Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 15
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.
April 19, 2023
AS I PLEASE XII: EXHAUSTED EDITION
Tonight I was planning on publishing a blog called "Red Flags." I actually spent some hours pondering how I would compose it as I walked along the Rail Trail yesterday after work, and then again today: I am however too goddamned tired to put it all together. It will have to wait 'til Saturday. However, being as I tired as I am right now, at exactly 9:00 PM, has got me thinking a lot about, well, being tired, and how the experience changes as you grow older.
* As a kid, tiredness is something you fight against. This begins, I believe, in infancy: a tired baby will cry, fuss, flail its tiny limbs, do just about anything but what it wants to do, which is sleep. Later, as a small and finally a large, sub-adult child, I fought against tiredness with a kind of bitter emnity. On weekends this could be well understood, since every conscious hour away from school was nectar to be savored. It made less sense on schoolnights, when there was no real reward and hefty penalty for staying up late: neverthless, I often did just that. This habit continued into high school and through college, and I believe in retrospect that children, and later teenagers, simply resent going to bed. It may be that their energy levels are higher to begin with and thus harder to exhaust, it may be that they are naturally noctural, but by God they do not like going to sleep.
* This is bizarre, because I have seldom encountered a child, teenager, or late college-age student who doesn't excel at sleeping. The sort of sleep one gets say, at the age of 9, or 19 for that matter, is of the very highest quantity and quality, far superior to the sleep people in even early middle age get except on their best nights. This makes the resentment the young feel about going to bed all the more ironic, since when they hit their 30s they will begin to crave deep, restful slumber, but achieve it less often, and less satisfyingly, than they did previously. Hell, by the time I was 25 years old, I was already too exhausted on Fridays to do much more than take my girlfriend to an early dinner, have a drink, and then go home to bed. The last thing I wanted to do was the first thing I'd wanted to on Fridays just a few short years before, which was go out and party.
* Because real adults often have trouble getting to sleep, or staying asleep, or achieving sleep which is truly restful even if the hours clocked are seemingly sufficient, they tend to welcome the very fatigue that they warred against as youths, when the act of being tired was viewed almost as an affliction that had to be overcome. I vividly remember the peer pressure, expressed usually as verbal abuse, which occurred in college when someone (me) used to start fading before the others in his group. Seldom if ever was this individual (me) simply allowed to leave and go to bed. Oh no. They were harrangued, plied with shots or more beer, and generally bullied into several extra hours of consciousness they did not want. And they always gave into this bullying, because deep down, they felt their tired state was a sign of weakness that had to be combatted.
* Starting in the middle-20s, feelings of weariness are, if not actually welcomed, generally accepted by the weary. By my later 20s, instead of raising hell on Fridays, or even just going to the gym, I began to greatly enjoy the ritual of disconnecting my phone, double locking my door, turning down most of the lights and essentially turning my apartment into a diving bell that may as well have been at the bottom of the sea. Pajama-type clothing was donned as soon as I was alone, and the hours between arrival and actual bedtime were essentially spent in a state of pre-sleep, where I spoke to no one, drank comforting hot beverages, and either watched TV or read a book in bed.
* This transition strikes most twentysomethings as somewhat embarrassing. Like baldness or decline in eyesight or sudden weight gain, it was deemed a sign of ageing, and thus something to be ridiculed, denied, fought against. However, since nobody really wants to fight against it -- pajamas are comfortable, hot tea on winter tights is soothing, and a good book or classic TV program provides great comfort after a rough week in the salt mines -- a lot of lies have to be told, a lot of exuses have to be made, to keep up the front that you are still the hellraiser you used to be, until at last you throw away all pretense and tell your friends you just want to fucking go to sleep.
* As we get older and the quality of our rest declines, we finally make note -- years too late -- that, holy shit, there is a connection between how much sleep we have and how well we function the next day at work. An early twentysomething can, as a rule, drink and smoke and screw themselves insensible 'til three in the morning, wake up at seven, slam a cup of coffee, take a cold shower, and still manage to have a prodctive workday: what's more, they can repeat the whole debauchery the next night. A fortysomething who stays up too late, drinks too much and crashes after midnight may as well not come to work the next day. He will barely be able to get out of bed, arrive late to his job, and once there do little but suck down company coffee while staring glassily at his computer, often unable to even remember his password, his extension, or his own middle name. What's more, when he arrives home, he will probably sleep for two hours in front of the television, and then awake even more depressed, confused and exhausted than he was before.
* Pushing through tiredness is also much more difficult as a fellow of fifty than it was when I was, say, thirty. This is because the fabled "second wind," which I first encountered in college and which allowed me to stay up for 24 hours at a crack without the aid of drugs, tends to wave bye-bye at some point and ne'er returns. "Pushing through" is still possible, but goddamn, is it hard: when I was working on Face Off back in 2012 or so, I used to arrive at the studio around three in the afternoon and work until somewhere between three and nine the next morning, almost without a break. At the time I was forty years old, and to do this sort of thing I required all the coffee Krispy Kreme could supply. Nevertheless, the entire next day was a dead loss. I was unable to sleep when I got home, but also unable to function. I did not have the mental powers even to watch television. I just sort of existed, in a mindless stupor.
* As a young-un, I often found exercise would revive my mind and body when I was in a state of physical and mental tiredness. A few miles around the jogging track could work wonders: they were nearly as effective as sleep. As an ancient relic, however, I now find that exercise is harder when tired, and provides no actual benefit in terms of waking me up. I may feel better afterward, I may actually be healthier, but instead of being just tired, I am now tired...and sweaty.
* For all of this, the amount of sleep I require to function is much lower now than it was when I was a kid. Back then, I required up to twelve hours: as a younger grown man, about nine: and as a middle-aged one, just under eight. I actually noticed at the age of thirty that I was horribly exhausted in the mornings after seven hours of sleep, but on weekends, would sleep only an extra hour at the most, and then wake feeling completely rested. Some of this was probably psychological, but most of it was physical: evidently "a good night's rest" is really a question of whether you got that last crucial 45 minutes or not.
* As depressing as all of this sounds, I have to say that Dan Henderson's remark that "I can do everything at forty that I could at twenty, just not as fast" actually does hold true even when you're fifty. Some of it is genetics, some of it is how well or poorly you treat yourself, but most of it is simply attitude. If one accepts that life is about change, unpleasant change first and foremost, then one accepts the necessity of flexibility. I woke up tired today, but I managed a ten hour workday that also involved about 40+ miles of driving, a bench trial, multiple court heatings, innumerable phone calls, a haircut, a four mile walk, a Perry Mason TV movie ("The Case of the Scandalous Scoundrel"), and writing this blog. I even had time for a beer. So yeah, I can still power through. It just takes more power than it used to.
It's now 9:58 PM, and I am about to hit the rack. Whether or not I will actually sleep through the night and greet Thursday with a saucy, Errol Flynn-like grin and a flippant remark, or just groan pitifully and stare in disbelief at my bedside clock, is unknown to me. But I just remember the words of Joyce Rochelle:
We all grow tired eventually; it happens to everyone. Even the sun, at the close of the year, is no longer a morning person.
* As a kid, tiredness is something you fight against. This begins, I believe, in infancy: a tired baby will cry, fuss, flail its tiny limbs, do just about anything but what it wants to do, which is sleep. Later, as a small and finally a large, sub-adult child, I fought against tiredness with a kind of bitter emnity. On weekends this could be well understood, since every conscious hour away from school was nectar to be savored. It made less sense on schoolnights, when there was no real reward and hefty penalty for staying up late: neverthless, I often did just that. This habit continued into high school and through college, and I believe in retrospect that children, and later teenagers, simply resent going to bed. It may be that their energy levels are higher to begin with and thus harder to exhaust, it may be that they are naturally noctural, but by God they do not like going to sleep.
* This is bizarre, because I have seldom encountered a child, teenager, or late college-age student who doesn't excel at sleeping. The sort of sleep one gets say, at the age of 9, or 19 for that matter, is of the very highest quantity and quality, far superior to the sleep people in even early middle age get except on their best nights. This makes the resentment the young feel about going to bed all the more ironic, since when they hit their 30s they will begin to crave deep, restful slumber, but achieve it less often, and less satisfyingly, than they did previously. Hell, by the time I was 25 years old, I was already too exhausted on Fridays to do much more than take my girlfriend to an early dinner, have a drink, and then go home to bed. The last thing I wanted to do was the first thing I'd wanted to on Fridays just a few short years before, which was go out and party.
* Because real adults often have trouble getting to sleep, or staying asleep, or achieving sleep which is truly restful even if the hours clocked are seemingly sufficient, they tend to welcome the very fatigue that they warred against as youths, when the act of being tired was viewed almost as an affliction that had to be overcome. I vividly remember the peer pressure, expressed usually as verbal abuse, which occurred in college when someone (me) used to start fading before the others in his group. Seldom if ever was this individual (me) simply allowed to leave and go to bed. Oh no. They were harrangued, plied with shots or more beer, and generally bullied into several extra hours of consciousness they did not want. And they always gave into this bullying, because deep down, they felt their tired state was a sign of weakness that had to be combatted.
* Starting in the middle-20s, feelings of weariness are, if not actually welcomed, generally accepted by the weary. By my later 20s, instead of raising hell on Fridays, or even just going to the gym, I began to greatly enjoy the ritual of disconnecting my phone, double locking my door, turning down most of the lights and essentially turning my apartment into a diving bell that may as well have been at the bottom of the sea. Pajama-type clothing was donned as soon as I was alone, and the hours between arrival and actual bedtime were essentially spent in a state of pre-sleep, where I spoke to no one, drank comforting hot beverages, and either watched TV or read a book in bed.
* This transition strikes most twentysomethings as somewhat embarrassing. Like baldness or decline in eyesight or sudden weight gain, it was deemed a sign of ageing, and thus something to be ridiculed, denied, fought against. However, since nobody really wants to fight against it -- pajamas are comfortable, hot tea on winter tights is soothing, and a good book or classic TV program provides great comfort after a rough week in the salt mines -- a lot of lies have to be told, a lot of exuses have to be made, to keep up the front that you are still the hellraiser you used to be, until at last you throw away all pretense and tell your friends you just want to fucking go to sleep.
* As we get older and the quality of our rest declines, we finally make note -- years too late -- that, holy shit, there is a connection between how much sleep we have and how well we function the next day at work. An early twentysomething can, as a rule, drink and smoke and screw themselves insensible 'til three in the morning, wake up at seven, slam a cup of coffee, take a cold shower, and still manage to have a prodctive workday: what's more, they can repeat the whole debauchery the next night. A fortysomething who stays up too late, drinks too much and crashes after midnight may as well not come to work the next day. He will barely be able to get out of bed, arrive late to his job, and once there do little but suck down company coffee while staring glassily at his computer, often unable to even remember his password, his extension, or his own middle name. What's more, when he arrives home, he will probably sleep for two hours in front of the television, and then awake even more depressed, confused and exhausted than he was before.
* Pushing through tiredness is also much more difficult as a fellow of fifty than it was when I was, say, thirty. This is because the fabled "second wind," which I first encountered in college and which allowed me to stay up for 24 hours at a crack without the aid of drugs, tends to wave bye-bye at some point and ne'er returns. "Pushing through" is still possible, but goddamn, is it hard: when I was working on Face Off back in 2012 or so, I used to arrive at the studio around three in the afternoon and work until somewhere between three and nine the next morning, almost without a break. At the time I was forty years old, and to do this sort of thing I required all the coffee Krispy Kreme could supply. Nevertheless, the entire next day was a dead loss. I was unable to sleep when I got home, but also unable to function. I did not have the mental powers even to watch television. I just sort of existed, in a mindless stupor.
* As a young-un, I often found exercise would revive my mind and body when I was in a state of physical and mental tiredness. A few miles around the jogging track could work wonders: they were nearly as effective as sleep. As an ancient relic, however, I now find that exercise is harder when tired, and provides no actual benefit in terms of waking me up. I may feel better afterward, I may actually be healthier, but instead of being just tired, I am now tired...and sweaty.
* For all of this, the amount of sleep I require to function is much lower now than it was when I was a kid. Back then, I required up to twelve hours: as a younger grown man, about nine: and as a middle-aged one, just under eight. I actually noticed at the age of thirty that I was horribly exhausted in the mornings after seven hours of sleep, but on weekends, would sleep only an extra hour at the most, and then wake feeling completely rested. Some of this was probably psychological, but most of it was physical: evidently "a good night's rest" is really a question of whether you got that last crucial 45 minutes or not.
* As depressing as all of this sounds, I have to say that Dan Henderson's remark that "I can do everything at forty that I could at twenty, just not as fast" actually does hold true even when you're fifty. Some of it is genetics, some of it is how well or poorly you treat yourself, but most of it is simply attitude. If one accepts that life is about change, unpleasant change first and foremost, then one accepts the necessity of flexibility. I woke up tired today, but I managed a ten hour workday that also involved about 40+ miles of driving, a bench trial, multiple court heatings, innumerable phone calls, a haircut, a four mile walk, a Perry Mason TV movie ("The Case of the Scandalous Scoundrel"), and writing this blog. I even had time for a beer. So yeah, I can still power through. It just takes more power than it used to.
It's now 9:58 PM, and I am about to hit the rack. Whether or not I will actually sleep through the night and greet Thursday with a saucy, Errol Flynn-like grin and a flippant remark, or just groan pitifully and stare in disbelief at my bedside clock, is unknown to me. But I just remember the words of Joyce Rochelle:
We all grow tired eventually; it happens to everyone. Even the sun, at the close of the year, is no longer a morning person.
April 16, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: ADVENTURES IN POETRY
I play the game for the game's own sake. -- Sherlock Holmes
One of the many skills I wish I possessed is the ability to write great, or even just really good, poetry. On the face of it, this does not make sense. Orwell once remarked that poetry was "the least tolerated of the arts" and he was right. In American society anyway, poets are despised, ridiculed, marginalized, under- or simply un-paid, and have no social cachet whatsoever. The very act of writing poetry is often linked to effeminacy or homosexuality regardless of whether the poet falls in these categories, and is associated in many minds with weakness or societial uselessness. When in modern times a poet is rocognized, it is usually due to circumstances which have nothing to do with their skill as a poet. Maya Angelou, for example, was not famous because she was a good poet: she was famous because she was a good black poet. I am absolutely convinced that had she been white or latina, she would not be nearly as well known, even if her verses were exactly the same. This is not a criticism of her poetry: it is a criticism of the "trained bear" aspect of American culture: when a person in a traditionally downtrodden category of humanity excels at something, they are often given a fame disproportionate to others of equal talent who lack their so-called "exotic" quality. And this fame is often slightly tinged with condescention, as in "look at how well that bear dances!" This is not something we like to talk about or admit, but it is true. Yet the fact remains that there have been very great poets in the last 50 - 100 years who are totally unknown to the public because they did not catch the fancy of reporters looking for an "angle." They simply wrote great poems in poverty and near-total obscurity.
This intolerance, mingled with tokenism ("the thing is only interesting if a 'trained bear' does it") is hypocritical in the extreme, because poetry ceases to be contemptible at the exact moment we cease to call it poetry. If we refer to it as songwriting, from which it is often almost indistinguishable, it suddenly acquires huge merit. The same goes for the writing of rap lyrics, which are actually viewed through a funhouse mirror and become ultra-masculine rather than effeminiate, even though they too are simply rhyming poetry. This phenomenon is something I have observed my entire life, though it runs contrary to Shakespeare's assertion that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." In point of fact, if we called roses "garbage flowers," we would probably find excuses notto smell them. Names have enormous power. And the name of poetry is largely mud in the culture we share.
Despite this, I crave the poet's skills, which are as different from the writer's skills as a flare gun is from a howitzer, and have from time to time tried to hone them by producing poems of my own. The vast majority of poems I've written were unreadable trash, but every now and again I produced something which was not altogether hopeless, showed signs of promise, or simply burst with imagery and passion even if the technique was sorely lacking. And in fact I have no technique whatsoever. I never really studied the art, and in a sense the real attraction to the form is rooted in its general lack of rules: poetry is language freed of restraints. It doesn't require grammar or syntax or punctuation or even proper spelling. It doesn't have to make sense or tell a complete story. It can exist entirely for its own sake, like "Jabberwock." And yet when teachers did try to introduce us to poetry, they usually adopted the horrible "Dead Poet's Society" method of trying to reduce poetry to a series of formulas, rules and devices which had to be ruthlessly applied, thus crushing any sense of fun or daring out of the entire exercise before it even began. This left me with a resentment of the writing process itself, which no doubt contributed to my general inability to compose anything worthwhile, but did free me from learning all those tedious "schools of thought" which often hobble the imaginations of overserious students.
The curious thing about sharing poetry is the embarrassment involved. Nothwithstanding the prejudices I mentioned above, the very act of showing a poem with someone, or to an audience, is one of surprisingly intense intimacy. As a novelist, I have written explicit sex scenes, moments of gut-wrenching tragedy, vivid depictions of the most horrific violence and depravity, and there are times when I feel a certain awkwardness knowing friends, family and acquaintances are reading these things. Poetry, however, is on a totally different level of discomfort. Poems by their very nature come from the heart, from the soul, from the deepest recesses of our own personality and spirit. It is impossible to share a poem with another human being without lowering your guard, setting down your armor, and making yourself totally vulnerable: in short, showing your true, naked self. Poems are probably as close to pure honesty as can exist in life, honesty has no artifice to dress it up, and emotional nudity can be extremely discomfiting. This is at once the attraction and the repulsion of the medium. It is both beautiful and personally frightening.
Somewhere in Los Angeles I have a few poems scribbled down in hard copy which do not exist anywhere else: the remainder are here, in electronic form, skulking in a folder I seldom open because I forget for years at a time that it even exists. The spirit moves me to even try my hand at poetry only at very great intervals: sometimes so much time passes between composition and me reading them again that I forget I ever penned them. Having stumbled over my poetry file, however, I found it not altogether humiliating to read. I will never be mistaken for a great or even a good poet, but I am definitely a sincere one, and there is a great deal of strength in sincerity, even if every other measureable quality is lacking.
I am going to share a few examples here with you, written in somewhat different veins. This will at least show that as in my fictional writing, there is some diversity of subject matter. It will also show that I am willing to share more in this blog than my subjective opinions. In a recent post I rather stupidly remarked that I had come to understand that no growth is possible without change. This was a very commonplace observation, rather like stating water is wet: it only seemed profound to me because as an axious person I tend to take comfort in routines. However, I truly believe the only way for writers to get better is to take risks, and opening one's self to ridicule is a fairish risk.
The first poem was written some years ago when I was living in Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, the idea came to me while I was sitting in godawful traffic, brooding about the shallowness of the entertainment industry and the seeming pointlessness of my life in general:
Superficial Cars
We live superficial lives
In a superficial city
Sit in superficial traffic
And get superficial pity.
We drive to superficial jobs,
In superficial cars
We meet superficial women
In superficial bars.
We eat superficial meals
In superficial places
We make superficial talks
In superficial spaces.
At our superficial booths
We drink superficial beers
Smile superficial smiles
Hide superficial tears.
And in the superficial nights
We scream superficial screams
Lay in superficial beds
Have superficial dreams.
And as our superficial hearts
Beat in superficial souls
Our superficial lives
Burn like superficial coals.
Setting aside deeper analysis of my observations here, which may themselves not be worthy of deeper analysis since the poem is direct to the point of obviousness, I am slightly partial to it all the same because it seems, within my own mind anyway, to capture the essential emptiness of modern life, with its pointless scurrying, empty pleasures, and underlying loneliness.
Next comes a much older and completely different poem, written in the early-mid 2000s. There is no attempt at rhyme, nor is there the strict structure I imposed upon the former example. In this exercise I was trying very hard to set a tone, establish a mood, create an atmosphere, while simultaneously telling a story:
Risen
We had not come to dine
The night was young
And we were
Gone with the way of things
The old way
Of doing business.
We had but come to see
For ourselves
This new Face
They had put upon the world
Our old enemies, our old friends
Our lovers.
We had the rest of forever
But no time to waste
The stars
They shine for all
But for some
Only briefly.
The moon
(How beautiful is the moon)
How pale
And we your children
How do we love thee?
Madly.
We had not come to dance
The night was ours
The garden secret
Winding roses, by the pool
And our faces
Unreflected.
We cast no shadow
On this world
And know the darkest secrets
Of your heart
(O how we understand you,
Plaything.)
By the surf, by the storm-swept rock
You built your house
Upon the sand
Into your door
We came on in
Invited.
You poured the wine, we did not drink
You set the meal, we did not eat
But gracious host
The time has come
To show our teeth.
We saw your Face
The world you made
The life you lead
Your daylight dreams
That burn our eyes
Vengeance is ours.
You washed your hands
You hung the cross
And rolled the stone
And broke the seal
Now not your Caesar, and not your Christ, is
Risen.
So darkness falls
Behind your eyes
Our bite is sharp
We taste the blood
The night is ours, we show our Face
Grinning.
The moon has set
The air is chill
Our point is made, it’s time to leave
You where you lie
In the world you made…
Finished.
One of my most annoying characteristics is a tendency to assume my audience needs to have everything explained to them: I was "mansplaining" to both men and women long before this dubious word came into vogue. Fortunately the tendency was recognized and called out by those close to me when I was still very young, and I have worked hard to eliminate it from my writing. I try always to show and not to tell, both in terms of description and moral point, so I will leave interpretations of this poem entirely to you, with the exception that there is a subtheme of narrative dishonestly, or perhaps merely the difficulty of change, in the opening line.
As an example of "flash poetry" I offer this:
I Would Love To
“I would love to,” she said
And all the reasons not to
Were crushed between our lips.
This is perhaps the oldest surviving example of a poem I have. I came up with the idea sometime, but not a long time, after hearing Steve Vai's Passion and Warfare in 1990. I was experimenting with the idea of communicating as much as possible in the fewest possible words: in this case, the idea of lust overcoming good sense.
My fourth example is probably the best, which is perhaps a dubious distinction in this company, but what the hell. I wrote it in 2013, during a period of great emotional anguish, and reached deep into my vault of borrowed imagery to compose it. In these words are contained a very large number of homages, principally to Clive Barker, but at least a half a dozen other writers as well. In fact, the whole poem is really a collection of dialog taken from other people's scripts and novels bridged together here and there by my own fragmentary ideas and driven by own raw emotions. I had no shame in doing this, since Andre "Dr. Dre" Young and Quentin Tarantino became both rich and famous doing much, much worse:
INQUITATUS
You again?
Very well. Let us begin the lesson. Leave your clothes with your hopes and stand before me
Naked as you came into the world.
Naked as you came before your lover, well
I will give you an orgasm at the taste of this whip,
This lash you love. And hate.
(You may scream; there is no shame)
The first stroke lays bare the muscle and the blood
Flows into the cracks between the floorboards where I buried you before.
You can taste the blood, can you not? And do you not like the taste?
After all it is what you came here for.
The second lash lays bare the bone and glistening
Brain in which hide your thoughts,
Your wet machinery of scheming.
And those thoughts
Stalk about this room and caper in glee
These are what nightmares look like,
Unbound.
Do you not like their parade?
Why do you weep so that your
Tears mingle with the blood you came here to shed?
You are the stubbornest of all my pupils
So eager to play and so reluctant to admit it.
But I know what you want, what you came here for
Your words are lies but your screams
Mean what they say
And more blood flicks the wall and spatters the marching
Nightmares as the lash seeks the truth
Within you, and lays bare your beating heart from within its
Cage of ribs
And it is for this that you have come to me, have you not, child?
It is for this and just this you have come to your master to hang naked from
The chains you forged, link by link and yard by yard, so I could show you what your heart looks like.
Let me take it from you, flaming like a coal
And hold it before you, burning like an augury
That tells your future.
This is a hellbound heart, and hell calls hell
Abyssus abyssum invocat
But you do not know this because you do not know
Yourself, do not know
why you even come here. So I will tell you
It is to find the truth in yourself, because there is truth in
Pain and pain alone will show you who you are,
But all this I have told you before.
Shown you before.
And perhaps that is enough for today
You may
Come down off the chains and sew yourself together
Sew yourself around the hellbound heart that drives you
To fresh hells yet unborn
(Abyss abyssum invocat, after all)
And make your way home, steaming, through the snow
Your hopes bundled beneath your arm like schoolbooks
To the empty loveless place in which you live
To lick your wounds by the cold hearth
And curse me for telling you that which you wished to know.
As a final example, similarly personal in nature but drawing less from the work of others, is "Thousand Cigarette Kiss (For Kathy)". Way back in 1996, when I was still lingering in college long after its charms had exhausted themselves, I had a rather tragic, somewhat squalid affair with an unhappy girl named Kathy. (I actually have no idea if she spelled her name with a K or not, but somehow it seems to fit.) In any event, "Kathy," despite her looks, was even more of a mess than I was at the time: drinking too heavily, smoking too much, and seeking to blot out emotional pain and academic disappointment by taking me to bed at regular intervals. Even at the time I could see this provided her with only a temporary feeling of relief at very high cost, but I was too selfish to stop it, as it provided me emotional morphine of my own.
You sit in the bar
Drinking away the pain I can’t
Cure and making it worse
For the both of us
And I fascinated
Watch
You make love to the menthol
The way you never made love to me
And I never made love to you
Because we are both loveless
It was cold when we first met
So dark
The snow was deep
To drunk to drive
So we ended up in bed instead
I can remember the way
Your body looked
Naked in the streetlight
Remember the taste of smoke and wine
upon your lips
He didn’t love you and you wanted
So bad to blot out the pain and I
Excellent in that regard
So generously agreed to help
And now
Nights have passed and here
We are in that same bar
Floundering again
In the wake of your Marlboro
And I’m waiting
Patient as a spider
For the shot that will numb you
Enough to be with me instead
If shame was a thing I could feel
I would be ashamed
But it’s so dark outside
So cold
And the snow’s so deep
And even spiders have the right
To keep warm
Hell
You can even think of him
While we do it
(I told you I was generous)
Another greasy quarter down the juke box
Another sad sad song
And I'll see you home and
In your doorway collect
Your thousand cigarette kiss.
I find this poem interesting because it makes me look somewhat worse than I actually am, or rather was, in terms of behavior. Kathy was always the aggressive intiator of our encounters, sometimes going as far as to bang on my door (or my window) at three in the morning when all I really wanted to do was get some goddamned sleep. The predatory, arachnid-like imagery I use is actually unfair to me, and I believe it stems entirely from my persistent sense of guilt: I could have handled our affair (I don't know what the hell else to call it) in a much more human and friendly way, but was afraid that any kindness that went deeper than mere politeness would be misinterpreted by a deeply unhappy, foundering young woman, at a time when I was barely keeping afloat myself.
You see what I'm getting at here. However good, bad, or downright awful you find these five examples, they are objectively very personal works, products either of deep-seated emotions or of very strong desires to produce a specific effect. There is honesty in them even if they lack in every other department. When I write fiction, I never publish it unless I think it fit to pass muster, and I am a strict drill sergeant: but with poetry, since I have no intention of publication, I can afford to concentrate on emotional veracity rather than technical perfection. As with a woman giving birth, the goal is not to do the thing with panache, but simply to get it done. The rest will take care of itself.
One of the many skills I wish I possessed is the ability to write great, or even just really good, poetry. On the face of it, this does not make sense. Orwell once remarked that poetry was "the least tolerated of the arts" and he was right. In American society anyway, poets are despised, ridiculed, marginalized, under- or simply un-paid, and have no social cachet whatsoever. The very act of writing poetry is often linked to effeminacy or homosexuality regardless of whether the poet falls in these categories, and is associated in many minds with weakness or societial uselessness. When in modern times a poet is rocognized, it is usually due to circumstances which have nothing to do with their skill as a poet. Maya Angelou, for example, was not famous because she was a good poet: she was famous because she was a good black poet. I am absolutely convinced that had she been white or latina, she would not be nearly as well known, even if her verses were exactly the same. This is not a criticism of her poetry: it is a criticism of the "trained bear" aspect of American culture: when a person in a traditionally downtrodden category of humanity excels at something, they are often given a fame disproportionate to others of equal talent who lack their so-called "exotic" quality. And this fame is often slightly tinged with condescention, as in "look at how well that bear dances!" This is not something we like to talk about or admit, but it is true. Yet the fact remains that there have been very great poets in the last 50 - 100 years who are totally unknown to the public because they did not catch the fancy of reporters looking for an "angle." They simply wrote great poems in poverty and near-total obscurity.
This intolerance, mingled with tokenism ("the thing is only interesting if a 'trained bear' does it") is hypocritical in the extreme, because poetry ceases to be contemptible at the exact moment we cease to call it poetry. If we refer to it as songwriting, from which it is often almost indistinguishable, it suddenly acquires huge merit. The same goes for the writing of rap lyrics, which are actually viewed through a funhouse mirror and become ultra-masculine rather than effeminiate, even though they too are simply rhyming poetry. This phenomenon is something I have observed my entire life, though it runs contrary to Shakespeare's assertion that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." In point of fact, if we called roses "garbage flowers," we would probably find excuses notto smell them. Names have enormous power. And the name of poetry is largely mud in the culture we share.
Despite this, I crave the poet's skills, which are as different from the writer's skills as a flare gun is from a howitzer, and have from time to time tried to hone them by producing poems of my own. The vast majority of poems I've written were unreadable trash, but every now and again I produced something which was not altogether hopeless, showed signs of promise, or simply burst with imagery and passion even if the technique was sorely lacking. And in fact I have no technique whatsoever. I never really studied the art, and in a sense the real attraction to the form is rooted in its general lack of rules: poetry is language freed of restraints. It doesn't require grammar or syntax or punctuation or even proper spelling. It doesn't have to make sense or tell a complete story. It can exist entirely for its own sake, like "Jabberwock." And yet when teachers did try to introduce us to poetry, they usually adopted the horrible "Dead Poet's Society" method of trying to reduce poetry to a series of formulas, rules and devices which had to be ruthlessly applied, thus crushing any sense of fun or daring out of the entire exercise before it even began. This left me with a resentment of the writing process itself, which no doubt contributed to my general inability to compose anything worthwhile, but did free me from learning all those tedious "schools of thought" which often hobble the imaginations of overserious students.
The curious thing about sharing poetry is the embarrassment involved. Nothwithstanding the prejudices I mentioned above, the very act of showing a poem with someone, or to an audience, is one of surprisingly intense intimacy. As a novelist, I have written explicit sex scenes, moments of gut-wrenching tragedy, vivid depictions of the most horrific violence and depravity, and there are times when I feel a certain awkwardness knowing friends, family and acquaintances are reading these things. Poetry, however, is on a totally different level of discomfort. Poems by their very nature come from the heart, from the soul, from the deepest recesses of our own personality and spirit. It is impossible to share a poem with another human being without lowering your guard, setting down your armor, and making yourself totally vulnerable: in short, showing your true, naked self. Poems are probably as close to pure honesty as can exist in life, honesty has no artifice to dress it up, and emotional nudity can be extremely discomfiting. This is at once the attraction and the repulsion of the medium. It is both beautiful and personally frightening.
Somewhere in Los Angeles I have a few poems scribbled down in hard copy which do not exist anywhere else: the remainder are here, in electronic form, skulking in a folder I seldom open because I forget for years at a time that it even exists. The spirit moves me to even try my hand at poetry only at very great intervals: sometimes so much time passes between composition and me reading them again that I forget I ever penned them. Having stumbled over my poetry file, however, I found it not altogether humiliating to read. I will never be mistaken for a great or even a good poet, but I am definitely a sincere one, and there is a great deal of strength in sincerity, even if every other measureable quality is lacking.
I am going to share a few examples here with you, written in somewhat different veins. This will at least show that as in my fictional writing, there is some diversity of subject matter. It will also show that I am willing to share more in this blog than my subjective opinions. In a recent post I rather stupidly remarked that I had come to understand that no growth is possible without change. This was a very commonplace observation, rather like stating water is wet: it only seemed profound to me because as an axious person I tend to take comfort in routines. However, I truly believe the only way for writers to get better is to take risks, and opening one's self to ridicule is a fairish risk.
The first poem was written some years ago when I was living in Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, the idea came to me while I was sitting in godawful traffic, brooding about the shallowness of the entertainment industry and the seeming pointlessness of my life in general:
Superficial Cars
We live superficial lives
In a superficial city
Sit in superficial traffic
And get superficial pity.
We drive to superficial jobs,
In superficial cars
We meet superficial women
In superficial bars.
We eat superficial meals
In superficial places
We make superficial talks
In superficial spaces.
At our superficial booths
We drink superficial beers
Smile superficial smiles
Hide superficial tears.
And in the superficial nights
We scream superficial screams
Lay in superficial beds
Have superficial dreams.
And as our superficial hearts
Beat in superficial souls
Our superficial lives
Burn like superficial coals.
Setting aside deeper analysis of my observations here, which may themselves not be worthy of deeper analysis since the poem is direct to the point of obviousness, I am slightly partial to it all the same because it seems, within my own mind anyway, to capture the essential emptiness of modern life, with its pointless scurrying, empty pleasures, and underlying loneliness.
Next comes a much older and completely different poem, written in the early-mid 2000s. There is no attempt at rhyme, nor is there the strict structure I imposed upon the former example. In this exercise I was trying very hard to set a tone, establish a mood, create an atmosphere, while simultaneously telling a story:
Risen
We had not come to dine
The night was young
And we were
Gone with the way of things
The old way
Of doing business.
We had but come to see
For ourselves
This new Face
They had put upon the world
Our old enemies, our old friends
Our lovers.
We had the rest of forever
But no time to waste
The stars
They shine for all
But for some
Only briefly.
The moon
(How beautiful is the moon)
How pale
And we your children
How do we love thee?
Madly.
We had not come to dance
The night was ours
The garden secret
Winding roses, by the pool
And our faces
Unreflected.
We cast no shadow
On this world
And know the darkest secrets
Of your heart
(O how we understand you,
Plaything.)
By the surf, by the storm-swept rock
You built your house
Upon the sand
Into your door
We came on in
Invited.
You poured the wine, we did not drink
You set the meal, we did not eat
But gracious host
The time has come
To show our teeth.
We saw your Face
The world you made
The life you lead
Your daylight dreams
That burn our eyes
Vengeance is ours.
You washed your hands
You hung the cross
And rolled the stone
And broke the seal
Now not your Caesar, and not your Christ, is
Risen.
So darkness falls
Behind your eyes
Our bite is sharp
We taste the blood
The night is ours, we show our Face
Grinning.
The moon has set
The air is chill
Our point is made, it’s time to leave
You where you lie
In the world you made…
Finished.
One of my most annoying characteristics is a tendency to assume my audience needs to have everything explained to them: I was "mansplaining" to both men and women long before this dubious word came into vogue. Fortunately the tendency was recognized and called out by those close to me when I was still very young, and I have worked hard to eliminate it from my writing. I try always to show and not to tell, both in terms of description and moral point, so I will leave interpretations of this poem entirely to you, with the exception that there is a subtheme of narrative dishonestly, or perhaps merely the difficulty of change, in the opening line.
As an example of "flash poetry" I offer this:
I Would Love To
“I would love to,” she said
And all the reasons not to
Were crushed between our lips.
This is perhaps the oldest surviving example of a poem I have. I came up with the idea sometime, but not a long time, after hearing Steve Vai's Passion and Warfare in 1990. I was experimenting with the idea of communicating as much as possible in the fewest possible words: in this case, the idea of lust overcoming good sense.
My fourth example is probably the best, which is perhaps a dubious distinction in this company, but what the hell. I wrote it in 2013, during a period of great emotional anguish, and reached deep into my vault of borrowed imagery to compose it. In these words are contained a very large number of homages, principally to Clive Barker, but at least a half a dozen other writers as well. In fact, the whole poem is really a collection of dialog taken from other people's scripts and novels bridged together here and there by my own fragmentary ideas and driven by own raw emotions. I had no shame in doing this, since Andre "Dr. Dre" Young and Quentin Tarantino became both rich and famous doing much, much worse:
INQUITATUS
You again?
Very well. Let us begin the lesson. Leave your clothes with your hopes and stand before me
Naked as you came into the world.
Naked as you came before your lover, well
I will give you an orgasm at the taste of this whip,
This lash you love. And hate.
(You may scream; there is no shame)
The first stroke lays bare the muscle and the blood
Flows into the cracks between the floorboards where I buried you before.
You can taste the blood, can you not? And do you not like the taste?
After all it is what you came here for.
The second lash lays bare the bone and glistening
Brain in which hide your thoughts,
Your wet machinery of scheming.
And those thoughts
Stalk about this room and caper in glee
These are what nightmares look like,
Unbound.
Do you not like their parade?
Why do you weep so that your
Tears mingle with the blood you came here to shed?
You are the stubbornest of all my pupils
So eager to play and so reluctant to admit it.
But I know what you want, what you came here for
Your words are lies but your screams
Mean what they say
And more blood flicks the wall and spatters the marching
Nightmares as the lash seeks the truth
Within you, and lays bare your beating heart from within its
Cage of ribs
And it is for this that you have come to me, have you not, child?
It is for this and just this you have come to your master to hang naked from
The chains you forged, link by link and yard by yard, so I could show you what your heart looks like.
Let me take it from you, flaming like a coal
And hold it before you, burning like an augury
That tells your future.
This is a hellbound heart, and hell calls hell
Abyssus abyssum invocat
But you do not know this because you do not know
Yourself, do not know
why you even come here. So I will tell you
It is to find the truth in yourself, because there is truth in
Pain and pain alone will show you who you are,
But all this I have told you before.
Shown you before.
And perhaps that is enough for today
You may
Come down off the chains and sew yourself together
Sew yourself around the hellbound heart that drives you
To fresh hells yet unborn
(Abyss abyssum invocat, after all)
And make your way home, steaming, through the snow
Your hopes bundled beneath your arm like schoolbooks
To the empty loveless place in which you live
To lick your wounds by the cold hearth
And curse me for telling you that which you wished to know.
As a final example, similarly personal in nature but drawing less from the work of others, is "Thousand Cigarette Kiss (For Kathy)". Way back in 1996, when I was still lingering in college long after its charms had exhausted themselves, I had a rather tragic, somewhat squalid affair with an unhappy girl named Kathy. (I actually have no idea if she spelled her name with a K or not, but somehow it seems to fit.) In any event, "Kathy," despite her looks, was even more of a mess than I was at the time: drinking too heavily, smoking too much, and seeking to blot out emotional pain and academic disappointment by taking me to bed at regular intervals. Even at the time I could see this provided her with only a temporary feeling of relief at very high cost, but I was too selfish to stop it, as it provided me emotional morphine of my own.
You sit in the bar
Drinking away the pain I can’t
Cure and making it worse
For the both of us
And I fascinated
Watch
You make love to the menthol
The way you never made love to me
And I never made love to you
Because we are both loveless
It was cold when we first met
So dark
The snow was deep
To drunk to drive
So we ended up in bed instead
I can remember the way
Your body looked
Naked in the streetlight
Remember the taste of smoke and wine
upon your lips
He didn’t love you and you wanted
So bad to blot out the pain and I
Excellent in that regard
So generously agreed to help
And now
Nights have passed and here
We are in that same bar
Floundering again
In the wake of your Marlboro
And I’m waiting
Patient as a spider
For the shot that will numb you
Enough to be with me instead
If shame was a thing I could feel
I would be ashamed
But it’s so dark outside
So cold
And the snow’s so deep
And even spiders have the right
To keep warm
Hell
You can even think of him
While we do it
(I told you I was generous)
Another greasy quarter down the juke box
Another sad sad song
And I'll see you home and
In your doorway collect
Your thousand cigarette kiss.
I find this poem interesting because it makes me look somewhat worse than I actually am, or rather was, in terms of behavior. Kathy was always the aggressive intiator of our encounters, sometimes going as far as to bang on my door (or my window) at three in the morning when all I really wanted to do was get some goddamned sleep. The predatory, arachnid-like imagery I use is actually unfair to me, and I believe it stems entirely from my persistent sense of guilt: I could have handled our affair (I don't know what the hell else to call it) in a much more human and friendly way, but was afraid that any kindness that went deeper than mere politeness would be misinterpreted by a deeply unhappy, foundering young woman, at a time when I was barely keeping afloat myself.
You see what I'm getting at here. However good, bad, or downright awful you find these five examples, they are objectively very personal works, products either of deep-seated emotions or of very strong desires to produce a specific effect. There is honesty in them even if they lack in every other department. When I write fiction, I never publish it unless I think it fit to pass muster, and I am a strict drill sergeant: but with poetry, since I have no intention of publication, I can afford to concentrate on emotional veracity rather than technical perfection. As with a woman giving birth, the goal is not to do the thing with panache, but simply to get it done. The rest will take care of itself.
April 12, 2023
WOLF WEATHER
in the pale, pale
light.
pale, pale light of
the moonglow.
I've got a hunger that's in
motion. a hunger that i
cant control.
I'm alone now, in my room
again. on the prowl now
through your dreams
again.
howling
On Saturday I regaled you -- tried to, anyway -- with tell of my upcoming novel Exiles: A Tale From the Chronicle of Magnus. Tonight I attempt to enliven your Wednesday by announcing the not-terribly-far-off release of a new novella, Wolf Weather.
As you may know if you habituate this blog (there are a few that do, poor, wretched, long-suffering creatures), I have been trying my damndest to resurrect the half-forgotten, often disrespected corpses of the novella and novelette for some years now. Now, according to the interwebs, a novelette is a fictional story ranging from 7,500 to 19,000 words (the "long short story"), while a novella ranges from 10,000 to 40,000 words (the "short novel"). There is obviously a degree of overlap there, for no hard definitions of story types exist: the term "novelette" isn't even used in the Americas, though it may still have some purchase in Britain, or so I'm told. But you get my point. Of all the storytelling forms, tales in this word count range are probably the most difficult to get published traditionally. There are surprisingly large numbers of venues both print and electronic, for flash fiction and short stories; and of course novels are as popular as they have ever been; but those lower-mid range tales fell out of fashion ages ago. I hate this very much, for it so happens that this is the range in which I am often most comfortable writing. I have also found that many readers enjoy this length, because it provides more "meat" than a short story and allows them to become more emotionally invested in the characters. At the same time, it does not have the same intimidating quality that a novel possesses (how many people have avoided classic works of literature because the sheer fucking size turns them off?)
Since 2018, I have released five novelettes and novellas. They are:
Deus Ex
The Numbers Game * Pinnacle Book Achievement Award
Seelenmord
Nosferatu * Pinnacle Book Achievement Award
Shadows and Glory
Well, in the next few months, possibly sooner, I am adding a sixth novella to the list. Wolf Weather is a horror-fantasy story of 15,000-odd words, and unlike anything I have ever-before published. I debated with myself as to how much I was going to reveal about it here, and decided that less is more, so I will keep it simple: imagine if you had lived a life of harsh military discipline from the time you were a child, were whipped for the slightest disobedience, and constantly called upon to do battle for an emperor you had never seen. Now imagine that emperor orders you to the far north, far off the map, into a frozen land where the sun never shines and the only light comes from the grinning moon. Imagine that once there, hundreds of miles from the warmth of civilization and the sun, you encounter supernatural beasts somewhere between wolf and man. Cunning creatures who slaughter your comrades and lay siege to the fort you have built with your own raw and bleeding hands. Imagine that one by one, your fellow legionnaires are torn to bits and consumed or worse yet, turned into beasts themselves, until at last, only you remain. The sole survivor and inhabitant of Fort Luna. Now imagine that is where the story begins.
Wolf Weather is a tale about discipline and duty in the face of hopeless odds. It is also a story about wildness...and desire. And what happens when the two things meet head on in the deeps of the forest beneath the light of the moon.
And that's it. That's all I'm gonna say, except that I really like the story, which is far from always the case, and greatly enjoyed my excursion into dark fantasy. Wolf Weather is undergoing its final editorial polish and the cover is still being formatted, but I expect to release it by midsummer latest. It will be available on pre-order from Amazon, and also through my website (autographed) at mileswatsonauthor.com.
Til then, keep howlin'.
light.
pale, pale light of
the moonglow.
I've got a hunger that's in
motion. a hunger that i
cant control.
I'm alone now, in my room
again. on the prowl now
through your dreams
again.
howling
On Saturday I regaled you -- tried to, anyway -- with tell of my upcoming novel Exiles: A Tale From the Chronicle of Magnus. Tonight I attempt to enliven your Wednesday by announcing the not-terribly-far-off release of a new novella, Wolf Weather.
As you may know if you habituate this blog (there are a few that do, poor, wretched, long-suffering creatures), I have been trying my damndest to resurrect the half-forgotten, often disrespected corpses of the novella and novelette for some years now. Now, according to the interwebs, a novelette is a fictional story ranging from 7,500 to 19,000 words (the "long short story"), while a novella ranges from 10,000 to 40,000 words (the "short novel"). There is obviously a degree of overlap there, for no hard definitions of story types exist: the term "novelette" isn't even used in the Americas, though it may still have some purchase in Britain, or so I'm told. But you get my point. Of all the storytelling forms, tales in this word count range are probably the most difficult to get published traditionally. There are surprisingly large numbers of venues both print and electronic, for flash fiction and short stories; and of course novels are as popular as they have ever been; but those lower-mid range tales fell out of fashion ages ago. I hate this very much, for it so happens that this is the range in which I am often most comfortable writing. I have also found that many readers enjoy this length, because it provides more "meat" than a short story and allows them to become more emotionally invested in the characters. At the same time, it does not have the same intimidating quality that a novel possesses (how many people have avoided classic works of literature because the sheer fucking size turns them off?)
Since 2018, I have released five novelettes and novellas. They are:
Deus Ex
The Numbers Game * Pinnacle Book Achievement Award
Seelenmord
Nosferatu * Pinnacle Book Achievement Award
Shadows and Glory
Well, in the next few months, possibly sooner, I am adding a sixth novella to the list. Wolf Weather is a horror-fantasy story of 15,000-odd words, and unlike anything I have ever-before published. I debated with myself as to how much I was going to reveal about it here, and decided that less is more, so I will keep it simple: imagine if you had lived a life of harsh military discipline from the time you were a child, were whipped for the slightest disobedience, and constantly called upon to do battle for an emperor you had never seen. Now imagine that emperor orders you to the far north, far off the map, into a frozen land where the sun never shines and the only light comes from the grinning moon. Imagine that once there, hundreds of miles from the warmth of civilization and the sun, you encounter supernatural beasts somewhere between wolf and man. Cunning creatures who slaughter your comrades and lay siege to the fort you have built with your own raw and bleeding hands. Imagine that one by one, your fellow legionnaires are torn to bits and consumed or worse yet, turned into beasts themselves, until at last, only you remain. The sole survivor and inhabitant of Fort Luna. Now imagine that is where the story begins.
Wolf Weather is a tale about discipline and duty in the face of hopeless odds. It is also a story about wildness...and desire. And what happens when the two things meet head on in the deeps of the forest beneath the light of the moon.
And that's it. That's all I'm gonna say, except that I really like the story, which is far from always the case, and greatly enjoyed my excursion into dark fantasy. Wolf Weather is undergoing its final editorial polish and the cover is still being formatted, but I expect to release it by midsummer latest. It will be available on pre-order from Amazon, and also through my website (autographed) at mileswatsonauthor.com.
Til then, keep howlin'.
April 8, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: OLE MAGNUS IS BACK
In 2022 I released DEUS EX, an alternative-history novella about a defeated dictator who, as his enemies close in, contemplates both escape and how his great empire came to ruin. The central figure is Magnus Antonius Magnus, a man who is equal parts Caesar, Hitler, Napoleon and Ghengis Khan: brilliant, charismatic, ambitious, and ruthless. He conquered a quarter of the earth's surface and ruled it with an iron fist, in time coming to see himself as a god. The questions I posed with the book were whether Magnus could indeed escape justice for his terrible crimes, and if so, if he were able to flee and start anew in a distant land, had he learned anything from his downfall...or would he simply repeat his mistakes?
Like all my novellas, I wrote it as a stand-alone story. I wanted to explore the psychology of tyrants, autocrats, and dictators generally, while also penning a thriller of the "will he get away, or won't he?" variety. To do this, I had to set the scene, and give readers an understanding of what the world Magnus ruled was like. However, as I began to write, I came to realize that in order to tell the tale of his downfall, I also had to chronicle his rise to power. I had to supply not only a certain amount of backstory for the character, but also create a second world, the world he overthrew to become a dictator. Very little of this world appears in DEUS EX, and in fact I constructed only what was necessary for the internal logic of the story to hold true, but the fact is that a writer's creative faculties, once turned on, are not so easily turned off. Months after the novella had hit literal and electronic shelves, I kept adding bricks to the edifice. I kept sketching more and more detail into the world Magnus was born into, which he came to detest and ultimately decided to destroy. It began to take a very clear and detailed shape in my mind, and like most landscapes, seemed to beg its artist for the insertion of some people. Quite without intending to, I had set up all the preconditions to continue the story of Magnus, albeit in a prequel rather than a sequel form.
All of this is a roundabout way of telling you that 2023 will see the release of EXILES: A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLE OF MAGNUS. This story is not a novella: it is a full-length novel, albeit a somewhat shorter novel than is my usual wont. It is set about twenty years before the events of DEUS EX, and is the story of Enitan Champoleon, a solitary exile on the Isle of a Thousand Names, and Marguerite Bain, a smuggler who encounters this fantastical man and learns his life story...and how it intersects with Magnus, the mysterious rebel leader. There is not a lot I can reveal about this novel without ruining its many surprises, but I can say this much:
* It is the first novel I have written with a female protagonist. Marguerite Bain, captain of the Sea Dragon and member of the Brotherhood of the Coast, a band of smugglers and pirates licensed by the Order to operate in the Mediterranean Sea, is a woman grown weary of intrigue and violence, who secretly longs for peace, but must never show weakness.
* It is the first novel I have written where the male protagonist has neither size, nor stature, nor fighting ability: Enitan Champoleon lives solely by his wits...and his lies. Champoleon is among other things the means by which I explore the awesome power of lies, and how they can not only move the world, but grow out of the control of the liars who utter them.
* It explores the peculiar world of the Order, the politico-economic system which rules Europe not with an iron hand, but red tape: it is a faceless bureacracy backed up by highly skilled assassins, which restricts all technology to further its control ove the population.
* It shows us Magnus as a much younger man, just beginning his quest for power, and yet already demonstrating the ruthless cunning which will ultimately leave him as master of Europe...as well as the cruelty and lust for domination which prove his eventual downfall.
* Since Deus Ex actually takes place at the very end of the story of Magnus, it is not necessary to read it before you read Exiles: however, having a go at the novella first will give you a better understanding of what sort of man Magnus is and what he is capable of. It is my intention to piece him together story by story, paying little attention to chronology, until we have a complete picture of this very complex, profoundly evil, and yet strangely sympathetic man.
No novel writes itself, but Exiles was at once the easiest, and at the same time the most pleasurable experience I have ever had writing a novel. The first draft took less than four months to complete: one-third of the time it normally takes me under the most idealized circumstances. Indeed,
most literary works are like love affairs: dizzying moments of joy and pleasure alternate with long periods of boredom and stagnation, followed by agonizing battles with confusion, heartbreak and failure. This one was more like a summer vacation packed with interesting experiences and colorful adventures. I enjoyed every moment of writing it and was sad when I typed the final period. Only the knowledge that the Chronicles of Magnus will continue, probably in 2024, with yet another full-length novel, made saying goodbye to the world I'd accidentally created bearable.
I am presently in the process of producing the second draft, commissioning a cover and booking a review tour, but I am confident that the release date will correspond roughly with my planned trip to Iceland in September or October of this year. It is not going to be my only release of 2024, and may be preceded by a horror-fantasy novella called Wolf Weather, but it is something I'm deeply excited about. If you have interest, Deus Ex is available on Amazon on Kindle e-book and in paperback
Deus Ex
and autographed, personalized copies can be obtained from my own website
https://www.mileswatsonauthor.com/
Like all my novellas, I wrote it as a stand-alone story. I wanted to explore the psychology of tyrants, autocrats, and dictators generally, while also penning a thriller of the "will he get away, or won't he?" variety. To do this, I had to set the scene, and give readers an understanding of what the world Magnus ruled was like. However, as I began to write, I came to realize that in order to tell the tale of his downfall, I also had to chronicle his rise to power. I had to supply not only a certain amount of backstory for the character, but also create a second world, the world he overthrew to become a dictator. Very little of this world appears in DEUS EX, and in fact I constructed only what was necessary for the internal logic of the story to hold true, but the fact is that a writer's creative faculties, once turned on, are not so easily turned off. Months after the novella had hit literal and electronic shelves, I kept adding bricks to the edifice. I kept sketching more and more detail into the world Magnus was born into, which he came to detest and ultimately decided to destroy. It began to take a very clear and detailed shape in my mind, and like most landscapes, seemed to beg its artist for the insertion of some people. Quite without intending to, I had set up all the preconditions to continue the story of Magnus, albeit in a prequel rather than a sequel form.
All of this is a roundabout way of telling you that 2023 will see the release of EXILES: A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLE OF MAGNUS. This story is not a novella: it is a full-length novel, albeit a somewhat shorter novel than is my usual wont. It is set about twenty years before the events of DEUS EX, and is the story of Enitan Champoleon, a solitary exile on the Isle of a Thousand Names, and Marguerite Bain, a smuggler who encounters this fantastical man and learns his life story...and how it intersects with Magnus, the mysterious rebel leader. There is not a lot I can reveal about this novel without ruining its many surprises, but I can say this much:
* It is the first novel I have written with a female protagonist. Marguerite Bain, captain of the Sea Dragon and member of the Brotherhood of the Coast, a band of smugglers and pirates licensed by the Order to operate in the Mediterranean Sea, is a woman grown weary of intrigue and violence, who secretly longs for peace, but must never show weakness.
* It is the first novel I have written where the male protagonist has neither size, nor stature, nor fighting ability: Enitan Champoleon lives solely by his wits...and his lies. Champoleon is among other things the means by which I explore the awesome power of lies, and how they can not only move the world, but grow out of the control of the liars who utter them.
* It explores the peculiar world of the Order, the politico-economic system which rules Europe not with an iron hand, but red tape: it is a faceless bureacracy backed up by highly skilled assassins, which restricts all technology to further its control ove the population.
* It shows us Magnus as a much younger man, just beginning his quest for power, and yet already demonstrating the ruthless cunning which will ultimately leave him as master of Europe...as well as the cruelty and lust for domination which prove his eventual downfall.
* Since Deus Ex actually takes place at the very end of the story of Magnus, it is not necessary to read it before you read Exiles: however, having a go at the novella first will give you a better understanding of what sort of man Magnus is and what he is capable of. It is my intention to piece him together story by story, paying little attention to chronology, until we have a complete picture of this very complex, profoundly evil, and yet strangely sympathetic man.
No novel writes itself, but Exiles was at once the easiest, and at the same time the most pleasurable experience I have ever had writing a novel. The first draft took less than four months to complete: one-third of the time it normally takes me under the most idealized circumstances. Indeed,
most literary works are like love affairs: dizzying moments of joy and pleasure alternate with long periods of boredom and stagnation, followed by agonizing battles with confusion, heartbreak and failure. This one was more like a summer vacation packed with interesting experiences and colorful adventures. I enjoyed every moment of writing it and was sad when I typed the final period. Only the knowledge that the Chronicles of Magnus will continue, probably in 2024, with yet another full-length novel, made saying goodbye to the world I'd accidentally created bearable.
I am presently in the process of producing the second draft, commissioning a cover and booking a review tour, but I am confident that the release date will correspond roughly with my planned trip to Iceland in September or October of this year. It is not going to be my only release of 2024, and may be preceded by a horror-fantasy novella called Wolf Weather, but it is something I'm deeply excited about. If you have interest, Deus Ex is available on Amazon on Kindle e-book and in paperback
Deus Ex
and autographed, personalized copies can be obtained from my own website
https://www.mileswatsonauthor.com/
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
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