Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 17
March 11, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: THE BEST NOVELS I'VE EVER READ
On this cold and somewhat dreary St. Patrick's Day, I find myself already hungover and therefore unwilling to participate in the revelry I can hear clearly through my windows. And since this is a Goodreads blog and I never seem to talk about books in it (unless they are my own), I thought I would discuss some of my all-time favorites.
Now, when I say "the best novels I've ever read," I have to remind myself that the best novels and my favorite novels are not necessarily the same thing. I am going to exclude some I greatly enjoyed because, objectively speaking, they aren't all that well-written or are simply guilty pleasures. I suppose they will end up in a separate blog. For now, I'll stick to those I feel are the elite of my own experience: well-written, well-crafted, deeply resonant novels that achieve whatever it is they set out to do, no matter how ambitious. This list is just a chunk of an iceberg (there are obviously going to be more), the titles are chosen at random, and my only rule is that no author be referenced more than once in the same list.
Now, to quote Dominic Da Vinci, "Let me get into this."
COMING UP FOR AIR by George Orwell. Regarded as "minor classic" but largely unknown outside of those who have actually read Orwells novels that aren't named 1984 or ANIMAL FARM, this is my favorite Orwell story and fundamentally his most human. The protagonist, George "Fatty" Bowling, is an insurance salesman living in the inner-outer suburbs of London in 1938. He's fat (hence the name), wears false teeth, has a nagging, penny-pinching wife he doesn't love and children he regards largely as nuisances. Though vulgar and thick-skinned, Bowling is also quite intelligent, and increasingly depressed by the soullnessness, the shallowness, the sheer deafening noise of modern life, anxious about the coming war, and even more anxious about what he calls "the after war" -- a dystopian era of totalitarianism and poverty he foresees which is very similar to the one Orwell actually created for 1984. Reflecting on his childhood in a small rural market town in the Late Victorian/Edwardian Eras, he realizes that what he had then was a sense of inner peace, of stillness: a freedom not from physical labor, privation or illness, but from fear. He decides to revisit his childhood home and see if he can take a literal and metaphysical breath of fresh air. Being a political firebrand, Orwell is not really thought of as a strong prose-writer, but he did excellent work here, and more than that, recreated the atmosphere of early 1900s rural England to a degree which makes the reader feel, in a few short chapters, that he has been there himself. Likewise, his brutish descriptions of WW1 and Bowling's struggles to find a job in postwar England, and his inevitable descent from a hopeful young man into a disillusioned nobody. Bowling's journey into the past and through the present is witty and tragic, cynical and sentimental: what's more, its themes of a middle-aged man beginning to feel increasingly alienated from modern life are absolutely timeless.
THE ANTAGONISTS by Ernest K. Gann.* This was the first historical "war" novel I ever read which is largely absent any actual combat, and does not suffer from the fact. Taking place during the Siege of Masada in A.D. 72 - 73, it is Gann's fictionalized but beautifully researched take on the war of wills between Flavius Silva, commander of the Roman Empire's Tenth Legion, and Eleazar ben Yair, the Jewish rebel who holed up atop a seemingly impregnable desert fortress with 900 men, women and children following Rome's conquest of Judea. Silva is a man with many problems. First, he's got to take Masada, which requires years of siege warfare in blistering temperatures, and an engineering feat which strains the imagination. Second, he's got to do it before his fed-up legionaries mutiny. Third, he's got to deal with a "dignitary" from Rome who is scheming to take over his command. To top it off, he's a drunk in the bargain, gutted by the premature death of his beloved wife, and who now finds himself falling in love with a beautiful Jewish hostage who naturally hates his guts. Meanwhile, on top of "the Rock," ben Yair has problems of his own. The charismatic rebel leader is surrounded by thousands of enemy troops with no hope of escape, trying to hold morale together among his people while the Romans build a ramp right up to his very gates, and increasingly anxious about the fate of his wife and son, who are just as doomed as he is. Each of the antagonists is basically faced with insurmountable internal problems while trying to kill the other, and yet they develop a healthy respect for each other's skills. More a story about human beings in conflict and under extreme pressure than combat per se, it is also an examination of the qualities that make good leaders have more in common with each other than they do with the men that send them to die.
*This novel is also published under the name MASADA.
THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT by Lawrence Sanders. Sanders is today remembered as "Mr. Bestseller," a prolific and occasionally hackish author who nonetheless had a command of descriptive prose that is perhaps unequaled in the modern English language. At his height, however, he could produce works of pure art, and T6C is such a book. It follows the dissolute Samuel Todd, an investigator for a scientific grant foundation, as he travels to a dying town in upstate New York to meet a famous researcher hoping for said grant. The seemingly picayune assignment of deciding whether Dr. Teleford Thorndecker should get his funding turns increasingly bizarre and dangerous when he begins to realize just what kind of experiments Thorndecker is conducting in the depressing town of Coburn, NY, a place where everyone from the police chief to the local minister is not only hiding their own secrets, but desperate to make sure the foundation money flows through their moribund burg no matter what teh cost. Really good books always have something to say beyond the obvious, and THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT has a lot to say about our fear of ageing -- not death per se, but the act of growing older and the state of being old. Todd is a man who just broke up with the love of his life because he couldn't hack the age difference between them, and Thorndecker is a man obsessed with recapturing the vitality of youth to please his seductive, amoral wife. Beautifully and atmospherically written, with a cliche' of a drunken priavte-eye protagonist who turns said trope upside down by neither carrying a gun nor being able to fight, this is a thoughtful book about the need to come to terms with things inevitable, and the terrible costs we pay when we fail to do so.
THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman. At once a science-fiction masterpiece and a scathing antiwar novel, Haldeman's novel about a reluctant soldier who ends up living for thousands of years thanks to the principle of "time dilation" is one that will stay with you, well, forever. In the near future, Earth is at war with a mysterious race referred to as Taurans. Because the laws of relativity cause time-dilation for space travelers nearing the speed of light, every time Private William Mandella comes back from a mission, he finds decades or even centuries have passed. Every friend, relative, and society he has ever known become extinct: language, the physical look of the human race, and even sexuality are no longer recognizable to him. Yet the war persists, leaving him, at one point, the oldest person in the human race, with no clear idea what he is even fighting for, and desperate to be reunited with a fellow soldier, Marygay, with whom he is hopelessly in love but seemingly doomed never to encounter again. Dark, bitter, brutal, but also curiously witty and always deft, THE FOREVER WAR is one of the most imaginative novels I have ever read, showing us a man who tries to remain fundamentally human even as the human race itself becomes increasingly like the machines it uses to wage endless war.
RED DRAGON by Thomas Harris. Now merely remembered as the book that introduced us to Dr. Hannibal Lecter ("Is that the one before SILENCE OF THE LAMBS?") this novel is an absolute masterpiece in its own right, arguably the best novel I have ever read. Harris introduces us to Will Graham, a wounded, world-weary former FBI consultant dragged out of retirement to help the Bureau track down a serial murderer known as Red Dragon. The Dragon slaughters entire families at the full moon, and as the story begins, we are a few weeks away from yet another lunar massacre. Graham is a top forensics man, but his real gift -- he views it as a curse -- is his ability to get into the heads of serial killers, reconstruct their fantasies, and eventually predict their behavior. He caught Lecter years before by getting into his hideous head; now he's after the equally twisted Dragon. Unfortunately, due to Lecter's covert intervention, the Dragon is also after him. As much an examination of how monsters are made as how they are hunted, DRAGON is a deeply empathetic and human novel, in which Francis Dolarhyde, the Dragon, is shown to be as much a victim of monsters as a monster himself. Violating the "show don't tell" rule with brilliant aplomb, he eventually takes us into Dolarhyde's horrific childhood with such merciless exactitude that we cannot help heartbroken at how he came to be the man he is. Nor can we help but root for his burgeoning romance with a female co-worker, even though we know it is as doomed as anything can be. Graham, too, is a casualty of his own mind: he cannot turn off the faculties which allow him to be such a superb manhunter, making his return to the field a tightrope walk over his own sanity. The basic ideas driving DRAGON are now exhausted cliches after 30 years of shows about crime-scene techs, profilers, forensic experts, etc., etc., but Harris struck first: DRAGON is the father of every novel, television series and movie which mined these subjects absolutely bare. And it is better than all of its imitators.
PIECE OF CAKE by Derek Robinson. Probably no event in modern Western history is as mythologized as The Battle of Britain. The image of a handful of heroic "knights of the air" turning back Hitler's hordes and saving civilization with sheer guts and determination is a picturesque one that has survived even this cynical cage. Yet Derek Robinson did his best to destroy it in PIECE OF CAKE, a brutally iconoclastic take on the Battle and the men who fought it. CAKE is the story of the Royal Air Force's "Hornet Squadron" and its first twelve months at war, from September 1939 to September 1940. During that time we meet the pilots and follow them through the air war's early, boring days to its frantic, cataclysmic climax over London. While most of the pilots are killed off, and then replaced by others who are in turn killed off, a few linger long enough for us to get to know them, and boy, are they jerks. Far from being noble and selfless, Robinson paints a picture of shallow, callow, thrill-seeking post-adolescents who "would probably be out robbing banks if they weren't flying for us." (One of them, Lance "Moggy" Cattermole, is an out and out psychopath, and a sadist in the bargain.) Nor are their commanders any better: Ramsay is a mean-tempered bully, and Lord Rex an inflexible snob. Of course there are some likeable blokes, too, such as "Uncle" Kellaway, "Skull" Skellen, "Fanny" Barton, "Mother" Cox and poor "Fitz" Fitzgerald -- but the point is that nobody, not even the character who becomes the main protagonist, Christopher Hart, fits anybody's image of a hero. They shoot down friendly aircraft by mistake, bully each other, sleep with each other's women, steal, lie, cheat, go crazy, and even commit murder. Robinson has a marvelous and very English gift for sarcasm and sustained low-grade cruelty in his writing, and he depicts Hornet Squadron as a kind of flying collegiate dormitory, full of men behaving badly. Robinson also shows the air war for what it was: a grinding, slow-moving slaughter, generally absent anything resembling glory and definitely absent anything resembling honor. As Hart puts it, "Up there the world is divided into bastards and suckers. Make your choice."
PET SEMATARY by Stephen King. As I said above, the best novels always have something to say beyond the obvious, and in PET SEMATARY, Stephen King (who incidentally hates this book), had a dark and curious theme indeed: "Sometimes dead is better." When Louis Creed and his family move into their new home in rural Maine, they never suspect the old animal cemetery in the woods beyond has the power to resurrect the dead. And when Louis finds out, courtesy of his kindly neighbor Jud (one of King's best-drawn characters ever), he naturally uses its power to bring the family cat back to life after it is tragically struck down on the road. By the time he asks Jud the inevitable question, "Has anyone ever buried a person there?" however, very bad and evil things are already in motion, centering around a Mack truck, Louis's toddling son Gage, and his beautiful wife Rachael. A slow-burn into true horror, King takes his time getting you to know, and love, the Crandalls and the Creeds, before he systematically puts them through the worst hell imaginable. The thesis of the book is that death is a natural process to be made friends with rather than feared, and like Dr. Thorndecker in SIXTH COMMANDENT, those who go against that process risk fates worth than the death they fear. King was very big on the idea of "forbidden knowledge" as a classic trope of horror, and he employs it brutally and beautifully here, letting Lou Creed know in no uncertain terms that everything has a price, and sometimes dead is better. This is, I believe, the first book that ever truly frightened me.
THE STRANGE CASE OF DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE by Robert Louis Stevenson. Continuing in the theme of Forbidden Knowledge is the classic of the genre. Set in Victorian England, this is the story of Dr. Henry Jekyll, benefactor of the community, "fellow of all souls" and general do-gooder, who creates a potion which allows him to assume a different physical form. In that form, that of Edward Hyde, he indulges in all the vices Victorian morals forbid, and then, transforming back to himself, continues his upright ways until his craving for sin gets the better of him. Unfortunately for Jekyll, however, he swiftly loses control of both the Hyde persona itself and his ability to change into and out of it at will: in fact he ends up stranded as Hyde, and having committed a vicious public murder, is now a hunted man. Reaching out to his old friend Utterson, he tries desperately to rework the formula, assume Jekyll's shape, and escape justice, but the walls are closing in, and as I said above, everything has a price. Known as much for its attack on Victorian hypocrisy as for its horror and sci-fi elements, the book is actually a brilliant examination of the nature of human character itself. Is Jekyll a wicked man who merely desires to be appear virtuous while he satisfies his sweet tooth on the side, or a red-blooded man rebelling against the strict and cramping moral codes of the era the only way possible? The answer is not really clear, and that's part of what makes this swift-moving, beautifully written novella so enjoyable.
DUNE by Frank Herbert. I am not traditionally a sci-fi guy. I have read more fantasy than science-fiction...and I don't read a lot of fantasy, either. That having been said, DUNE has to be one of the greatest novels ever written in any genre. It is a towering masterwork of imagination harnessed to a unique prose-style, and while it has sold less than Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," it is comparable in terms of influence within its own genre. DUNE is the story of one young man's transformation from the heir to a minor noble line into a messiah-like figure, somewhere between Mohammed and Caesar. Set in a universe as complex and fully-developed as the real one, where the mind rather than technology is key and king, it is brimming with intrigue and conflict, as Paul Atreides struggles not only to regain his birthright, but to prevent his transformation into a higher being from turning him into a monster more cruel than the one who drove him into exile. With lots to say about politics, ecology, economics and religion, DUNE is one of those books that is so rich that one invariably picks up on new subthemes with each subsequent rereading.
THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald. What makes a classic? Timelessness. That's really the only difference between the "great" popular novels that are quickly forgotten, and the ones that resonate through the decades, generations, even centuries. Taken on its face, THE GREAT GATSBY is a light, comic-tragic coming-of-age story set in the Jazz Age: a tale about a man who came from nothing and went back to nothing. But it is much more than that. It is a tale about illusion and disillusion, young love and heartbreak, power and fragility. It is a cautionary tale with an underlying note of bitterness against the unfairness of life and the fleeting nature of relationships. The narrator, Nick Carraway, is the vehicle by which we encounter Jay Gatsby, a fabulously wealthy Long Islander of dubious reputation and uncertain history: Gatsby has everything money can buy except his long-lost, now married love Daisy Buchanan. Throughout the novel he schemes with the precision of a chess master to cleave Daisy from her jerk husband Tom, but his plans go awry, with tragic consequences for many involved, but perhaps most tragic for Nick: Carraway enters the story young, upbeat and naive, and leaves it older, sadder, and wiser, his path mimicking the path of all men in their 20s whose dreams break against the crueler realities of life. And it is really this last point that cements the books greatness: in avoiding even a partially happy ending and thus giving us the outcome the story demanded, Fitzgerald turned what might have been a "book of the year" into a timeless classic which is as relevant today as when it was written.
And with that, I come to the end of The Saturday Evening Post and today's list. I tried to keep it fairly diverse, and in the next installment may cheat a little and include short-story collections, because a) they are novel length works of fiction, and b) it's my blog and I'll do as I please with the damned thing. In the mean time, happy St. Patrick's Day to any sober enough to read this.
Now, when I say "the best novels I've ever read," I have to remind myself that the best novels and my favorite novels are not necessarily the same thing. I am going to exclude some I greatly enjoyed because, objectively speaking, they aren't all that well-written or are simply guilty pleasures. I suppose they will end up in a separate blog. For now, I'll stick to those I feel are the elite of my own experience: well-written, well-crafted, deeply resonant novels that achieve whatever it is they set out to do, no matter how ambitious. This list is just a chunk of an iceberg (there are obviously going to be more), the titles are chosen at random, and my only rule is that no author be referenced more than once in the same list.
Now, to quote Dominic Da Vinci, "Let me get into this."
COMING UP FOR AIR by George Orwell. Regarded as "minor classic" but largely unknown outside of those who have actually read Orwells novels that aren't named 1984 or ANIMAL FARM, this is my favorite Orwell story and fundamentally his most human. The protagonist, George "Fatty" Bowling, is an insurance salesman living in the inner-outer suburbs of London in 1938. He's fat (hence the name), wears false teeth, has a nagging, penny-pinching wife he doesn't love and children he regards largely as nuisances. Though vulgar and thick-skinned, Bowling is also quite intelligent, and increasingly depressed by the soullnessness, the shallowness, the sheer deafening noise of modern life, anxious about the coming war, and even more anxious about what he calls "the after war" -- a dystopian era of totalitarianism and poverty he foresees which is very similar to the one Orwell actually created for 1984. Reflecting on his childhood in a small rural market town in the Late Victorian/Edwardian Eras, he realizes that what he had then was a sense of inner peace, of stillness: a freedom not from physical labor, privation or illness, but from fear. He decides to revisit his childhood home and see if he can take a literal and metaphysical breath of fresh air. Being a political firebrand, Orwell is not really thought of as a strong prose-writer, but he did excellent work here, and more than that, recreated the atmosphere of early 1900s rural England to a degree which makes the reader feel, in a few short chapters, that he has been there himself. Likewise, his brutish descriptions of WW1 and Bowling's struggles to find a job in postwar England, and his inevitable descent from a hopeful young man into a disillusioned nobody. Bowling's journey into the past and through the present is witty and tragic, cynical and sentimental: what's more, its themes of a middle-aged man beginning to feel increasingly alienated from modern life are absolutely timeless.
THE ANTAGONISTS by Ernest K. Gann.* This was the first historical "war" novel I ever read which is largely absent any actual combat, and does not suffer from the fact. Taking place during the Siege of Masada in A.D. 72 - 73, it is Gann's fictionalized but beautifully researched take on the war of wills between Flavius Silva, commander of the Roman Empire's Tenth Legion, and Eleazar ben Yair, the Jewish rebel who holed up atop a seemingly impregnable desert fortress with 900 men, women and children following Rome's conquest of Judea. Silva is a man with many problems. First, he's got to take Masada, which requires years of siege warfare in blistering temperatures, and an engineering feat which strains the imagination. Second, he's got to do it before his fed-up legionaries mutiny. Third, he's got to deal with a "dignitary" from Rome who is scheming to take over his command. To top it off, he's a drunk in the bargain, gutted by the premature death of his beloved wife, and who now finds himself falling in love with a beautiful Jewish hostage who naturally hates his guts. Meanwhile, on top of "the Rock," ben Yair has problems of his own. The charismatic rebel leader is surrounded by thousands of enemy troops with no hope of escape, trying to hold morale together among his people while the Romans build a ramp right up to his very gates, and increasingly anxious about the fate of his wife and son, who are just as doomed as he is. Each of the antagonists is basically faced with insurmountable internal problems while trying to kill the other, and yet they develop a healthy respect for each other's skills. More a story about human beings in conflict and under extreme pressure than combat per se, it is also an examination of the qualities that make good leaders have more in common with each other than they do with the men that send them to die.
*This novel is also published under the name MASADA.
THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT by Lawrence Sanders. Sanders is today remembered as "Mr. Bestseller," a prolific and occasionally hackish author who nonetheless had a command of descriptive prose that is perhaps unequaled in the modern English language. At his height, however, he could produce works of pure art, and T6C is such a book. It follows the dissolute Samuel Todd, an investigator for a scientific grant foundation, as he travels to a dying town in upstate New York to meet a famous researcher hoping for said grant. The seemingly picayune assignment of deciding whether Dr. Teleford Thorndecker should get his funding turns increasingly bizarre and dangerous when he begins to realize just what kind of experiments Thorndecker is conducting in the depressing town of Coburn, NY, a place where everyone from the police chief to the local minister is not only hiding their own secrets, but desperate to make sure the foundation money flows through their moribund burg no matter what teh cost. Really good books always have something to say beyond the obvious, and THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT has a lot to say about our fear of ageing -- not death per se, but the act of growing older and the state of being old. Todd is a man who just broke up with the love of his life because he couldn't hack the age difference between them, and Thorndecker is a man obsessed with recapturing the vitality of youth to please his seductive, amoral wife. Beautifully and atmospherically written, with a cliche' of a drunken priavte-eye protagonist who turns said trope upside down by neither carrying a gun nor being able to fight, this is a thoughtful book about the need to come to terms with things inevitable, and the terrible costs we pay when we fail to do so.
THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman. At once a science-fiction masterpiece and a scathing antiwar novel, Haldeman's novel about a reluctant soldier who ends up living for thousands of years thanks to the principle of "time dilation" is one that will stay with you, well, forever. In the near future, Earth is at war with a mysterious race referred to as Taurans. Because the laws of relativity cause time-dilation for space travelers nearing the speed of light, every time Private William Mandella comes back from a mission, he finds decades or even centuries have passed. Every friend, relative, and society he has ever known become extinct: language, the physical look of the human race, and even sexuality are no longer recognizable to him. Yet the war persists, leaving him, at one point, the oldest person in the human race, with no clear idea what he is even fighting for, and desperate to be reunited with a fellow soldier, Marygay, with whom he is hopelessly in love but seemingly doomed never to encounter again. Dark, bitter, brutal, but also curiously witty and always deft, THE FOREVER WAR is one of the most imaginative novels I have ever read, showing us a man who tries to remain fundamentally human even as the human race itself becomes increasingly like the machines it uses to wage endless war.
RED DRAGON by Thomas Harris. Now merely remembered as the book that introduced us to Dr. Hannibal Lecter ("Is that the one before SILENCE OF THE LAMBS?") this novel is an absolute masterpiece in its own right, arguably the best novel I have ever read. Harris introduces us to Will Graham, a wounded, world-weary former FBI consultant dragged out of retirement to help the Bureau track down a serial murderer known as Red Dragon. The Dragon slaughters entire families at the full moon, and as the story begins, we are a few weeks away from yet another lunar massacre. Graham is a top forensics man, but his real gift -- he views it as a curse -- is his ability to get into the heads of serial killers, reconstruct their fantasies, and eventually predict their behavior. He caught Lecter years before by getting into his hideous head; now he's after the equally twisted Dragon. Unfortunately, due to Lecter's covert intervention, the Dragon is also after him. As much an examination of how monsters are made as how they are hunted, DRAGON is a deeply empathetic and human novel, in which Francis Dolarhyde, the Dragon, is shown to be as much a victim of monsters as a monster himself. Violating the "show don't tell" rule with brilliant aplomb, he eventually takes us into Dolarhyde's horrific childhood with such merciless exactitude that we cannot help heartbroken at how he came to be the man he is. Nor can we help but root for his burgeoning romance with a female co-worker, even though we know it is as doomed as anything can be. Graham, too, is a casualty of his own mind: he cannot turn off the faculties which allow him to be such a superb manhunter, making his return to the field a tightrope walk over his own sanity. The basic ideas driving DRAGON are now exhausted cliches after 30 years of shows about crime-scene techs, profilers, forensic experts, etc., etc., but Harris struck first: DRAGON is the father of every novel, television series and movie which mined these subjects absolutely bare. And it is better than all of its imitators.
PIECE OF CAKE by Derek Robinson. Probably no event in modern Western history is as mythologized as The Battle of Britain. The image of a handful of heroic "knights of the air" turning back Hitler's hordes and saving civilization with sheer guts and determination is a picturesque one that has survived even this cynical cage. Yet Derek Robinson did his best to destroy it in PIECE OF CAKE, a brutally iconoclastic take on the Battle and the men who fought it. CAKE is the story of the Royal Air Force's "Hornet Squadron" and its first twelve months at war, from September 1939 to September 1940. During that time we meet the pilots and follow them through the air war's early, boring days to its frantic, cataclysmic climax over London. While most of the pilots are killed off, and then replaced by others who are in turn killed off, a few linger long enough for us to get to know them, and boy, are they jerks. Far from being noble and selfless, Robinson paints a picture of shallow, callow, thrill-seeking post-adolescents who "would probably be out robbing banks if they weren't flying for us." (One of them, Lance "Moggy" Cattermole, is an out and out psychopath, and a sadist in the bargain.) Nor are their commanders any better: Ramsay is a mean-tempered bully, and Lord Rex an inflexible snob. Of course there are some likeable blokes, too, such as "Uncle" Kellaway, "Skull" Skellen, "Fanny" Barton, "Mother" Cox and poor "Fitz" Fitzgerald -- but the point is that nobody, not even the character who becomes the main protagonist, Christopher Hart, fits anybody's image of a hero. They shoot down friendly aircraft by mistake, bully each other, sleep with each other's women, steal, lie, cheat, go crazy, and even commit murder. Robinson has a marvelous and very English gift for sarcasm and sustained low-grade cruelty in his writing, and he depicts Hornet Squadron as a kind of flying collegiate dormitory, full of men behaving badly. Robinson also shows the air war for what it was: a grinding, slow-moving slaughter, generally absent anything resembling glory and definitely absent anything resembling honor. As Hart puts it, "Up there the world is divided into bastards and suckers. Make your choice."
PET SEMATARY by Stephen King. As I said above, the best novels always have something to say beyond the obvious, and in PET SEMATARY, Stephen King (who incidentally hates this book), had a dark and curious theme indeed: "Sometimes dead is better." When Louis Creed and his family move into their new home in rural Maine, they never suspect the old animal cemetery in the woods beyond has the power to resurrect the dead. And when Louis finds out, courtesy of his kindly neighbor Jud (one of King's best-drawn characters ever), he naturally uses its power to bring the family cat back to life after it is tragically struck down on the road. By the time he asks Jud the inevitable question, "Has anyone ever buried a person there?" however, very bad and evil things are already in motion, centering around a Mack truck, Louis's toddling son Gage, and his beautiful wife Rachael. A slow-burn into true horror, King takes his time getting you to know, and love, the Crandalls and the Creeds, before he systematically puts them through the worst hell imaginable. The thesis of the book is that death is a natural process to be made friends with rather than feared, and like Dr. Thorndecker in SIXTH COMMANDENT, those who go against that process risk fates worth than the death they fear. King was very big on the idea of "forbidden knowledge" as a classic trope of horror, and he employs it brutally and beautifully here, letting Lou Creed know in no uncertain terms that everything has a price, and sometimes dead is better. This is, I believe, the first book that ever truly frightened me.
THE STRANGE CASE OF DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE by Robert Louis Stevenson. Continuing in the theme of Forbidden Knowledge is the classic of the genre. Set in Victorian England, this is the story of Dr. Henry Jekyll, benefactor of the community, "fellow of all souls" and general do-gooder, who creates a potion which allows him to assume a different physical form. In that form, that of Edward Hyde, he indulges in all the vices Victorian morals forbid, and then, transforming back to himself, continues his upright ways until his craving for sin gets the better of him. Unfortunately for Jekyll, however, he swiftly loses control of both the Hyde persona itself and his ability to change into and out of it at will: in fact he ends up stranded as Hyde, and having committed a vicious public murder, is now a hunted man. Reaching out to his old friend Utterson, he tries desperately to rework the formula, assume Jekyll's shape, and escape justice, but the walls are closing in, and as I said above, everything has a price. Known as much for its attack on Victorian hypocrisy as for its horror and sci-fi elements, the book is actually a brilliant examination of the nature of human character itself. Is Jekyll a wicked man who merely desires to be appear virtuous while he satisfies his sweet tooth on the side, or a red-blooded man rebelling against the strict and cramping moral codes of the era the only way possible? The answer is not really clear, and that's part of what makes this swift-moving, beautifully written novella so enjoyable.
DUNE by Frank Herbert. I am not traditionally a sci-fi guy. I have read more fantasy than science-fiction...and I don't read a lot of fantasy, either. That having been said, DUNE has to be one of the greatest novels ever written in any genre. It is a towering masterwork of imagination harnessed to a unique prose-style, and while it has sold less than Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," it is comparable in terms of influence within its own genre. DUNE is the story of one young man's transformation from the heir to a minor noble line into a messiah-like figure, somewhere between Mohammed and Caesar. Set in a universe as complex and fully-developed as the real one, where the mind rather than technology is key and king, it is brimming with intrigue and conflict, as Paul Atreides struggles not only to regain his birthright, but to prevent his transformation into a higher being from turning him into a monster more cruel than the one who drove him into exile. With lots to say about politics, ecology, economics and religion, DUNE is one of those books that is so rich that one invariably picks up on new subthemes with each subsequent rereading.
THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald. What makes a classic? Timelessness. That's really the only difference between the "great" popular novels that are quickly forgotten, and the ones that resonate through the decades, generations, even centuries. Taken on its face, THE GREAT GATSBY is a light, comic-tragic coming-of-age story set in the Jazz Age: a tale about a man who came from nothing and went back to nothing. But it is much more than that. It is a tale about illusion and disillusion, young love and heartbreak, power and fragility. It is a cautionary tale with an underlying note of bitterness against the unfairness of life and the fleeting nature of relationships. The narrator, Nick Carraway, is the vehicle by which we encounter Jay Gatsby, a fabulously wealthy Long Islander of dubious reputation and uncertain history: Gatsby has everything money can buy except his long-lost, now married love Daisy Buchanan. Throughout the novel he schemes with the precision of a chess master to cleave Daisy from her jerk husband Tom, but his plans go awry, with tragic consequences for many involved, but perhaps most tragic for Nick: Carraway enters the story young, upbeat and naive, and leaves it older, sadder, and wiser, his path mimicking the path of all men in their 20s whose dreams break against the crueler realities of life. And it is really this last point that cements the books greatness: in avoiding even a partially happy ending and thus giving us the outcome the story demanded, Fitzgerald turned what might have been a "book of the year" into a timeless classic which is as relevant today as when it was written.
And with that, I come to the end of The Saturday Evening Post and today's list. I tried to keep it fairly diverse, and in the next installment may cheat a little and include short-story collections, because a) they are novel length works of fiction, and b) it's my blog and I'll do as I please with the damned thing. In the mean time, happy St. Patrick's Day to any sober enough to read this.
March 8, 2023
AS I PLEASE XI: SWEEPING OUT MY BRAIN EDITION
An old friend of mine recently accused me of using the "As I Please" subseries of this blog as a broom to sweep out my brain. He likened my other subseries to objects that had been crafted fully, if not necessarily to everyone's taste: but this one, he said, was the mere sawdust within my creative noggin. Curlicues of ideas. Pieces and fragments. Leftovers and remnants. The grisly bits I couldn't or wouldn't fully develop into their own blogs.
This accusation is entirely true. I'm fairly sure I've even admitted it in these very pages. So if you're a regular or semi-regular reader of Stone Cold Prose, you could be forgiven if you rolled your eyes and muttered "hard pass" whenever you see an As I Please pop up in your feed. On the other hand, you must realize that allblogs, of whatever kind and written with whatever motive, exist partially for this exact purpose, the purpose of emptying the ole braincase. They are essentially outlets, pressure valves, "playspaces" (as Maynard James Keenan put it) where rules which might govern our lives in other ways do not apply.
In my mind, the whole fun of the otherwise frequently poisonous internet is that all that tedious logic and structure we were taught in school can be chucked out the window in favor of all sorts of niche, recherché, free-form, even stream-of-consciousness approaches to storytelling and idea-sharing. Being old enough to remember when the internet was actually invented, I recall as well the excitement many of its earliest denizens felt at discovering this playspace where no teacher, parent, or disapproving neighbor could intrude on their passion for Star Trek, Japanese pottery, or porn stars. Where dense, inaccessible, deeply immersive subjects of great complexity could be analyzed on one hand, while on the other, the most absurd, juvenile nonsense could be blathered about in another -- free of pesky grammar, syntax, spelling or punctuation. The early Net was a kind of cyberspace Wild West, a digital Hong Kong whose anthem was "Anything Goes." It was, in a word, free. In recent years that excitement has faded almost out of existence, and with it the crude outsize passion those lucky nerds who got in on the web's ground floor felt back in, oh, 1998 or so. That's sad. It's always sad when excitement yields to a mixture of boredom, oversaturation and entitlement. And this sadness is also why I refuse to bring any real order to the chaos that is my blog. The Wild West is only fun to look back upon because it was Wild. Take away the wildness, and all you've got are dusty, desolate frontier towns where the beer is served warm and the streets are full of horse shit.
All of this having been said, it's now time for me to grab my broom and start sweeping the following onservations out of my cranium:
* While visiting my Mom the other day, I took the occasion to peruse the still-vast, highly eclectic collection of books occupying shelves all over her home. This is the home I grew up in, and both she and my father, and later me and my older brother, filled it from floor to ceiling with books of every kind. I took home with me an armload from the basement, and I know book lovers everywhere will understand the quiet pleasure I experienced when, after dusting them off (no easy task, that) I opened them and was greeted by "that book smell." And no, I don't mean the smell of mold or dust itself. I mean the smell of old linen and foxed paper. It's the sort of scent you encounter only in secondhand bookstores or private libraries, and if you love to read, it is to you what the smell of gunsmoke is to a warhorse, or brandy and cigars might be to a Victorian gentleman coming home from a hard day's work. It manages to convey not merely an object, but a range of experience which includes wonderful tactile sensations, such as one experiences when sitting in an armchair by a fire with your favorite volume and a cup of tea (or whiskey). George Orwell once wrote a depressing passage about how much he loved the smell and feel of books until he worked in a bookshop and grew tired of it all. I hope that never happens to me. It would be a great loss.
* In the same spirit, I now recall an incident from more than twenty years ago, when I came home from work in a state of some exhaustion and despair. It was a winter night of the "dark and stormy" variety, cold and inimical, and the first thing I did was chain the door, as if this could keep the evil from following me. What I wanted was to turn off my phone, turn down all the lights but one, put on comfortable clothes and get into bed with something hot to drink and a good book. But not just any good book. It had to be Lawrence Sanders' "The Fourth Deadly Sin." In that moment I needed the pure escapism Sanders' magnificient prose could deliver, and rummaged all through the apartment: I couldn't find it and nearly gave in, then said, "No, I'm not quitting," and continued to strip-search my modest home until at last, the paperback was in my hand. Only people who frequent a site like Goodreads can understand the joy I felt when, with door locked, phone silenced and only my reading lamp on, I reclined into bliss. It was the perfect antidote to a cold, cruel world.
* When I moved back East in 2020, I had to leave in storage nearly all my books. I had only a few on hand, and a few more I later bought online or from the local secondhand bookstore. Not having my favorite entertainment on hand, I began to replace reading with video games, movies, television. Not to say that I didn't do these other things before: I just balanced them against my principal hobby. But now I had fallen into the trap of mostly watching rather than mostly participating. It troubled me but I did nothing to stop it, and now I find myself struggling every year to read a mere 12 - 14 new books. I boasted in last year's wrapup that I was going to finally meet the Goodreads Challenge again, but I failed -- again. I am in the process of getting myself back into the habit, but it's proven disturbingly difficult. Evidently even lifelong habits can atrophy if neglected long enough.
* Speaking of television, and from the "just because they can, doesn't mean they should" files of human existence, I must say that HD-TV is a retroactive disaster for pretty much any television show shot between the 1990s and the 2010s. The cameras being used at present see more detail than the human eye, and therefore easily penetrate the make-believe of the eras in question. Since getting a hi-def TV years ago, I've noticed more tan lines, freckles, age spots, vericose veins, cellulite, stretch marks, pimples, burst capillaries, wig-lines, appliance seams, spirit gum, and pancake makeup applications than I would have believed humanly possible on actors who are supposed to be beautiful or at least passably attractive. A show as recently produced as "CSI" (2000 - 2015), watched in hi-def, seems designed mainly to display that no amount of makeup, mood lighting, filters and color correction can disguise human frailty from modern cameras and modern televisions: the line of Ted Danson's wig is as plainly divisible as a national border on a map. It doesn't do wonders for silicone appliances, either: the effects work which looked so good in SD looks as fake as a three dollar bill in HD.
* I know I talk a lot about Hollywood in this blog, and sometimes it probably strikes the reader as a form of self-aggrandizing monomania: "Oh Christ, he's corking off about the entertainment industry again." But let's face it, everyone's wells are wettest where interest meets life experience, and thirteen years in the business leaves me with a lot to say, even if I do tend to harp on the same themes over and over again. On the other hand, I rarely talk about law enforcement or criminal justice in these epistles, probably because it's presently how I make most of my wages and therefore impossible to write about objectively or even safely. This is a subject I intend to explore more fully, but for obvious reasons I have to careful not to be too specific, local or contemporary. In the mean time, the Hollywood rants will continue.
* I was accidentally reminded today that Trump is running for president again. The fact that I had to be reminded surprised me, and speaks a lot, I think about shock value and the law of diminishing returns. Trump, like Madonna and various others throughout history -- I'm also reminded of Morton Downey Jr., Rock Newman and Paris Hilton -- thrives on controversy. He craves and in fact requires attention, and doesn't much care whether it's good attention or bad attention, so long as they spell his name right. A lot of his so-called weaknesses in that regard were actually what got him elected. The problem with this burn-it-down approach is that, well, sooner or later you torch all the combustibles and use up all the oxygen: witness the careers of every one of the people I just mentioned. The shtick gets old, people get bored, and attention wanders. It's too soon to write Trump's political obituary, but I get a strong sense, at least at this juncture, that not many people have the stomach, or the stamina, to endure another five to six years of The Donald Trump Show. The mere fact someone as dull, boring and "establishment" as Joe Biden was elected by a such a wide margin serves as partial proof that Americans may need a break from loud noises and open flames for a few years yet.
* Speaking of diminishing returns: the war in Ukraine -- the largest, bloodiest conflict fought in Europe since WW2 -- has now entered its second year, and is clearly slipping out of the minds of Americans concerned with skyrocketing gas prices and energy bills, not to mention the increasingly absurd cost of food. As a rule, Americans traditionally care very little about anything outside our own borders, but the speed with which we can acclimatize ourselves to catastrophes on this scale is distressing. The Russo-Ukraine War is a pivotal historical event unfolding in real time. It is a struggle between the forces of ethno-nationalism and global unity, between autocracy and democracy, between institutionalized corruption and fragile honesty. It is as close to a good and righteous war as anything that has happened since 1945, and near as I can figure, almost nobody around me cares. Caring, of course, won't change anything in Ukraine, but an awareness that there is no going back to the American isolationism of yesteryear, that like it or not the nations of this world are inextricably linked to each other and what effects one effects all, and that doing nothing in the face of aggression always -- always -- fuels more aggression, would restore some of my lagging faith in the human species.
* I've finally decided that this blog will now appear every Saturday (my "Saturday Evening Post") and Wednesday both, so twice as much incoherent nonsense as before is now coming your way, delivered every half-week, like junk mail or allergy injections. You're welcome.
And with that observation -- maybe it's just a hope, politics are best when served bland -- I now leave you among my sawdust.
This accusation is entirely true. I'm fairly sure I've even admitted it in these very pages. So if you're a regular or semi-regular reader of Stone Cold Prose, you could be forgiven if you rolled your eyes and muttered "hard pass" whenever you see an As I Please pop up in your feed. On the other hand, you must realize that allblogs, of whatever kind and written with whatever motive, exist partially for this exact purpose, the purpose of emptying the ole braincase. They are essentially outlets, pressure valves, "playspaces" (as Maynard James Keenan put it) where rules which might govern our lives in other ways do not apply.
In my mind, the whole fun of the otherwise frequently poisonous internet is that all that tedious logic and structure we were taught in school can be chucked out the window in favor of all sorts of niche, recherché, free-form, even stream-of-consciousness approaches to storytelling and idea-sharing. Being old enough to remember when the internet was actually invented, I recall as well the excitement many of its earliest denizens felt at discovering this playspace where no teacher, parent, or disapproving neighbor could intrude on their passion for Star Trek, Japanese pottery, or porn stars. Where dense, inaccessible, deeply immersive subjects of great complexity could be analyzed on one hand, while on the other, the most absurd, juvenile nonsense could be blathered about in another -- free of pesky grammar, syntax, spelling or punctuation. The early Net was a kind of cyberspace Wild West, a digital Hong Kong whose anthem was "Anything Goes." It was, in a word, free. In recent years that excitement has faded almost out of existence, and with it the crude outsize passion those lucky nerds who got in on the web's ground floor felt back in, oh, 1998 or so. That's sad. It's always sad when excitement yields to a mixture of boredom, oversaturation and entitlement. And this sadness is also why I refuse to bring any real order to the chaos that is my blog. The Wild West is only fun to look back upon because it was Wild. Take away the wildness, and all you've got are dusty, desolate frontier towns where the beer is served warm and the streets are full of horse shit.
All of this having been said, it's now time for me to grab my broom and start sweeping the following onservations out of my cranium:
* While visiting my Mom the other day, I took the occasion to peruse the still-vast, highly eclectic collection of books occupying shelves all over her home. This is the home I grew up in, and both she and my father, and later me and my older brother, filled it from floor to ceiling with books of every kind. I took home with me an armload from the basement, and I know book lovers everywhere will understand the quiet pleasure I experienced when, after dusting them off (no easy task, that) I opened them and was greeted by "that book smell." And no, I don't mean the smell of mold or dust itself. I mean the smell of old linen and foxed paper. It's the sort of scent you encounter only in secondhand bookstores or private libraries, and if you love to read, it is to you what the smell of gunsmoke is to a warhorse, or brandy and cigars might be to a Victorian gentleman coming home from a hard day's work. It manages to convey not merely an object, but a range of experience which includes wonderful tactile sensations, such as one experiences when sitting in an armchair by a fire with your favorite volume and a cup of tea (or whiskey). George Orwell once wrote a depressing passage about how much he loved the smell and feel of books until he worked in a bookshop and grew tired of it all. I hope that never happens to me. It would be a great loss.
* In the same spirit, I now recall an incident from more than twenty years ago, when I came home from work in a state of some exhaustion and despair. It was a winter night of the "dark and stormy" variety, cold and inimical, and the first thing I did was chain the door, as if this could keep the evil from following me. What I wanted was to turn off my phone, turn down all the lights but one, put on comfortable clothes and get into bed with something hot to drink and a good book. But not just any good book. It had to be Lawrence Sanders' "The Fourth Deadly Sin." In that moment I needed the pure escapism Sanders' magnificient prose could deliver, and rummaged all through the apartment: I couldn't find it and nearly gave in, then said, "No, I'm not quitting," and continued to strip-search my modest home until at last, the paperback was in my hand. Only people who frequent a site like Goodreads can understand the joy I felt when, with door locked, phone silenced and only my reading lamp on, I reclined into bliss. It was the perfect antidote to a cold, cruel world.
* When I moved back East in 2020, I had to leave in storage nearly all my books. I had only a few on hand, and a few more I later bought online or from the local secondhand bookstore. Not having my favorite entertainment on hand, I began to replace reading with video games, movies, television. Not to say that I didn't do these other things before: I just balanced them against my principal hobby. But now I had fallen into the trap of mostly watching rather than mostly participating. It troubled me but I did nothing to stop it, and now I find myself struggling every year to read a mere 12 - 14 new books. I boasted in last year's wrapup that I was going to finally meet the Goodreads Challenge again, but I failed -- again. I am in the process of getting myself back into the habit, but it's proven disturbingly difficult. Evidently even lifelong habits can atrophy if neglected long enough.
* Speaking of television, and from the "just because they can, doesn't mean they should" files of human existence, I must say that HD-TV is a retroactive disaster for pretty much any television show shot between the 1990s and the 2010s. The cameras being used at present see more detail than the human eye, and therefore easily penetrate the make-believe of the eras in question. Since getting a hi-def TV years ago, I've noticed more tan lines, freckles, age spots, vericose veins, cellulite, stretch marks, pimples, burst capillaries, wig-lines, appliance seams, spirit gum, and pancake makeup applications than I would have believed humanly possible on actors who are supposed to be beautiful or at least passably attractive. A show as recently produced as "CSI" (2000 - 2015), watched in hi-def, seems designed mainly to display that no amount of makeup, mood lighting, filters and color correction can disguise human frailty from modern cameras and modern televisions: the line of Ted Danson's wig is as plainly divisible as a national border on a map. It doesn't do wonders for silicone appliances, either: the effects work which looked so good in SD looks as fake as a three dollar bill in HD.
* I know I talk a lot about Hollywood in this blog, and sometimes it probably strikes the reader as a form of self-aggrandizing monomania: "Oh Christ, he's corking off about the entertainment industry again." But let's face it, everyone's wells are wettest where interest meets life experience, and thirteen years in the business leaves me with a lot to say, even if I do tend to harp on the same themes over and over again. On the other hand, I rarely talk about law enforcement or criminal justice in these epistles, probably because it's presently how I make most of my wages and therefore impossible to write about objectively or even safely. This is a subject I intend to explore more fully, but for obvious reasons I have to careful not to be too specific, local or contemporary. In the mean time, the Hollywood rants will continue.
* I was accidentally reminded today that Trump is running for president again. The fact that I had to be reminded surprised me, and speaks a lot, I think about shock value and the law of diminishing returns. Trump, like Madonna and various others throughout history -- I'm also reminded of Morton Downey Jr., Rock Newman and Paris Hilton -- thrives on controversy. He craves and in fact requires attention, and doesn't much care whether it's good attention or bad attention, so long as they spell his name right. A lot of his so-called weaknesses in that regard were actually what got him elected. The problem with this burn-it-down approach is that, well, sooner or later you torch all the combustibles and use up all the oxygen: witness the careers of every one of the people I just mentioned. The shtick gets old, people get bored, and attention wanders. It's too soon to write Trump's political obituary, but I get a strong sense, at least at this juncture, that not many people have the stomach, or the stamina, to endure another five to six years of The Donald Trump Show. The mere fact someone as dull, boring and "establishment" as Joe Biden was elected by a such a wide margin serves as partial proof that Americans may need a break from loud noises and open flames for a few years yet.
* Speaking of diminishing returns: the war in Ukraine -- the largest, bloodiest conflict fought in Europe since WW2 -- has now entered its second year, and is clearly slipping out of the minds of Americans concerned with skyrocketing gas prices and energy bills, not to mention the increasingly absurd cost of food. As a rule, Americans traditionally care very little about anything outside our own borders, but the speed with which we can acclimatize ourselves to catastrophes on this scale is distressing. The Russo-Ukraine War is a pivotal historical event unfolding in real time. It is a struggle between the forces of ethno-nationalism and global unity, between autocracy and democracy, between institutionalized corruption and fragile honesty. It is as close to a good and righteous war as anything that has happened since 1945, and near as I can figure, almost nobody around me cares. Caring, of course, won't change anything in Ukraine, but an awareness that there is no going back to the American isolationism of yesteryear, that like it or not the nations of this world are inextricably linked to each other and what effects one effects all, and that doing nothing in the face of aggression always -- always -- fuels more aggression, would restore some of my lagging faith in the human species.
* I've finally decided that this blog will now appear every Saturday (my "Saturday Evening Post") and Wednesday both, so twice as much incoherent nonsense as before is now coming your way, delivered every half-week, like junk mail or allergy injections. You're welcome.
And with that observation -- maybe it's just a hope, politics are best when served bland -- I now leave you among my sawdust.
March 4, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: MY MARTIAL ARTS JOURNEY
I have had as many doubts as anyone else. Standing on the starting line, we’re all cowards. -- Alberto Salazar
I am now old enough to have lived through various eras of history. I was, for example, born during the Cold War, and saw its ending, just as I was born in the 20th Century and saw that end, too. I have lived through the finale of some technological eras and the beginnings of others, and in some cases I have seen multiple technologies come and go in the same line -- LPs yielding to CDs yielding to MP3s yielding to clouds, and so forth. I've seen the demise of mighty retail chains which had stood since the 1800s, the near-extinction of chain bookstores, the decline of malls, the rise of Amazon, the creation of the internet and social media. None of this makes me the least bit special, of course, it is simply an accident of birth-timing coupled with the fact I've been blessed to live half a century.
During those fifty years I have observed a significant change in what is broadly termed "the martial arts." It's worth commenting on because, to if I may quote Jim Halpert from a particularly amusing cold open to an episode of The Office: "Once a year, Dwight holds a seminar updating us on the newest developments in the world of karate. Because, as we all know, one thing a thousand year old martial arts do all the time...is change."
Until 1993, this jolt of sarcasm was an accurate picture of traditional martial arts. They changed, if at all, only very slowly and reluctantly, and usually with a tremendous amount of acrimony. The degree to which practicioners of various martial arts styles resisted any kind of modtification or influence on the systems they were passing down found its most hostile expression in the loathing the old kung fu masters had for Bruce Lee. Though rumors that a confederacy of these masters was responsible for Lee's premature death is widely accepted as sensationalism, their acrimony toward him was quite real. Martial arts narrowly, and Asiatic culture broadly, is founded on tradition, at to paraphrase Mr. Halpert, the one thing traditions don't do...is change. Indeed, as I write this in 2023, some forty-nine years after Lee's death, a Chinese muckraker named Xu Xiaodong is getting into enormities of trouble in his homeland for exposing "fake" kung fu masters with his modernized fighting skills. Xu has suffered a great deal of legal harassment from the Chinese government for drubbing these hapless "masters" in real fights: the CCP has a vested interest in protecting the mystique of kung fu, which runs like a thread through Chinese culture and is also a source of many tourist dollars.
When I was growing up, in the late 70s and 80s, kung fu, and other traditional martial arts like karate, taekwondo and even judo, were cloaked in said mystique. Among the various claims I heard or read about were the ability to slow down heart rates and raise or lower body temperature, walk over hot coals, disable people with single strikes to nerve clusters, or kill them with a single touch. You couldn't open a comic book without seeing advertisements for Count Dante's "Black Dragon Society," which promised -- if you'd only send them a money order -- to make you invincible as Superman and deadly as the plague. An entire episode of the hit show Quincy, revolved around the so-called "dim mak" or "death touch," which allowed a practicioner to kill their victim through a delayed-reaction strike which could be timed to the hour. And anyone from Generation X will remember the "ninja craze," which included that ridiculously awful (yet strangely enjoyable) show The Master, itself essentially codifying all the so-called abilities possible in martial arts: silent movement, borderline gravity defiance, imperviousness to pain, superhuman reflexes, and stealthines to the point of invisibility. Of course, not all of this was taken seriously or even semi-seriously even by boys of ten, but at the same time, anyone who was known to be seriously studying any martial art was usually given a wide berth. There was a boy in my junior high school from Indonesia who studied one of their nastier martial forms, and I was warned to avoid him because he had nearly beaten another student to death in a street fight: it turned out he was one of the nicest (and goofiest) kids I ever met at that wretched school, but the lies told about him prove my point: he "knew karate or something," and that made him essentially lethal.
In spite of all of this, in spite my older brother's buddy who owned a full ninja costume which he would wear when egging houses and suchlike, in spite of the numchuck craze, the throwing-star craze, in spite of Kung Fu theater and all the rest of it, I never had any interest whatever in practicing any martial art until around 1986 or so. I saw The Karate Kid on VHS (or maybe it was cable) and was instantly and utterly obsessed, to the point where I began practicing jump kicks on the backyard gate and wearing black headbands and wishing my hair was gold so I'd look like Johnny Lawrence. I mail-ordered a dozen books on various martial arts, bought exotic-looking patches with fists and flags and dragon emblems on them and had my mom sew them to my jacket, watched ridiculous, poorly-produced instructional home videos, and in short, did everything but actually learn how to fight. It wasn't until the following year that I learned that the family gym, the Yates Field House on the Georgetown University Campus, had a judo class, that I actually joined up and my fantasies about winning flashy tournaments and becoming a brick-pulverizing badass with a babe on each arm slammed into gritty reality.
For starters, I had no idea about the differences between one martial art and another, and boy was a disappointed when I discovered that my new art had no punches or kicks: it was more like wrestling, specifically Greco-Roman wrestling, in which I had no interest. This took some of the bloom off the rose. The rest was rubbed away, or should I say scratched, gouged, and scourged away, by my master, James Takemori. Takemori was a veteran of the famous 442nd "Nisei" Regiment in WW2, comprised entirely of Japanese-Americans, which took more casualties and won more medals than any other, and a legend in the judo community. He was also a tough, mean-spirited, sarcastic bastard, who used to ridicule his students and occasionally strike them when annoyed or displeased. At the time I joined his dojo, I was just coming off a long period of intense unpopularity in school, during which I was alternatively bullied by students and teachers, and his half Army drill instructor, half-Socratic approach to instruction left me empty of enthusiasm. Nevertheless, I toiled, sweated and bled in on his blue mats for what seemed like ages. I didn't learn a helluva lot of useful skills, and I never rose beyond the rank of white belt, but that was as much my fault as his. I didn't have my heart in the work, and I was at that time still very lazy and weak -- weak in character, I mean. Eventually I quit, and submerged back into being a "dimestore cowboy" who walked as if he knew the deep, dark secrets of martial arts, but in reality just practiced out of books propped up in his parents basement. The curious thing about stand-up martial arts, of course, is that it is possible to look very flashy in a short period of time without actually knowing how to fight, and being a teenager, I had remarkable flexibility, speed, and accuracy, which awed friends when I would show off with fancy, pinpoint-precise kicks. I took this useless knowledge with me to college, and began to slap on a thick coat of lies to make it more attractive. Since nobody knew me, I was free to declare that I was a black belt in "American freestyle karate" and also knew some judo. "American freestyle karate" is a real thing, but my knowledge of it came from books and my imagination (even then, "books and imagination" were part and parcel of my personality).
Inevitably I was tested, but the test came in a peculiar form. A fellow inmate of my dorm picked up on my interest and, being a martial artist himself, nagged at me to spar with him. I was desperate to avoid exposure and ducked him as long as possible before my pride forced me onto the mats. To my surprise, I performed pretty well. My defense was non-existent, and my punches weak and awkward, but I had blinding speed and that curious, laser-like precision, which allowed me to avoid a lot of his shots, and also see the smallest opening and take it before my larger, more muscular, much better techicnically skilled opponent could react. I was convincing enough to fool him into thinking I was legitimate, and we ended up forming The York College Karate Club in 1991. We even got the school to front us money for a heavy bag (which I kept until last year), sparring pads, and other equipment we didn't need but wanted badly, such as wooden practice swords and pullovers with our names on them. Populating this club were an assortment of novice and intermediate boxers, martial artists, wrestlers and street brawlers who believed we knew what the hell we were talking about. And in a sense, we did, because our open sparring sessions were at least full contact, which made what we did legitimate if clumsy practice rather than the pure theory taught by other sporting martial arts clubs. Indeed, some of our sparring sessions were wild affairs that produced bruises, bloody lips and noses, skinned knuckles, and slightly loosened teeth. It was here that I began to learn that getting punched in the face is not as bad as a middle-class kid from the suburbs thinks it is, that adrenaline highs are a real thing, and that even pain can be pleasurable when it comes in the heat of combat. But it was also here that I learned my limitations, and they were many. Not only my technique but my courage was insufficient, and in any case I was still a fraud, albeit one who periodically put his body where his mouth was. In time my faternity life would interfere with my participation in the Club, and by my junior year (1992-1993) I had discarded it entirely.
In 1995 my interest in the arts was rekindled when I watched the first of the Ultimate Fighting Championships (I, II and III) on videotapes rented from Blockbuster. At the time, the UFC was essentially human cockfighting (as John McCain put it) and
advertised as having no rules, though in fact a few did exist (no eye gouging, fish hooking or biting was allowed). Like many other young men bursting with bloodlust I couldn't watch these gladiatorial games fast enough and found them wonderful and terrible to behold. Part of my personal curiosity lay in the fact that the UFC was here to settle an ancient argument about which style of martial arts was the best in actual, (almost) no-holds barred combat. Kung fu, boxing, karate, pit fighting, shooto, wrestling, jiu-jitsu, judo, ninjitsu -- the list of names was endless, each represented by a guy usually looking like the hero or villain of those terrible 80s action movies you saw on Cinemax. And two facts were quickly established. The first was that stand-up fighters were essentially helpless when paired against grapplers. The second was that the dominant style of grappling was the Brazilian take on Japanese jiu-jitsu, epitomized by Royce Gracie. But just as quickly, Gracie jiu-jitsu -- itself a traditional art -- got exposed as being insufficient for victory if the practicioner in question could not take his opponent to the ground. The previously invicible Gracie was humbled at UFC V by Ken Shamrock, and while the fight was declared a draw, it was clear that something, some fundamental shift, was going on in the previously hidebound, even petrified, world of martial arts. Shamrock, who had been submitted by Gracie at UFC I, had adapted his game to neutralize Gracie's superior techniques. So what had begun as a commercial for Gracie jiu-jitsu became a warning, a cautionary tale. For generations, traditional practicioners had been declaring their styles invcincible and perfect, and now, one after the other, their delusions were being brutally shattered on pay-per-view television. Men who wanted to compete in what was now being dubbed "mixed martial arts" had to do just that: mix. Wrestlers, grapplers and strikers had to learn each other's secrets. They had to grow. They had to do the very thing they prided themselves on never doing: change.
My own journey continued -- as before, in blundering fits and cowardly, apathetic starts. After graduating college in 1997, I joined a boxing gym and spent some months toiling within its battered bosom. It was a truly humbling experience. Boxing is less of a sport than it is a complex vocation. Because you can only use your fists, and only strike a very clearly defined area of your opponent's body -- because, in short, you are so sharply limited in what you can do -- you must do it phenomenally well. And doing things phenomenally well requires an enormous amount of practice...which takes stamina...which takes commitment. Once again I found myself struggling in that final, most crucial area. I still wanted the propers, but I didn't want the lumps, the bumps, the bloody noses that went with them.
For years after this, I thrashed bags at gyms between Pennsylvania and Maryland, once again giving passersby and observers the distinct impression I knew what I was doing. I even trained personal trainers at a gym in Bethesda, MD, in how to use the speed bag, which I could handle like a pro. As Tommy Morrison once observed, some guys can look great on the bag but can't beat the shit out of a diaper, and this probably applied to me. I remained a dimestore cowboy: all sizzle but very little steak. Meanwhile, the martial arts world was changing all around me. The UFC left the sleazy, neon-lighted world of "no holds barred" and became a mainstream sport with ever-increasing popularity. Fighters ceased to be brawlers or single-style masters but synthesized their techniques and became well-rounded athletes. Colorful "characters" became professionals. If I'd been aware of the contrast between this phenomenon and my own status, I would not have enjoyed the knowledge.
Time marches onward, and so did I -- to California. I continued to terrorize inanimate objects at gyms, but I was getting tired of it. I was now in my 30s and tired beyond words of looking like I knew what I was doing: I wanted to actually know. Then one day, when I was in the midst of a search for a gym which taught aikido -- a peculiar martial art I'd always been curious about -- my headlights splashed against a window on Third Street in Los Angeles. It advertised KARATE, HAPKIDO, AIKIDO. The next morning I walked over to it, introduced myself to the master, and arranged to come back for an introductory class. A single hour of training there and I knew I'd found a second home. It is possible to exist in dischord with one's goals for decades, but now everything seemed to fall into place with a satisfying click. All the experiments with all those martial arts on both coasts now became an actual practice. Two days a week of training became three, sometimes four, and occasionally five. At my first belt test I was almost paralyzed with fright, and when the time came for the ceremonial bareknuckle board-breaking, I had so much adrenaline flowing I didn't so much break it as annihilate the poor thing. I knew, of course, that these traditionalist martial arts were of limited practical value. The dark, half-supernature mystique they had once carried was long gone. They were simply sets of techniques, some of which might be useful if one were jumped, mugged, or assaulted, but for the most part they existed for their own sake. The tornado kick, for example, is almost completely useless in real life, but boy is it beautiful to witness if you do it right, and that's really the point -- "tricking" is simply to martial arts what muscle cars are to automotion. They are demonstrations of what the human body is capable of if it is trained correctly, and that in itself carries its own sense of mystique. The point, for me, is that I was actually doing "the things" rather than merely talking about them or pretending to do them. I went to class. I trained. I got thrown. I got hurt. I lost skin on knuckles, elbows, knees. And I won my promotions fairly.
In 2012 I fought my first -- and last -- "professional" fight, down at the Team Quest gym in Encinitas, California. It was "professional" only in that it was sanctioned by the California State Athletic Commission, and open to any style of kickboxing. Present were several well-known MMA and bareknuckle fighters, but the competition was between amateurs like myself. I hadn't trained for the fight, my equipment was all wrong, and the organizers fibbed about the type of gloves we'd be using and what was and was not allowed in the fights. I lost my bout by TKO in the second round. My opponent, a firefighter and triathlete who trained x3 times a week with world champions, was too tall, too well-trained and far too well-conditioned for me to handle. I had the moves, mostly, but not the stamina. However, I acquitted myself well enough to harrangue the crowd afterwards, much to their amusement, and the referee, a pro kickboxer himself, told me my performance had inspired him. Indeed, for the first and last time in my life I was contacted by a professional kickboxing promotion and asked if I wanted to fight on their card up around Fresno (or was it Frisco?) in a few months. It was heady wine to be offered such a fight. I even ended up on the list of perspective title challengers in my weight class. I was now "real" in my own mind, no longer the dimestore cowboy, no longer the phony. On the other hand, I was not "real" in the larger sense. I was too old, too inexperienced and too poor to do this seriously: training requires money, and I didn't have it, any more than I had the time to do the work necessary when freelancing in the entertainment industry, sometimes 100 hours a week. And so my dreams in this direction faded, albeit with little regret. I had proven to myself I could make the commitments necessary -- the blood, the sweat, the figurative tears. And when I finally got my black belt in 2013, well, I knew that I had come out the other side of a long tunnel which I had entered almost twenty years before. Martial arts were changing around me, shedding centuries of petrified traditions, and I was changing too -- growing up, accepting discipline and discomfort and humility as the price of achievement, even taking some pleasure in the process itself.
I tell you all this because I have come to understand that change is fundamental to life, to the actual process of existing as a living, breathing, thinking being. I'm all for traditions, and as an anxious person require more routines than most people to soothe my nerves, but I now believe that a feeling of anxiety, of fear, towards or about a new endeavour is a sure sign that you are on the right track. That which scares you, engages you, and forces you to grow. As David Goggins has often maintained, you can't find growth from a place of comfort. All growth and all greatness lie on the other side of that line, where things are frightening and uncomfortable. It was awful for my ego, as a 38 year-old man, to have to put on a white belt again. And it was awful for traditional martial artists to choke down the fact that a lot of what they were preaching was nonsense. But it was precisely this point that our transformations began. Sometimes pride is precisely what prevents us from being the people, or the institutions, we wish to be. So my challenge to myself is the same one I make to you now: allow yourself to get punched on the nose, literally or figuratively, once in a while. Try new things. Fail at them. Try others. Fail at them, too. Keep trying and keep failing until you find something you love, until you hear the click of connection. Whatever pain you experience will be more than made up for by the introduction to whole new worlds within yourself you never knew existed.
I am now old enough to have lived through various eras of history. I was, for example, born during the Cold War, and saw its ending, just as I was born in the 20th Century and saw that end, too. I have lived through the finale of some technological eras and the beginnings of others, and in some cases I have seen multiple technologies come and go in the same line -- LPs yielding to CDs yielding to MP3s yielding to clouds, and so forth. I've seen the demise of mighty retail chains which had stood since the 1800s, the near-extinction of chain bookstores, the decline of malls, the rise of Amazon, the creation of the internet and social media. None of this makes me the least bit special, of course, it is simply an accident of birth-timing coupled with the fact I've been blessed to live half a century.
During those fifty years I have observed a significant change in what is broadly termed "the martial arts." It's worth commenting on because, to if I may quote Jim Halpert from a particularly amusing cold open to an episode of The Office: "Once a year, Dwight holds a seminar updating us on the newest developments in the world of karate. Because, as we all know, one thing a thousand year old martial arts do all the time...is change."
Until 1993, this jolt of sarcasm was an accurate picture of traditional martial arts. They changed, if at all, only very slowly and reluctantly, and usually with a tremendous amount of acrimony. The degree to which practicioners of various martial arts styles resisted any kind of modtification or influence on the systems they were passing down found its most hostile expression in the loathing the old kung fu masters had for Bruce Lee. Though rumors that a confederacy of these masters was responsible for Lee's premature death is widely accepted as sensationalism, their acrimony toward him was quite real. Martial arts narrowly, and Asiatic culture broadly, is founded on tradition, at to paraphrase Mr. Halpert, the one thing traditions don't do...is change. Indeed, as I write this in 2023, some forty-nine years after Lee's death, a Chinese muckraker named Xu Xiaodong is getting into enormities of trouble in his homeland for exposing "fake" kung fu masters with his modernized fighting skills. Xu has suffered a great deal of legal harassment from the Chinese government for drubbing these hapless "masters" in real fights: the CCP has a vested interest in protecting the mystique of kung fu, which runs like a thread through Chinese culture and is also a source of many tourist dollars.
When I was growing up, in the late 70s and 80s, kung fu, and other traditional martial arts like karate, taekwondo and even judo, were cloaked in said mystique. Among the various claims I heard or read about were the ability to slow down heart rates and raise or lower body temperature, walk over hot coals, disable people with single strikes to nerve clusters, or kill them with a single touch. You couldn't open a comic book without seeing advertisements for Count Dante's "Black Dragon Society," which promised -- if you'd only send them a money order -- to make you invincible as Superman and deadly as the plague. An entire episode of the hit show Quincy, revolved around the so-called "dim mak" or "death touch," which allowed a practicioner to kill their victim through a delayed-reaction strike which could be timed to the hour. And anyone from Generation X will remember the "ninja craze," which included that ridiculously awful (yet strangely enjoyable) show The Master, itself essentially codifying all the so-called abilities possible in martial arts: silent movement, borderline gravity defiance, imperviousness to pain, superhuman reflexes, and stealthines to the point of invisibility. Of course, not all of this was taken seriously or even semi-seriously even by boys of ten, but at the same time, anyone who was known to be seriously studying any martial art was usually given a wide berth. There was a boy in my junior high school from Indonesia who studied one of their nastier martial forms, and I was warned to avoid him because he had nearly beaten another student to death in a street fight: it turned out he was one of the nicest (and goofiest) kids I ever met at that wretched school, but the lies told about him prove my point: he "knew karate or something," and that made him essentially lethal.
In spite of all of this, in spite my older brother's buddy who owned a full ninja costume which he would wear when egging houses and suchlike, in spite of the numchuck craze, the throwing-star craze, in spite of Kung Fu theater and all the rest of it, I never had any interest whatever in practicing any martial art until around 1986 or so. I saw The Karate Kid on VHS (or maybe it was cable) and was instantly and utterly obsessed, to the point where I began practicing jump kicks on the backyard gate and wearing black headbands and wishing my hair was gold so I'd look like Johnny Lawrence. I mail-ordered a dozen books on various martial arts, bought exotic-looking patches with fists and flags and dragon emblems on them and had my mom sew them to my jacket, watched ridiculous, poorly-produced instructional home videos, and in short, did everything but actually learn how to fight. It wasn't until the following year that I learned that the family gym, the Yates Field House on the Georgetown University Campus, had a judo class, that I actually joined up and my fantasies about winning flashy tournaments and becoming a brick-pulverizing badass with a babe on each arm slammed into gritty reality.
For starters, I had no idea about the differences between one martial art and another, and boy was a disappointed when I discovered that my new art had no punches or kicks: it was more like wrestling, specifically Greco-Roman wrestling, in which I had no interest. This took some of the bloom off the rose. The rest was rubbed away, or should I say scratched, gouged, and scourged away, by my master, James Takemori. Takemori was a veteran of the famous 442nd "Nisei" Regiment in WW2, comprised entirely of Japanese-Americans, which took more casualties and won more medals than any other, and a legend in the judo community. He was also a tough, mean-spirited, sarcastic bastard, who used to ridicule his students and occasionally strike them when annoyed or displeased. At the time I joined his dojo, I was just coming off a long period of intense unpopularity in school, during which I was alternatively bullied by students and teachers, and his half Army drill instructor, half-Socratic approach to instruction left me empty of enthusiasm. Nevertheless, I toiled, sweated and bled in on his blue mats for what seemed like ages. I didn't learn a helluva lot of useful skills, and I never rose beyond the rank of white belt, but that was as much my fault as his. I didn't have my heart in the work, and I was at that time still very lazy and weak -- weak in character, I mean. Eventually I quit, and submerged back into being a "dimestore cowboy" who walked as if he knew the deep, dark secrets of martial arts, but in reality just practiced out of books propped up in his parents basement. The curious thing about stand-up martial arts, of course, is that it is possible to look very flashy in a short period of time without actually knowing how to fight, and being a teenager, I had remarkable flexibility, speed, and accuracy, which awed friends when I would show off with fancy, pinpoint-precise kicks. I took this useless knowledge with me to college, and began to slap on a thick coat of lies to make it more attractive. Since nobody knew me, I was free to declare that I was a black belt in "American freestyle karate" and also knew some judo. "American freestyle karate" is a real thing, but my knowledge of it came from books and my imagination (even then, "books and imagination" were part and parcel of my personality).
Inevitably I was tested, but the test came in a peculiar form. A fellow inmate of my dorm picked up on my interest and, being a martial artist himself, nagged at me to spar with him. I was desperate to avoid exposure and ducked him as long as possible before my pride forced me onto the mats. To my surprise, I performed pretty well. My defense was non-existent, and my punches weak and awkward, but I had blinding speed and that curious, laser-like precision, which allowed me to avoid a lot of his shots, and also see the smallest opening and take it before my larger, more muscular, much better techicnically skilled opponent could react. I was convincing enough to fool him into thinking I was legitimate, and we ended up forming The York College Karate Club in 1991. We even got the school to front us money for a heavy bag (which I kept until last year), sparring pads, and other equipment we didn't need but wanted badly, such as wooden practice swords and pullovers with our names on them. Populating this club were an assortment of novice and intermediate boxers, martial artists, wrestlers and street brawlers who believed we knew what the hell we were talking about. And in a sense, we did, because our open sparring sessions were at least full contact, which made what we did legitimate if clumsy practice rather than the pure theory taught by other sporting martial arts clubs. Indeed, some of our sparring sessions were wild affairs that produced bruises, bloody lips and noses, skinned knuckles, and slightly loosened teeth. It was here that I began to learn that getting punched in the face is not as bad as a middle-class kid from the suburbs thinks it is, that adrenaline highs are a real thing, and that even pain can be pleasurable when it comes in the heat of combat. But it was also here that I learned my limitations, and they were many. Not only my technique but my courage was insufficient, and in any case I was still a fraud, albeit one who periodically put his body where his mouth was. In time my faternity life would interfere with my participation in the Club, and by my junior year (1992-1993) I had discarded it entirely.
In 1995 my interest in the arts was rekindled when I watched the first of the Ultimate Fighting Championships (I, II and III) on videotapes rented from Blockbuster. At the time, the UFC was essentially human cockfighting (as John McCain put it) and
advertised as having no rules, though in fact a few did exist (no eye gouging, fish hooking or biting was allowed). Like many other young men bursting with bloodlust I couldn't watch these gladiatorial games fast enough and found them wonderful and terrible to behold. Part of my personal curiosity lay in the fact that the UFC was here to settle an ancient argument about which style of martial arts was the best in actual, (almost) no-holds barred combat. Kung fu, boxing, karate, pit fighting, shooto, wrestling, jiu-jitsu, judo, ninjitsu -- the list of names was endless, each represented by a guy usually looking like the hero or villain of those terrible 80s action movies you saw on Cinemax. And two facts were quickly established. The first was that stand-up fighters were essentially helpless when paired against grapplers. The second was that the dominant style of grappling was the Brazilian take on Japanese jiu-jitsu, epitomized by Royce Gracie. But just as quickly, Gracie jiu-jitsu -- itself a traditional art -- got exposed as being insufficient for victory if the practicioner in question could not take his opponent to the ground. The previously invicible Gracie was humbled at UFC V by Ken Shamrock, and while the fight was declared a draw, it was clear that something, some fundamental shift, was going on in the previously hidebound, even petrified, world of martial arts. Shamrock, who had been submitted by Gracie at UFC I, had adapted his game to neutralize Gracie's superior techniques. So what had begun as a commercial for Gracie jiu-jitsu became a warning, a cautionary tale. For generations, traditional practicioners had been declaring their styles invcincible and perfect, and now, one after the other, their delusions were being brutally shattered on pay-per-view television. Men who wanted to compete in what was now being dubbed "mixed martial arts" had to do just that: mix. Wrestlers, grapplers and strikers had to learn each other's secrets. They had to grow. They had to do the very thing they prided themselves on never doing: change.
My own journey continued -- as before, in blundering fits and cowardly, apathetic starts. After graduating college in 1997, I joined a boxing gym and spent some months toiling within its battered bosom. It was a truly humbling experience. Boxing is less of a sport than it is a complex vocation. Because you can only use your fists, and only strike a very clearly defined area of your opponent's body -- because, in short, you are so sharply limited in what you can do -- you must do it phenomenally well. And doing things phenomenally well requires an enormous amount of practice...which takes stamina...which takes commitment. Once again I found myself struggling in that final, most crucial area. I still wanted the propers, but I didn't want the lumps, the bumps, the bloody noses that went with them.
For years after this, I thrashed bags at gyms between Pennsylvania and Maryland, once again giving passersby and observers the distinct impression I knew what I was doing. I even trained personal trainers at a gym in Bethesda, MD, in how to use the speed bag, which I could handle like a pro. As Tommy Morrison once observed, some guys can look great on the bag but can't beat the shit out of a diaper, and this probably applied to me. I remained a dimestore cowboy: all sizzle but very little steak. Meanwhile, the martial arts world was changing all around me. The UFC left the sleazy, neon-lighted world of "no holds barred" and became a mainstream sport with ever-increasing popularity. Fighters ceased to be brawlers or single-style masters but synthesized their techniques and became well-rounded athletes. Colorful "characters" became professionals. If I'd been aware of the contrast between this phenomenon and my own status, I would not have enjoyed the knowledge.
Time marches onward, and so did I -- to California. I continued to terrorize inanimate objects at gyms, but I was getting tired of it. I was now in my 30s and tired beyond words of looking like I knew what I was doing: I wanted to actually know. Then one day, when I was in the midst of a search for a gym which taught aikido -- a peculiar martial art I'd always been curious about -- my headlights splashed against a window on Third Street in Los Angeles. It advertised KARATE, HAPKIDO, AIKIDO. The next morning I walked over to it, introduced myself to the master, and arranged to come back for an introductory class. A single hour of training there and I knew I'd found a second home. It is possible to exist in dischord with one's goals for decades, but now everything seemed to fall into place with a satisfying click. All the experiments with all those martial arts on both coasts now became an actual practice. Two days a week of training became three, sometimes four, and occasionally five. At my first belt test I was almost paralyzed with fright, and when the time came for the ceremonial bareknuckle board-breaking, I had so much adrenaline flowing I didn't so much break it as annihilate the poor thing. I knew, of course, that these traditionalist martial arts were of limited practical value. The dark, half-supernature mystique they had once carried was long gone. They were simply sets of techniques, some of which might be useful if one were jumped, mugged, or assaulted, but for the most part they existed for their own sake. The tornado kick, for example, is almost completely useless in real life, but boy is it beautiful to witness if you do it right, and that's really the point -- "tricking" is simply to martial arts what muscle cars are to automotion. They are demonstrations of what the human body is capable of if it is trained correctly, and that in itself carries its own sense of mystique. The point, for me, is that I was actually doing "the things" rather than merely talking about them or pretending to do them. I went to class. I trained. I got thrown. I got hurt. I lost skin on knuckles, elbows, knees. And I won my promotions fairly.
In 2012 I fought my first -- and last -- "professional" fight, down at the Team Quest gym in Encinitas, California. It was "professional" only in that it was sanctioned by the California State Athletic Commission, and open to any style of kickboxing. Present were several well-known MMA and bareknuckle fighters, but the competition was between amateurs like myself. I hadn't trained for the fight, my equipment was all wrong, and the organizers fibbed about the type of gloves we'd be using and what was and was not allowed in the fights. I lost my bout by TKO in the second round. My opponent, a firefighter and triathlete who trained x3 times a week with world champions, was too tall, too well-trained and far too well-conditioned for me to handle. I had the moves, mostly, but not the stamina. However, I acquitted myself well enough to harrangue the crowd afterwards, much to their amusement, and the referee, a pro kickboxer himself, told me my performance had inspired him. Indeed, for the first and last time in my life I was contacted by a professional kickboxing promotion and asked if I wanted to fight on their card up around Fresno (or was it Frisco?) in a few months. It was heady wine to be offered such a fight. I even ended up on the list of perspective title challengers in my weight class. I was now "real" in my own mind, no longer the dimestore cowboy, no longer the phony. On the other hand, I was not "real" in the larger sense. I was too old, too inexperienced and too poor to do this seriously: training requires money, and I didn't have it, any more than I had the time to do the work necessary when freelancing in the entertainment industry, sometimes 100 hours a week. And so my dreams in this direction faded, albeit with little regret. I had proven to myself I could make the commitments necessary -- the blood, the sweat, the figurative tears. And when I finally got my black belt in 2013, well, I knew that I had come out the other side of a long tunnel which I had entered almost twenty years before. Martial arts were changing around me, shedding centuries of petrified traditions, and I was changing too -- growing up, accepting discipline and discomfort and humility as the price of achievement, even taking some pleasure in the process itself.
I tell you all this because I have come to understand that change is fundamental to life, to the actual process of existing as a living, breathing, thinking being. I'm all for traditions, and as an anxious person require more routines than most people to soothe my nerves, but I now believe that a feeling of anxiety, of fear, towards or about a new endeavour is a sure sign that you are on the right track. That which scares you, engages you, and forces you to grow. As David Goggins has often maintained, you can't find growth from a place of comfort. All growth and all greatness lie on the other side of that line, where things are frightening and uncomfortable. It was awful for my ego, as a 38 year-old man, to have to put on a white belt again. And it was awful for traditional martial artists to choke down the fact that a lot of what they were preaching was nonsense. But it was precisely this point that our transformations began. Sometimes pride is precisely what prevents us from being the people, or the institutions, we wish to be. So my challenge to myself is the same one I make to you now: allow yourself to get punched on the nose, literally or figuratively, once in a while. Try new things. Fail at them. Try others. Fail at them, too. Keep trying and keep failing until you find something you love, until you hear the click of connection. Whatever pain you experience will be more than made up for by the introduction to whole new worlds within yourself you never knew existed.
March 2, 2023
WINNER TAKE NOTHING: A BRIEF WORD ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH
The issue of mental health has been on my mind quite a bit of late. It seems like a lot of people I know are struggling -- psychologically struggling, I mean. If I were in a statistical mood, I could drag out a raft of depressing figures showing that every form of mental illness and disorder is on the rise in America, and has been for decades. But I'm not in a statistical mood. Stats are boring, and I hate math, so I just want to speak frankly about the problem and how I observe it from my own little corner of the world.
Some years ago I read Winner Take Nothing by Ernest Hemingway. It was written by a man who, 28 years after publishing it, blew his head off with a shotgun in a barn in Ketchum, Idaho. The book opens with the following words, words which have haunted me ever since I read them:
"Unlike all other forms of lutte or combat the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing; neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory; nor, if he win far enough, shall there be any reward within himself."
Hemingway struggled his entire life with feelings of emptiness, anomie, depression and what might be called existential mania. He struggled with the pain of the friction between the inborn desire to achieve and the intrinsic hollowness of achievement; between what we think we are supposed to feel, what society tells us we must feel, and what we actually do feel, at any given moment. At the age of 61, he was among the most famous men in the world, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, sexually a conquistador, and held both the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes for literature. None of that made his life worth living in his own judgment.
I am convinced many people, and nearly all creative types, whether their field of creativity is writing, acting, music, comedy, painting, sculpting or what have you, feel this way from time to time. Or all the time. I do not mean suicidal per se: I mean they experience the depression, anger, confusion, loneliness and despair that often drive the act itself.
Many artists -- I detest the term "creatives" -- battle with intermittent doubts about their talent, experience depressive reactions to criticism, or let the frustration of rejection (which is part and parcel of the artistic process) get the best of them. These are among the most common forms of problems suffered by artists, and also simply by creative or imaginative people. Thomas Harris was quite correct in "Red Dragon" when he wrote that the price of imagination is fear. He might have added that another of its costs is doubt, and that doubt comes in more than one guise.
Sometimes we feel like we are not creating art ourelves but merely serving as the vessel for creative forces that are too big for us and too powerful for us and will eventually burn us out or blow us to bits. We are goaded along by a Muse who doesn't give a damn about us, regards us with about as much compassion and interest as a farmer regards a mule. Who sees us a merely a means to an end. The ancient Britons believed this, believed that those whom the gods touched with their power were ultimately destroyed by that blessing. If fear is the price of imagination, then depression may be the hidden cost, the fine print, the devil in the details.
Think for a moment about the number of entertainers and artists and performers who have committed de jure or de facto suicide in this young century alone. Think about the number who have committed suicide in the last five years.
It's staggering, really.
So many artistic people are burdened by feelings of doubt, worthlessness, loneliness, anger, frustration and depression. They are stuck in a "winner take nothing" scenario where their triumphs and accomplishments and even the process which led to them often ring hollow. They are denied both the pleasure of the journey and the relief provided by the destination. They spend their days struggling to achieve an end which, should they happen to achieve it even momentarily, rewards them by offering... nothing.
Every time I finish writing a book, I am struck by the sickly gloom that overtakes me. Here I am, at the point which I have been struggling to reach for months, a year, even several years...and when I break the tape, when I cross the finish line and grab the trophy, well, there isn't much in my heart except weariness and a vague feeling of disappointment.
"Is this all there is?" I ask myself. "Shouldn't I feel something else, something more?"
On a number of occasions I have won literary awards. When I was younger and only an aspiring writer with a mass of ideas and very little actual literary output, I would dream of obtaining such recognition -- luctie trophies, brass cups, bronze plaques, framed certificates, shiny baubles to show the world that I am legit, a stud, a badass, an artist. In each instance, upon hearing news of my victory, there was an immense feeling of joy...which dissipated with remarkable speed, sometimes in as little as two days. It was as if my natural state was discontent and any extended period of happiness with what I had accomplished was artificial, a fluke, gone as soon as glimpsed.
Glory is by its nature fleeting, but for some it is far more fleeting than others. And for artists it is perhaps the most fleeting of all.
Of course, this sort of feeling isn't limited to creative types. I begin with them merely because it is my own lens, my own frame of reference. Depression is everywhere. A friend of mine was briefly a world boxing champion in the 1990s. He won the title in an enormous upset -- a title that meant for him fame, the achievement of a long-standing dream, a torrent of cash, and plenty of female attention. I asked him once how long it took for a feeling of hollowness to set in -- a week? a month? a year?
He looked at me and replied:
"In the locker room, afterwards."
When people are chronically depressed, a condition which manifests itself in a surprisingly diverse number of forms, they are often a huge pain in the ass to those who love them most. This is because to those who don't suffer from depression, the very state of being depressed is considered a sign of weakness, of self-pity. Why don't they just stop moping about? Why don't they just stop feeling sorry for themselves? Why don't they just appreciate what they have, because, after all, so many others have it worse? Why don't they just realize it's all "First World Problems?"
Why don't they just -- ?
Nobody ever tells a cancer patient to "just get over" his or her cancer. Nobody tells a veteran with no legs to "just get up and walk." Nobody would dream of telling a blind man to see, a deaf woman to hear, or a child with mental retardation, autism or Down's Syndrome to "just fucking deal with it."
Well, depressed folks hear this shit every day. Every...single...day. And it's twice as hard to swallow because it often comes from those they love the most and want to trouble the least. So they do swallow it. They hide their symptoms. They slam a mask over their face and rivet it tight. Because they don't want to be a pain in the ass. They don't want to be a burden. They don't want to be the guy everyone avoids because he's always moping and blue. They fake it for the benefit of others. But as any first-year psychology student can tell you, to suppress emotions is merely to ensure they will out at the wrong time and place...and in a more violent form than had they been released naturally.
It amazed a lot of people that Chester Bennington, the lead singer of Linkin Park who committed suicide a few years ago, was seen on video laughing and joking with his family just hours before he hanged himself. Fans of entertainers as diverse as Chris Cornell, Lucy Gordon and Hervé Villechaize were similarly amazed when their heroes killed themselves within hours of social events in which they behaved with seeming normalcy.
Hemingway's wife, was, too. The night he committed suicide, "Papa" had just finished dinner. He was in a seemingly affable humor. He put out his cigar, finished his drink, kissed his wife and thanked her for dinner...and then he walked out to the barn and ended his life with a shotgun. Only he knew what he was thinking, but it's pretty obvious what he was feeling, in those moments before he pulled the trigger.
I suppose this is the part of the story where I'm supposed to give a lecture on how all of this could have been avoided. Don't worry. We aren't coming to that part because I'm not writing it. I'm no expert on depression, having only recently discovered I suffer from it (the symptoms, as I said before, are not always what you'd expect: you don't have to feel sad to be depressed: in my case it manifests as anger). I am especially not an expert on suicide. It is a topic my otherwise curious mind has always shied away from until recently. What I'd like to say, really, is that I have no idea if any of it could have been avoided, because ultimately people are in control of their own actions, but I do know that there are right methods and wrong methods of going about anything, and when you have a relative or friend who is depressed or suffering from a mental health issue, the wrong method is telling them to suck it up, grow a pair, or be a man (or a woman). The wrong method is to avoid them completely because they bring you down or make you uncomfortable. The wrong method is to shrug and wait for the storm to pass so you can have your friend or relative back on your own terms. And it is most especially, wretchedly wrong to worry that you will become "infected" by their anger or sadness if you do stick around, that by mere proximity you will "catch it."
The most depressing fact about mental health problems is, from my standpoint anyway, the fact that I never learned to recognize them in myself or others until just a few short years ago. Once that light was finally switched on, I realized, in retrospect, just how many people I had known, from relations to ex-girlfriends to friends in school and back again, who clearly, obviously suffered from severe anxiety, from depression, from panic attacks, from violent mood swings and post-traumatic stress. Many of these people were openly trying to medicate their issues with alcohol, drugs, sex, exercise, adrenaline, or attention. Nearly all of them, even the popular ones, suffered ridicule either to their face or behind their back for being unstable, or weird, or unpredictable, or unreliable, or promiscuous, or dangerous to be around. Very few had any vocal defenders. A girl exhibiting hypersexuality because she was molested as a kid was simply termed a slut. A man drowning in whiskey because he couldn't handle his chronic anxiety was simply termed a boozehound. A person who was obviously seeking self-destruction through endless high-risk behaviors was dubbed "crazy" in a half-affectionate way and left to their own destructive devices. And the chronically angry individual was either shunned or confronted violently: nobody ever seemed to ask them, "You seem really upset and angry all the time -- are you okay? Is something bothering you? Do you need help?"
I grew up at a time when men were expected to carry their crosses in grim-jawed silence. A man was permitted to get into fights and drink himself into a stupor, but never to complain, and certainly not to ask for help. Anyone who did was a weakling and a coward. Audie Murphy, America's most decorated soldier of the Second World War, repeatedly stated in his autobiography that he felt no remorse for killing what had to be at least a hundred Axis soldiers in that conflict. Yet his wife went on the record that, after watching newsreel footage of German orphans in postwar Berlin, Murphy burst into tears, moaning that he may have been the man that killed their fathers. Later he took to the bottle, and "plagued by insomnia and nightmares, a condition that would eventually become known as post-traumatic stress disorder, Murphy suffered from a powerful addiction to sleeping pills. In his later years, Murphy squandered his fortune on gambling and bad investments and was in financial ruin when he died in a plane crash on May 28, 1971." (1) My point here is that Murphy was not of a generation permitted to address trauma or mental health problems in a helpful way. He had to seek out his own solutions, and they proved just as harmful as his personal demons. We don't live in that era anymore, but it is not necessarily easier for men or women to ask for help -- especially if, like me, they didn't even know they had issues in the first place. Sometimes it takes an external intervention to shed that afformentioned light upon the problem. Why can't this person be you?
It seems to me that at a time when hatred, anger and divisiveness are so prevalent in our society, that the qualities of patience, friendship and love are most necessary and have the greatest potential to do good. I grant this is a very commonplace observation, but unfortunately we live in an era where commonplaces are necessary. There is too much ignorance in the world, and ignorance of how to deal with people suffering from depression and mental health issues generally must certainly be a contributing factor in the terrifying spike of suicides we've seen in the last 25 years. So to alleviate some of my own, I perused a website called helpguide.org, which deals with mental health and wellness. They made a couple of interesting points in regards to ways to approach people you suspect are suffering from depression or other MH issues. Some suggested openings included:
“You are not alone in this. I’m here for you.”
“You may not believe it now, but the way you’re feeling will change.”
“I may not be able to understand exactly how you feel, but I care about you and want to help.”
“When you want to give up, tell yourself you will hold on for just one more day, hour, minute—whatever you can manage.”
“You are important to me. Your life is important to me.”
“Tell me what I can do now to help you.”
Again, it sounds commonplace, but these opening gambits, even if they fail miserably, are certainly better than telling someone to "just snap out of it" or "call me when you're not so goddamn gloomy." Hell, if you don't save someone's life, you might at least make their day.
(1) biography.com
Some years ago I read Winner Take Nothing by Ernest Hemingway. It was written by a man who, 28 years after publishing it, blew his head off with a shotgun in a barn in Ketchum, Idaho. The book opens with the following words, words which have haunted me ever since I read them:
"Unlike all other forms of lutte or combat the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing; neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory; nor, if he win far enough, shall there be any reward within himself."
Hemingway struggled his entire life with feelings of emptiness, anomie, depression and what might be called existential mania. He struggled with the pain of the friction between the inborn desire to achieve and the intrinsic hollowness of achievement; between what we think we are supposed to feel, what society tells us we must feel, and what we actually do feel, at any given moment. At the age of 61, he was among the most famous men in the world, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, sexually a conquistador, and held both the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes for literature. None of that made his life worth living in his own judgment.
I am convinced many people, and nearly all creative types, whether their field of creativity is writing, acting, music, comedy, painting, sculpting or what have you, feel this way from time to time. Or all the time. I do not mean suicidal per se: I mean they experience the depression, anger, confusion, loneliness and despair that often drive the act itself.
Many artists -- I detest the term "creatives" -- battle with intermittent doubts about their talent, experience depressive reactions to criticism, or let the frustration of rejection (which is part and parcel of the artistic process) get the best of them. These are among the most common forms of problems suffered by artists, and also simply by creative or imaginative people. Thomas Harris was quite correct in "Red Dragon" when he wrote that the price of imagination is fear. He might have added that another of its costs is doubt, and that doubt comes in more than one guise.
Sometimes we feel like we are not creating art ourelves but merely serving as the vessel for creative forces that are too big for us and too powerful for us and will eventually burn us out or blow us to bits. We are goaded along by a Muse who doesn't give a damn about us, regards us with about as much compassion and interest as a farmer regards a mule. Who sees us a merely a means to an end. The ancient Britons believed this, believed that those whom the gods touched with their power were ultimately destroyed by that blessing. If fear is the price of imagination, then depression may be the hidden cost, the fine print, the devil in the details.
Think for a moment about the number of entertainers and artists and performers who have committed de jure or de facto suicide in this young century alone. Think about the number who have committed suicide in the last five years.
It's staggering, really.
So many artistic people are burdened by feelings of doubt, worthlessness, loneliness, anger, frustration and depression. They are stuck in a "winner take nothing" scenario where their triumphs and accomplishments and even the process which led to them often ring hollow. They are denied both the pleasure of the journey and the relief provided by the destination. They spend their days struggling to achieve an end which, should they happen to achieve it even momentarily, rewards them by offering... nothing.
Every time I finish writing a book, I am struck by the sickly gloom that overtakes me. Here I am, at the point which I have been struggling to reach for months, a year, even several years...and when I break the tape, when I cross the finish line and grab the trophy, well, there isn't much in my heart except weariness and a vague feeling of disappointment.
"Is this all there is?" I ask myself. "Shouldn't I feel something else, something more?"
On a number of occasions I have won literary awards. When I was younger and only an aspiring writer with a mass of ideas and very little actual literary output, I would dream of obtaining such recognition -- luctie trophies, brass cups, bronze plaques, framed certificates, shiny baubles to show the world that I am legit, a stud, a badass, an artist. In each instance, upon hearing news of my victory, there was an immense feeling of joy...which dissipated with remarkable speed, sometimes in as little as two days. It was as if my natural state was discontent and any extended period of happiness with what I had accomplished was artificial, a fluke, gone as soon as glimpsed.
Glory is by its nature fleeting, but for some it is far more fleeting than others. And for artists it is perhaps the most fleeting of all.
Of course, this sort of feeling isn't limited to creative types. I begin with them merely because it is my own lens, my own frame of reference. Depression is everywhere. A friend of mine was briefly a world boxing champion in the 1990s. He won the title in an enormous upset -- a title that meant for him fame, the achievement of a long-standing dream, a torrent of cash, and plenty of female attention. I asked him once how long it took for a feeling of hollowness to set in -- a week? a month? a year?
He looked at me and replied:
"In the locker room, afterwards."
When people are chronically depressed, a condition which manifests itself in a surprisingly diverse number of forms, they are often a huge pain in the ass to those who love them most. This is because to those who don't suffer from depression, the very state of being depressed is considered a sign of weakness, of self-pity. Why don't they just stop moping about? Why don't they just stop feeling sorry for themselves? Why don't they just appreciate what they have, because, after all, so many others have it worse? Why don't they just realize it's all "First World Problems?"
Why don't they just -- ?
Nobody ever tells a cancer patient to "just get over" his or her cancer. Nobody tells a veteran with no legs to "just get up and walk." Nobody would dream of telling a blind man to see, a deaf woman to hear, or a child with mental retardation, autism or Down's Syndrome to "just fucking deal with it."
Well, depressed folks hear this shit every day. Every...single...day. And it's twice as hard to swallow because it often comes from those they love the most and want to trouble the least. So they do swallow it. They hide their symptoms. They slam a mask over their face and rivet it tight. Because they don't want to be a pain in the ass. They don't want to be a burden. They don't want to be the guy everyone avoids because he's always moping and blue. They fake it for the benefit of others. But as any first-year psychology student can tell you, to suppress emotions is merely to ensure they will out at the wrong time and place...and in a more violent form than had they been released naturally.
It amazed a lot of people that Chester Bennington, the lead singer of Linkin Park who committed suicide a few years ago, was seen on video laughing and joking with his family just hours before he hanged himself. Fans of entertainers as diverse as Chris Cornell, Lucy Gordon and Hervé Villechaize were similarly amazed when their heroes killed themselves within hours of social events in which they behaved with seeming normalcy.
Hemingway's wife, was, too. The night he committed suicide, "Papa" had just finished dinner. He was in a seemingly affable humor. He put out his cigar, finished his drink, kissed his wife and thanked her for dinner...and then he walked out to the barn and ended his life with a shotgun. Only he knew what he was thinking, but it's pretty obvious what he was feeling, in those moments before he pulled the trigger.
I suppose this is the part of the story where I'm supposed to give a lecture on how all of this could have been avoided. Don't worry. We aren't coming to that part because I'm not writing it. I'm no expert on depression, having only recently discovered I suffer from it (the symptoms, as I said before, are not always what you'd expect: you don't have to feel sad to be depressed: in my case it manifests as anger). I am especially not an expert on suicide. It is a topic my otherwise curious mind has always shied away from until recently. What I'd like to say, really, is that I have no idea if any of it could have been avoided, because ultimately people are in control of their own actions, but I do know that there are right methods and wrong methods of going about anything, and when you have a relative or friend who is depressed or suffering from a mental health issue, the wrong method is telling them to suck it up, grow a pair, or be a man (or a woman). The wrong method is to avoid them completely because they bring you down or make you uncomfortable. The wrong method is to shrug and wait for the storm to pass so you can have your friend or relative back on your own terms. And it is most especially, wretchedly wrong to worry that you will become "infected" by their anger or sadness if you do stick around, that by mere proximity you will "catch it."
The most depressing fact about mental health problems is, from my standpoint anyway, the fact that I never learned to recognize them in myself or others until just a few short years ago. Once that light was finally switched on, I realized, in retrospect, just how many people I had known, from relations to ex-girlfriends to friends in school and back again, who clearly, obviously suffered from severe anxiety, from depression, from panic attacks, from violent mood swings and post-traumatic stress. Many of these people were openly trying to medicate their issues with alcohol, drugs, sex, exercise, adrenaline, or attention. Nearly all of them, even the popular ones, suffered ridicule either to their face or behind their back for being unstable, or weird, or unpredictable, or unreliable, or promiscuous, or dangerous to be around. Very few had any vocal defenders. A girl exhibiting hypersexuality because she was molested as a kid was simply termed a slut. A man drowning in whiskey because he couldn't handle his chronic anxiety was simply termed a boozehound. A person who was obviously seeking self-destruction through endless high-risk behaviors was dubbed "crazy" in a half-affectionate way and left to their own destructive devices. And the chronically angry individual was either shunned or confronted violently: nobody ever seemed to ask them, "You seem really upset and angry all the time -- are you okay? Is something bothering you? Do you need help?"
I grew up at a time when men were expected to carry their crosses in grim-jawed silence. A man was permitted to get into fights and drink himself into a stupor, but never to complain, and certainly not to ask for help. Anyone who did was a weakling and a coward. Audie Murphy, America's most decorated soldier of the Second World War, repeatedly stated in his autobiography that he felt no remorse for killing what had to be at least a hundred Axis soldiers in that conflict. Yet his wife went on the record that, after watching newsreel footage of German orphans in postwar Berlin, Murphy burst into tears, moaning that he may have been the man that killed their fathers. Later he took to the bottle, and "plagued by insomnia and nightmares, a condition that would eventually become known as post-traumatic stress disorder, Murphy suffered from a powerful addiction to sleeping pills. In his later years, Murphy squandered his fortune on gambling and bad investments and was in financial ruin when he died in a plane crash on May 28, 1971." (1) My point here is that Murphy was not of a generation permitted to address trauma or mental health problems in a helpful way. He had to seek out his own solutions, and they proved just as harmful as his personal demons. We don't live in that era anymore, but it is not necessarily easier for men or women to ask for help -- especially if, like me, they didn't even know they had issues in the first place. Sometimes it takes an external intervention to shed that afformentioned light upon the problem. Why can't this person be you?
It seems to me that at a time when hatred, anger and divisiveness are so prevalent in our society, that the qualities of patience, friendship and love are most necessary and have the greatest potential to do good. I grant this is a very commonplace observation, but unfortunately we live in an era where commonplaces are necessary. There is too much ignorance in the world, and ignorance of how to deal with people suffering from depression and mental health issues generally must certainly be a contributing factor in the terrifying spike of suicides we've seen in the last 25 years. So to alleviate some of my own, I perused a website called helpguide.org, which deals with mental health and wellness. They made a couple of interesting points in regards to ways to approach people you suspect are suffering from depression or other MH issues. Some suggested openings included:
“You are not alone in this. I’m here for you.”
“You may not believe it now, but the way you’re feeling will change.”
“I may not be able to understand exactly how you feel, but I care about you and want to help.”
“When you want to give up, tell yourself you will hold on for just one more day, hour, minute—whatever you can manage.”
“You are important to me. Your life is important to me.”
“Tell me what I can do now to help you.”
Again, it sounds commonplace, but these opening gambits, even if they fail miserably, are certainly better than telling someone to "just snap out of it" or "call me when you're not so goddamn gloomy." Hell, if you don't save someone's life, you might at least make their day.
(1) biography.com
February 25, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: WHAT'S IN THE BOX?
Like many people, I keep a box of momentos. Actually, it's been quite some time since I added anything to it: it's usually just sort of in the background, visible yet forgotten on my rather large nightstand. My cat Spike had occasion to barf upon the box recently -- when it was open, no less -- and as I was cursing and trying to perform emergency clean-up on my items before they were permanently ruined, it occurred to me that it had been so long since I looked at them I'd quite forgotten what as inside.
Turns out most of it is paper. Not many solid objects. But the paper is well worth listing for posterity. In no particular order, this is what I found:
A ticket to a double feature of "Predator" and "Action Jackson" at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, circa 2014. Carl Weathers was present, and I got a photograph of the two of us together. That remains the only time I ever got starstruck.
A ticket to "The Bourne Supremacy" dated 2004, from the Galleria 16 in Los Angeles.
A ticket to "Gladiator" dated 2000, from Hoyts Potomac Cinema 13. Saw it with my dear friend Cate Franklin. The sound was so loud I got an anxiety attack.
A guest card for the Parsippany, NJ Hilton (room #449) circa 1999. I was there for my fraternity brother Ken's wedding. It was basically a college reunion, and I had much more fun in that room than allowed by conventional morality.
A ticket to "The Big Brawl" at the Sovreign Center in Reading, PA, dated 2002. There I saw Smokin' Burt Cooper fight for the Pennsylvania Heavyweight Boxing Title with my fraternity brother Mark Durgin, who drank a pint glass of Scotch during the matches. There I spied the hottest ring card girl I have ever seen. That was a helluva day, maybe as close to a perfect one as a man can have: it might make a great rated-X book some day.
A ticket to "The Patriot" (2000) and "Lord of the Rings 1" (2002), both seen at the West Manchester Mall 13 in York, PA. I actually didn't care for the theatrical release of LOTR at the time: I still don't. The extended version is the only way to go.
A ticket to Monsterpalooza 2018, in the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, California. My friend Mark Viniello got me into that convention VIP style, at which I met Slash, Tom Savini, John Landis, Faruza Balk, Doug Bradley, Ashley Lawrence, Paul Sorvino, and Ron Jeremy. What a crew.
A ticket to see The Siren Six! at The Glass House in Pomona, California in 2018, for their farewell performance. My friend Nate Bott was the lead singer and I believe there may be video somewhere of me dancing to ska music.
A ticket to see William Shatner's one man show "Shatner's World" at Club Nokia in 2016. I went there with my brother Cory, and finally got to meet Captain Kirk in the flesh. He said it was a pleasure to meet me. I doubt that, but I appreciated the sentiment.
A welcome guest card to The Governor's House Hotel in Washington, D.C. (room 217), circa 2004. I can't comment as to what happened there, but it sure was fun.
A printout of a ticket to The Happy Little Festival at the Angel City Brewery in Los Angeles, CA, 2016. It was a tribute to Bob Ross. I drank a great deal of beer at that one and somewhere have video of my two female companions dancing with each other.
A ticket to "Rogue One," dated 2016, seen at the Burbank 16 in Burbank, California.
A very faded ticket to Dodger Stadium for a Cubs - Dodgers game. I believe this was in 2001 but the cat barf has stained the date. Saw Sammy Sosa hit a home run.
A very badly stained scrap of paper signed by the infamous porn star Traci Lords. I saw her speak at an ill-attended engagement at York College in 1993 or 1994. My question made her blush. (It was, "Did your porn career effect your social life afterwards?")
A backstage pass for R.E.M. dated 1995. My older brother was interviewing Michael Stipe and he hired me to work as crew. Stipe's (gigantic) bodyguard drafted me to be his co-bodyguard, the only time in my life I have ever been granted this distinction.
An expired Pennsylvania driver's license in which I have a lot more hair, two earrings, and wear a baseball jersey for a team I don't even like. the expiration is "8/31/00."
A ticket for "The Big Sleep" at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood dated 2016. I have absolutely no memory of going to this movie. None whatsoever.
A printout of a ticket to see Van Halen (with David Lee Roth) at the Hollywood Bowl in 2015. The chief objective of my high school years, accomplished a few decades late.
A ticket to see "The Santaland Diaries" at the Stella Adler Theater in Hollywood in 2010. A one man show starring Nicholas Brendon of "Buffy" fame. Very good performance.
A ticket to see the Washington Redskins play the Atlanta Falcons at FedEx Field in 2006. A boring game, the Skins lost as usual, I got drunk and stole a tree from the parking lot.
Another Redskins ticket, for the same arena, in 2007, to see them lose again (I'm sure), this time to the Cardinals. This was a week before I moved to Los Angeles, and I remember tailgating in the parking lot and not much else except a sunburned nose.
More tickets from the Egyptian to see "The House of Long Shadows" (2015) and "The Battle of the Bulge" (2014).
A completely ruined ticket for "An Academy Salute to Jackie Chan." I remember Jackie telling a story about how he was knocked unconscious by Bruce Lee on the set of "Enter the Dragon." This would have been around 2012.
A ticket to the Jets - Lions playoff game held in the Meadowlands, NJ, with no date: but this would be 2001 or 2002. It poured cold rain the whole time and the guy in front of us passed out in his own puke. I had to change clothes in my car.
A ticket (No. 02484) to the Walt Whitman High School Commencement Exercises at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., 1990. My high school graduation. I was very well dressed but I forgot my deodorant...and boy was it a hot day.
Tickets to The Strand Theater in York, PA, to see The Psychedelic Furs, Ben Folds, and Toad The Wet Sprocket, all in 2022. I had always and especially wanted to see Toad play live and they were damned good.
A train ticket from Washington, D.C. to New York, New York, dated 2003. I was visiting the afformentioned Cate. A great trip to Manhattan in its "Sex and the City" heyday.
A ticket to a Ravens - Jets game at Ravens Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland, circa 2003. I have a vague memory of visiting a bar beforehand, and then nothing. Literally nothing. I think I drink too much at these games.
A program for a one man show called "Nevermore" performed by Jeffrey Combs and directed by Stuart Gordon, at the Steve Allen Theater in Los Angeles. Armin Shimmerman produced it, if memory serves -- three legends of sci-fi/horror. A good time.
A ticket to see Live! and Counting Crows at Hersheypark Stadium in 2000. Good shows. The lead singer of the Crows complained he'd eaten too much before the show while at the lead singer of Live!'s house and wanted to barf the entire set.
A ticket to The Home Depot Center in Carson, California to see Sugar Shane Mosley fight Ricardo Mayorga. Shane won by knockout in the closing seconds of the 12th and final round. A real Rocky moment for the hometown kid against his jerk opponent.
A ticket to "Guardians of the Galaxy" circa 2014 from Burbank 16 in Burbank, CA.
A ticket to see Val Kilmer perform "Cinema Twain." I have no memory of where this performance went down except it was a ritzy, well-lighted West Side neighborhood in Los Angeles, and I got to tell Val how I used my "Iceman" imitation to hook up with chicks in college, a fact he found greatly amusing. Nor do I remember the year, except that it was after 2013 and before 2020.
A ticket to see Mike Tyson's one-man show "The Undisputed Truth" at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, CA in 2013. Still have the picture of me and Iron Mike together afterwards. I was surprised to find I'm taller than he is.
A ticket to the Home Depot Center to see "Donaire vs. Mathebula" dated 2012. Pretty sure I was there with my cousin Scott to see Kelly Pavlik fight. But Kelly was washed up at this time and looked terrible in the ring. A brilliant career ruined by drinking. Kind of like Paul Spadafora.
A fake dollar bill from the Ghost concert I saw at the Wiltern for "666 dollars." I think this was in 2015 or so. I enjoyed the concert but there were too many hipsters.
A ticket to a Bellator MMA show at The Forum in Inglewood, California (2017) for the Ortiz - Sonnen fight. This was supposed to be Tito Ortiz's retirement fight. I'm not sure it was.
A fake dollar bill ("Angus dollar") from the AC/DC show I saw in 1992 or so on their "Razor's Edge" Tour, somewhere in Maryland. My ears rang for three days after that bad boy.
A King of the Cage MMA fight ticket for a card called "Bitter Rivals" held in Ontario, CA at the Citizens Business Bank Arena. Probably the most boring fight card I've ever seen. A fat Mexican guy in the audience kept up a steady stream of heckling that should have landed him an HBO comedy special.
A ticket to the Bruce Lee tribute "Enter the Dragon" at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Samuel Goldwyn Theater, 2013. Met John Saxon there. Somewhere there's footage of me giving an interview about Bruce and I hope I never see it because I acted like a pompous asshole.
An El ticket I used to get from the McCormick Center in Chicago, Illinois to Wrigley Field to catch the Cubs. I was in Chicago to promote my book CAGE LIFE at the Book Expo America but I just had to sneak away and watch the Cubs pound the Pirates. I regret nothing.
A ticket to "Star Wars III" (Revenge of the Sith) for the Arclight Theater (Cineramadome) in Hollywood, circa 2005. Saw it with the family.
A ticket to see the Frederick Keys play the Wilmighton Blue Rocks ("Fireworks by Bank of America"), dated 2002. My first minor league baseball game, in Frederick, MD.
A printed ticket to see "The Ultimate Voyage" at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood in 2016. A musical tribute to "Star Trek" throughout the ages.
A ticket to the National Muay Thai Championships 2011 at Commerce Casino in Commerce, CA. A good time. The hotel smelled like bad incense, however.
A ticket to see "Starship Troopers" at the Arclight in 2012. It was an anniversary showing thrown by its star, Casper Van Dien, and was invite-only to the movie's crew. My friend Mark, who worked on the film, got me the hookup. Some great stories were told.
A ticket to "Star Wars 1" (The Phantom Menace) dated 2002. That was not a happy car-ride home.
A very faded piece of paper which has symbols printed out upon it which, in stenographic language, mean "Miles Watson." Given to me by a very attractive stenographer about twenty years ago.
Tickets to all three of the legendary Gatti - Ward fights: May 18, 2002 (Connecticut, MA); November 23, 2002, and June 7, 2003 (Atlantic City, NJ). The first installment of this trilogy was my first-ever boxing match, and is widely considered one of the greatest fights of all time. But as good as it looks on film, it was better live. I will never see a better sporting event, and I'm OK with that.
I also found: a passport-type photo of my father, a button for Blue Ridge Beer, three small seashells, several broken silver and gold chains, an ornate spoon given to me by my grandmother (she collected spoons), a champagne cork, a bronze pocket watch, a very small ID photo of me from my freshman year in college, a photographic negative taken around 1994, a money clip that belonged to my grandfather fashioned from a Morgan silver dollar dated 1879, a small gold St. Jude medal I wore for many years, a smooth stone, and a German penny.
As you can see, the total value of all of this is almost nothing in monetary: the Gatti-Ward tickets would probably be pretty valuable if they hadn't been stained, and the gold medallion might and coin-clip be worth a few bucks, but like most momentos these for the most part have zero intrinsic value. And yet they are most of them triggers to my memory, and in some cases they trigger memories so neatly sealed off within my brain I might never have thought of them again if not for the existence of these dry, crumpled, faded, stained little scraps of time. And I suppose this is why we keep momentos. Not so much for sentimental reasons but because we forget the vast majority of our lives. They simply passes beneath us like so much metaphorical water under an equally metaphorical bridge. Even someone like myself, who religiously keeps a journal, loses most of the substance and flavor of my days in those rambling and often prosaic paragraphs. It helps to have things we can touch, little jack-in-the-boxes that plunge us, if only for a few moments, into our own pasts...and remind us who we are, and what we enjoy. They can be embarrassing, but they are also revealing. Have you never wondered how you are perceived by others? A good way to get a bead on that perception is to take a look at what you yourself value, and there's no better way to do that than than by studying keepsakes. They tell a lot about us.
And of course, if you meet someone with no keepsakes, no momentos, no sentimentality, that tells us a lot about them, doesn't it?
Turns out most of it is paper. Not many solid objects. But the paper is well worth listing for posterity. In no particular order, this is what I found:
A ticket to a double feature of "Predator" and "Action Jackson" at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, circa 2014. Carl Weathers was present, and I got a photograph of the two of us together. That remains the only time I ever got starstruck.
A ticket to "The Bourne Supremacy" dated 2004, from the Galleria 16 in Los Angeles.
A ticket to "Gladiator" dated 2000, from Hoyts Potomac Cinema 13. Saw it with my dear friend Cate Franklin. The sound was so loud I got an anxiety attack.
A guest card for the Parsippany, NJ Hilton (room #449) circa 1999. I was there for my fraternity brother Ken's wedding. It was basically a college reunion, and I had much more fun in that room than allowed by conventional morality.
A ticket to "The Big Brawl" at the Sovreign Center in Reading, PA, dated 2002. There I saw Smokin' Burt Cooper fight for the Pennsylvania Heavyweight Boxing Title with my fraternity brother Mark Durgin, who drank a pint glass of Scotch during the matches. There I spied the hottest ring card girl I have ever seen. That was a helluva day, maybe as close to a perfect one as a man can have: it might make a great rated-X book some day.
A ticket to "The Patriot" (2000) and "Lord of the Rings 1" (2002), both seen at the West Manchester Mall 13 in York, PA. I actually didn't care for the theatrical release of LOTR at the time: I still don't. The extended version is the only way to go.
A ticket to Monsterpalooza 2018, in the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, California. My friend Mark Viniello got me into that convention VIP style, at which I met Slash, Tom Savini, John Landis, Faruza Balk, Doug Bradley, Ashley Lawrence, Paul Sorvino, and Ron Jeremy. What a crew.
A ticket to see The Siren Six! at The Glass House in Pomona, California in 2018, for their farewell performance. My friend Nate Bott was the lead singer and I believe there may be video somewhere of me dancing to ska music.
A ticket to see William Shatner's one man show "Shatner's World" at Club Nokia in 2016. I went there with my brother Cory, and finally got to meet Captain Kirk in the flesh. He said it was a pleasure to meet me. I doubt that, but I appreciated the sentiment.
A welcome guest card to The Governor's House Hotel in Washington, D.C. (room 217), circa 2004. I can't comment as to what happened there, but it sure was fun.
A printout of a ticket to The Happy Little Festival at the Angel City Brewery in Los Angeles, CA, 2016. It was a tribute to Bob Ross. I drank a great deal of beer at that one and somewhere have video of my two female companions dancing with each other.
A ticket to "Rogue One," dated 2016, seen at the Burbank 16 in Burbank, California.
A very faded ticket to Dodger Stadium for a Cubs - Dodgers game. I believe this was in 2001 but the cat barf has stained the date. Saw Sammy Sosa hit a home run.
A very badly stained scrap of paper signed by the infamous porn star Traci Lords. I saw her speak at an ill-attended engagement at York College in 1993 or 1994. My question made her blush. (It was, "Did your porn career effect your social life afterwards?")
A backstage pass for R.E.M. dated 1995. My older brother was interviewing Michael Stipe and he hired me to work as crew. Stipe's (gigantic) bodyguard drafted me to be his co-bodyguard, the only time in my life I have ever been granted this distinction.
An expired Pennsylvania driver's license in which I have a lot more hair, two earrings, and wear a baseball jersey for a team I don't even like. the expiration is "8/31/00."
A ticket for "The Big Sleep" at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood dated 2016. I have absolutely no memory of going to this movie. None whatsoever.
A printout of a ticket to see Van Halen (with David Lee Roth) at the Hollywood Bowl in 2015. The chief objective of my high school years, accomplished a few decades late.
A ticket to see "The Santaland Diaries" at the Stella Adler Theater in Hollywood in 2010. A one man show starring Nicholas Brendon of "Buffy" fame. Very good performance.
A ticket to see the Washington Redskins play the Atlanta Falcons at FedEx Field in 2006. A boring game, the Skins lost as usual, I got drunk and stole a tree from the parking lot.
Another Redskins ticket, for the same arena, in 2007, to see them lose again (I'm sure), this time to the Cardinals. This was a week before I moved to Los Angeles, and I remember tailgating in the parking lot and not much else except a sunburned nose.
More tickets from the Egyptian to see "The House of Long Shadows" (2015) and "The Battle of the Bulge" (2014).
A completely ruined ticket for "An Academy Salute to Jackie Chan." I remember Jackie telling a story about how he was knocked unconscious by Bruce Lee on the set of "Enter the Dragon." This would have been around 2012.
A ticket to the Jets - Lions playoff game held in the Meadowlands, NJ, with no date: but this would be 2001 or 2002. It poured cold rain the whole time and the guy in front of us passed out in his own puke. I had to change clothes in my car.
A ticket (No. 02484) to the Walt Whitman High School Commencement Exercises at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., 1990. My high school graduation. I was very well dressed but I forgot my deodorant...and boy was it a hot day.
Tickets to The Strand Theater in York, PA, to see The Psychedelic Furs, Ben Folds, and Toad The Wet Sprocket, all in 2022. I had always and especially wanted to see Toad play live and they were damned good.
A train ticket from Washington, D.C. to New York, New York, dated 2003. I was visiting the afformentioned Cate. A great trip to Manhattan in its "Sex and the City" heyday.
A ticket to a Ravens - Jets game at Ravens Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland, circa 2003. I have a vague memory of visiting a bar beforehand, and then nothing. Literally nothing. I think I drink too much at these games.
A program for a one man show called "Nevermore" performed by Jeffrey Combs and directed by Stuart Gordon, at the Steve Allen Theater in Los Angeles. Armin Shimmerman produced it, if memory serves -- three legends of sci-fi/horror. A good time.
A ticket to see Live! and Counting Crows at Hersheypark Stadium in 2000. Good shows. The lead singer of the Crows complained he'd eaten too much before the show while at the lead singer of Live!'s house and wanted to barf the entire set.
A ticket to The Home Depot Center in Carson, California to see Sugar Shane Mosley fight Ricardo Mayorga. Shane won by knockout in the closing seconds of the 12th and final round. A real Rocky moment for the hometown kid against his jerk opponent.
A ticket to "Guardians of the Galaxy" circa 2014 from Burbank 16 in Burbank, CA.
A ticket to see Val Kilmer perform "Cinema Twain." I have no memory of where this performance went down except it was a ritzy, well-lighted West Side neighborhood in Los Angeles, and I got to tell Val how I used my "Iceman" imitation to hook up with chicks in college, a fact he found greatly amusing. Nor do I remember the year, except that it was after 2013 and before 2020.
A ticket to see Mike Tyson's one-man show "The Undisputed Truth" at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, CA in 2013. Still have the picture of me and Iron Mike together afterwards. I was surprised to find I'm taller than he is.
A ticket to the Home Depot Center to see "Donaire vs. Mathebula" dated 2012. Pretty sure I was there with my cousin Scott to see Kelly Pavlik fight. But Kelly was washed up at this time and looked terrible in the ring. A brilliant career ruined by drinking. Kind of like Paul Spadafora.
A fake dollar bill from the Ghost concert I saw at the Wiltern for "666 dollars." I think this was in 2015 or so. I enjoyed the concert but there were too many hipsters.
A ticket to a Bellator MMA show at The Forum in Inglewood, California (2017) for the Ortiz - Sonnen fight. This was supposed to be Tito Ortiz's retirement fight. I'm not sure it was.
A fake dollar bill ("Angus dollar") from the AC/DC show I saw in 1992 or so on their "Razor's Edge" Tour, somewhere in Maryland. My ears rang for three days after that bad boy.
A King of the Cage MMA fight ticket for a card called "Bitter Rivals" held in Ontario, CA at the Citizens Business Bank Arena. Probably the most boring fight card I've ever seen. A fat Mexican guy in the audience kept up a steady stream of heckling that should have landed him an HBO comedy special.
A ticket to the Bruce Lee tribute "Enter the Dragon" at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Samuel Goldwyn Theater, 2013. Met John Saxon there. Somewhere there's footage of me giving an interview about Bruce and I hope I never see it because I acted like a pompous asshole.
An El ticket I used to get from the McCormick Center in Chicago, Illinois to Wrigley Field to catch the Cubs. I was in Chicago to promote my book CAGE LIFE at the Book Expo America but I just had to sneak away and watch the Cubs pound the Pirates. I regret nothing.
A ticket to "Star Wars III" (Revenge of the Sith) for the Arclight Theater (Cineramadome) in Hollywood, circa 2005. Saw it with the family.
A ticket to see the Frederick Keys play the Wilmighton Blue Rocks ("Fireworks by Bank of America"), dated 2002. My first minor league baseball game, in Frederick, MD.
A printed ticket to see "The Ultimate Voyage" at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood in 2016. A musical tribute to "Star Trek" throughout the ages.
A ticket to the National Muay Thai Championships 2011 at Commerce Casino in Commerce, CA. A good time. The hotel smelled like bad incense, however.
A ticket to see "Starship Troopers" at the Arclight in 2012. It was an anniversary showing thrown by its star, Casper Van Dien, and was invite-only to the movie's crew. My friend Mark, who worked on the film, got me the hookup. Some great stories were told.
A ticket to "Star Wars 1" (The Phantom Menace) dated 2002. That was not a happy car-ride home.
A very faded piece of paper which has symbols printed out upon it which, in stenographic language, mean "Miles Watson." Given to me by a very attractive stenographer about twenty years ago.
Tickets to all three of the legendary Gatti - Ward fights: May 18, 2002 (Connecticut, MA); November 23, 2002, and June 7, 2003 (Atlantic City, NJ). The first installment of this trilogy was my first-ever boxing match, and is widely considered one of the greatest fights of all time. But as good as it looks on film, it was better live. I will never see a better sporting event, and I'm OK with that.
I also found: a passport-type photo of my father, a button for Blue Ridge Beer, three small seashells, several broken silver and gold chains, an ornate spoon given to me by my grandmother (she collected spoons), a champagne cork, a bronze pocket watch, a very small ID photo of me from my freshman year in college, a photographic negative taken around 1994, a money clip that belonged to my grandfather fashioned from a Morgan silver dollar dated 1879, a small gold St. Jude medal I wore for many years, a smooth stone, and a German penny.
As you can see, the total value of all of this is almost nothing in monetary: the Gatti-Ward tickets would probably be pretty valuable if they hadn't been stained, and the gold medallion might and coin-clip be worth a few bucks, but like most momentos these for the most part have zero intrinsic value. And yet they are most of them triggers to my memory, and in some cases they trigger memories so neatly sealed off within my brain I might never have thought of them again if not for the existence of these dry, crumpled, faded, stained little scraps of time. And I suppose this is why we keep momentos. Not so much for sentimental reasons but because we forget the vast majority of our lives. They simply passes beneath us like so much metaphorical water under an equally metaphorical bridge. Even someone like myself, who religiously keeps a journal, loses most of the substance and flavor of my days in those rambling and often prosaic paragraphs. It helps to have things we can touch, little jack-in-the-boxes that plunge us, if only for a few moments, into our own pasts...and remind us who we are, and what we enjoy. They can be embarrassing, but they are also revealing. Have you never wondered how you are perceived by others? A good way to get a bead on that perception is to take a look at what you yourself value, and there's no better way to do that than than by studying keepsakes. They tell a lot about us.
And of course, if you meet someone with no keepsakes, no momentos, no sentimentality, that tells us a lot about them, doesn't it?
February 23, 2023
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "FRIDAY THE 13TH - THE SERIES"
When one thinks of "Friday the 13th," there is a very definite visual image which comes to mind: a hulking psychopath in a hockey mask, chasing down terrified teens by the moonlit waters of Camp Crystal Lake. Very few film franchises in history have such powerful name recognition, such immediate associative power, as that seemingly endless slew of celluloid slashers which began in 1980 and 2009. But it is not of the "Friday the 13th" films that I now write: it is the immensely influential, cruelly underrated, and in fact largely forgotten television series, "Friday the 13th: The Series," which ran on syndicated television from 1987 - 1990, and which had nothing whatsoever to do with Mr. Jason Voorhees and his grim penchant for hacking horny teenagers into grisyly bits. So for the purposes of clarification, I will henceforth refer to the series by the title it was known by in Canada, "Friday's Curse."
"Friday's Curse" came about, interestingly enough, due to the success of the "F-13" flicks. Paramount Pictures, hot to exploit the success of their slasher series, went to its creator, Frank Mancuso Jr., and told him to cobble together a companion TV show, PDQ. Mancuso wasn't interested, but the studio was so desperate to kick the cash pinata one more time time they told him that he could make any kind of series he liked, anything it all, so long as it had "Friday the 13th" in the title. No doubt repressing a chuckle, or a groan, at this naked cynicism, Mancuso commissioned a series which, despite many flaws, spawned or inspired or at least influenced many much more famous shows which followed.
That premise was this. Years ago, an occultist named Lewis Vendredi (R.G. Armstrong) sold his soul to the devil in exchange for wealth and longevity. The owner of an antiques store, he was tasked by said Prince of Darkness to sell items which carried horribly ironic curses: they often provided great powers to the recipient, but only at horrible costs. When Vendredi tried to break his pact with Satan, he was sucked into hell, leaving his store unattended. Enter the beneficiaries of his will, his nephew Ryan Dallion (John LeMay) and his neice Micki Foster (Louise Robey). The cousins by marriage have never met, barely remember "Uncle Lewis," know nothing of the curse, and care little for each other or running an antique store. So they naturally get shot of the whole lot of items in a fire sale. ..only to be told by the mysterious Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins), Vendredi's old business partner, the true nature of the store and its contents.
For the next three years, the trio tries to rectify their mistake by hunting down these cursed objects and placing them in The Vault, an impendetrable chamber beneath the shop they now call Curious Goods. (They must secure the items for safekeeping because, having been cursed by the devil, they are now indestructable.) Unfortunately, few of the item owners actually want to part with their terrible chatchkis, and are often more than willing to resort to murder to keep them. And therein lies the drama.
The ordinary episode of "Friday's Curse" moves on two axes at once. On the one hand you have Jack, Micki and Ryan trying to locate and secure a cursed object through trickery, bribery or just plain theft: on the other, you have the person or persons who have the object, and are using it for selfish gain at the expense of the blood price it inevitably demands from innocent victims. The normal curse works something like this: the item will grant the bearer a supernatural power or ability of some sort, but it must be "fed" regularly in order to operate, and generally turns upon its owner if this "feeding" does not take place. Most shows end with the item being recovered, but by no means does this guarantee a happy ending. Indeed, one of the more interesting tenents of the series is the terrible emotional and psychological toll this war against Satan takes on our heroes. Over the three seasons, all of them suffer terrible personal losses, and all of them lose, at times, their will to continue the fight: indeed, at the beginning of Season Three, the battle-weary Ryan leaves Curious Goods (in very unusual circumstances) and is replaced by Johnny Ventura (Steve Monarque), whose resolve to do good is similarly tested. At times, bitter arguments erupt about the inevitability of one or more of the "family" dying to fulfill the quest, and more selifsh motives, such as the desire to find a spouse and settle down into a normal life, also intrude. As many a superhero from Buffy to Batman has discovered, it is difficult to have a love life or start a family when one is on call 24/7 to fight the forces of darkness.
One immediately noticeable quality about "Friday's Curse" is the family dynamic. Jack, a veteran of WW2 with an affinity for the occult, is unquestionably the patriarch, and veteran actor Chris Wiggins plays him to near-perfection: a big, balding old teddy bear of a man, he leads with wisdom and compassion and the occasional flash of steely resolve, and is a convenient encyclopedia of magic-occultic lore. Fans of Hammer Horror films will recognize this archetype, and fans of "Buffy" will immediately see his resmemblance to Rupert Giles, right down to the tweed coat. Ryan, in contrast, is young, impulsive, and immature, the brash "son" of the stuffy, responsible father, but soon becomes invested in the quest and often spars with Micki over her selfishness in wanting to abandon it. John LeMay's performance could be uneven at times as he lacked great range, but he was otherwise perfect for the role, and once again, fans of "Buffy" will see a lot of Xander in his sense of humor, fashion sense and possession of more courage than ability. The final member, Micki, is the daughter/sister of the trio: deeply affectionate towards Jack, she is often infuriated or exasperated by Ryan's antics, though this is mixed with sisterly affection and at some times, a deeper romantic attraction for her "sibling." Micki hates the burden of responsibility owning Curious Goods brings, and is bitter over the fact her fiance deserted her for refusing to walk away from it. Yet when push comes to shove, she's just as committed and courageous as the others. With her flaming red hair, 1940s style elegance, and periodic penchant for put-downs, coupled with her chaste/tension-filled relationship with her partner, it's very hard not to see shades of "The X-Files" Dana Scully in Micki Foster.
One outstanding quality of "Curse" was its theme of "giving the devil his due." Not all of the owners/users of cursed objects are evil or unsympathetic. Some are good people faced with terrible choices: one episode features parents of a dying child who must commit seven murders to save the infant; in another, a quadriplegic teenager is promised use of her body again if she kills the boys who raped her and left her paralyzed; in yet another, a desperate father tortures innocent people (including Micki) to restore his young daughter's sanity. On the other hand, many of the bearers are entirely wicked, addicted to the beauty, youth, power, or wealth the object provides and completely uncaring as to how many they have to murder to keep the metaphorical or literal champagne flowing. Regardless of their morals or lack of same, however, the underlying themes of "Curse" are that making a pact with the devil comes with a heavy price, and so too does trying to interfere in the devil's designs. The object-holders usually die horrific deaths, quite often at the hands of their own objects, while our heroes suffer terribly recovering those objects. It's almost taken for granted by our gang that they will be destroyed sooner or later, and that this is the price of doing the right thing. It's not a particularly uplifting theme, but it is a realistic one, and realism in small things is crucial when the big things involve stuff like cursed wood chippers that spit money, not blood, when you throw a human being into them.
For 80s television, "Friday's Curse" was remarkbly violent. Using memory alone, I recall throat-slittings, impalements, beheadings, immolations, strangulations, eviscerations, electrocutions, beatings, shootings, stabbings, deaths by stinging insect, deaths by sudden disease, deaths by having brain fluid drained out, deaths in trash compactors or the afformentioned wood chipper, and death by drowning, including one man memorably drowned in a toilet. A lot of this was shown to a surprising and uncomfortable degree, including a very graphic episode directed by David Cronenberg which features a glove that can cure any disease...provided you transfer it to someone else in exaggerated form. The many cursed items included things like a violin, a statue of cupid, a pipe, a china doll, a brooch, a mask, a camera, a scalpel, a radio, a key, a compact, a handkerchief, a sherff's star, a pocket watch, a coin, a crystal pendant, a make-up kit, a television, a ring and a child's playhouse. The curses often operated on a law of diminishing returns, demanding more and more blood at more and more frequent intervals to bestow the same benefits or powers, and were always quick to turn on any bearer who couldn't keep them fed -- again, keeping in the theme of the devil being a lousy guy to do business with, though in at least one case, a cursed wheelchair, we see a former owner who walked away successfully from his paralysis.
"Curse" takes place in a nameless American city, presumably Chicago, but was actually shot in Toronto. Though there is plenty of daylight, many of the stories are set largely or entirely at night, and the cruel Canadian winters add to the bleak, brooding atmosphere, as does the use of rather gritty film -- it may not be 16mm, but it often looks like 16mm. Fred Mollin, who composed the music for the similarly brooding and dark "Forever Knight," was in good form here: while no Mark Snow or Christophe' Beck, he makes appropriately spooky soundscapes to accompany the carnage. The acting pool in Canada is narrow but extremely deep, and a great number of "familiar face" character actors and soon-to-be-star types appear in varying roles: among others, R.G. Armstrong, Colm Feore, David Orth, Michael Constantine, Billy Drago, the late great Denis Forest, Gwynnth Walsh, Nigel Bennett, Robert Ito, Tia Carrere, John Fujioka, Gary Farmer, the singer Vanity, and Jill Hennessey all make appearances (if many of these names don't ring a bill, the faces generally will).
"Curse" was hardly perfect even by the wobbly standards of 80s television. The shows vary widely, one might even say wildly, in the quality of scripts, acting, and cinematography, occasionally looking polished and professional, and at other times terribly cheesy and terribly low budget. (The actual budget for the show was quite large, so there is no excuse for episodes that look as if they were shot on a shoestring: this sort of thing falls on the producers.) What's more, Steve Monarque's Johnny, while he certainly has his moments, never entirely works -- in the book "Curious Goods," it's revealed that Wiggins and Robey didn't think much of him as an actor and didn't particularly like the character he was playing. Of course, it didn't help either that Elisabeth Robey was a fashion model and singer making her debut in television: while charismatic and charming, and in possession of good chemistry with both LeMay and Wiggins, she often emotes like a silent movie film star: you'd have to look at Emma Watson's performance as Hermionie in the first few "Harry Potter" films, in which she seems to think moving her eyebrows is a substitute for acting, to find this much eye-bulging and facial contortion. And while this is not an attack but an observation, it must be said that Robey's fashion sense belongs entirely to the period in question, and that most certainly includes her occasional and unfortunate hairscapades into the land of the bouffant. (In one comedic moment, Micki is sparked by electricity and her hair stands on end: I remember saying out loud, "What's the difference?")
Setting all of this aside, there is no doubt that "Curse" is an enormously enjoyable experience for afficianados of the horror genre, and that the show had a huge if unacknowledged influence on much which came after: THE X-FILES, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, SUPERNATURAL, FRINGE, and most especially WAREHOUSE 13, which lifts most of the premises and conceits almost intact. Though the series itself draws heavily on KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER and Hammer Horror movies, its basic ideas cast shadows which still fall on television today. The show's own demise came suddenly and ignominiously late in its third season: a boycott campaign, organized by religious fanatics opposed to the show's references to witchcraft and Satanism, frightened executives into pulling the plug despite strong ratings. I find this exceptionally tragic, because CURSE by its very premise had a virtually inexhaustable number of potential storylines: anyone who doubts this might want to take a look at SUPERNATURAL's fifteen seasons (a staggering 327 episodes). If nothing else, we were cheated of a planned series finale in which the gang would go to Crystal Lake -- yes, that Crystal Lake -- and try to get the ultimate cursed item: that quite literally God-damned hockey mask. I would have paid a pretty to see that show.
For myself, I find the spooky, old school atmosphere of the show to be curiously homey. All really enjoyable television creates a sense of family, however metaphorical, and CURSE managed this twice over -- with the characters themselves, and with the its design. There are certain film sets which the viewer comes to regard as second homes over the course of long viewership, and Curious Goods is one of them. I have the oddest feeling that if I were to drive to Toronto right now and stop at the address, I would find its lights burning into the night, and the bell over the door still ready to jingle. The oddities and antiques would still be nested behind their glass cases or hanging from the walls, and Jack, Micki and Ryan would be there, standing in dusty lamplight and untouched by time, ready to fight -- however reluctantly and grudgingly -- the forces of evil. I suppose the Mary Sue sort of hero, the suave and swaggering James Bond type, who annihilates his enemies, saves the world, and then slips on a dinner jacket and makes love to a supermodel, all without breaking a sweat, has its place in fiction...but I myself much prefer protagonists I can identify with. People who express fear. Who suffer pain. Who occasionally run away from responsibility. Or who, like Jack, feel doubt: "It used to be so simple. There was good, and there was evil. Now they're blending, mixing together. Can't tell where ends and the other begins. I'm not sure I know the difference anymore." In an age when writers are increasingly falling into the trap of writing born-perfect characters, where the hero's journey and the character arc are not so much marginlized as utterly elminated from storytelling, it's refreshing to see more or less ordinary people picking up a lance for what's right...even in the face of the devil himself.
"Friday's Curse" came about, interestingly enough, due to the success of the "F-13" flicks. Paramount Pictures, hot to exploit the success of their slasher series, went to its creator, Frank Mancuso Jr., and told him to cobble together a companion TV show, PDQ. Mancuso wasn't interested, but the studio was so desperate to kick the cash pinata one more time time they told him that he could make any kind of series he liked, anything it all, so long as it had "Friday the 13th" in the title. No doubt repressing a chuckle, or a groan, at this naked cynicism, Mancuso commissioned a series which, despite many flaws, spawned or inspired or at least influenced many much more famous shows which followed.
That premise was this. Years ago, an occultist named Lewis Vendredi (R.G. Armstrong) sold his soul to the devil in exchange for wealth and longevity. The owner of an antiques store, he was tasked by said Prince of Darkness to sell items which carried horribly ironic curses: they often provided great powers to the recipient, but only at horrible costs. When Vendredi tried to break his pact with Satan, he was sucked into hell, leaving his store unattended. Enter the beneficiaries of his will, his nephew Ryan Dallion (John LeMay) and his neice Micki Foster (Louise Robey). The cousins by marriage have never met, barely remember "Uncle Lewis," know nothing of the curse, and care little for each other or running an antique store. So they naturally get shot of the whole lot of items in a fire sale. ..only to be told by the mysterious Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins), Vendredi's old business partner, the true nature of the store and its contents.
For the next three years, the trio tries to rectify their mistake by hunting down these cursed objects and placing them in The Vault, an impendetrable chamber beneath the shop they now call Curious Goods. (They must secure the items for safekeeping because, having been cursed by the devil, they are now indestructable.) Unfortunately, few of the item owners actually want to part with their terrible chatchkis, and are often more than willing to resort to murder to keep them. And therein lies the drama.
The ordinary episode of "Friday's Curse" moves on two axes at once. On the one hand you have Jack, Micki and Ryan trying to locate and secure a cursed object through trickery, bribery or just plain theft: on the other, you have the person or persons who have the object, and are using it for selfish gain at the expense of the blood price it inevitably demands from innocent victims. The normal curse works something like this: the item will grant the bearer a supernatural power or ability of some sort, but it must be "fed" regularly in order to operate, and generally turns upon its owner if this "feeding" does not take place. Most shows end with the item being recovered, but by no means does this guarantee a happy ending. Indeed, one of the more interesting tenents of the series is the terrible emotional and psychological toll this war against Satan takes on our heroes. Over the three seasons, all of them suffer terrible personal losses, and all of them lose, at times, their will to continue the fight: indeed, at the beginning of Season Three, the battle-weary Ryan leaves Curious Goods (in very unusual circumstances) and is replaced by Johnny Ventura (Steve Monarque), whose resolve to do good is similarly tested. At times, bitter arguments erupt about the inevitability of one or more of the "family" dying to fulfill the quest, and more selifsh motives, such as the desire to find a spouse and settle down into a normal life, also intrude. As many a superhero from Buffy to Batman has discovered, it is difficult to have a love life or start a family when one is on call 24/7 to fight the forces of darkness.
One immediately noticeable quality about "Friday's Curse" is the family dynamic. Jack, a veteran of WW2 with an affinity for the occult, is unquestionably the patriarch, and veteran actor Chris Wiggins plays him to near-perfection: a big, balding old teddy bear of a man, he leads with wisdom and compassion and the occasional flash of steely resolve, and is a convenient encyclopedia of magic-occultic lore. Fans of Hammer Horror films will recognize this archetype, and fans of "Buffy" will immediately see his resmemblance to Rupert Giles, right down to the tweed coat. Ryan, in contrast, is young, impulsive, and immature, the brash "son" of the stuffy, responsible father, but soon becomes invested in the quest and often spars with Micki over her selfishness in wanting to abandon it. John LeMay's performance could be uneven at times as he lacked great range, but he was otherwise perfect for the role, and once again, fans of "Buffy" will see a lot of Xander in his sense of humor, fashion sense and possession of more courage than ability. The final member, Micki, is the daughter/sister of the trio: deeply affectionate towards Jack, she is often infuriated or exasperated by Ryan's antics, though this is mixed with sisterly affection and at some times, a deeper romantic attraction for her "sibling." Micki hates the burden of responsibility owning Curious Goods brings, and is bitter over the fact her fiance deserted her for refusing to walk away from it. Yet when push comes to shove, she's just as committed and courageous as the others. With her flaming red hair, 1940s style elegance, and periodic penchant for put-downs, coupled with her chaste/tension-filled relationship with her partner, it's very hard not to see shades of "The X-Files" Dana Scully in Micki Foster.
One outstanding quality of "Curse" was its theme of "giving the devil his due." Not all of the owners/users of cursed objects are evil or unsympathetic. Some are good people faced with terrible choices: one episode features parents of a dying child who must commit seven murders to save the infant; in another, a quadriplegic teenager is promised use of her body again if she kills the boys who raped her and left her paralyzed; in yet another, a desperate father tortures innocent people (including Micki) to restore his young daughter's sanity. On the other hand, many of the bearers are entirely wicked, addicted to the beauty, youth, power, or wealth the object provides and completely uncaring as to how many they have to murder to keep the metaphorical or literal champagne flowing. Regardless of their morals or lack of same, however, the underlying themes of "Curse" are that making a pact with the devil comes with a heavy price, and so too does trying to interfere in the devil's designs. The object-holders usually die horrific deaths, quite often at the hands of their own objects, while our heroes suffer terribly recovering those objects. It's almost taken for granted by our gang that they will be destroyed sooner or later, and that this is the price of doing the right thing. It's not a particularly uplifting theme, but it is a realistic one, and realism in small things is crucial when the big things involve stuff like cursed wood chippers that spit money, not blood, when you throw a human being into them.
For 80s television, "Friday's Curse" was remarkbly violent. Using memory alone, I recall throat-slittings, impalements, beheadings, immolations, strangulations, eviscerations, electrocutions, beatings, shootings, stabbings, deaths by stinging insect, deaths by sudden disease, deaths by having brain fluid drained out, deaths in trash compactors or the afformentioned wood chipper, and death by drowning, including one man memorably drowned in a toilet. A lot of this was shown to a surprising and uncomfortable degree, including a very graphic episode directed by David Cronenberg which features a glove that can cure any disease...provided you transfer it to someone else in exaggerated form. The many cursed items included things like a violin, a statue of cupid, a pipe, a china doll, a brooch, a mask, a camera, a scalpel, a radio, a key, a compact, a handkerchief, a sherff's star, a pocket watch, a coin, a crystal pendant, a make-up kit, a television, a ring and a child's playhouse. The curses often operated on a law of diminishing returns, demanding more and more blood at more and more frequent intervals to bestow the same benefits or powers, and were always quick to turn on any bearer who couldn't keep them fed -- again, keeping in the theme of the devil being a lousy guy to do business with, though in at least one case, a cursed wheelchair, we see a former owner who walked away successfully from his paralysis.
"Curse" takes place in a nameless American city, presumably Chicago, but was actually shot in Toronto. Though there is plenty of daylight, many of the stories are set largely or entirely at night, and the cruel Canadian winters add to the bleak, brooding atmosphere, as does the use of rather gritty film -- it may not be 16mm, but it often looks like 16mm. Fred Mollin, who composed the music for the similarly brooding and dark "Forever Knight," was in good form here: while no Mark Snow or Christophe' Beck, he makes appropriately spooky soundscapes to accompany the carnage. The acting pool in Canada is narrow but extremely deep, and a great number of "familiar face" character actors and soon-to-be-star types appear in varying roles: among others, R.G. Armstrong, Colm Feore, David Orth, Michael Constantine, Billy Drago, the late great Denis Forest, Gwynnth Walsh, Nigel Bennett, Robert Ito, Tia Carrere, John Fujioka, Gary Farmer, the singer Vanity, and Jill Hennessey all make appearances (if many of these names don't ring a bill, the faces generally will).
"Curse" was hardly perfect even by the wobbly standards of 80s television. The shows vary widely, one might even say wildly, in the quality of scripts, acting, and cinematography, occasionally looking polished and professional, and at other times terribly cheesy and terribly low budget. (The actual budget for the show was quite large, so there is no excuse for episodes that look as if they were shot on a shoestring: this sort of thing falls on the producers.) What's more, Steve Monarque's Johnny, while he certainly has his moments, never entirely works -- in the book "Curious Goods," it's revealed that Wiggins and Robey didn't think much of him as an actor and didn't particularly like the character he was playing. Of course, it didn't help either that Elisabeth Robey was a fashion model and singer making her debut in television: while charismatic and charming, and in possession of good chemistry with both LeMay and Wiggins, she often emotes like a silent movie film star: you'd have to look at Emma Watson's performance as Hermionie in the first few "Harry Potter" films, in which she seems to think moving her eyebrows is a substitute for acting, to find this much eye-bulging and facial contortion. And while this is not an attack but an observation, it must be said that Robey's fashion sense belongs entirely to the period in question, and that most certainly includes her occasional and unfortunate hairscapades into the land of the bouffant. (In one comedic moment, Micki is sparked by electricity and her hair stands on end: I remember saying out loud, "What's the difference?")
Setting all of this aside, there is no doubt that "Curse" is an enormously enjoyable experience for afficianados of the horror genre, and that the show had a huge if unacknowledged influence on much which came after: THE X-FILES, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, SUPERNATURAL, FRINGE, and most especially WAREHOUSE 13, which lifts most of the premises and conceits almost intact. Though the series itself draws heavily on KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER and Hammer Horror movies, its basic ideas cast shadows which still fall on television today. The show's own demise came suddenly and ignominiously late in its third season: a boycott campaign, organized by religious fanatics opposed to the show's references to witchcraft and Satanism, frightened executives into pulling the plug despite strong ratings. I find this exceptionally tragic, because CURSE by its very premise had a virtually inexhaustable number of potential storylines: anyone who doubts this might want to take a look at SUPERNATURAL's fifteen seasons (a staggering 327 episodes). If nothing else, we were cheated of a planned series finale in which the gang would go to Crystal Lake -- yes, that Crystal Lake -- and try to get the ultimate cursed item: that quite literally God-damned hockey mask. I would have paid a pretty to see that show.
For myself, I find the spooky, old school atmosphere of the show to be curiously homey. All really enjoyable television creates a sense of family, however metaphorical, and CURSE managed this twice over -- with the characters themselves, and with the its design. There are certain film sets which the viewer comes to regard as second homes over the course of long viewership, and Curious Goods is one of them. I have the oddest feeling that if I were to drive to Toronto right now and stop at the address, I would find its lights burning into the night, and the bell over the door still ready to jingle. The oddities and antiques would still be nested behind their glass cases or hanging from the walls, and Jack, Micki and Ryan would be there, standing in dusty lamplight and untouched by time, ready to fight -- however reluctantly and grudgingly -- the forces of evil. I suppose the Mary Sue sort of hero, the suave and swaggering James Bond type, who annihilates his enemies, saves the world, and then slips on a dinner jacket and makes love to a supermodel, all without breaking a sweat, has its place in fiction...but I myself much prefer protagonists I can identify with. People who express fear. Who suffer pain. Who occasionally run away from responsibility. Or who, like Jack, feel doubt: "It used to be so simple. There was good, and there was evil. Now they're blending, mixing together. Can't tell where ends and the other begins. I'm not sure I know the difference anymore." In an age when writers are increasingly falling into the trap of writing born-perfect characters, where the hero's journey and the character arc are not so much marginlized as utterly elminated from storytelling, it's refreshing to see more or less ordinary people picking up a lance for what's right...even in the face of the devil himself.
February 19, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: 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 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.
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.
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 tragic 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.)
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.
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 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 Force sadly wasn't listening, because this miniseries, despite some promising moments, 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 (2015) -- 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 resonance. 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 (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 (11 episodes) -- 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 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 -- 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 and 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.
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 blanks 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 (2021) "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.
ALl
The Fabelmans (2022): Steven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical movie about a plucky Jewish kid obsessed with moviemaking has definite resonance, 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.
All Quiet on the Western Front (1979): This television movie is in many ways the polar opposite of the modern, German version I reviewed above. It fully explores its many doomed characters as they enter the maelstrom of trench warfare, and explores as well their individual agony over the misery of their lives and the looming certainty of their deaths. A very accurate adaptation of Remarque's classic novel, and very well worth watching.
And that about wraps up my non-horror watches of the previous year. As you can see, it's a fairly eclectic mess, and I'm enormously behind on contemporary TV series that don't involve wookies or lightsabers, 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 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.
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.
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 tragic 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.)
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.
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 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 Force sadly wasn't listening, because this miniseries, despite some promising moments, 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 (2015) -- 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 resonance. 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 (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 (11 episodes) -- 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 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 -- 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 and 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.
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 blanks 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 (2021) "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.
ALl
The Fabelmans (2022): Steven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical movie about a plucky Jewish kid obsessed with moviemaking has definite resonance, 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.
All Quiet on the Western Front (1979): This television movie is in many ways the polar opposite of the modern, German version I reviewed above. It fully explores its many doomed characters as they enter the maelstrom of trench warfare, and explores as well their individual agony over the misery of their lives and the looming certainty of their deaths. A very accurate adaptation of Remarque's classic novel, and very well worth watching.
And that about wraps up my non-horror watches of the previous year. As you can see, it's a fairly eclectic mess, and I'm enormously behind on contemporary TV series that don't involve wookies or lightsabers, but I suppose I'll get there eventually. Hell, one of these days I may even finish "The Walking Dead."
February 11, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST
Aeons ago, when dinosaurs walked the earth and there was no such thing as television or even, necessarily, radio, it was common for newspapers to print two editions a day -- morning and evening. None was more famous than The Saturday Evening Post, and as I went walking on this fine Saturday, I considered the fact that I have, of late, been keeping many promises I made to myself. (I won't call them resolutions, because the New Year's Resolution has, in America anyway, become a synonym for good intentions that die quick deaths.) And one of those promises was to blog consistently, publishing a new one every Monday. I've been doing this for several months now, and to my great surprise have had no difficulty in the doing, which is further proof that you can do anything you set your mind to, if you actually follow through with it long enough to make it a habit: then, interestingly enough, it's harder to fail than to succeed.
Well, as I was walking and considering all the resolutions -- sorry, promises -- I have kept, I remembered David Goggins' advice on how to succeed at anything. According to Goggins, most people settle for about 40% of what they are capable of, and then convince themselves that that forty is actually one hundred, the full monty, everything. The figure of 40% comes from Goggins believing that this is the maximum effort one can sustain and still remain comfortable in life. It is the appearance of hard work without actually working hard, a kind of shadow puppet theater in which a modest amount of action appears falsely to be much more than it is. Only when we push past that forty into fifty, sixty, seventy percent and beyond do we feel real discomfort, and it's in discomfort that we find our full potential.
What the hell does this have to do with the Saturday Evening Post, you ask? It's simple. For the first six or so years I maintained this blog, I often struggled to post even once a month, much less once a week. But as 2022 began to wind down, I resolved (there's that goddamned word again) to stick to a strict "every Monday" schedule, and lo and behold, I've done it -- initially with great difficulty. But now, after some months of hitting my marks, I find that meeting this schedule has grown, well, comfortable. There is no longer especial difficulty in producing a (coughs) reasonably well-thought out and well-edited blog every week, so I have decided to produce two. The second of these will be called, you guessed it, The Saturday Evening Post, because, you guessed it, it will come out on Saturdays. I'm not entirely sure if it will be a "specialty" blog like some of my other subseries (As I Please, Memory Lanes, Gone Too Soon) or not: I'm even toying with the idea of doing a weekly book review, this being Goodreads and all, but not yet sold on the idea. Nor am I sure if I will keep Monday as the other release day, or move it to Wednesday, which would at least put an equal distance between blogs. The point, dear reader, is that I'm doubling up my output: if you follow me, you will now have twice as many notifications to delete as you did before. And this increased output will continue as long as I'm convinced the quality remains respectable and doesn't deteriorate into mere "content," pushed out the door for the sake of publishing something, anything.
I recently read an interview with, of all people, Rick Moranis, in which he spent a surprising amount of time attacking the very concept of blogging. He considers blogs little more than unedited first drafts: half-baked, undercooked ideas served to the world like chicken nuggets with cold, salmonella-pink centers. I cannot really disagree with his thesis. Blogs are, in the words of my friend Nate (a fellow blogger), often little more than a way of "slopping out the bucket" known as the human brain. They're a kind of spring cleaning for the noggin, a deadwood removal which allows whatever's been cluttering up our thoughts to be dumped onto the public. On the other hand, nobody forces anyone to read a blog, and while Goodreads stupidly eliminated their "views" indicator years ago, before they did I saw that some of my posts had crossed the thousand mark. Assuming that number has only risen in the interval, which I grant is a wobbly assumption, I assume there is readership for these things after all. Either way, more are coming. And that, fellas, is my first Saturday Evening Post.
Well, as I was walking and considering all the resolutions -- sorry, promises -- I have kept, I remembered David Goggins' advice on how to succeed at anything. According to Goggins, most people settle for about 40% of what they are capable of, and then convince themselves that that forty is actually one hundred, the full monty, everything. The figure of 40% comes from Goggins believing that this is the maximum effort one can sustain and still remain comfortable in life. It is the appearance of hard work without actually working hard, a kind of shadow puppet theater in which a modest amount of action appears falsely to be much more than it is. Only when we push past that forty into fifty, sixty, seventy percent and beyond do we feel real discomfort, and it's in discomfort that we find our full potential.
What the hell does this have to do with the Saturday Evening Post, you ask? It's simple. For the first six or so years I maintained this blog, I often struggled to post even once a month, much less once a week. But as 2022 began to wind down, I resolved (there's that goddamned word again) to stick to a strict "every Monday" schedule, and lo and behold, I've done it -- initially with great difficulty. But now, after some months of hitting my marks, I find that meeting this schedule has grown, well, comfortable. There is no longer especial difficulty in producing a (coughs) reasonably well-thought out and well-edited blog every week, so I have decided to produce two. The second of these will be called, you guessed it, The Saturday Evening Post, because, you guessed it, it will come out on Saturdays. I'm not entirely sure if it will be a "specialty" blog like some of my other subseries (As I Please, Memory Lanes, Gone Too Soon) or not: I'm even toying with the idea of doing a weekly book review, this being Goodreads and all, but not yet sold on the idea. Nor am I sure if I will keep Monday as the other release day, or move it to Wednesday, which would at least put an equal distance between blogs. The point, dear reader, is that I'm doubling up my output: if you follow me, you will now have twice as many notifications to delete as you did before. And this increased output will continue as long as I'm convinced the quality remains respectable and doesn't deteriorate into mere "content," pushed out the door for the sake of publishing something, anything.
I recently read an interview with, of all people, Rick Moranis, in which he spent a surprising amount of time attacking the very concept of blogging. He considers blogs little more than unedited first drafts: half-baked, undercooked ideas served to the world like chicken nuggets with cold, salmonella-pink centers. I cannot really disagree with his thesis. Blogs are, in the words of my friend Nate (a fellow blogger), often little more than a way of "slopping out the bucket" known as the human brain. They're a kind of spring cleaning for the noggin, a deadwood removal which allows whatever's been cluttering up our thoughts to be dumped onto the public. On the other hand, nobody forces anyone to read a blog, and while Goodreads stupidly eliminated their "views" indicator years ago, before they did I saw that some of my posts had crossed the thousand mark. Assuming that number has only risen in the interval, which I grant is a wobbly assumption, I assume there is readership for these things after all. Either way, more are coming. And that, fellas, is my first Saturday Evening Post.
GOOD WAR, BAD WAR: Ernst Jünger vs. Erich Maria Remarque
When I was a boy, the one war novel you could be certain everyone below the age of eighteen had either read or been told to read was Erich Maria Remarque's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1928). I myself read it in junior high school, and I confess it is the only book I have ever encountered that brought tears to my eyes. The ending is so heart-wrenching, so cruelly tragic, that I found it unendurable. This, of course, was the point -- not only of Remarque writing it, but of my teachers in forcing we students to read it. My generation was probably the last to grow up at a time when war and militarism were not only politically but socially fashionable in the United States, and as a counter to this, we were introduced to Paul Bäumer, the fictional -- but realistically depicted and quite deliberately allegorical -- protagonist of the story. Remarque let us know this in no uncertain terms with the epigraph which he opens the story:
"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."
When I read the novel, it had already been a bestseller for more than fifty years, and twice made into films -- once in 1930 and again in 1979. Today it remains a bestseller, and as recently as 2022 another movie version was released to widespread acclaim. It is certainly one of the most famous books ever written, and one of the few which almost everyone has heard of even if they have not read it or seen one of the cinematic adaptations. To some people it is the final word on the so-called Great War, World War One, and also the final word on war itself, at least from the generation which had to fight it. But this is not the case. There was another writer, quite similar to Remarque in many ways, who enjoyed (at the time anyway) equal success and fame, as well as equal influence...except that his influence was not toward pacifism. His name was Ernst Jünger.
Taken at a glance, there is little to choose between them. Both were Germans born into the Second Reich, i.e. Imperial Germany; both hailed from the west part of the country; both served in the German Army during the First World War on the Western Front; both were severely wounded in action; and both penned books inspired by their experiences there during the 1920s which became international bestsellers. Likeiwse, both men had long and very successful postwar literary careers, and became enormously respected if occasionally controversial authors. Each man, upon his death, was mourned as a literary titan, a giant in the field, leaving a vast legacy behind them.
There, however, the similarities end.
To begin at the crux of the matter: Remarque was drafted into the German army in 1917 upon his eighteenth birthday, deployed to the front at the end of June, and wounded at the end of July. He spent the rest of the war in hospital and never returned to action. The events of the war deeply traumatized him, and his seminal work is a reflection of that trauma: the novel's protagonist, Paul Bäumer, loses not merely his innocence but all of his childhood friends and finally his life, reflecting the destruction Remarque felt the war had visited upon his own psyche. After the war, Remarque struggled with alcoholism and what we would now describe as PTSD, became wealthy and famous when the novel was released, fell deeply afoul of the pro-war Nazis, and had to flee the country to save his own life. Despite his success, he was in a sense a continuous victim of his wartime experience, an experience which lasted just thirty days.
In contrast: Jünger, who was three years older than Remarque and thus in a position to do so, volunteered for service in 1914, and served until it ended four years later, fighting in numerous battles. He rose through the ranks from private to captain, was wounded in action at least seven times -- often so severely he probably should have died -- and in the last year of the war was given Prussia's highest military award for valor, the fabled "Blue Max." He, too, was fundamentally altered by the war, in a completely different way: his autobiographical story, "In The Storm of Steel" (1920), while depicting the ferocity of war in all of its terrible fullness, also depicts it as a white-hot crucible from which those who survive emerged not merely transformed but strengthened into a new "race," one conditioned to withstand pain, overcome fear, and think clearly in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity. One which could find beauty and meaning in destruction and death, purpose in slaughter and carnage.
His dedication is quite different than Remarque's, and reads in part:
"War...is an incomparible schooling of the heart. The soldier's boot, if it comes down grimly and harshly, also comes down cleanly."
"In The Storm of Steel" is not precisely a pro-war book: as I stated above, its depiction of combat is savage and unremitting, and such glory is to be found is of an equally savage variety: any real glorification is found only in the psycho-spiritual aftereffect. But whereas Remarque, in the form of his protagonist, does not survive his conflict, Jünger emerges from his own work stronger and more complete than when he began. He came into the war intoxicated with patriotism, ideals, adventure, and emerged with a harder, more brutally realistic outlook, yet one which did not entirely or even largely abandon the idea that war was a profound and even positive experience. It is little wonder, then, that while "All Quiet" became perhaps the sharpest arrow in the quiver of pacifists and antiwar activists for generations afterward, "Storm" was viewed favorably by adventurers, nationalists and the emerging Nazi movement.
It is in their treatment by the Nazis, however, that some level of reconvergence between the two men begins to occur. The Nazis hated Remarque from the outset, ridiculed his work, slandered his name, and eventually drove him from the country: his sister was ultimately beheaded by them for making "defeatist" remarks, but more likely simply because she was his sister and in their clutches while he lay beyond their power. Jünger, on the other hand, was initially admired by the Nazis and even courted by them, though he declined the invitation. From the outset, he saw that behind their militarism and professed love of Fatherland (which he shared) was a lively moral rot which deprived them of any legitimacy. Although many who studied the subject believe he provided fascists with an intellectual and spiritual-psychological basis for their otherwise intellectually bankrupt ideology, over time they soured upon him, kicked him out of the army, and eventually sent his son to a concentration camp. He himself avoided that fate only because Hitler, an early admirer, had declared him untouchable -- and even this was a narrow thing, for in 1943, Jünger actually wrote a fantasy novel called "On The Marble Cliffs," which was a thinly-veiled allegorical attack on Nazism. (Had the Nazi censors been more intelligent, they would have recognized it for what it was.) After WW2, however, German literature which drew a positive moral from the experience of war was not popular almost anywhere, and "Storm" faded from public consciousness for many years. Though Jünger's standing as an author became titanic in Europe, and he lived an immensely long and prolific life (103 years), he stopped writing war-themed works and became known more as a self-styled philosopher and thinker.
It is a curious contrast indeed. On the one hand, then, we have the antiwar novelist of all antiwar novelists, one who paid a terrible personal price for his success, whose fame is undiminished after generations; and on the other, "the intellectual godfather of fascism," who also paid a terrible price for his fame, and whose legacy is a curious mixture of irrelevancy and a very narrow, somewhat regional form of immortality. Given these facts alone, the vast majority of people would say that it was Remarque's take on war which made the more sense and was also more firmly on the moral high ground. Yet there is one crucial point which spoils, or at least clouds, this narrative, and that is the two men's actual experience with war.
Remarque, as I noted above, spent exactly thirty days on the front line. It was certainly an eventful and life-changing month, and one which ended with a personal catastrophe...but it was only thirty days, and it came about as the result of a draft notice. Jünger was a volunteer, and served for four years, surviving against all odds and despite numerous wounds, including gunshot wounds to the head and chest, shrapnel punctures, and gas attacks which scoured his lungs. His picture of war was far more involved, far more complete, than Remarque's could have been, yet his conclusions were totally different. And it is for those conclusions that "In the Storm of Steel" was forced off the stage of history and into the shadows.
To understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to acknowledge a truth which is often flatly denied: the vast majority of teachers, especially at the university level, identify as liberal or very liberal, and many as pacifists. This is not a criticism or a value judgment: it's a fact born out by legitimate polls such as the one conducted by Gallup years ago, which found less than 10% of college professors identified as conservatives. In a sense, conservatives have only themselves to blame for this: there is a decided anti-intellectual streak in most right wing political parties and movements. However, it being the case, it cannot help lend itself to a different view of war and the military itself. "The right," very broadly speaking, defines itself by its nationalistic fervor, deifies the military and regards war in a semi-sacred way. But that body of thought and action known as "the left" are far less quick to embrace nationalism, militarism, or even traditional patriotism. Pacifism has almost no purchase whatsoever on the right, but at times it has been widely embraced by the left, where it is considered virtuous even by those who reject it. The ordinary university professor, never having come within 5,000 miles of a battlefield, has preconcieved notions of war which Remarque's work neatly validated. Remarque was the token combat veteran who had drawn the "correct" opinion about armed conflict, so Remarque was lionized by the left and his books can be found on just about any school shelf you care you examine.
Jünger, on the other hand, drew the "incorrect" moral from his experiences, and is routinely accused of glorifying them -- of making a pointless slaughter look like a transformative experience. And it is true that the unedited version of "In The Storm of Steel" which is taken directly from his war diaries and was only recently published, is shakier and less certain in its philosophical elevation of warfare. The fact remains, however, that of the two men, Jünger is by far the more qualified, based strictly upon his resume and on no other criteria, to present us with an accurate picture of what happened in that conflict. And this brings us to the decisive point: just who is qualified to tell us about war, and what criteria should we use to judge their conclusions?
P.J. Caputo, the former Marine lieutenant who wrote "A Rumor of War" (often called "The All Quiet on the Western Front" of the Vietnam generation) noted in his introduction to the book that though he became an active participant in the antiwar movement upon his return from Vietnam, he could never hate the war with anything like the fervor of his friends in that movement who had not fought. And in my own discussions with my parents' generation, I often found that the bitterest hatred for the Vietnam conflict came from those who had not been there. It was not necessarily that the veterans enjoyed the experience or felt they had fought in a worthwhile cause: but they had seen the complexity of the situation firsthand, and in some cases had formed intense bonds with their fellow veterans which superceded any relationships they'd had before or since. In short, they simply didn't want to talk about it, because the language they would have to use was not a language civilians could understand.
This fact did not escape me even as a junior high school student. The combat vets I'd met from various conflicts and wars were always quite conscious that their was an unbridgable gulf between them and everyone else, at least where their experiences with war were concerned. Like women who have given birth, they were possessors of an experience which could not be communicated who hadn't gone through it themselves, and did not really need to be communicated with people who had. It was a case of, "If you know, you know." But most of us don't, and that is why we need Remarques and Jüngers. The problem lies with which of them we believe, which of them we accept. Because narratives are curious things. They can be shaped by our actual experiences, or they can be handed to us Compleat by others. A secondhand narrative which is is wrong, whether crafted out of ignorance or malice, can lead to horrific consequences, especially if given official stamp by church, government or society. Remarque has handed five generations of human beings his own take on war, and it is an accurate take -- it can't be anything less, because it was born from his own ordeal, and it also corresponds to what we, the uninitiated to war, can read in other books written by veterans and see with our own eyes in documentaries and news broadcasts. But Jünger's view of war is also accurate, because it was also sincerely held and the result of cruelly empirical experiments conducted with his own body. Although he later regretted some of the more nationalistic morals he drew from his early work, he never backed away from his feeling that war was a creative as much as a destructive force, that it was an "incomparible schooling of the heart," and that it was a catalyst for energies within the human being which could not be tapped in any other way. Industrialized war, he believed, was creating a new race of man, one who was taking on the relentless, unfeeling qualities of the machine, and though he cataloged its cost in blood and suffering more meticulously than most, and at much closer range, he did not see this as an evil thing. We live, after all, in an industrial age, and it would be foolish to pretend our technology hasn't changed us, or that change isn't necessary to integrate ourselves into the world we ourselves have created. One has only to look at people in the age bracket 20 - 30 to see the effects that social media and the internet have had on their mind-set, behavior, and emotional makeup.
In the end, war, like sex, like childbirth, like only a handful of other experiences in human existence, is something which is evidently incommunicable despite the endless attempts which have been throughout history to communicate it. No matter how vivid the prose, no matter how heartfelt the passion driving the pen, no matter how convincing the actor's portrayal or how brilliantly composed the director's shot, in the end we are on the other side of a phenomenon we can't fully understand. The differences in outlook between Remarque and Jünger are more important, then, for the way they highlight the fact that no too people see or respond to the same phenomena in the same way, than for anything else. And implicit in this fact is a warning, Orwell's warning, the one he gave after reading Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and grasping for the first time that not everyone wants peace, democracy and a cushion beneath one's bum. Some find value, and even majesty, in circumstances that fill the rest of us with horror -- blood, pain, harsh discipline, obedience, violence, destruction. Understanding this is the key to understanding why the human race keeps resorting to war despite the most fervent efforts to eliminate it from our collective toolbox. And why there will always be a need for quiet fronts, and storms of steel.
"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."
When I read the novel, it had already been a bestseller for more than fifty years, and twice made into films -- once in 1930 and again in 1979. Today it remains a bestseller, and as recently as 2022 another movie version was released to widespread acclaim. It is certainly one of the most famous books ever written, and one of the few which almost everyone has heard of even if they have not read it or seen one of the cinematic adaptations. To some people it is the final word on the so-called Great War, World War One, and also the final word on war itself, at least from the generation which had to fight it. But this is not the case. There was another writer, quite similar to Remarque in many ways, who enjoyed (at the time anyway) equal success and fame, as well as equal influence...except that his influence was not toward pacifism. His name was Ernst Jünger.
Taken at a glance, there is little to choose between them. Both were Germans born into the Second Reich, i.e. Imperial Germany; both hailed from the west part of the country; both served in the German Army during the First World War on the Western Front; both were severely wounded in action; and both penned books inspired by their experiences there during the 1920s which became international bestsellers. Likeiwse, both men had long and very successful postwar literary careers, and became enormously respected if occasionally controversial authors. Each man, upon his death, was mourned as a literary titan, a giant in the field, leaving a vast legacy behind them.
There, however, the similarities end.
To begin at the crux of the matter: Remarque was drafted into the German army in 1917 upon his eighteenth birthday, deployed to the front at the end of June, and wounded at the end of July. He spent the rest of the war in hospital and never returned to action. The events of the war deeply traumatized him, and his seminal work is a reflection of that trauma: the novel's protagonist, Paul Bäumer, loses not merely his innocence but all of his childhood friends and finally his life, reflecting the destruction Remarque felt the war had visited upon his own psyche. After the war, Remarque struggled with alcoholism and what we would now describe as PTSD, became wealthy and famous when the novel was released, fell deeply afoul of the pro-war Nazis, and had to flee the country to save his own life. Despite his success, he was in a sense a continuous victim of his wartime experience, an experience which lasted just thirty days.
In contrast: Jünger, who was three years older than Remarque and thus in a position to do so, volunteered for service in 1914, and served until it ended four years later, fighting in numerous battles. He rose through the ranks from private to captain, was wounded in action at least seven times -- often so severely he probably should have died -- and in the last year of the war was given Prussia's highest military award for valor, the fabled "Blue Max." He, too, was fundamentally altered by the war, in a completely different way: his autobiographical story, "In The Storm of Steel" (1920), while depicting the ferocity of war in all of its terrible fullness, also depicts it as a white-hot crucible from which those who survive emerged not merely transformed but strengthened into a new "race," one conditioned to withstand pain, overcome fear, and think clearly in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity. One which could find beauty and meaning in destruction and death, purpose in slaughter and carnage.
His dedication is quite different than Remarque's, and reads in part:
"War...is an incomparible schooling of the heart. The soldier's boot, if it comes down grimly and harshly, also comes down cleanly."
"In The Storm of Steel" is not precisely a pro-war book: as I stated above, its depiction of combat is savage and unremitting, and such glory is to be found is of an equally savage variety: any real glorification is found only in the psycho-spiritual aftereffect. But whereas Remarque, in the form of his protagonist, does not survive his conflict, Jünger emerges from his own work stronger and more complete than when he began. He came into the war intoxicated with patriotism, ideals, adventure, and emerged with a harder, more brutally realistic outlook, yet one which did not entirely or even largely abandon the idea that war was a profound and even positive experience. It is little wonder, then, that while "All Quiet" became perhaps the sharpest arrow in the quiver of pacifists and antiwar activists for generations afterward, "Storm" was viewed favorably by adventurers, nationalists and the emerging Nazi movement.
It is in their treatment by the Nazis, however, that some level of reconvergence between the two men begins to occur. The Nazis hated Remarque from the outset, ridiculed his work, slandered his name, and eventually drove him from the country: his sister was ultimately beheaded by them for making "defeatist" remarks, but more likely simply because she was his sister and in their clutches while he lay beyond their power. Jünger, on the other hand, was initially admired by the Nazis and even courted by them, though he declined the invitation. From the outset, he saw that behind their militarism and professed love of Fatherland (which he shared) was a lively moral rot which deprived them of any legitimacy. Although many who studied the subject believe he provided fascists with an intellectual and spiritual-psychological basis for their otherwise intellectually bankrupt ideology, over time they soured upon him, kicked him out of the army, and eventually sent his son to a concentration camp. He himself avoided that fate only because Hitler, an early admirer, had declared him untouchable -- and even this was a narrow thing, for in 1943, Jünger actually wrote a fantasy novel called "On The Marble Cliffs," which was a thinly-veiled allegorical attack on Nazism. (Had the Nazi censors been more intelligent, they would have recognized it for what it was.) After WW2, however, German literature which drew a positive moral from the experience of war was not popular almost anywhere, and "Storm" faded from public consciousness for many years. Though Jünger's standing as an author became titanic in Europe, and he lived an immensely long and prolific life (103 years), he stopped writing war-themed works and became known more as a self-styled philosopher and thinker.
It is a curious contrast indeed. On the one hand, then, we have the antiwar novelist of all antiwar novelists, one who paid a terrible personal price for his success, whose fame is undiminished after generations; and on the other, "the intellectual godfather of fascism," who also paid a terrible price for his fame, and whose legacy is a curious mixture of irrelevancy and a very narrow, somewhat regional form of immortality. Given these facts alone, the vast majority of people would say that it was Remarque's take on war which made the more sense and was also more firmly on the moral high ground. Yet there is one crucial point which spoils, or at least clouds, this narrative, and that is the two men's actual experience with war.
Remarque, as I noted above, spent exactly thirty days on the front line. It was certainly an eventful and life-changing month, and one which ended with a personal catastrophe...but it was only thirty days, and it came about as the result of a draft notice. Jünger was a volunteer, and served for four years, surviving against all odds and despite numerous wounds, including gunshot wounds to the head and chest, shrapnel punctures, and gas attacks which scoured his lungs. His picture of war was far more involved, far more complete, than Remarque's could have been, yet his conclusions were totally different. And it is for those conclusions that "In the Storm of Steel" was forced off the stage of history and into the shadows.
To understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to acknowledge a truth which is often flatly denied: the vast majority of teachers, especially at the university level, identify as liberal or very liberal, and many as pacifists. This is not a criticism or a value judgment: it's a fact born out by legitimate polls such as the one conducted by Gallup years ago, which found less than 10% of college professors identified as conservatives. In a sense, conservatives have only themselves to blame for this: there is a decided anti-intellectual streak in most right wing political parties and movements. However, it being the case, it cannot help lend itself to a different view of war and the military itself. "The right," very broadly speaking, defines itself by its nationalistic fervor, deifies the military and regards war in a semi-sacred way. But that body of thought and action known as "the left" are far less quick to embrace nationalism, militarism, or even traditional patriotism. Pacifism has almost no purchase whatsoever on the right, but at times it has been widely embraced by the left, where it is considered virtuous even by those who reject it. The ordinary university professor, never having come within 5,000 miles of a battlefield, has preconcieved notions of war which Remarque's work neatly validated. Remarque was the token combat veteran who had drawn the "correct" opinion about armed conflict, so Remarque was lionized by the left and his books can be found on just about any school shelf you care you examine.
Jünger, on the other hand, drew the "incorrect" moral from his experiences, and is routinely accused of glorifying them -- of making a pointless slaughter look like a transformative experience. And it is true that the unedited version of "In The Storm of Steel" which is taken directly from his war diaries and was only recently published, is shakier and less certain in its philosophical elevation of warfare. The fact remains, however, that of the two men, Jünger is by far the more qualified, based strictly upon his resume and on no other criteria, to present us with an accurate picture of what happened in that conflict. And this brings us to the decisive point: just who is qualified to tell us about war, and what criteria should we use to judge their conclusions?
P.J. Caputo, the former Marine lieutenant who wrote "A Rumor of War" (often called "The All Quiet on the Western Front" of the Vietnam generation) noted in his introduction to the book that though he became an active participant in the antiwar movement upon his return from Vietnam, he could never hate the war with anything like the fervor of his friends in that movement who had not fought. And in my own discussions with my parents' generation, I often found that the bitterest hatred for the Vietnam conflict came from those who had not been there. It was not necessarily that the veterans enjoyed the experience or felt they had fought in a worthwhile cause: but they had seen the complexity of the situation firsthand, and in some cases had formed intense bonds with their fellow veterans which superceded any relationships they'd had before or since. In short, they simply didn't want to talk about it, because the language they would have to use was not a language civilians could understand.
This fact did not escape me even as a junior high school student. The combat vets I'd met from various conflicts and wars were always quite conscious that their was an unbridgable gulf between them and everyone else, at least where their experiences with war were concerned. Like women who have given birth, they were possessors of an experience which could not be communicated who hadn't gone through it themselves, and did not really need to be communicated with people who had. It was a case of, "If you know, you know." But most of us don't, and that is why we need Remarques and Jüngers. The problem lies with which of them we believe, which of them we accept. Because narratives are curious things. They can be shaped by our actual experiences, or they can be handed to us Compleat by others. A secondhand narrative which is is wrong, whether crafted out of ignorance or malice, can lead to horrific consequences, especially if given official stamp by church, government or society. Remarque has handed five generations of human beings his own take on war, and it is an accurate take -- it can't be anything less, because it was born from his own ordeal, and it also corresponds to what we, the uninitiated to war, can read in other books written by veterans and see with our own eyes in documentaries and news broadcasts. But Jünger's view of war is also accurate, because it was also sincerely held and the result of cruelly empirical experiments conducted with his own body. Although he later regretted some of the more nationalistic morals he drew from his early work, he never backed away from his feeling that war was a creative as much as a destructive force, that it was an "incomparible schooling of the heart," and that it was a catalyst for energies within the human being which could not be tapped in any other way. Industrialized war, he believed, was creating a new race of man, one who was taking on the relentless, unfeeling qualities of the machine, and though he cataloged its cost in blood and suffering more meticulously than most, and at much closer range, he did not see this as an evil thing. We live, after all, in an industrial age, and it would be foolish to pretend our technology hasn't changed us, or that change isn't necessary to integrate ourselves into the world we ourselves have created. One has only to look at people in the age bracket 20 - 30 to see the effects that social media and the internet have had on their mind-set, behavior, and emotional makeup.
In the end, war, like sex, like childbirth, like only a handful of other experiences in human existence, is something which is evidently incommunicable despite the endless attempts which have been throughout history to communicate it. No matter how vivid the prose, no matter how heartfelt the passion driving the pen, no matter how convincing the actor's portrayal or how brilliantly composed the director's shot, in the end we are on the other side of a phenomenon we can't fully understand. The differences in outlook between Remarque and Jünger are more important, then, for the way they highlight the fact that no too people see or respond to the same phenomena in the same way, than for anything else. And implicit in this fact is a warning, Orwell's warning, the one he gave after reading Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and grasping for the first time that not everyone wants peace, democracy and a cushion beneath one's bum. Some find value, and even majesty, in circumstances that fill the rest of us with horror -- blood, pain, harsh discipline, obedience, violence, destruction. Understanding this is the key to understanding why the human race keeps resorting to war despite the most fervent efforts to eliminate it from our collective toolbox. And why there will always be a need for quiet fronts, and storms of steel.
February 5, 2023
A BURNING INDEED: HOW HOLLYWOOD NORMALIZES THE PERV
Eons ago, when I was in high school, I had an argument with a guy I'll call "Marty." Although witty, sharply intelligent, and musically talented, Marty was also firmly on the pretentious side, and prone, in my estimation, to dislike things merely because they were popular with fellow students, just as he also tended to like other things because they were obscure or inaccessible. How the subject came up I don't recall, but I had made a nasty remark about Woody Allen, who I considered creepy and repulsive, and Marty took up a lance in Allen's defense.
"Woody Allen is considered to be one of the sexiest men alive," he replied.
"Oh, fuck off with that," I said. "He's a 98 pound weakling and a weirdo in the bargain."
"One of the sexiest men alive," Marty repeated, rather sharply. "Look into it."
I looked into it, merely to prove Marty wrong. In those days, of course, we had no internet, so I had to flat-out ask girls, as well as various teachers and parents, what they thought of him, and to my dismay, discovered that Allen was indeed considered sexy by certain females -- girls of a more intellectual leaning in my school, and many older women.
My dismay stemmed not from the fact that Allen was a puny specimen, or that I completely failed to see the correlation between humor and sexual attractiveness, but from his cartoonishly overheated sexuality, which coupled with his numerous neuroses, filled me with a strong sense of revulsion. Call it instinct, but he wasn't the sort I would have cared to be alone with or leave a sister or girlfriend with, even for a short while. If Allen had been a teacher in my high school, and subsequently been accused of groping students, I would not have been surprised. There was just something about him I didn't trust.
As it happened, time eventually vindicated my unscientific opinion -- at least in part. Since my conversation with Marty back in 1989 or so, all sorts of unsavory information and allegation has come to light about Allen's personal life, not least of which was the way he allegedly "groomed" his 16 year-old adoptive daughter as a sexual and romantic partner while still married to actress Mia Farrow. His response to being asked how he could seduce a teen entrusted to his parental care while simultaneously betraying and humiliating his wife was to murmur, in that bland, blunt, deliberately taunting way, "the heart wants what it wants."
That is, of course, true. If we could pry back our ribs and let loose our darkest, most secret fantasies for the world to see, well, we'd all of us either be disowned, arrested or shot without trial. Fantasy by its very nature tends in the direction of forbidden fruit, and the more forbidden the fruit, the more intense the fantasy. In most human beings, however, a very distinct line exists between harmless daydreaming and harmful action. We keep our demons chained on one side of that line, and generally speaking do not let them go, no matter how badly we might want to. A "good person" is not one who lacks dark desires, merely one who is strong enough in character to keep them in check. Woody Allen is evidently not such a person, which is too bad for him and those he hurt as a result of letting his heart's "wants" to get in the way of good sense and common decency. But Woody Allen, himself, is not the issue. The issue is how his brand of "sexiness" came to be.
Now, you may recall that in October of last year I went batshit crazy watching horror movies and generally reveling in Halloween. One of my revels was a stop on the LCS Hockey Radio Show, on which I am a frequent guest: we discussed the 1981 slasher film "The Burning," and during that discussion it came up that no less a personage than Harvey Weinstein had co-written the script. In light of the way that movie's story unfolded, this was disturbing indeed. Since you probably haven't watched, or even heard of, "The Burning," allow me to explain.
"The Burning" is about an unpleasant camp handyman named Cropsey who is horribly disfigured after rebellious teenagers accidentally burn him alive during a prank gone wrong. Mad with rage, the monstrous-looking handyman returns to the camp and proceeds to stalk and murder the kids in generic slasher style until he is finally bested by two of the camp's residents, Todd and Alfred. What is special about this, you ask? In the case of Todd, nothing: he's a fairly typical hero of this type of film, handsome and resourceful. He's even got some karmic debts to pay off, since he's one of the guys who burned Cropsey in the first place. No, the thing that makes my skin crawl is the character of Alfred.
Alfred is, to put it mildly, ugly. This is no sin, in fact it's a refreshing and endearing quality in a cinematic hero, but in addition to being unpleasant to look at, he's also awkward, cowardly, unpleasant, and creepy. In fact, when we first meet him, he's peeping on a nubile co-ed bathing in an outdoor shower. When Alfred is caught, the girl's BF wants to pound him a good one, and oddly enough, the script implies the BF is the bad guy for wishing to do this. In fact, Todd encourages some of the other boys to befriend him, but Alfred never warms up to them, to girls, or to the audience. He remains unpleasant and off-putting and in fact spends much of the movie sniveling in fear, and I don't mean of Cropsey: in one scene, where presumably another screenwriter would have had him find some courage, he's afraid even to get into the lake and has to be shoved in. His cowardice, his creepiness and Other-ness, are never redeemed in any way, yet he lives where most of the rest of the cast dies horribly, and Todd goes out of his way to rescue him at the end of the movie.
To anyone familiar with Harvey Weinstein's physical appearance, character, and generations-long pattern of sexual predation, the affinity he shows as a writer for Alfred in "The Burning" is truly chilling. In retrospect, it seems not so much that that he was merely an outcast trying to get the audience to sympathize with outcasts, but as a creepy pervert trying very hard to normalize weirdness and creepy perversion through cinema. Alfred is presented to us as someone we are supposed to sympathize with, but -- and this is the kicker -- because he makes no effort to change at all, because his negative traits are not punished, because he learns nothing, we do not like him. Indeed, he is the character I most wanted to see murdered in the movie. Weinstein's attempt -- and perhaps it was only a subconscious attempt, but I doubt it -- to legitimize Alfred failed miserably, because he forgot (or never knew) that in order for us to sympathize with a freak, the freak must show us he is not a freak underneath, but a human being. That he is more than his appearance or the surface of his personality. The implication of "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" is that society is ugly because it judges Quasimodo only by his looks and cares nothing for who he is as a person. This is just and proper. Likewise, the implication of something like "Beauty and the Beast" is that the physical ugliness of the beast is actually expression of his inner self: only when he becomes a beautiful soul does he regain his physical attractiveness. This too is just and proper. But if an unappealing exterior runs all the way through, well, we have a completely different product: Alfred, or more literally, Harvey Weinstein.
The attempts of Hollywood -- and by "Hollywood" I mean the industry in its totality -- in normalizing and fetishizing the various character failings of Woody Allen were far more successful, but they amounted to the same tactic. Audiences were told that nervous, anxiety-ridden, physically weak, psychologically damaged nebbish types, preoccupied with sex past the point of obsession -- the sort you expect to be busted peeping at the keyholes of women's bedrooms -- were, well, sexy. That women ought to ignore their myriad shortcomings and concentrate on the fact they had wit and perhaps some intelligence, even if they were repugnant physically and utterly deficient of any traditional masculine qualities. And this begs a question: why? Why try to replace the traditional cinematic hero/protagonist with someone of this sort? Why swap John Wayne for Woody Allen?
It all comes back to "The Burning." Weinstein could not make himself more attractive physically, nor was he willing or able to curb his perverse sexual tastes, so in the character of Alfred, Weinstein created an analog for himself in the hopes it would engender sympathy and understanding. It was a stupid thing for him to attempt, but I understood why he attempted it. He didn't look like a hero, and sure as shit didn't think like one, so he wanted to redefine its definition. He was doomed to fail because it was too much to ask of the audience. But in Woody Allen, who at least was an undeniable talent, Hollywood executives saw themselves -- not only physically, but morally. It was they, after all, who invented the Casting Couch, who hosted parties that were little more than "give some head to get ahead" orgies, who normalized the exchange of sex for opportunity, who rejected the idea that conventional morality even applied to them. If they could make a man like Allen into a sex symbol, there was hope they could step into the clear light of day without changing their appearance or behavior: they would be the alphas -- the Alfreds! -- of this new world: puny men with warped morals, grooming society to tolerate and even applaud their antics.
I have to say for the record that I am not a prude. I have no brief with unconventional sex symbols, either. The very notion of attractiveness changes so drastically from generation to generation that the beauty of today is the pug-ugly of tomorrow anyway. Physical beauty is to a large extent a societal construct -- we think X is attractive because society tells us to. If guys who look like mathletes replace guys who look like athletes as "Sexiest Man Alive" on the covers of PEOPLE magazine for a few years, I don't give a damn, so long as they aren't simultaneously trying to redefine right and wrong at the same time. Things in the world are bad enough without normalzing physical cowardice, incest, and other forms of destructive sexual perversion. One Hollywood is enough.
"Woody Allen is considered to be one of the sexiest men alive," he replied.
"Oh, fuck off with that," I said. "He's a 98 pound weakling and a weirdo in the bargain."
"One of the sexiest men alive," Marty repeated, rather sharply. "Look into it."
I looked into it, merely to prove Marty wrong. In those days, of course, we had no internet, so I had to flat-out ask girls, as well as various teachers and parents, what they thought of him, and to my dismay, discovered that Allen was indeed considered sexy by certain females -- girls of a more intellectual leaning in my school, and many older women.
My dismay stemmed not from the fact that Allen was a puny specimen, or that I completely failed to see the correlation between humor and sexual attractiveness, but from his cartoonishly overheated sexuality, which coupled with his numerous neuroses, filled me with a strong sense of revulsion. Call it instinct, but he wasn't the sort I would have cared to be alone with or leave a sister or girlfriend with, even for a short while. If Allen had been a teacher in my high school, and subsequently been accused of groping students, I would not have been surprised. There was just something about him I didn't trust.
As it happened, time eventually vindicated my unscientific opinion -- at least in part. Since my conversation with Marty back in 1989 or so, all sorts of unsavory information and allegation has come to light about Allen's personal life, not least of which was the way he allegedly "groomed" his 16 year-old adoptive daughter as a sexual and romantic partner while still married to actress Mia Farrow. His response to being asked how he could seduce a teen entrusted to his parental care while simultaneously betraying and humiliating his wife was to murmur, in that bland, blunt, deliberately taunting way, "the heart wants what it wants."
That is, of course, true. If we could pry back our ribs and let loose our darkest, most secret fantasies for the world to see, well, we'd all of us either be disowned, arrested or shot without trial. Fantasy by its very nature tends in the direction of forbidden fruit, and the more forbidden the fruit, the more intense the fantasy. In most human beings, however, a very distinct line exists between harmless daydreaming and harmful action. We keep our demons chained on one side of that line, and generally speaking do not let them go, no matter how badly we might want to. A "good person" is not one who lacks dark desires, merely one who is strong enough in character to keep them in check. Woody Allen is evidently not such a person, which is too bad for him and those he hurt as a result of letting his heart's "wants" to get in the way of good sense and common decency. But Woody Allen, himself, is not the issue. The issue is how his brand of "sexiness" came to be.
Now, you may recall that in October of last year I went batshit crazy watching horror movies and generally reveling in Halloween. One of my revels was a stop on the LCS Hockey Radio Show, on which I am a frequent guest: we discussed the 1981 slasher film "The Burning," and during that discussion it came up that no less a personage than Harvey Weinstein had co-written the script. In light of the way that movie's story unfolded, this was disturbing indeed. Since you probably haven't watched, or even heard of, "The Burning," allow me to explain.
"The Burning" is about an unpleasant camp handyman named Cropsey who is horribly disfigured after rebellious teenagers accidentally burn him alive during a prank gone wrong. Mad with rage, the monstrous-looking handyman returns to the camp and proceeds to stalk and murder the kids in generic slasher style until he is finally bested by two of the camp's residents, Todd and Alfred. What is special about this, you ask? In the case of Todd, nothing: he's a fairly typical hero of this type of film, handsome and resourceful. He's even got some karmic debts to pay off, since he's one of the guys who burned Cropsey in the first place. No, the thing that makes my skin crawl is the character of Alfred.
Alfred is, to put it mildly, ugly. This is no sin, in fact it's a refreshing and endearing quality in a cinematic hero, but in addition to being unpleasant to look at, he's also awkward, cowardly, unpleasant, and creepy. In fact, when we first meet him, he's peeping on a nubile co-ed bathing in an outdoor shower. When Alfred is caught, the girl's BF wants to pound him a good one, and oddly enough, the script implies the BF is the bad guy for wishing to do this. In fact, Todd encourages some of the other boys to befriend him, but Alfred never warms up to them, to girls, or to the audience. He remains unpleasant and off-putting and in fact spends much of the movie sniveling in fear, and I don't mean of Cropsey: in one scene, where presumably another screenwriter would have had him find some courage, he's afraid even to get into the lake and has to be shoved in. His cowardice, his creepiness and Other-ness, are never redeemed in any way, yet he lives where most of the rest of the cast dies horribly, and Todd goes out of his way to rescue him at the end of the movie.
To anyone familiar with Harvey Weinstein's physical appearance, character, and generations-long pattern of sexual predation, the affinity he shows as a writer for Alfred in "The Burning" is truly chilling. In retrospect, it seems not so much that that he was merely an outcast trying to get the audience to sympathize with outcasts, but as a creepy pervert trying very hard to normalize weirdness and creepy perversion through cinema. Alfred is presented to us as someone we are supposed to sympathize with, but -- and this is the kicker -- because he makes no effort to change at all, because his negative traits are not punished, because he learns nothing, we do not like him. Indeed, he is the character I most wanted to see murdered in the movie. Weinstein's attempt -- and perhaps it was only a subconscious attempt, but I doubt it -- to legitimize Alfred failed miserably, because he forgot (or never knew) that in order for us to sympathize with a freak, the freak must show us he is not a freak underneath, but a human being. That he is more than his appearance or the surface of his personality. The implication of "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" is that society is ugly because it judges Quasimodo only by his looks and cares nothing for who he is as a person. This is just and proper. Likewise, the implication of something like "Beauty and the Beast" is that the physical ugliness of the beast is actually expression of his inner self: only when he becomes a beautiful soul does he regain his physical attractiveness. This too is just and proper. But if an unappealing exterior runs all the way through, well, we have a completely different product: Alfred, or more literally, Harvey Weinstein.
The attempts of Hollywood -- and by "Hollywood" I mean the industry in its totality -- in normalizing and fetishizing the various character failings of Woody Allen were far more successful, but they amounted to the same tactic. Audiences were told that nervous, anxiety-ridden, physically weak, psychologically damaged nebbish types, preoccupied with sex past the point of obsession -- the sort you expect to be busted peeping at the keyholes of women's bedrooms -- were, well, sexy. That women ought to ignore their myriad shortcomings and concentrate on the fact they had wit and perhaps some intelligence, even if they were repugnant physically and utterly deficient of any traditional masculine qualities. And this begs a question: why? Why try to replace the traditional cinematic hero/protagonist with someone of this sort? Why swap John Wayne for Woody Allen?
It all comes back to "The Burning." Weinstein could not make himself more attractive physically, nor was he willing or able to curb his perverse sexual tastes, so in the character of Alfred, Weinstein created an analog for himself in the hopes it would engender sympathy and understanding. It was a stupid thing for him to attempt, but I understood why he attempted it. He didn't look like a hero, and sure as shit didn't think like one, so he wanted to redefine its definition. He was doomed to fail because it was too much to ask of the audience. But in Woody Allen, who at least was an undeniable talent, Hollywood executives saw themselves -- not only physically, but morally. It was they, after all, who invented the Casting Couch, who hosted parties that were little more than "give some head to get ahead" orgies, who normalized the exchange of sex for opportunity, who rejected the idea that conventional morality even applied to them. If they could make a man like Allen into a sex symbol, there was hope they could step into the clear light of day without changing their appearance or behavior: they would be the alphas -- the Alfreds! -- of this new world: puny men with warped morals, grooming society to tolerate and even applaud their antics.
I have to say for the record that I am not a prude. I have no brief with unconventional sex symbols, either. The very notion of attractiveness changes so drastically from generation to generation that the beauty of today is the pug-ugly of tomorrow anyway. Physical beauty is to a large extent a societal construct -- we think X is attractive because society tells us to. If guys who look like mathletes replace guys who look like athletes as "Sexiest Man Alive" on the covers of PEOPLE magazine for a few years, I don't give a damn, so long as they aren't simultaneously trying to redefine right and wrong at the same time. Things in the world are bad enough without normalzing physical cowardice, incest, and other forms of destructive sexual perversion. One Hollywood is enough.
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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