think a lot about the moments I failed to enjoy to their fullest because I was trying too hard to exploit them rather than simply enjoy them. On the other hand, now that I'm out of the circus, I take enormous pleasure, even relish, in moments like this -- moments where I meet someone I admire, and have no other agenda than telling them that I admire them. The shift was not intentional on my part, it involved no discipline or brains or courage, it happened organically on its own: nevertheless, I reap the benefits by being fully present, fully appreciative, fully in the moment. For obvious reasons, I do not have as many moments like these as I used to, not being at the epicenter of all entertainment, but I take greater enjoyment in the ones I do experience.
Like everyone else, I've zero idea what the future holds in store. I make my plans, and I harbor my hopes, but I am keenly aware that Fate is going to do with me exactly as it pleases no matter how many reservations I make. This prosaic epiphany (right up there with discovering water is wet) has allowed me to surrender some of the egotistical desire I had for total control over my own life. It has also allowed me to realize just how much of the suffering I endured between 2017 - 2020 was self-inflicted -- a direct effect of attempting a completely hopeless task. The more I tried to bring order, the more chaos I experienced. Had I been able to relax, to forget myself and ride the waves...but that water is very much under the dam. All I can say is the lesson did sink in, and I hope it stays, well, sunk.
I am now reading Wilson's book, which describes the spiritual journey he has made which allowed him to overcome anxiety, depression and existential dread and lead a more fulfilled, creative, and enjoyable life. I am hopeful that it will help me in my own quest to find more satisfaction and less strife in my existence, but amuses me greatly to think that this book is in my hands only because I ran into Rainn on the 3,000-mile road that I took to avoid him.
When I first arrived in La La Land, I lived in Sherman Oaks, on the very edge of Van Nuys, where they were shooting THE OFFICE, and over the course of the first few years I lived there, I ran into B.J. Novak (Ryan), Mindy Kaling (Kelly) and Katherine Flannery (Meredith) on the street. I'm pretty sure I spotted Brian Baumgartner (Kevin), too -- on a donut line, no less. However, I never ran into, or even glimpsed, Rainn Wilson, who played the infamous Dwight Shrute. It was a small sore point with me. I admired his acting, and wanted to tell him so, even if it violated the "L.A. Code" of never stepping to famous people when you randomly encountered them. If you'd told me then that I would have to quit Los Angeles and move 3,000 miles away to a modest Pennsylvania town to encounter him at last, I'd have laughed in your face (at very least, I'd have laughed after you left the room). But that's what went down, strange as it was. Like the ancient saying goes, you often encounter your destiny on the road you take to avoid it.
I mention this because as I get older (and older still), I realize that while it is necessary and often wonderful to have life plans and long-term strategies, Moltke was right when he said that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Man proposes, but God disposes. Sometimes the very act of letting go of a dream is sufficient to make the dream come true, just as the very act of pursuing a goal -- or a person -- can drive it away. I'm no expert on Eastern philosophy (or Western philosophy, for that matter), but I do agree with Bruce Lee when he said that "the greatest hindrance to the execution of all physical action is knowledge of the self." The more self-aware, the more self-conscious, we are, the harder it is to do anything of a physical nature. But when we are in "the Zone," in a Zen state, conscious but unconscious, just acting without thinking, just being we are often flawless. It is ironic and paradoxical at the same time. Humans are marked and defined by their brains, their self-awareness, but they are also inhibited by them. We get in our own way. All of our elaborate plans and schemes and our intrigues and plots often obscure the simple necessity of letting go from time to time: of simply allowing life to happen, and bring us what it will.
When I was in "Hollywood," meaning both town and industry, I was too caught up in the frantic struggle to "make good" to ever truly relax and open myself up to the random opportunities that often float silently past us down life's curious currents. I don't like to think about what I missed while I was busy trying so hard to catch, but I think a lot about the moments I failed to enjoy to their fullest because I was trying too hard to exploit them rather than simply enjoy them. On the other hand, now that I'm out of the circus, I take enormous pleasure, even relish, in moments like this -- moments where I meet someone I admire, and have no other agenda than telling them that I admire them. The shift was not intentional on my part, it involved no discipline or brains or courage, it happened organically on its own: nevertheless, I reap the benefits by being fully present, fully appreciative, fully in the moment. For obvious reasons, I do not have as many moments like these as I used to, not being at the epicenter of all entertainment, but I take greater enjoyment in the ones I do experience.
Like everyone else, I've zero idea what the future holds in store. I make my plans, and I harbor my hopes, but I am keenly aware that Fate is going to do with me exactly as it pleases no matter how many reservations I make. This prosaic epiphany (right up there with discovering water is wet) has allowed me to surrender some of the egotistical desire I had for total control over my own life. It has also allowed me to realize just how much of the suffering I endured between 2017 - 2020 was self-inflicted -- a direct effect of attempting a completely hopeless task. The more I tried to bring order, the more chaos I experienced. Had I been able to relax, to forget myself and ride the waves...but that water is very much under the dam. All I can say is the lesson did sink in, and I hope it stays, well, sunk.
I am now reading Wilson's book, which describes the spiritual journey he has made which allowed him to overcome anxiety, depression and existential dread and lead a more fulfilled, creative, and enjoyable life. I am hopeful that it will help me in my own quest to find more satisfaction and less strife in my existence, but amuses me greatly to think that this book is in my hands only because I ran into Rainn on the 3,000-mile road that I took to avoid him.
April 29, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: SALTIVUR AMBULANO
HOLMES: Solvitur ambulando.
WATSON: Latin. It means, "The problem is solved by walking."
HOLMES: That is a very loose translation, Watson.
It must have rained a good twelve to fourteen hours yesterday. Really hard, cold rain, of the sort you are more likely to encounter in mid-late autumn than early spring. Because of this, all the places I like to go hiking are undoubtely a morass of mud, puddles, knocked-down branches and felled saplings. To hike today means putting on my uncomfortable boots and trudging through this soapy mess while water drips endlessly upon the back of my neck. It also means at least one humiliating fall in the muck. Nevertheless, I intend to go.
Do not think I am signaling some kind of athletic virtue. I was scandalously lazy this entire week past and hardly got any exercise at all. To compound the felony, I ate foods I should not have eaten and ate too many of them. I feel soft and disgusting. No virtue here. This is necessity, and overdue necessity at that. But as much as I need to burn up some calories, my purpose is hardly athletic-only in nature. I am going to slog through the wet woods because I have problems to solve, and a long, exhausting meander through nature is the only way I know how to solve them.
For me, as for countless others throughout human history, the best place to find practical enlightenment is in motion. When I have a personal problem, I go into the woods and try to find an answer there. More interestingly, it is also the place where I seek answers to my creative problems, i.e. the problems I face as a writer. My last (not yet published) novel, Exiles: A Tale From The Chronicle of Magnus, was composed, and all of its various plot issues resolved, via a series of lengthy hikes. Not every one of these hikes was equally productive, of course, but all of them yielded something, and due to the proximity of trees, streams, fields and animals, it has a paganistic feeling, as if one is recieving a benefit from communing with the elder gods of nature. However, the process is consistently effective to have more of a scientific than a magical property within my own mind: it especially feels nonmagical because it is necessary to concentrate on the issues at hand while one walks. If I let my mind wander and ramble the way my feet are wandering and rambling, well, I end up nowhere. So it is a process which requires active participation, rather than mere observation. For all that, I do think it good for the spirit as well as the body. Our species was born in the wild: for a 94,000 of our 100,000 year history the wild was where we lived and died. It is only in the last six thousand years, the period of what we call civilization, that we have shut ourselves off from the air, the sky, the moon, the stars, the sun, and all the things the sun shines upon.
My present problem is one of focus. I am not comfortable unless I have a writing project to undertake, but at the moment I am suffering from an embarrassment of riches in this regard. I have so many different projects I want to start, or to finish, that following my (usually) obeyed rule of "concentrate on one until it's done" has been impossible to follow. I'm like a kid given only one minute to have his way in a candy store, a bull allowed but sixty seconds to work off his rage in a china shop. The only way to reap anything useful from the experience is to pick a target. And I just can't seem to do it. I have too many choices. Here's a partial list:
* Twenty years ago I wrote a rough-as-sandpaper first draft of a shortish horror novel set in Los Angeles. It's by no means fit for publication and has to be rewritten from page one so as to actually incorporate the local knowledge I acquired in the 12 1/2 years I spent in the city afterwriting the draft. I love the story, but I get weak when I think of how much of it I am going to have to change.
* Twenty years ago I wrote 85% of a short novel set in Vietnam. I had the ending, but never wrote it: my enthusiasm for the project waned, as it always did in those days, short of the finish line. I want to finish this goddamned thing, but promoting it would be exceptionally difficult and probably not even possible before 2024, which seems a long way off.
* I need to write a third entry in my Cage Life series. I've finally worked out a plot for the damned thing, and even an ending, but it's still upsettingly vague, and I don't want to begin until I have a much clearer picture of exactly what I want to do with the story. This series, despite all its violence and neonoir flavor, is really about the redemption of one man, his spiritual journey, and it has to be handled just so.
* I have written about a quarter of the third novel in the Sinner's Cross series, and like what I have done, but again, I am not certain enough of exactly where I want the story to go, or how it will get there, and I do not want to improvise. This series is, from a writing standpoint, my masterpiece: at least I view it that way. I can't afford to get it wrong. Also? I put out the second book late last year, so there's really no urgency to get this one on the shelves yet.
* When I finished Exiles, I already had creative ammunition for another novel in that universe, and began it with considerable ease and pleasure. Unfortunately, it is proving a much harder story to write than its predecessor, which came close to writing itself. Although I truly love the protagonist, exactly what I want him to learn upon his journey, and how he will interact with the character of Magnus (the driving force for the series), is unclear to me.
Today I hope to solve my central problem by courting an epiphany as to just where my creative focus needs to be. If I can reach that much of an enlightenment, I justify the mud I am going to have to scrap off myself afterwards: but I am greedy, and hoping as well for a wave of inspiration to help me solve the internal problems each of these projects is presenting me, its would-be author. On Wednesday, I will be happy to share what if anything I accomplished on my journey, but for now, I just hope you wish that any falls into streams or down hillsides go unwitnessed by anything but the deer.
WATSON: Latin. It means, "The problem is solved by walking."
HOLMES: That is a very loose translation, Watson.
It must have rained a good twelve to fourteen hours yesterday. Really hard, cold rain, of the sort you are more likely to encounter in mid-late autumn than early spring. Because of this, all the places I like to go hiking are undoubtely a morass of mud, puddles, knocked-down branches and felled saplings. To hike today means putting on my uncomfortable boots and trudging through this soapy mess while water drips endlessly upon the back of my neck. It also means at least one humiliating fall in the muck. Nevertheless, I intend to go.
Do not think I am signaling some kind of athletic virtue. I was scandalously lazy this entire week past and hardly got any exercise at all. To compound the felony, I ate foods I should not have eaten and ate too many of them. I feel soft and disgusting. No virtue here. This is necessity, and overdue necessity at that. But as much as I need to burn up some calories, my purpose is hardly athletic-only in nature. I am going to slog through the wet woods because I have problems to solve, and a long, exhausting meander through nature is the only way I know how to solve them.
For me, as for countless others throughout human history, the best place to find practical enlightenment is in motion. When I have a personal problem, I go into the woods and try to find an answer there. More interestingly, it is also the place where I seek answers to my creative problems, i.e. the problems I face as a writer. My last (not yet published) novel, Exiles: A Tale From The Chronicle of Magnus, was composed, and all of its various plot issues resolved, via a series of lengthy hikes. Not every one of these hikes was equally productive, of course, but all of them yielded something, and due to the proximity of trees, streams, fields and animals, it has a paganistic feeling, as if one is recieving a benefit from communing with the elder gods of nature. However, the process is consistently effective to have more of a scientific than a magical property within my own mind: it especially feels nonmagical because it is necessary to concentrate on the issues at hand while one walks. If I let my mind wander and ramble the way my feet are wandering and rambling, well, I end up nowhere. So it is a process which requires active participation, rather than mere observation. For all that, I do think it good for the spirit as well as the body. Our species was born in the wild: for a 94,000 of our 100,000 year history the wild was where we lived and died. It is only in the last six thousand years, the period of what we call civilization, that we have shut ourselves off from the air, the sky, the moon, the stars, the sun, and all the things the sun shines upon.
My present problem is one of focus. I am not comfortable unless I have a writing project to undertake, but at the moment I am suffering from an embarrassment of riches in this regard. I have so many different projects I want to start, or to finish, that following my (usually) obeyed rule of "concentrate on one until it's done" has been impossible to follow. I'm like a kid given only one minute to have his way in a candy store, a bull allowed but sixty seconds to work off his rage in a china shop. The only way to reap anything useful from the experience is to pick a target. And I just can't seem to do it. I have too many choices. Here's a partial list:
* Twenty years ago I wrote a rough-as-sandpaper first draft of a shortish horror novel set in Los Angeles. It's by no means fit for publication and has to be rewritten from page one so as to actually incorporate the local knowledge I acquired in the 12 1/2 years I spent in the city afterwriting the draft. I love the story, but I get weak when I think of how much of it I am going to have to change.
* Twenty years ago I wrote 85% of a short novel set in Vietnam. I had the ending, but never wrote it: my enthusiasm for the project waned, as it always did in those days, short of the finish line. I want to finish this goddamned thing, but promoting it would be exceptionally difficult and probably not even possible before 2024, which seems a long way off.
* I need to write a third entry in my Cage Life series. I've finally worked out a plot for the damned thing, and even an ending, but it's still upsettingly vague, and I don't want to begin until I have a much clearer picture of exactly what I want to do with the story. This series, despite all its violence and neonoir flavor, is really about the redemption of one man, his spiritual journey, and it has to be handled just so.
* I have written about a quarter of the third novel in the Sinner's Cross series, and like what I have done, but again, I am not certain enough of exactly where I want the story to go, or how it will get there, and I do not want to improvise. This series is, from a writing standpoint, my masterpiece: at least I view it that way. I can't afford to get it wrong. Also? I put out the second book late last year, so there's really no urgency to get this one on the shelves yet.
* When I finished Exiles, I already had creative ammunition for another novel in that universe, and began it with considerable ease and pleasure. Unfortunately, it is proving a much harder story to write than its predecessor, which came close to writing itself. Although I truly love the protagonist, exactly what I want him to learn upon his journey, and how he will interact with the character of Magnus (the driving force for the series), is unclear to me.
Today I hope to solve my central problem by courting an epiphany as to just where my creative focus needs to be. If I can reach that much of an enlightenment, I justify the mud I am going to have to scrap off myself afterwards: but I am greedy, and hoping as well for a wave of inspiration to help me solve the internal problems each of these projects is presenting me, its would-be author. On Wednesday, I will be happy to share what if anything I accomplished on my journey, but for now, I just hope you wish that any falls into streams or down hillsides go unwitnessed by anything but the deer.
April 26, 2023
WHAT I WATCHED IN 2022 - HORROR FREE EDITION
Without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken. -- Duke Leto Atreides
Every year I keep an accounting not only of what I read, but what I watched -- the new stuff, anyway. I do this not because I suffer from glazomania, but rather as a goad to make sure that I continue to expand my horizons. As I have stated here before, one surefire way of battling anxiety is to engage in repetitious behavior where the outcome is known. Thus, just as I reread books, I rewatch movies and television shows. The downside of this technique is that one becomes a bit of a ghost while still alive, endlessly repeating old experiences without accumulating the new ones necessary for growth. And so I make a list of everything I have seen which I have never seen before, and make sure that list is of sufficient length to prove to myself that I am, in fact, still among the living.
In 2022 I did a better-than-usual job of seeking out new entertainments, the caveat being that thirty of the films I watched were horror movies consumed during October. Since I have already shared most of those films and my take on them here, I won't do so again, and have also eliminated some very genre-specific stuff such as very old episodes of "Doctor Who."
That having been said, let's examine my weird and eclectic tastes:
Trapped (1949) - This is an excellent detective thriller with strongly Noirish elements starring Lloyd Bridges as a counterfeiter who escapes Secret Service custody and proceeds to raise hell while trying to put together One Last Deal. The dialog in this film is delivered with the rapid-fire assurance of a machine gun, the pace never lags, and the climax is sufficiently violent to satisfy any fan of the genre.
The Lady Confesses (1945) -- This is a Film Noir flick which is so predictable and by the numbers I nearly switched it off until a completely unexpected twist changed the entire direction of the movie. I confess to being completely unready for the course this movie took about halfway through, though sharper wits may not be as surprised.
The Winter War (Extended Edition, 1989) -- Thanks to Vladimir Putin, this "director's cut" of a Finnish war movie about Stalin's brutal invasion of Finland in 1940 is now timelier than ever. It follows a group of Finnish men called up into the army to oppose the Soviet attack, and the horrors they endure as they are streadily ground down by the Red hordes. It's a lively, extremely brutal depiction of war, but curiously removed from its protagonists. It's the story of an event, and a very unpleasant one at that.
Exorcist III: Legion (1990) -- I forgot to mention I rewatched this last year during my October-fest. I hadn't seen it since its original theater release, and had forgotten a great deal of it, largely with good reason. Though almost carried by George C. Scott's memorable performance as a crusty, spiritually bankrupt cop forced to come to terms with the supernatural, and an even more memorable turn by Brad Dourif as a serial killer possessed by the devil, the movie is ultimately a mere jumble of scenes (some quite effective, I grant you) that borders on the incoherent and never really comes together. A classic example of a film destroyed by reshoots ordered by the studio brass. I am somewhat sentimental about it because I practically grew up in Georgetown, where the movie is set: my high school crew team used to run the infamous "Exorcist steps" as part of their daily workout.
I, Claudius (1976) -- A Who's Who of British actors who would later become famous, the miniseries follows the improbable rise of Claudius, a shy little bookworm with a terrible stutter and a limp who probably suffered from cerebral palsy, to the throne of the Roman Empire. The only knock on this dusty masterpiece is that all the intrigue, perversion, betrayal, power-lust and casual cruelty become wearisome after a time, though Claudius' relentless innocence in the face of all this guile is therefore all the more charming. A young Patrick Stewart excels as the horribly sadistic plotter Sejanus: John Hurt is similarly terrifying as the mad Caligula.
For the Rights of Mankind (1934) -- this piece of Nazi-era cinema is a look at the brief but savage German civil war which followed their defeat in the First World War. Directed by arch-Nazi Hans Zöberlein, and scathing in its anti-communism, it is nonetheless an entertaining and well-made film, meant to glorify the "Free Corps" who crushed the Communist uprisings of 1919. Like most German movies of the Weimar/Nazi era, it has a fractured narrative, so the characters do not stand out, but it is subtler in its political approach than one would expect from a man like Zöberlein. Nazi cinema is by and large a very good place to study the intersection between propaganda and pop culture.
Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) -- OK, I have seen this movie before, but so many years ago I'd forgotten most of it. This is a lavish, beautiful, operatic, tragic depiction of the downfall of the Romanov Dynasty, which walks the tightrope between sympathy and disgust at the naivete, haplesses and incompetence which ultimately doomed the last of the Russian Tsars. In the end it is a romance between Nicholas II and his bride Alexandra, who loved each other so much they destroyed one another. (Tom Baker excels as the legendary degenerate Rasputin: this performance got him the role as Doctor Who #4 in 1974.)
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). I'd never heard of this movie, and I can't understand why. Despite its central flaw -- extremely unlikeable characters all around -- this is a very memorable story about the infamous charge made by British cavalry against the Russians at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. A scathing, black-comic take on life in the brutally class-ridden British army, it depicts rotten-hearted officers obsessed with personal honor and glory who treat their men worse than livestock when they aren't balling each others' wives. There's nobody to like in the movie, but this is the cruelly treated, ill-paid mercenary army of 19th century Great Britain as it undoubtedly was, full of drunkenness, adultery, and venereal disease. Forget romanticizing the past, this is deromanticizing it.
In Battle With the Enemies of the World (1939) -- A Nazi propaganda film depicting the activities of the Legion Condor during the Spanish Civil War, this is more of historical and technical interest than it is actually entertaining. The Legion Condor was a military force of Germans sent by Hitler to fight for Franco's Nationalists, and returned in triumph to Germany following Franco's victory in 1939. Proflific Nazi director Karl Ritter put together this noisy, technically innovative, not terribly resonant piece of cheerleading for Hitler, and it's worth watching for its historical interest.
Ukraine In Flames (1944) -- Flipping the propaganda coin, UKRAINE IN FLAMES is a wartime Soviet documentary about Nazi crimes in Ukraine during Hitler's occupation of same. It is a graphic, unsettling, sometimes disgusting depiction of the aftereffects of war, looting, deliberate starvation, scorched-earth policies and casual killing. Wrecked towns, rotting corpses, dead horses harvested for their meat, sobbing mothers holding starvation-bloated babies crawling with flies -- the whole horror of Nazism in practice is laid bare. The film seethes with hatred for the "Hiterlites" but lays out a surprisingly disciplined case against them, mostly letting the horror speak for itself. There is, of course, a strong tinge of irony in watching this movie now, given what the Russians, inheritors of Stalin's mantle, are doing to Ukraine even as I write these words.
Perry Mason: Seasons 6 & 7 (1961 - 1962) -- I have been slowly working my way through all 271 episodes of this legendary lawyer show over the past three or four years now, and enjoying every moment thoroughly. Probably the best legal show ever made, it was never better than during its sixth season, featuring innovative stories, strong performances, crackling courtroom confrontations, and liberal doses of wink-wink humor. The rigid formula of the show never got in the way of a good time, and the depiction of late 50s-early-mid-60s L.A., with its huge steel-chassied convertibles, its women in furs and pearls, its Martini and cigarette culture, is worth the price of admission by itself. (Living in L.A. for many years, I saw glimpses of this extinct world here and there in old buildings and old cars, but here it comes alive in all its romantic, slightly tawdry beauty.)
Simon and Simon: Season 8 (1988) -- I truly loved SIMON & SIMON when I was growing up, and I'm happy to say that 30+ years have neither dated the show out of watchability nor lessened the joy of watching Gerald McRaney (Rick) and Jameson Parker (A.J.) play brothers running a private detective agency in San Diego in the 1980s. Despite living in the shadow of MAGNUM, P.I., this spirited, often hilarious show was never stunted in its growth, and while the plots were often fairly pedestrian in nature, the chemistry between the actors and the often brilliant dialog never failed to elevate the material. Season 8 was the finale, and I'm happy to say the formula was working just as well if not better in these final episodes as it was in the first season.
The Last Full Measure (2019) -- This movie was so well-reviewed on Amazon that I had to see it for myself. The result, however, is highly underwhelming, flat and predictable. The story of a selfish modern-day Pentagon flunky tasked with investigating whether a Vietnam soldier killed in battle should receive a posthumous Medal of Honor, it is a well-crafted movie which holds one's interest, but fails to resonate, mainly because the arc of the protagonist is so badly telegraphed. The best part, by far, is a brief appearance by Samuel Jackson, who underplays himself deliberately to produce a memorable effect.
The Gauntlet (1977) - This is a dumb, plot-hole-ridden mess of a Clint Eastwood movie which nevertheless manages to be modestly entertaining and surprisingly memorable. Eastwood plays a drunken, broken-down cop charged with escorting a prostitute back from Vegas to Phoenix for a Mafia trial. On the way, every manner of assassin shows up, leading to one of the more improbable if visually arresting finales I can recall, where Eastwood plows an armored bus through hailstorms of police gunfire to get to City Hall. It's a brutal, silly, extremely vulgar film, but there is a memorably evil performance by a misogynistic deputy (Ron Chapman) and a hilarious, profane rant by Sandra Locke in which she puts Eastwood firmly in his place.
Obi-Wan Kenobi (6 episodes, 2022) -- As much as I abominate live-action Disney Star Wars, I was looking forward to being reunited with Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christiansen, Jimmy Smits, and various others from the prequel series and praying to the Force that Kathleen Kennedy wouldn't fuck this up the way she has everything else. The Force sadly wasn't listening, because this miniseries, despite some promising moments here and there, is a bloated, poorly conceived, poorly written, Wokeist bait-and-switch of the very worst kind. The story, such as it is, revolves almost entirely around Reva, arguably the worst character Star Wars has produced since Rose Tico, and a 10 year-old Princess Leia who is exploited for cute points almost as badly as "The Mandalorian" mines Baby Yoda. Obi-Wan spends the entire series backseating to various "strong female characters," all of whom are smarter and savvier than he is, and the plot is so riddled with holes, inconsistencies, and pointless characters that you could cut this by 2/3 and actually improve the product. An embarrassment that should never have been made, any second season of this lifeless trash should pretend the first one never happened.
Father Dowling Mysteries: The Complete Series (1989-1991) -- There is a place for "family entertainment" in everyone's literal or figurative DVD cabinet, and when I've had a tough day, nothing relaxes me more than to sink into some unchallenging cozy mystery show from the 80s. This short-lived series stars Tom Bosley as a kindly, cuddly priest who solves crimes in Chicago when he ought to be praying. It's predictable, silly, under-funded, and riddled with the tropes and cliches of the era: I still enjoyed it.
Downton Abbey: Series 1 -- I wanted to see what all the fuss was about viz this series, so I watched the first season. It's an entertaining if very soap-opera-ey depiction of a titled British family and their "help," both of whom struggle to find places in the rapidly changing world of the 1910s-1920s. I wasn't blown away, and it already seemed to be running short of ideas come the beginning of the second season, but I get why some people found it addictive: it's a steady look at a largely vanished era full of glamour, hypocrisy, snobbery, duty, tradition and scandal. Kind of like the Royal Family now!
Sundown (1943) -- This is a surprisingly offbeat WW2 movie set in Africa, in which a Canadian colonial official spars with his British military colleagues and a mysterious and beautiful local princess, while battling Axis spies trying to encourage the natives to revolt. A surprisingly complex look at the ethics of colonialism in a war supposedly fought for freedom, it's far less heavy-handed than I was expecting, and touches lightly on the hypocrisy of the British "fighting for democracy" while simultaneously ruling over a vast empire held together by economic extortion and brute military force.
Raid 2 (2014) -- The original RAID is something of a legendary martial arts action movie, featuring incredibly brutal, elaborate, and lengthy fight scenes between actors who, in the Indo-Asiatic tradition, actually do their own stunts. The sequel is more of a conventional action picture, drenched in blood and betrayal but lacking in impact. It will hold your interest, and the fight scenes are of course epic, but it won't linger with you. Too much action and violence are in my mind the same as not enough.
The Six Million Dollar Man: Season 5 (1977-1978) -- The ultimate season of this classic, campy superhero series was just as much fun as the ones which preceded it, the main difference being that Lee Majors did more of his own stunts this time around. Some of the plots are past absurdity even for a 70s kids show about an ex-astronaut with robotic body parts, but in this cynical age, it's fun to see an unconflicted, old-style hero in action. No politics, no preaching, just good guys fighting and ultimately beating bad guys without anyone ever getting killed.
Brideshead Revisited (1981) -- A dissolute, depressed English lord and his social-climbing middle-class friend, who exist in perpetual homoerotic tension with each other, fumble through life in Jazz Age England as the shadow of WW2 begins to fall. Sound dull? It often is, but it's also a strangely compelling look at the last gasp of the old British aristocracy as seen through a man who benefits from the association, but isn't blind, and in fact shares, all of its faults. Rife with suppressed sexuality of every kind, and full of characters who are absolutely useless to society and subconsciously aware of it, it's also a story of the search for sincere faith amid well-mannered, white-tie-and-tails depravity. Jeremy Irons is brilliant as Charles Ryder, who allows himself to be seduced by a wealth that isn't his, and pays a curiously terrible emotional price.
The Octopus: Series 5 & 6 (1990 - 1991) -- This longrunning 80s-00s Italian series was a ruthless, fictionalized expose of the Mafia's domination of Italian and Sicilian politics, and ruffled so many feathers that the government actually stepped in following the sixth season to prevent any further embarrassment. Season 5 - 6 follow the new hero cop, Davide, and his love interest, the scrappy prosecutor Silvia, as they battle the Mafia with the usual mixed success at the cost of heavy casualties. Relentlessly violent and full of twists, turns and betrayals, "The Octopus" is always entertaining, and features one of the most complex and fascinating villains I've ever seen: criminal mastermind Tano Carridi, portrayed by Remo Girone: a solitary, misanthropic crook who is at once chillingly amoral and deeply pathetic.
Streets of Fire -- This 1984 Walter Hill film, a "rock 'n roll fable," died a quick death at the box office, but has rightfully won cult status. Set in an alternate, Noirish, 50s-style reality, it's the story of a rugged loner-mercenary (Michael Pare') hired to rescue his former flame, a rock singer, from the clutches of an evil biker gang leader (Willem Defoe). Just sheer fun from beginning to end, the best performance in this music-laden rock opera is actually Rick Moranis as a nerdy, obnoxious, but absolutely fearless band tour manager determined to get his "property" back. This movie is way ahead of its time in terms of imagination and casting, and employs a Who's Who of "familiar face" actors, including a young Bill Paxton.
Tales of the Jedi (2022) -- "The Clone Wars," being mostly free of Disney's slimy clutches, were some of the best Star Wars to come out in God knows how long. "Tales of the Jedi" is a series of stand-alone episodes that fills in certain still-lingering blanks, such as how Count Dooku fell to the dark side and what happened to Ashoka Tano after she left the series. Very enjoyable if you're already a fan of the prequels/Clone Wars universe. It continues to fill in gaps in the fascinating but not always well-told story of the downfall of the Republic and the Jedi.
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) - This is the latest cinematic adaptation of Remarque's antiwar classic. A purely visual exercise, it abandons the novel's detailed character studies of the soldiers in favor of using its hero as a mere eyewitness to the pointless massacre that was WW1. Visually stunning, well-edited and extremely graphic, it nonetheless lacks the humanity of the 1979 version starring Richard Thomas. With the exception of Kat (Albert Schuch in a fine performance), there are no real characters in the movie, just bodies waiting to be destroyed. I get the point, but it hits harder when you know who they are and care about them.
Andor: Season 1 (12 episodes, 2022). "The best Star Wars since Empire Strikes Back" ? No. Like "Rogue One," the movie from which it devolves, "Andor" is dreary, slow and has too many unmemorable characters. Even Andor himself is just sort of there, an emotionless plot device without charisma or a quest we really care about. That's the bad news. The good news is that when it finally finds its groove, it's extremely well-done and even riveting. "Star Wars" really has nothing to offer us at this point but immersive visitations into the already-established lore, and "Andor" is quite good at depicting life under the Empire -- a slow slide into corruption and oppression.
Soviet Victory in Ukraine : A gory propaganda movie released in 1945, this documentary gloats over the Soviet Union's successful campaign to drive the Nazis from the soil of the Ukraine in the summer of 1944. It's graphic in its depiction of dead men, burned villages, wrecked locomotives, abandoned tanks, and even features a lingering shot of a severed German head laying in a road. If you want a one-sided, historically flawed, but nonetheless vivid depiction of how violent and destructive the Eastern Front was during WW2, this is it. But it's not a fun watch, and lacks the humanity that drove "Ukraine in Flames."
Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Season 1 (16 episodes) "The Bad Batch" was a spinoff of "The Clone Wars" and after a stumbling beginning, became a highly entertaining continuation of that series. Set immediately after the end of the Wars, with the Jedi exterminated and the Republic fallen, it depicts a small band of "defective" clone troopers on the run from the newly-established Empire, and explains how the first years of Imperial rule changed the face, and the history, of the galaxy. Lucas & Co. built a huge world with the prequel series, but only gave us a glimpse of it: "Bad Batch" continues the deeper exploration "Clone Wars" began. Its main weakness is too many filler episodes, but the non-fillers, such as "The Solitary Clone" are simply superb.
The Fabelmans (2022): Steven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical movie about a plucky Jewish kid obsessed with moviemaking has definite impact, thanks to some strong performances, especially by Paul Dano as his saintly but oblivious father. Unfortunately, it's also bloated, sluggish, self-indulgent, and seems unsure of whether it's a comedy with dramatic elements, or a drama with an undertone of comedy. We were promised, in trailers, a laugh-laden movie about a cinematic obsession that ultimately led to cinematic greatness: instead we get a film about the slow death of a marriage with some anti-semitic school bullying thrown in for good measure. The flick hints here and there at some of Spielberg's old magic, but ultimately fails to capture it.
And that about wraps up my non-horror watches of 2022. As you can see, it's a fairly eclectic mess, almost bereft of modern cinema: and I'm enormously behind on contemporary TV series that don't involve wookies or lightsabers, too, but I suppose I'll get there eventually. Hell, one of these days I may even finish "The Walking Dead."
Every year I keep an accounting not only of what I read, but what I watched -- the new stuff, anyway. I do this not because I suffer from glazomania, but rather as a goad to make sure that I continue to expand my horizons. As I have stated here before, one surefire way of battling anxiety is to engage in repetitious behavior where the outcome is known. Thus, just as I reread books, I rewatch movies and television shows. The downside of this technique is that one becomes a bit of a ghost while still alive, endlessly repeating old experiences without accumulating the new ones necessary for growth. And so I make a list of everything I have seen which I have never seen before, and make sure that list is of sufficient length to prove to myself that I am, in fact, still among the living.
In 2022 I did a better-than-usual job of seeking out new entertainments, the caveat being that thirty of the films I watched were horror movies consumed during October. Since I have already shared most of those films and my take on them here, I won't do so again, and have also eliminated some very genre-specific stuff such as very old episodes of "Doctor Who."
That having been said, let's examine my weird and eclectic tastes:
Trapped (1949) - This is an excellent detective thriller with strongly Noirish elements starring Lloyd Bridges as a counterfeiter who escapes Secret Service custody and proceeds to raise hell while trying to put together One Last Deal. The dialog in this film is delivered with the rapid-fire assurance of a machine gun, the pace never lags, and the climax is sufficiently violent to satisfy any fan of the genre.
The Lady Confesses (1945) -- This is a Film Noir flick which is so predictable and by the numbers I nearly switched it off until a completely unexpected twist changed the entire direction of the movie. I confess to being completely unready for the course this movie took about halfway through, though sharper wits may not be as surprised.
The Winter War (Extended Edition, 1989) -- Thanks to Vladimir Putin, this "director's cut" of a Finnish war movie about Stalin's brutal invasion of Finland in 1940 is now timelier than ever. It follows a group of Finnish men called up into the army to oppose the Soviet attack, and the horrors they endure as they are streadily ground down by the Red hordes. It's a lively, extremely brutal depiction of war, but curiously removed from its protagonists. It's the story of an event, and a very unpleasant one at that.
Exorcist III: Legion (1990) -- I forgot to mention I rewatched this last year during my October-fest. I hadn't seen it since its original theater release, and had forgotten a great deal of it, largely with good reason. Though almost carried by George C. Scott's memorable performance as a crusty, spiritually bankrupt cop forced to come to terms with the supernatural, and an even more memorable turn by Brad Dourif as a serial killer possessed by the devil, the movie is ultimately a mere jumble of scenes (some quite effective, I grant you) that borders on the incoherent and never really comes together. A classic example of a film destroyed by reshoots ordered by the studio brass. I am somewhat sentimental about it because I practically grew up in Georgetown, where the movie is set: my high school crew team used to run the infamous "Exorcist steps" as part of their daily workout.
I, Claudius (1976) -- A Who's Who of British actors who would later become famous, the miniseries follows the improbable rise of Claudius, a shy little bookworm with a terrible stutter and a limp who probably suffered from cerebral palsy, to the throne of the Roman Empire. The only knock on this dusty masterpiece is that all the intrigue, perversion, betrayal, power-lust and casual cruelty become wearisome after a time, though Claudius' relentless innocence in the face of all this guile is therefore all the more charming. A young Patrick Stewart excels as the horribly sadistic plotter Sejanus: John Hurt is similarly terrifying as the mad Caligula.
For the Rights of Mankind (1934) -- this piece of Nazi-era cinema is a look at the brief but savage German civil war which followed their defeat in the First World War. Directed by arch-Nazi Hans Zöberlein, and scathing in its anti-communism, it is nonetheless an entertaining and well-made film, meant to glorify the "Free Corps" who crushed the Communist uprisings of 1919. Like most German movies of the Weimar/Nazi era, it has a fractured narrative, so the characters do not stand out, but it is subtler in its political approach than one would expect from a man like Zöberlein. Nazi cinema is by and large a very good place to study the intersection between propaganda and pop culture.
Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) -- OK, I have seen this movie before, but so many years ago I'd forgotten most of it. This is a lavish, beautiful, operatic, tragic depiction of the downfall of the Romanov Dynasty, which walks the tightrope between sympathy and disgust at the naivete, haplesses and incompetence which ultimately doomed the last of the Russian Tsars. In the end it is a romance between Nicholas II and his bride Alexandra, who loved each other so much they destroyed one another. (Tom Baker excels as the legendary degenerate Rasputin: this performance got him the role as Doctor Who #4 in 1974.)
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). I'd never heard of this movie, and I can't understand why. Despite its central flaw -- extremely unlikeable characters all around -- this is a very memorable story about the infamous charge made by British cavalry against the Russians at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. A scathing, black-comic take on life in the brutally class-ridden British army, it depicts rotten-hearted officers obsessed with personal honor and glory who treat their men worse than livestock when they aren't balling each others' wives. There's nobody to like in the movie, but this is the cruelly treated, ill-paid mercenary army of 19th century Great Britain as it undoubtedly was, full of drunkenness, adultery, and venereal disease. Forget romanticizing the past, this is deromanticizing it.
In Battle With the Enemies of the World (1939) -- A Nazi propaganda film depicting the activities of the Legion Condor during the Spanish Civil War, this is more of historical and technical interest than it is actually entertaining. The Legion Condor was a military force of Germans sent by Hitler to fight for Franco's Nationalists, and returned in triumph to Germany following Franco's victory in 1939. Proflific Nazi director Karl Ritter put together this noisy, technically innovative, not terribly resonant piece of cheerleading for Hitler, and it's worth watching for its historical interest.
Ukraine In Flames (1944) -- Flipping the propaganda coin, UKRAINE IN FLAMES is a wartime Soviet documentary about Nazi crimes in Ukraine during Hitler's occupation of same. It is a graphic, unsettling, sometimes disgusting depiction of the aftereffects of war, looting, deliberate starvation, scorched-earth policies and casual killing. Wrecked towns, rotting corpses, dead horses harvested for their meat, sobbing mothers holding starvation-bloated babies crawling with flies -- the whole horror of Nazism in practice is laid bare. The film seethes with hatred for the "Hiterlites" but lays out a surprisingly disciplined case against them, mostly letting the horror speak for itself. There is, of course, a strong tinge of irony in watching this movie now, given what the Russians, inheritors of Stalin's mantle, are doing to Ukraine even as I write these words.
Perry Mason: Seasons 6 & 7 (1961 - 1962) -- I have been slowly working my way through all 271 episodes of this legendary lawyer show over the past three or four years now, and enjoying every moment thoroughly. Probably the best legal show ever made, it was never better than during its sixth season, featuring innovative stories, strong performances, crackling courtroom confrontations, and liberal doses of wink-wink humor. The rigid formula of the show never got in the way of a good time, and the depiction of late 50s-early-mid-60s L.A., with its huge steel-chassied convertibles, its women in furs and pearls, its Martini and cigarette culture, is worth the price of admission by itself. (Living in L.A. for many years, I saw glimpses of this extinct world here and there in old buildings and old cars, but here it comes alive in all its romantic, slightly tawdry beauty.)
Simon and Simon: Season 8 (1988) -- I truly loved SIMON & SIMON when I was growing up, and I'm happy to say that 30+ years have neither dated the show out of watchability nor lessened the joy of watching Gerald McRaney (Rick) and Jameson Parker (A.J.) play brothers running a private detective agency in San Diego in the 1980s. Despite living in the shadow of MAGNUM, P.I., this spirited, often hilarious show was never stunted in its growth, and while the plots were often fairly pedestrian in nature, the chemistry between the actors and the often brilliant dialog never failed to elevate the material. Season 8 was the finale, and I'm happy to say the formula was working just as well if not better in these final episodes as it was in the first season.
The Last Full Measure (2019) -- This movie was so well-reviewed on Amazon that I had to see it for myself. The result, however, is highly underwhelming, flat and predictable. The story of a selfish modern-day Pentagon flunky tasked with investigating whether a Vietnam soldier killed in battle should receive a posthumous Medal of Honor, it is a well-crafted movie which holds one's interest, but fails to resonate, mainly because the arc of the protagonist is so badly telegraphed. The best part, by far, is a brief appearance by Samuel Jackson, who underplays himself deliberately to produce a memorable effect.
The Gauntlet (1977) - This is a dumb, plot-hole-ridden mess of a Clint Eastwood movie which nevertheless manages to be modestly entertaining and surprisingly memorable. Eastwood plays a drunken, broken-down cop charged with escorting a prostitute back from Vegas to Phoenix for a Mafia trial. On the way, every manner of assassin shows up, leading to one of the more improbable if visually arresting finales I can recall, where Eastwood plows an armored bus through hailstorms of police gunfire to get to City Hall. It's a brutal, silly, extremely vulgar film, but there is a memorably evil performance by a misogynistic deputy (Ron Chapman) and a hilarious, profane rant by Sandra Locke in which she puts Eastwood firmly in his place.
Obi-Wan Kenobi (6 episodes, 2022) -- As much as I abominate live-action Disney Star Wars, I was looking forward to being reunited with Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christiansen, Jimmy Smits, and various others from the prequel series and praying to the Force that Kathleen Kennedy wouldn't fuck this up the way she has everything else. The Force sadly wasn't listening, because this miniseries, despite some promising moments here and there, is a bloated, poorly conceived, poorly written, Wokeist bait-and-switch of the very worst kind. The story, such as it is, revolves almost entirely around Reva, arguably the worst character Star Wars has produced since Rose Tico, and a 10 year-old Princess Leia who is exploited for cute points almost as badly as "The Mandalorian" mines Baby Yoda. Obi-Wan spends the entire series backseating to various "strong female characters," all of whom are smarter and savvier than he is, and the plot is so riddled with holes, inconsistencies, and pointless characters that you could cut this by 2/3 and actually improve the product. An embarrassment that should never have been made, any second season of this lifeless trash should pretend the first one never happened.
Father Dowling Mysteries: The Complete Series (1989-1991) -- There is a place for "family entertainment" in everyone's literal or figurative DVD cabinet, and when I've had a tough day, nothing relaxes me more than to sink into some unchallenging cozy mystery show from the 80s. This short-lived series stars Tom Bosley as a kindly, cuddly priest who solves crimes in Chicago when he ought to be praying. It's predictable, silly, under-funded, and riddled with the tropes and cliches of the era: I still enjoyed it.
Downton Abbey: Series 1 -- I wanted to see what all the fuss was about viz this series, so I watched the first season. It's an entertaining if very soap-opera-ey depiction of a titled British family and their "help," both of whom struggle to find places in the rapidly changing world of the 1910s-1920s. I wasn't blown away, and it already seemed to be running short of ideas come the beginning of the second season, but I get why some people found it addictive: it's a steady look at a largely vanished era full of glamour, hypocrisy, snobbery, duty, tradition and scandal. Kind of like the Royal Family now!
Sundown (1943) -- This is a surprisingly offbeat WW2 movie set in Africa, in which a Canadian colonial official spars with his British military colleagues and a mysterious and beautiful local princess, while battling Axis spies trying to encourage the natives to revolt. A surprisingly complex look at the ethics of colonialism in a war supposedly fought for freedom, it's far less heavy-handed than I was expecting, and touches lightly on the hypocrisy of the British "fighting for democracy" while simultaneously ruling over a vast empire held together by economic extortion and brute military force.
Raid 2 (2014) -- The original RAID is something of a legendary martial arts action movie, featuring incredibly brutal, elaborate, and lengthy fight scenes between actors who, in the Indo-Asiatic tradition, actually do their own stunts. The sequel is more of a conventional action picture, drenched in blood and betrayal but lacking in impact. It will hold your interest, and the fight scenes are of course epic, but it won't linger with you. Too much action and violence are in my mind the same as not enough.
The Six Million Dollar Man: Season 5 (1977-1978) -- The ultimate season of this classic, campy superhero series was just as much fun as the ones which preceded it, the main difference being that Lee Majors did more of his own stunts this time around. Some of the plots are past absurdity even for a 70s kids show about an ex-astronaut with robotic body parts, but in this cynical age, it's fun to see an unconflicted, old-style hero in action. No politics, no preaching, just good guys fighting and ultimately beating bad guys without anyone ever getting killed.
Brideshead Revisited (1981) -- A dissolute, depressed English lord and his social-climbing middle-class friend, who exist in perpetual homoerotic tension with each other, fumble through life in Jazz Age England as the shadow of WW2 begins to fall. Sound dull? It often is, but it's also a strangely compelling look at the last gasp of the old British aristocracy as seen through a man who benefits from the association, but isn't blind, and in fact shares, all of its faults. Rife with suppressed sexuality of every kind, and full of characters who are absolutely useless to society and subconsciously aware of it, it's also a story of the search for sincere faith amid well-mannered, white-tie-and-tails depravity. Jeremy Irons is brilliant as Charles Ryder, who allows himself to be seduced by a wealth that isn't his, and pays a curiously terrible emotional price.
The Octopus: Series 5 & 6 (1990 - 1991) -- This longrunning 80s-00s Italian series was a ruthless, fictionalized expose of the Mafia's domination of Italian and Sicilian politics, and ruffled so many feathers that the government actually stepped in following the sixth season to prevent any further embarrassment. Season 5 - 6 follow the new hero cop, Davide, and his love interest, the scrappy prosecutor Silvia, as they battle the Mafia with the usual mixed success at the cost of heavy casualties. Relentlessly violent and full of twists, turns and betrayals, "The Octopus" is always entertaining, and features one of the most complex and fascinating villains I've ever seen: criminal mastermind Tano Carridi, portrayed by Remo Girone: a solitary, misanthropic crook who is at once chillingly amoral and deeply pathetic.
Streets of Fire -- This 1984 Walter Hill film, a "rock 'n roll fable," died a quick death at the box office, but has rightfully won cult status. Set in an alternate, Noirish, 50s-style reality, it's the story of a rugged loner-mercenary (Michael Pare') hired to rescue his former flame, a rock singer, from the clutches of an evil biker gang leader (Willem Defoe). Just sheer fun from beginning to end, the best performance in this music-laden rock opera is actually Rick Moranis as a nerdy, obnoxious, but absolutely fearless band tour manager determined to get his "property" back. This movie is way ahead of its time in terms of imagination and casting, and employs a Who's Who of "familiar face" actors, including a young Bill Paxton.
Tales of the Jedi (2022) -- "The Clone Wars," being mostly free of Disney's slimy clutches, were some of the best Star Wars to come out in God knows how long. "Tales of the Jedi" is a series of stand-alone episodes that fills in certain still-lingering blanks, such as how Count Dooku fell to the dark side and what happened to Ashoka Tano after she left the series. Very enjoyable if you're already a fan of the prequels/Clone Wars universe. It continues to fill in gaps in the fascinating but not always well-told story of the downfall of the Republic and the Jedi.
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) - This is the latest cinematic adaptation of Remarque's antiwar classic. A purely visual exercise, it abandons the novel's detailed character studies of the soldiers in favor of using its hero as a mere eyewitness to the pointless massacre that was WW1. Visually stunning, well-edited and extremely graphic, it nonetheless lacks the humanity of the 1979 version starring Richard Thomas. With the exception of Kat (Albert Schuch in a fine performance), there are no real characters in the movie, just bodies waiting to be destroyed. I get the point, but it hits harder when you know who they are and care about them.
Andor: Season 1 (12 episodes, 2022). "The best Star Wars since Empire Strikes Back" ? No. Like "Rogue One," the movie from which it devolves, "Andor" is dreary, slow and has too many unmemorable characters. Even Andor himself is just sort of there, an emotionless plot device without charisma or a quest we really care about. That's the bad news. The good news is that when it finally finds its groove, it's extremely well-done and even riveting. "Star Wars" really has nothing to offer us at this point but immersive visitations into the already-established lore, and "Andor" is quite good at depicting life under the Empire -- a slow slide into corruption and oppression.
Soviet Victory in Ukraine : A gory propaganda movie released in 1945, this documentary gloats over the Soviet Union's successful campaign to drive the Nazis from the soil of the Ukraine in the summer of 1944. It's graphic in its depiction of dead men, burned villages, wrecked locomotives, abandoned tanks, and even features a lingering shot of a severed German head laying in a road. If you want a one-sided, historically flawed, but nonetheless vivid depiction of how violent and destructive the Eastern Front was during WW2, this is it. But it's not a fun watch, and lacks the humanity that drove "Ukraine in Flames."
Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Season 1 (16 episodes) "The Bad Batch" was a spinoff of "The Clone Wars" and after a stumbling beginning, became a highly entertaining continuation of that series. Set immediately after the end of the Wars, with the Jedi exterminated and the Republic fallen, it depicts a small band of "defective" clone troopers on the run from the newly-established Empire, and explains how the first years of Imperial rule changed the face, and the history, of the galaxy. Lucas & Co. built a huge world with the prequel series, but only gave us a glimpse of it: "Bad Batch" continues the deeper exploration "Clone Wars" began. Its main weakness is too many filler episodes, but the non-fillers, such as "The Solitary Clone" are simply superb.
The Fabelmans (2022): Steven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical movie about a plucky Jewish kid obsessed with moviemaking has definite impact, thanks to some strong performances, especially by Paul Dano as his saintly but oblivious father. Unfortunately, it's also bloated, sluggish, self-indulgent, and seems unsure of whether it's a comedy with dramatic elements, or a drama with an undertone of comedy. We were promised, in trailers, a laugh-laden movie about a cinematic obsession that ultimately led to cinematic greatness: instead we get a film about the slow death of a marriage with some anti-semitic school bullying thrown in for good measure. The flick hints here and there at some of Spielberg's old magic, but ultimately fails to capture it.
And that about wraps up my non-horror watches of 2022. As you can see, it's a fairly eclectic mess, almost bereft of modern cinema: and I'm enormously behind on contemporary TV series that don't involve wookies or lightsabers, too, but I suppose I'll get there eventually. Hell, one of these days I may even finish "The Walking Dead."
April 22, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: RED FLAGS
Today is Saturday, and as promised -- or threatened -- I have returned to discuss personality red flags. Nowadays, everyone is so-well versed in pop-psychobabble terminology that this might seem pointless, but these are red flags which might be less familiar to you: they are things that I have noticed nearly always indicate the bearer is a jerk, a monster, or just a defective personality generally. And this is coming not from a denizen of the psychiatric ivory-tower, but a man who has encountered every type of criminal known to man: murderers, robbers, arsonists, rapists, thieves, wife-beaters, con artists. I grant you that a few of these fall into my own personal pet peeve category, but that does not make the dye in the particular flag any less red.
OVERTALKERS. Chronic overtalking is more than rude and annoying, it is a sign that the person in question is a) uninterested in anyone else's opinon, b) feels a need to dominate and control situations. It is a sign that they care very little for other people and don't respect them. Overtalkers are dangerous because they often bully themselves into positions of authority without being able to lead. What leader can make informed decisions without listening?
PEOPLE WHO WON'T TAKE YES FOR AN ANSWER. This is a person who may seem perfectly normal and sociable, but in reality is simply a contrarian. They will oppose any firm opinion you express, even if they actually hold the same opinion themselves. An example from my own experience would be when an acquaintance at my gym saw my boxing T-shirt and said, “Man, that was a great fight.” I replied, “Best I've ever seen.” He immediately said, “It wasn't that great.” I'd had it with the son of a bitch by this point and replied, “Yes, it was – the best fight I've ever seen and maybe the greatest fight ever.” He looked like I'd shot his dog and never spoke to me again. Contrarianism stems from a deep-seated fear of other people's strong opinions. It is found in people with big but fragile egos who feel insecure in the face of security and want to bully anyone who displays it.
PEOPLE WHO CAN'T LAUGH AT THEMSELVES. The ability to rib yourself, and be ribbed, over the blunders, stupidities, and fooleries that we all commit on a daily basis says a great deal about your ability to see your own life in perspective, and to efface your ego. The inability to do this is a gigantic red flag: I've never met a snob, bully, egomaniac or narcissist who found the slightest humor in themselves, or could make the distinction between being kidded in good fun or being insulted and attacked.
PEOPLE WHO CAN'T READ THE ROOM (OR A FACE). I'm aware some people have conditions that make it impossible for them to read social cues, facial expressions, and tones of voice, and I genuinely do feel sorry for them. However, such people are generally intolerable and having to deal with them regularly is infuriating: more than that, they may be showing signs of something else: narcissistic dickbagery. A person who tries to hold an unrelated conversation with you when you are visibly exhausted, in pain, or upset is – at best – someone who doesn't give a damn about you, your health, your sanity, or your feelings.
MONOMANIACS. “A monomaniac is a person who can't change their mind and won't change the subject.” Anyone who has but one topic of conversation is to be avoided at all costs, for the simple reason they are crashing bores. They are also obnoxious: they will always seek to turn any conversation in the direction of their obsession, and then control the conversation. Such people have no interest in any one else's opinions, thoughts, or feelings, nor can they read the social cues, or act upon them if by chance they can read them. This leads me to....
HIJACKERS. Hijackers are people who are unable to get others to listen to them, usually because they are unpleasant or uncharismatic: so they hijack social occasions planned and organized by others for their own selfish purposes. A person who announces their engagement at their sibling's sweet sixteen party is a hijacker; so too is the person who comes on the social media platform of a much more popular friend or relation and posts something guaranteed to shift conversation from the intended topic to themselves and their agenda. Hijackers are devious, manipulative, selfish people who try to compensate for their weakness through sly action.
PEOPLE WITH NO SELF-AWARENESS. A lack of self-awareness is often considered amusing in company: such people are viewed as entertaining. This tendency is however a sign of deep-seated narcissistic traits. Narcissists, as a rule, lack a sense of shame, so when someone behaves very badly, or says foolish things or lies or boasts outrageously without seeming to be remotely aware that they have done so, the red flag is flying like Old Glory on the Fourth of July. This entertainment you don't need.
PROJECTORS. One of the largest red flags you'll encounter is the person who thinks, because they are suspicious, mean-spirited, loveless, vindictive, petty, jealous, etc., that everyone else is, too. They project their own misanthropy onto everyone else. They do not believe in goodness, love, friendship, altruism, self-sacrifice, etc.: they view such things as con artistry used to disguise the base, selfish motives they themselves harbor and possess. These people also have a nasty tendency to assume that since everyone is going to betray them anyway, they had best strike first.
PEOPLE WHO HEAR WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR. I once took a photo of a woman in front of the Hollywood sign, using her camera. Later, she sent me the image, and I remarked, “Good picture.” A little while later we were talking and she said, “Remember when you said how hot I looked in that picture?” Wishful thinking is one thing. Delusion is another. But some people have brains like prisms, which refract what they actually see and hear into things they want to see and hear, so that they exist in a reality all their own, a fantasy world. You say, “You're pretty crazy,” and they will hear “You're pretty!” These folks are straight-up, stone cold psychos and have to be avoided at all costs.
PEOPLE WHO DON'T LEARN LESSONS. In college, I encountered a girl complaining bitterly that "every time I move into a house, my roomates always seem like cool people at first, but it turns out they're assholes and they all end up hating me." She admitted this had happened at least four times in her collegiate career. When I suggsted she might be the problem, she looked as if I had just sprung a second head. An inability to learn lessons or make conclusions from obvious evidence is generally a sign that the person, in addition to possibly being profoundly stupid, has zero self-awareness and cannot take responsibility for their actions. These types leave a lot of wreckage in their wake.
OVERSHARERS. I was once at a party and met a girl who, within moments of me being introduced, began to dive into the most intimate details of her past without any prompting and without any conversational context. Throughout the course of the evening I overheard her do this at least a half-dozen times to other people, totally heedless of the discomfort these details were causing the complete strangers she was evidently trying to impress. This sort of thing is more than mere social awkwardness: it indicates a deeper inability to understand how human interaction actually works, a tendency toward feeding on pity or attention, and, once again, a complete lack of self-awareness.
PEOPLE WHO HAVE TO WIN AT EVERYTHING. Did you ever have a slight disagreement with someone over some unimportant matter, and days later, get an e-mail from the person you were arguing with, featuring five links to websites proving they were right and you were wrong? Have you ever had someone stop everything they are doing, turn the car around, and pull a book off a shelf, just to show you there are 54 and not 53 countries in Africa? Worse yet, have you ever experienced someone who, having been proven wrong on a very minor point, will continue the argument, even after you have dropped it? These walking red flags are simply bullies of a more complicated variety than the sort that wanted your lunch money in fourth grade. They are the types who, if finally crushed in a dispute, will sulk, brood, give you the silent treatment, and plot petty acts of revenge for months or years, all over nothing. Seeing their self-worth in a perfection they don't possess, they will go to outrageous lengths to be right even when they are wrong.
PEOPLE WHO MAKE SUPERFICIAL JUDGMENTS. I once knew a man who prided himself on sizing up and appraising others on the scantiest possible information. Once arrived at, his opinions were inalterable: nothing people actually did after the fact mattered more than his hasty initial estimation of them. This is actually the essence of bigotry, and indeed, people who make decisive snap judgments about everything, usually with almost nothing to base those judgments upon, are bigots even if their metrics are not based on race, ethnicity or sex. What they see as “decisive” is really just moral and intellectual laziness coupled with the mean-spiritedness all bigots have at the core of their souls.
PEOPLE WHO ARE RUDE TO THE WAITER. A person who is as a rule rude to waiters, clerks, tellers, fast food employees, and service staff generally is a person who is a) a coward (service staffers can't fight back), and, b) a believer in feudal social hierarchies, i.e. that social status and money should determine how human beings should be treated. These are people uninterested in the actual worth of people as people. They may be sweet as pie to you, but you should remember that if you were the waiter, you'd be getting treated very differently indeed.
PEOPLE WHO OWN THINGS THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN TO THEM. From the Holocaust to slavery, it has become very chic for folks to act is they themselves carry post-traumatic stress from historical events which occurred decades, generations, even centuries before they were born. This phenomenon is part of a larger trend toward the fetishization of victimhood everywhere, but it is quite annoying on its own, and usually indicates that the person in question has bought into that trend. This type lacks identity and self-confidence and is covering guilt over their (probably) comfortable middle class existence by channelling long-dead ancestors who actually knew real suffering.
This list is hardly exhaustive, but does include most of the things I regard as more subtle (or less unsubtle) personality warning signs. I do not believe I have ever encountered a person who habitually exhibits one or more of these traits who was tolerable in the long run. Obviously some of my own personality quirks are at play in composing this list, but I never claimed to be quirk-free: merely passable at spotting red flags when they are flapping in my face.
OVERTALKERS. Chronic overtalking is more than rude and annoying, it is a sign that the person in question is a) uninterested in anyone else's opinon, b) feels a need to dominate and control situations. It is a sign that they care very little for other people and don't respect them. Overtalkers are dangerous because they often bully themselves into positions of authority without being able to lead. What leader can make informed decisions without listening?
PEOPLE WHO WON'T TAKE YES FOR AN ANSWER. This is a person who may seem perfectly normal and sociable, but in reality is simply a contrarian. They will oppose any firm opinion you express, even if they actually hold the same opinion themselves. An example from my own experience would be when an acquaintance at my gym saw my boxing T-shirt and said, “Man, that was a great fight.” I replied, “Best I've ever seen.” He immediately said, “It wasn't that great.” I'd had it with the son of a bitch by this point and replied, “Yes, it was – the best fight I've ever seen and maybe the greatest fight ever.” He looked like I'd shot his dog and never spoke to me again. Contrarianism stems from a deep-seated fear of other people's strong opinions. It is found in people with big but fragile egos who feel insecure in the face of security and want to bully anyone who displays it.
PEOPLE WHO CAN'T LAUGH AT THEMSELVES. The ability to rib yourself, and be ribbed, over the blunders, stupidities, and fooleries that we all commit on a daily basis says a great deal about your ability to see your own life in perspective, and to efface your ego. The inability to do this is a gigantic red flag: I've never met a snob, bully, egomaniac or narcissist who found the slightest humor in themselves, or could make the distinction between being kidded in good fun or being insulted and attacked.
PEOPLE WHO CAN'T READ THE ROOM (OR A FACE). I'm aware some people have conditions that make it impossible for them to read social cues, facial expressions, and tones of voice, and I genuinely do feel sorry for them. However, such people are generally intolerable and having to deal with them regularly is infuriating: more than that, they may be showing signs of something else: narcissistic dickbagery. A person who tries to hold an unrelated conversation with you when you are visibly exhausted, in pain, or upset is – at best – someone who doesn't give a damn about you, your health, your sanity, or your feelings.
MONOMANIACS. “A monomaniac is a person who can't change their mind and won't change the subject.” Anyone who has but one topic of conversation is to be avoided at all costs, for the simple reason they are crashing bores. They are also obnoxious: they will always seek to turn any conversation in the direction of their obsession, and then control the conversation. Such people have no interest in any one else's opinions, thoughts, or feelings, nor can they read the social cues, or act upon them if by chance they can read them. This leads me to....
HIJACKERS. Hijackers are people who are unable to get others to listen to them, usually because they are unpleasant or uncharismatic: so they hijack social occasions planned and organized by others for their own selfish purposes. A person who announces their engagement at their sibling's sweet sixteen party is a hijacker; so too is the person who comes on the social media platform of a much more popular friend or relation and posts something guaranteed to shift conversation from the intended topic to themselves and their agenda. Hijackers are devious, manipulative, selfish people who try to compensate for their weakness through sly action.
PEOPLE WITH NO SELF-AWARENESS. A lack of self-awareness is often considered amusing in company: such people are viewed as entertaining. This tendency is however a sign of deep-seated narcissistic traits. Narcissists, as a rule, lack a sense of shame, so when someone behaves very badly, or says foolish things or lies or boasts outrageously without seeming to be remotely aware that they have done so, the red flag is flying like Old Glory on the Fourth of July. This entertainment you don't need.
PROJECTORS. One of the largest red flags you'll encounter is the person who thinks, because they are suspicious, mean-spirited, loveless, vindictive, petty, jealous, etc., that everyone else is, too. They project their own misanthropy onto everyone else. They do not believe in goodness, love, friendship, altruism, self-sacrifice, etc.: they view such things as con artistry used to disguise the base, selfish motives they themselves harbor and possess. These people also have a nasty tendency to assume that since everyone is going to betray them anyway, they had best strike first.
PEOPLE WHO HEAR WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR. I once took a photo of a woman in front of the Hollywood sign, using her camera. Later, she sent me the image, and I remarked, “Good picture.” A little while later we were talking and she said, “Remember when you said how hot I looked in that picture?” Wishful thinking is one thing. Delusion is another. But some people have brains like prisms, which refract what they actually see and hear into things they want to see and hear, so that they exist in a reality all their own, a fantasy world. You say, “You're pretty crazy,” and they will hear “You're pretty!” These folks are straight-up, stone cold psychos and have to be avoided at all costs.
PEOPLE WHO DON'T LEARN LESSONS. In college, I encountered a girl complaining bitterly that "every time I move into a house, my roomates always seem like cool people at first, but it turns out they're assholes and they all end up hating me." She admitted this had happened at least four times in her collegiate career. When I suggsted she might be the problem, she looked as if I had just sprung a second head. An inability to learn lessons or make conclusions from obvious evidence is generally a sign that the person, in addition to possibly being profoundly stupid, has zero self-awareness and cannot take responsibility for their actions. These types leave a lot of wreckage in their wake.
OVERSHARERS. I was once at a party and met a girl who, within moments of me being introduced, began to dive into the most intimate details of her past without any prompting and without any conversational context. Throughout the course of the evening I overheard her do this at least a half-dozen times to other people, totally heedless of the discomfort these details were causing the complete strangers she was evidently trying to impress. This sort of thing is more than mere social awkwardness: it indicates a deeper inability to understand how human interaction actually works, a tendency toward feeding on pity or attention, and, once again, a complete lack of self-awareness.
PEOPLE WHO HAVE TO WIN AT EVERYTHING. Did you ever have a slight disagreement with someone over some unimportant matter, and days later, get an e-mail from the person you were arguing with, featuring five links to websites proving they were right and you were wrong? Have you ever had someone stop everything they are doing, turn the car around, and pull a book off a shelf, just to show you there are 54 and not 53 countries in Africa? Worse yet, have you ever experienced someone who, having been proven wrong on a very minor point, will continue the argument, even after you have dropped it? These walking red flags are simply bullies of a more complicated variety than the sort that wanted your lunch money in fourth grade. They are the types who, if finally crushed in a dispute, will sulk, brood, give you the silent treatment, and plot petty acts of revenge for months or years, all over nothing. Seeing their self-worth in a perfection they don't possess, they will go to outrageous lengths to be right even when they are wrong.
PEOPLE WHO MAKE SUPERFICIAL JUDGMENTS. I once knew a man who prided himself on sizing up and appraising others on the scantiest possible information. Once arrived at, his opinions were inalterable: nothing people actually did after the fact mattered more than his hasty initial estimation of them. This is actually the essence of bigotry, and indeed, people who make decisive snap judgments about everything, usually with almost nothing to base those judgments upon, are bigots even if their metrics are not based on race, ethnicity or sex. What they see as “decisive” is really just moral and intellectual laziness coupled with the mean-spiritedness all bigots have at the core of their souls.
PEOPLE WHO ARE RUDE TO THE WAITER. A person who is as a rule rude to waiters, clerks, tellers, fast food employees, and service staff generally is a person who is a) a coward (service staffers can't fight back), and, b) a believer in feudal social hierarchies, i.e. that social status and money should determine how human beings should be treated. These are people uninterested in the actual worth of people as people. They may be sweet as pie to you, but you should remember that if you were the waiter, you'd be getting treated very differently indeed.
PEOPLE WHO OWN THINGS THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN TO THEM. From the Holocaust to slavery, it has become very chic for folks to act is they themselves carry post-traumatic stress from historical events which occurred decades, generations, even centuries before they were born. This phenomenon is part of a larger trend toward the fetishization of victimhood everywhere, but it is quite annoying on its own, and usually indicates that the person in question has bought into that trend. This type lacks identity and self-confidence and is covering guilt over their (probably) comfortable middle class existence by channelling long-dead ancestors who actually knew real suffering.
This list is hardly exhaustive, but does include most of the things I regard as more subtle (or less unsubtle) personality warning signs. I do not believe I have ever encountered a person who habitually exhibits one or more of these traits who was tolerable in the long run. Obviously some of my own personality quirks are at play in composing this list, but I never claimed to be quirk-free: merely passable at spotting red flags when they are flapping in my face.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
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