Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 18

MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "CSI"

New year, new ideas. This Monday, the first of 2023, I am inaugurating a new series within this blog. In it I will be looking back at the television series, mini-series, video games and cultural what-not of yesteryear: some still enormously famous, others half-or-completely forgotten. It's a pretty straightforward assignment, but that last word requires some clarification on my part. “Yesteryear” is a word used nostalgically, with a reverence for the past which may or may not be justified: in MEMORY LANE, if I allow myself the luxury of nostalgia, it is because I feel nostalgia plays a role in the enjoyment and the retroactive perception of the series in question. I will strive to separate these feelings from my objective analysis of the show.

I should also like to add here that as someone who lived and worked in Hollywood for thirteen years and still keeps a hand, or at least a few fingers, lightly dipped in the game, I am occasionally going to be to cite examples from my personal experience or knowledge which I feel will add to my examination. It may be that I worked on the show myself in some capacity or knew people who did. On the other hand, it may be that I have no special knowledge whatsoever of the subject of which I speak and am merely coming from a viewer's perspective. In either event I will state the location of my perspective clearly.

That having been said, let's get this (sorry) show on the road, and begin by looking back at “CSI.”

Some shows come out of nowhere to achieve cultural dominance. “CSI” was no such phenomenon. Before the pilot had even been produced it was already one of the hottest properties in Hollywood, with actors fighting to land an audition, and seems almost destined to have become a hit, though the actual impact of the show was something no would could possibly have guessed. Created by Anthony Zuicker, “CSI” tapped into a burgeoning interest in the field of forensic science which initially began with "Quincy" in 1974, but really took off in popular culture after "The Silence of the Lambs" was made into a hit film in 1991. “CSI” harnessed itself to this trend, but in a distinct way. Featuring an ensemble cast, it was first and foremost a procedural, with the characters serving as agents of the story, and the stories themselves as mystery boxes which could only be unlocked through the application of forensic science. Audiences would get to know the characters well enough, but only in terms of their reactions to events and the way their personalities affected their methods of investigation. Science was to be the star, technology its co-star.

This is not to say that “CSI” lacked memorable characters. On the contrary, in Gil Grissom (William Petersen) it created one of the greatest television detectives of all time. Unlike the volatile, haunted, mentally unstable Will Graham of Michael Mann's “Manhunter” (1985), which Petersen also portayed, Grissom was conceived as a brilliant, eccentric loner, emotionally removed from his cases and to some extent his colleagues, obsessed with science as a thing-in-itself. In his own way he became a modern take on Sherlock Holmes: seemingly sexless, uninterested in money, fame or titles (he was a Ph.D. but seldom used the handle), he sometimes came off as an intellect trapped unwillingly in a human body. Nonetheless, he carried an air of pathos about him, a sense, on some level, of wanting but being unable to connect with his fellow human beings. Likewise, the original supporting characters, Kathryn Willows (Marg Helgenberger), Nick Stokes (George Eads), Warrick Brown (Gary Dourdan), Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox) and Jim Brass (Paul Guilfoyle), all found their favorites among adoring audiences, as much for their flaws as their merits: Willows was hotly defensive, territorial and intolerant of criticism, Stokes overly cocky and immature, Brown a short-tempered junkie gambler, Sidle emotionally unstable and needy, and Brass often just a plain, old-fashioned jerk.

Rewatching the first season, what struck me was how the show in its first episodes both resembled and differed with the show which was to come. The show was written at a fairly high level from the pilot episode, with an emphasis on wordplay and snappy dialog, often laced with double entendres, cultural references and jokes, one example being:

GRISSOM: (observing a rave) Teenage wasteland.
BROWN: Who?
GRISSOM: Exactly.

There was also an immediate attempt to define the show's basic premise through exposition delivered by Grissom, who is tirelessly preaching to his investigators that “evidence can't lie,” that the CSI's were “scientists, not detectives” and that personal feelings only muddle the process. Pushback to this comes primarily from Willows, who is equally obsessed with “why” rather than “how” and often allows her emotions to become entangled in her work. The tension of this dynamic drove the series from the pilot. Everyone quested for truth, but how they arrived was not always by the same path.

The characters established in the pilot stayed remarkably constant from that point, Grissom being an exception and Sara a smaller one. Grissom is initially more emotional and “human.” Sara is sexier and more facetious. As time went on, the former divested himself of some of his humanity while the latter became angrier, touchier, more unstable. The other characters, including a whole series of lesser characters who were elevated to full-time status (Doc, Ecklie, Super Dave, Hodges) were allowed to develop over time, but retained their initial personalities and stayed true to them.

“CSI” later became famous, and somewhat notorious, for its lavish, atmospheric set design and its habit of “painting with light” to produce luridly beautiful visual landscapes which were also somewhat cartoonish. The initial episodes do not reflect this. The CIS lab is depicted and lighted realistically, as a ramshackle government building. Atmosphere is created by contrasting bright light with deep shadow. This attempt at realism is generally in keeping with the way the CSIs are actually depicted as such, with large liberties taken in the scope of their powers for the purposes of drama, but the emphasis being on forensic science. Before long, however, the show began to deliberately blur the line between crime scene investigation and police work, so that in later seasons one would assume a CSI and a police officer were essentially the same thing. The CSIs interrogate suspects, chase them down alleys, draw guns and use them. They direct investigations rather than assisting with them, and are often seen ordering around cops like coolies. This heightened the drama at the expense of any sense of realism, but it did not in any way effect the show's watchability.

As CSI aged, it became more self-conscious of its cultural impact – the famous “CSI effect,” which actually reached real-life jury rooms (I have seen it firsthand in law enforcement), and in-jokes began to appear in the scripts. Nods and winks, borderline breaks in the fourth wall. It also became increasingly slick, sometimes to the point of greasiness. The dialog remained snappy and memorable, but was often constructed to produce affect, i.e., written for its sound and catchiness, rather than for its substance and content. More and more, the solving of mysteries involved the use of scientific techniques so sophisticated and unrealistic they bordered on the magical. This trend was to continue to the series finale, where bees are employed to catch a killer, and became rather a joke among audiences, and not always a kind-spirited one. The world of “CSI” began as a Hollywood take on forensic investigation. Suspension of disbelief was required but minimal. It ended as something of a fantasy.

One formula “CSI” adopted in the first season and never abandoned were over-arching stories about ingenious, elusive serial killers, sometimes lasting multiple seasons. The best of these, and the most memorable, was the Miniature Killer storyline, which went on for years and was by and largely extremely well-handled, though it also started a troubling trend of introducing serial murderers who also seem to have unlimited financial resources as well as advanced technical knowledge of just about every subject imaginable. By the end of “CSI,” this concluded in its logical absurdity, where the serial is in fact also a billionaire: but for a long time, it worked and worked well.

An unexpected element of the show was the development of a disaster-plagued romance between Grissom and Sara. This romance was handled deftly and in small installments, so it rarely seemed to be intruding into the show's procedural format. Petersen and Fox had very good chemistry together, and the particular nature of their romance – spiritual rather than physical, one might say – was in keeping with their character's personalities. Audiences began to root hard for these two to find their happily ever after.

The decline and fall of Warrick Brown was another tenent of the show which seemed true to life. Brown was depicted from the start as a first-rate investigator who often fell victim to his many personal demons. Gary Dourdan did fine work in this regard, and George Eads as well, in his role as a man trying to stop his best friend from disintegrating. Eads' Nick Stokes was in many ways the most realistically depicted of all the characters, because of the genuine way he reacted, emotionally, to trauma despite his cocky attitude: in one episode he weeps and begins to beg for mercy when a killer points a gun in his face. A lesser show would have had him spewing fake tough-guy dialog. Eads' face when suddenly confronted with possible death is beautifully depicted, and made us like and relate to him.

The effect of trauma on the characters is not ignored. Sara is as much a victim of what she sees as the victims themselves, and ultimately falls apart under the constant exposure to the visceral horror of crime scenes. It's true that when Jorja Fox returned full-time to the series after leaving for several years, she seems strangely unaffected and apart, a sort of android version of herself, but repeating this storyline would have been pointless.

The diversity of the characters was perhaps best reflected in those of Brass and Sanders. The former was a cynical, acid-tongued veteran cop who often quarreled with the CSIs (particularly Brown); the latter was a geeky lab rat who was convinced he was cool but had trouble convincing anyone else. The character of Brass deepened over time: he developed an abiding respect for the scientists he once despised and even formed lasting friendships among them, friendships which allowed him to endure terrible personal disasters in the show's later seasons. Sanders, on the other hand, evolved from a facteious and immature “counterculture kid” into a seasoned professional tested by personal tragedy.

“CSI” was set in Las Vegas, and serves not only the stage for the series but also a character. Though shot mainly in Valencia, Cailfornia, Vegas was simulated brilliantly through a combinaton of matching locations, green screens, second unit photography, and actual visits to the city. Many storylines revolved around Vegas-centric themes such as the casinos, gambling, nightlife and tourism, while others delve into Vegas's history, which is interwoven with greed, corruption and organized crime. Still others examine the city off the Strip, alternatively lavish, prosaic or crime-ridden. The portrayal is usually glamorous and sexy, but there is never any effort to hide the squalor and vice which seethes beneath the glow of the neon.

Ultimately, however, the setting was mere set dressing. The driving theme of “CSI” was the quest for truth. That one must follow the evidence, and while the evidence could not lie, it could be misinterpreted. Technology and procedure could produce data, but human beings had to make the conclusions. The show was a constant tension between head and heart, logic and passion, reason and instinct. The shallowness and frivolity of the city are belied by the grim and almost sacred work performed by the team.

All long-running shows have eras. “CSI” had three: the Petersen Era, the Fishburne Interlude, and the Danson Era. The first, which lasted about nine seasons, was unarguably the best. During that time the original cast with its fine chemistry remained intact, the quality of the stories remained strong, and the scripts were consistent. It is this part of the show that one tends to think of when one thinks of “CSI” at all. However, in a short period of time between seasons eight and nine there was a cast reshuffle in which Petersen and Dourdan left and Lawrence Fishburne arrived, and after that it was essentially a game of musical chairs. Jorja Fox left, returned, left and then returned. Marg Helgenberger left. Paul Guilfoyle was written out for budgetary reasons. Fishburne was shown the door after barely two years and replaced with Ted Danson. Minor characters were elevated to full-time status and then left themselves. New characters were written in with limited success. By the final season, of the truly original cast from the pilot; only George Eads remained, and technically he was fired at the end of it, though since there was no season sixteen his firing meant only that he failed to appear in the series finale the following year. Some continuity was maintained in the form of George Szmanda, Robert David Hall, Wallace Langham, etc., but by this time the show was more popcorn entertainment than anything else. It remained curiously addictive right to the end, but began to lack resonance and relied on increasingly preposterous plots and scientific maguffins to carry the day. Danson's performance was sound, but the show remained haunted by the ghost of Grissom, and quite wisely, he figured prominently in the series two-hour finale.

So where does “CSI” stand in retrospect?

Watching it over again, what struck me at once was how right it was, how well it worked, how completely it hit what it aimed at and achieved its intended effect. All series are unstable at their beginnings: they seek to discover what Dirk Benedict once referred to as their “spine,” the structure by which they will ultimately become known. During this process some shows change almost out of recognition. Yet “CSI” required remarkably little in the way of adjustment, and most of that was purely aesthetic. I had a very long meeting with Anthony Zuicker once, and what struck me about him was his absolute self-belief, his arrogant cigar-chewing confidence in the stories he wanted to tell and the way he wanted to tell them. That sort of attitude can be dangerous, and it is true that Zuicker has never again reached the heights he scaled with “CSI,” but it is also true that where this series was concerned, it was the right attitude. His dream became a billion-dollar empire with massive cultural impact, and to climb that mountain twice is perhaps asking too much of the universe. He created characters which will stick forever in the mind of those who witness them, and one, Gil Grissom, who has become an icon of crime fiction, beloved by millions.

Looking back, there is, too a certain nostalgia to be found, especially in the early seasons, when the technology is so visibly dated. I keenly remember the optimisic pre-9/11 world we see in the first season or two so keenly and fondly it brings me physical pain. Likewise, when I see how youthful the characters look at the outset: I had occaison to meet and speak with several cast members in more recent years, and to contrast them as middle or late-middle-aged men, with their younger, polished, eager selves is jarring in the way that looking at photos of yourself in high school is jarring. But what really strikes me now is the show's devotion to logic and reason, to scientific principles, to the idea that objective truth exists and will eventually out: Grissom's mantra that one must abandon personal prejudice, follow the facts, and trumpet the conclusions even if they violate one's own dearly-held beliefs. In the post-Trump, post-social media world, a world where Bill Nye has yielded to Alex Jones, a world of “alternate facts” on one side and Wokeism on the other, where conspiracy theories are now the cornerstone of major political parties, a world where mathematics are viewed as racist and political ideology is actively attacking the scientific method, such a view strikes me as sadly naive, almost pitiful. “CSI” was popcorn entertainment, but popcorn entertainment with an underlying purpose: to demonstrate that science was sexy and that a hard explanation lay behind every mystery. It was a world that , for all its glitz and mood lightning and woo-woo techie talk, Sherlock Holmes would have understood and identified with. The degree to which that world has vanished in such a short time is frightening, and today's mystery is of a very different variety: is it possible for us to learn how to think logically again? To embrace science? To grasp the importance of hypothesis and empircal data? To accept how little our unexamined, uneducated, uninformed opinions actually matter?

It's a mystery worthy of Gil Grissom himself.

2022: CRITIQUE TIME

“Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.” – Jean de La Bruyère

The last Monday of 2022 has arrived, and with it, my final blog of the year. It's a curious thing to bid goodbye to a year. On the one hand, the whole thing is simply made-up nonsense, like the days of the week or the hours of the day. They are constructs, like traditions, folkways, and societal norms: they seem to make sense because we are born into them, but they don't hold up well under strict examination. Yes, I know a year is the time it takes the Earth to revolve around our sun, but for practical purposes the 365th day of this year is no different than the 364th or the 366th. The arbiters of the passage of time are limited in real terms to the changing of the seasons and the usually too-subtle-to-see changes in our own bodies as we age. In Errol Flynn's autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways he recounts a tribe he encountered in the South Seas with no concept of time at all. Their climate offered no seasons, so they did not think in terms of years or understand the concept when it was explained to them. I have always found that passage to be delightful. Imagining not being subject to what Orwell referred to as "time neurosis" -- a life ruled by the clock. It's not easy. My own life is ruled by the clock to a degree that frightens, disgusts and angers me. And the older I get, the more conscious I am of the clock's ticking.

I once wrote an essay called "Not Wheels, but Wings: Thoughts on the Passage of Time" which is included here on Goodreads, and I've no desire to repeat it. But I will say, as I sit here in my bedroom, listening to the sound of sirens coming through my hallway windows, as my cat warms himself below the reading lamp on my night-table, as I digest the vegetarian sausages I ate for breakfast, that in the last 20 years or so, a lot of my life has been devoted to trying to make that passage feel slower. Mechanical time is objective, and a second is a second is a second, but human time doesn't work that way. In the human world, subjectivity is law. Whether something feels slow or fast makes it so, to the person experiencing it. 2020 felt endless to me (and countless millions of others) because it was so rotten, so fear-filled, so isolating and depressing, and yet at the same so full of personal changes. This year, on the other hand, seems to have lasted about six to eight months at the absolute maximum: sometimes it feels like a mere season. Fortunately, I keep a journal, and as I look back at its opening pages helps bring things into perspective. This year had its repetitions, its rituals, its samenesses, but it was not Groundhog Day. No year really is, and it's important we remember that. And even more important that, when it begins to resemble groundhog day, that we actually do something about it. Powerlessness in our own lives is a common theme in modern existence, but before a certain point it is an illusion. So, in the hopes of inspiring myself and others, I have listed 20 accomplishments and experiences I had this year which I felt worthy of note.

1. I am learning to cook. OK, granted, I've been cooking for 30 years, but I never got beyond a "yellow belt" level in the kitchen. This year I began to use a food delivery service which comes with an app containing (nearly) idiot-proof recipes. It has greatly enhanced my knowledge of cooking and my confidence with stoves and ovens, and also been a pleasurable experience in and of itself: it's even saved me some money.

2. I released my fourth novel, THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER: A SINNER'S CROSS NOVEL. It is my first full-length novel release since 2019, and was many years in the making.

3. Said novel won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award and the Literary Titan Book Award Gold Medal.

4. I turned 50 years old, and celebrated my birthday with a roadtrip up to Coudersport, PA, a beautiful little town two hours deep in a state forest preserve. Made a lot of memories there.

5. I completed a dark fantasy/horror novella called WOLF WEATHER which should come out next year. I had a lot of fun with this tale, and really let my imagination run riot. As soon as I commission a good cover from the right artist, I will be letting it run wind.

6. I completed a short novel called EXILES; A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLE OF MAGNUS which will also be released next year. This novel happened almost by accident: I banged it out in three months, as opposed to my ususal year to year-and-a-half, and enjoyed every second of writing it. It's a prequel to my novella DEUS EX, and reunites audiences with the villainous Magnus Antonius Magnus in the early stages of his career -- but in a very unusual way.

7. I was the featured guest on THE HOLLYWOOD GODFATHER PODCAST (Episode #160). I am a frequest guest on the LCS Hockey Radio Show and Comic Book Syndicate, but this was a higher level of exposure than I'm used to: 11,000K views just on the Podcast's homepage alone, and never mind Soundcloud, Goodpods, Apple, etc., etc. A video of the podcast is available at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulE8s...

if you want to see a horribly unflattering view of my face as it appeared last winter (pale, fat, bad haircut, shoddy video), by all means tune in.

8. While this isn't exactly a happy memory, I got into the first street fight I've been in since 1997, and won. A lunatic screaming that he was a prophet of Jesus, along with various anti-gay and anti-Semitic slurs (neither of which apply to me even theoretically) tried to jump me in an alley. He failed. What impressed me about the whole farsical yet terrifying situation was how instantly my martial arts instincts kicked in once he put his hands on me. I even had enough presence of mind to call 911 immediately afterward, though they never showed up. Baby, I've still got it. Minus the t-shirt he ripped off my body. (Ironically, a Glory Kickboxing t-shirt.)

9. Halloween orgy. As recounted here, I watched 31 horror movies in October, went to a costume party, and carved a jack o'lantern complete with candle and accompanying gourds. I've been wanted to do that sort of thing for years, and now I have.

10. A very attractive girl slipped me her phone number in the sneakiest way possible. No one has done this to me in years -- more years than I care to remember. It made me feel several hundred years younger than my chronological age.

11. Finally got 'round to attending a minor league baseball game at my local stadium, which is just up the street from my apartment. I had a terrific, very American time: beer, crackerjacks, hot dogs, and one bench-clearing brawl.

12. My old short story collection, DEVILS YOU KNOW, which I released back in 2016, hit three different #1 rankings on Amazon when I listed it as a freebie: horror anthologies, horror short stories and horror comedy.

13. I had a colonoscopy. No, this wasn't fun, but having turned fifty it was the prudent thing to do. Results were negative, and the whole thing was only a figurative pain in the ass, as opposed to a literal one.

14. I finally saw Toad the West Sprocket in concert. I've been a fan of this band since their 1994 release "Dulcinea," but was never able to catch them live. Imagine my surprise when they showed up to the venue literally on the same block as my flat -- a walk of about 300 paces. It was a great show, and unless I'm mistaken, I have now seen every band extant that I actually wanted to see perform in person. They were literally last on the list. I guess I need a new one.

15. I got asked to run for mayor. Yes, you read that correctly. A small group of "connected citizens" approached me one night about the possibility of me throwing my hat into the ring to run this hard-knock town of 45,000 souls. They liked my stances on local issues, my friendships with downtown businesspeople, and the fact I actually live right here, in the midst of things. For a minute I felt like my fictional hero, Dominic Da Vinci, on the show Da Vinci's Inquest when he's asked to run for mayor of Vancouver, B.C. But life is not a TV show (alas!) and nothing came of it. It's a pity, because as much as I hate politics, I think I could have made a difference. However, like an Oscar nomination, it's an honor just to be asked.

16. Took an ancestry test and settled a long-standing debate in my family. I found out I'm:

French & German: 25.8%
British & Irish: 20.4%
Scandanavian: 7.2%
Broadly Northwestern European: 13.6%
Eastern European: 5.7%
Italian: 24.3%
Spanish & Portuguese: 1.4%

We weren't sure as to the ethnicity of my mysterious and enigmatic maternal grandfather: know we know he was Southern Italian and Sicilian. I've always had an affinity for Sicily, so this perhaps explains it.

17. I received the last of twenty paintings I comissioned from my friend Jack, a fabulous artist who also painted the cover of my novella NOSFERATU Jack and his wife had me over for dinner, and then the artist and I went out on his boat and got happily sunburned on Lake Nockamixon while sipping beers and discussing old times. I'd forgotten how hard it is to tread water, especially while spinning yarn, and my lip got so sunburned it cracked, but it was a small price to pay for getting to drive the boat through such beautiful waters with an old pal.

18. To test a theory that I no longer have any discipline, I decided to eat nothing but broccoli and chicken, and drink nothing but black coffee, unsweetened tea and water, for a period of seven days. I did it. It sucked, but I did it. I then counted calories ruthlessly for the 90 days leading up to my birthday, and upped my cardio in the bargain. (It's amazing how much less you eat when you pay attention to what's going into your mouth.) At any rate, while the results weren't what I'd hoped aesthetically speaking, they at least showed I can muster some of my old self-restraint.

19. I got paid a fair pile of money -- fair by my standards anyway -- to write two scripts for projects I can't yet name, because they haven't been released. But I've already been shown actor's audition videos, footage from principal photography, and even a thank-you from one of the actors. That felt damned good. I had a feeling that I'd get more writing work from Hollywood if I left the place, and it's turning out to be true. Now, I have much bigger creative fish than this frying in my pan, but they are merely frying and not yet edible, which is a dumb way of saying they haven't paid off. These projects did. Money made this way is sweeter than any other kind of money I could make.

20. I'm winding up the very last pages of an epic horror novel, SOMETHING EVIL. This goddamned project has been my own literary Vietnam: an endless bog. It began in 1995, when I concieved a lengthy cold open for a horror movie whose plot I hadn't yet figured out. It began again in 2008, when I tried to turn that stubborn, alluring seed of an idea into a screenplay with the help of a partner. It began yet again in 2016 or thereabouts, when, having completed the screenplay but abandoned any hope of having it made into a movie, I decided to turn it into a novel. As I wrote above, I usually take between 12 - 18 months to turn out a full-length book (80K - 120K words). This fucking thing has taken me SEVEN YEARS or more, just in its novelistic iteration. It's a big story, it will probably 200K words in its first draft (at least 600 pages), but that's no goddamned excuse. The truth is, the story is so massive, and has so many characters, that it proved outside my abilities to write it as I conceived it: I had to develop whole new levels of storytelling craft to reach the finish line, like a guy learning new languages as he hitchhikes across the world. That's a good thing, but holy hell, has this been a battle. I pity my editor when the poor guy sees this thing clunk into his e-mail inbox. His "notes" will be a novella in themselves.

I suppose if I combed my journal more thoroughly I'd find a great deal more to discuss, but I think I've made my point. In any year of our lives, a great deal of what we do is numbingly repetitious. When I get up in the morning on a weekday, and think about what awaits me, I sometimes do feel as if I'm in Groundhog Day, or one of those "Star Trek" episodes where everything is stuck on repeat. Hell, the fact I've had three different tenures in this same neighborhood (2000 - 2002, 2004 - 2007, 2020 - present) only reinforces the deja vu: there's nary a streetcorner that doesn't hold some memory, good or bad, and I often feel as if I have to elbow aside the ghosts of my younger selves as I move from Point A to Point B. I know I'm not alone in this, either. But if we do shove past the ghosts, we see that while life may follow a circular track, the scenery changes, partially by accident but partially because we will it to change. And that's all it really takes: will. We cannot make time go slower, subjectively or objectively speaking, but we can do more with the time we have, by consciously pushing out of the repetitious cycles which mark our daily lives. By constantly seeking ways to disrupt the routine without destroying its necessary and beneficial aspects. So, as 2022 draws to its close, ask yourself this question: Against the balance of days in the year, how many stand out? How many memories and experiences will you carry away from this time, and how many will you leave behind, because they blend in so completely with the gray mass of uninspired days? And knowing this, how prepared are you to repeat that story next year, knowing how few you have, relatively speaking, until your counter reaches zero?

It's worth thinking about.

See you in 2023.

WHAT I READ IN 2022

Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. – William Faulkner

I no longer read as much as I used to, and this bothers me enormously. I have always taken enormous pleasure, and found immense relief and inspiration, in the act of reading. This goes back almost as long as I can remember. As a small child, I used to pull volumes off the shelves of my parents' considerable home library and attack books so far above my reading level it was almost comical: I didn't understand many of the words or expressions, and lacked the life experience to grasp the adult nature of the stories within, but I was neverthess compelled to keep after it. Being the child of journalists, it was part of my makeup to be drawn to the written word. Being a creative person, I was just as naturally drawn to words which sparked my imagination. I will never forget, for example, the beautiful prose I encountered in a biography of Al Capone written by John Kobler. It was so colorful and vivid, and yet so sparingly written, with nary a wasted word, that I felt as if the author had driven each individual latter and punctuation mark into place with a hammer. I had a similar reaction to a biography of Adolf Hitler penned by Robert Payne. The Englishman managed to paint word-pictures so vivid that I felt as if I had been transported back to the Vienna of 1910, the Munich of 1925. I didn't quite understand how these and other writers were able to affect this sorcery, but I knew I craved that power for myself.

So I read. As the above-quoted Faulker stated, I read everything, from Joe Silva's "Captain America" novels (such things exist, and they were amazing) to the complicated science-fiction of Frank Herbert and Ursula K. LeGuinn. I read historical fiction, mysteries, horror stories. I read biographies and memoirs and history books. When I got old enough, I even read the fiction they published in "Playboy," when my gaze wasn't otherwise occupied. Part of this reading was for pleasure and part was escape. All of it contributed to my growth and development as a writer.

There is, however, one curious fact about me which I have mentioned before in this blog in a different context. I suffer from anxiety. And as an anxious person I find great comfort in repetition. I rewatch television. I rewatch film. And nary a year goes by when I don't re-read certain books, such as Howard Fast's "Spartacus," George Orwell's "Coming Up For Air," or Lawrence Sanders' "The Sixth Commandment." Because of this tendency, I realized about ten years ago that the actual amount of new reading I was doing must be fairly small. I started keeping track of just how many new books I was reading per year, and was shocked at how paltry the number was: I was averaging -- at most -- a new book every other month, say 6 - 7 a year. For a writer who professes to love reading, those are sorry statistics indeed. By 2015, I had better than doubled that figure, but even this did not leave me contented, and my figures for the next three years were as follows:

2016 - 20 books
2017 - 22 books
2018 - 26 books

This may not seem like many to some reading this. I see people on Goodreads who claim to read 100 books or more each year. I myself wouldn't do that if I could, because I would never retain any of what I was reading nor would I savor the process. It would be like eating chicken McNuggets every day. (I'm of the opinion that books should never be relegated, in the main, to mere "content," but that's just me.)

Unfortunately, the next few years showed a very different trend. Circumstance piled upon circumstance to cut down on the time and the inclinination I had to read, leading to these pathetic figures:

2019 - 17 books
2020 - 15 books
2021 - 9 books

Well, as the saying goes, what you don't change, you choose. When 2020 came around, I made a resolution to arrest and reverse this trend. And I succeeded. Not impressively, but I succeeded. It turns out that the faculty for reading is like any other muscle: if you neglect it, it atrophies, and must be built back up again through intelligently applied effort. It also turns out that if you lack a single goddamn place in your apartment which is truly comfortable to read, you don't do it. So I bought myself a comfortable chair with matching Ottoman, and got down to business.

I am still two books short of what I need to consider 2022 a reading success, but I have thirteen days left in the year, and I don't anticipate any difficulty in finishing two or even three before the ball drops. It is therefore premature for me to make the following list, but I'm going to do it anyway. The following is what I've read so far.


Passchendaele and The Somme: A Diary of 1917 by Hugh Quigley -- This is one of the most bizarre books I've ever read, and got me off on the wrong foot. Quigley's memoir of his WWI experiences is written in a vague, florid, dreamlike style which was more poetry than prose. It quite literally was like trying to write down the events of a wild, nonsensical dream. Here and there he has moments of lucidity but by and large the book was an incomprehnsible if pretty mess, rather akin to talking to a poet on acid.

The Life and Death of Lenin by Robert Payne: Payne, despite his flaws, is one of my favorite historians and while quite bloated, his bio of Lenin is highly readable and atmospheric. He depicts a man who wanted to burn down the system and didn't have the faintest idea what he wanted to replace it with.

Mine Were of Trouble by Peter Kemp: Having read Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" many times, my perspective on the Spanish Civil War came from a hard left-wing angle. Kemp, like Orwell, was an Englishman who fought in that war, but for the Fascists rather than the government. His side of the story, and his motives, made for a fascinating read and helped balance the scale.

The Life and Death of Trotsky by Robert Payne: Payne's bio of the infamous Trotsky, Lenin's chief co-conspirator and the creator of the Red Army, is another win for him, though like "Lenin" it is somewhat bloated. Payne depicts a brilliant scholar and home-made soldier who lost a power struggle with Stalin and was effaced from history so thoroughly that Orwell fashioned the character of Goldstein in "1984" after him. An interesting and tragic tale.

Now and Then by Joseph Heller: This book bored me to almost literal tears. Heller wrote "Catch-22" so I figured a memoir about growing up Jewish in Coney Island in the 1920s - 1930s would be fun and interesting. It wasn't. Men who boast about how unsentimental they are should not write memoirs about happy childhoods. It just doesn't make any sense. Jesus, was this a bore. I had to force myself to finish it.

Johnny Carson by Henry Bushkin: I enjoyed this breezy tell-all about the last real King of Late Night TV by his former lawyer, friend and allaround fixer. Bushkin paints a fascinating if not terribly flattering picture of Carson as the hard-working product of an absolutely loveless mother: an immense talent but a psychological mess, both Jekkyl and Hyde, often simultaneously. It's also a tale of Bushkin's own seduction by fame, money and reflected glamour.

Fire and Blood by Ernst Jünger: This short book is essentially a "director's cut" of the final chapters of his seminal combat memoir, "In The Storm of Steel." It recounts the day before, and the day of the enormous 1918 attack the German Army mounted against the Allies, as witnessed by Jünger himself. It is a fascinating, fast-paced, pitiless depiction of war by a war hero who drew a very different moral from his experiences than, say, Klaus Maria Remarque ("All Quiet on the Western Front.")

War as an Inner Experience by Ernst Jünger: The notorious Jünger, sometimes referred to as "The Intellectual Godfather of Fascism," writes a fascinating little book here, one of the five he penned about his WWI experiences: it's broken up into a series of chapters devoted to one aspect of war each, (waiting, fear, battle, etc.), as the author sees it. This quick spiritual-psychological study of the German combat soldier of 1914 - 1918 is worth reading alone just for the horrible passage about fighting in a burning house full of corpses in the middle of the night, only for someone to accidentally trigger a player-piano. You can't forget imagery like that.

The Border Wolves by Damion Hunter a.k.a. Amanda Cockrell: This book probably holds the record as the Most Delayed Sequel in Literary History. "The Centurions" was a 1980s trilogy of novels about a sprawling military family in ancient Rome. The third book ended with everything unresolved, and fans like my father and me waited in vain for more.Hunter/Cockrell finally self-pubbed the fourth and final installment in 2022, after a pause of almost forty years...and it was more or less worth the wait. Although she really should have written at least one more novel to round out the saga -- it feels disjointed and incomplete at times -- I found it an enjoyable and largely satisfying end to a wrongly forgotten, very entertaining historical romance.

American Nightingale by Bob Welch: This is a very readable and informative biography of Frances Slanger, a U.S. Army nurse who was killed in action while serving in Europe in WW2. The thoughtful and compassionate Slanger, a Jewess originally born in Poland, had a special sense of mission and her death sparked an outpouring of national grief. She was truly the "Ellis Island immigrant who made good" in the face of cultural prejudices from her own family (Jewish women shouldn't be nurses) and society at large (women shouldn't be in uniform, much less serving overseas). It was also fascinating to see how combat nurses were trained and the hardships they had to endure, and did endure, uncomplainingly, much to the admiration of their patients and soldiers generally.

A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass: Probably no former slave contributed more to the destruction of slavery than Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave whose literacy proved his greatest weapon. Douglass lays bare the horrors of antebellum slavery, but it is his description of of the mental and spiritual anguish of being mere property, rather than the physical torment which came with it, which struck me most. Degredation, and not the whip, was what Douglass came to hate the most. Douglass's story is not a quest for freedom per se as much as a quest for dignity, the dignity of choice without which life is meaningless. (His writing, incidentally, is quite easy on the eye despite the heavy, formal, flowery style of the 19th century: contrast it with the plodding, turgid "forward" written by a famous abolitionist).

Crosses in the Wind by Joseph Shomon: This is a short, informative book about the Graves Registration service of the U.S. Army during WW2, told by the C.O. of one of its most prolific companies: his tiny outfit alone buried 21,000 American soldiers killed in action in Europe between 1944 - 1945, sometimes coming under heavy fire themselves to do it. While his historical background is quite badly written and sloppy, when Shomon writes about his own experiences the book is quite good, informative, and fast paced. He pulls a lot of punches to spare his audience, but nevertheless gives a fairly detailed picture of what life was like for men whose business was, even more than combat soldiers, quite literally death.

As I said above, I have a few more books to go this year, but I will at least complete the Goodreads Challenge for the first time since 2016, which will come to me more as a relief than a victory. Getting out of the habit of reading was a huge lapse on my part, an egregious failure of self-care, and I look forward very much to wearing out my reading chair in 2023 -- that is, if my cat doesn't destroy it first.

CONSISTENCY AND CONTRADICTION

“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” — Mark Twain

Back in 2016, just a few months after I started this blog, I was in Vancouver, B.C., on a video game gig. In case you don't know, a good part of how I made my wages when I lived in La La Land was by working in the VG industry, and if memory serves, we flew up to Canada to work three days on "Gears of War III." Well, one morning, as we ate breakfast before going to the studio, I remarked to my boss that I had begun blogging to support the release of my debut novel, CAGE LIFE.

"How often do you blog?" He asked.

"Whenever the spirit moves me," I replied. "I don't really have a schedule."

With a look of faint contempt, mingled with pity, he shook his head like a disappointed schoolmaster. "Do it religiously. Once a week, every week. And drop the blog on the same day, preferably at the same time. The only way to get a following is to be consistent with your content creation."

Now, God knows I tend to bristle at anything I do being dismissed as mere "content," but even I must confess that blogs, however brilliantly or cleverly or passionately they may be written, usually fall well short of art, and mine, being almost always written off the cuff and subjected to very little editing, probably fall even shorter of that mark than most. Unlike the weekly columns my dad wrote for The Chicago Sun-Times back in the 70s and 80s, they are mere outpourings of thought, the one similarity being the occasional effort I have made to whip them into some kind of coherent, structural shape. I certainly don't get paid to write them. Indeed, Goodreads long-ago removed the meter which showed how many views these missives get, so I have absolutely no way of knowing how many people are still reading them, or indeed, if anyone is reading them at all. This, however, is not the reason I have struggled with the consistency that my would-be mentor encouraged me to display six years ago. The fact is, somewhat ironically and paradoxically, that I am a writer. And being a writer, I am also a Bohemian. A creative type. A free spirit. In other words, I'm undisciplined, lazy, and generally incapable of sustained effort over long periods of time. I hate obligations and deadlines, and even the good ones tend to fill me with anxiety and dread. At the same time, I'm riddled with guilt over my frequent failure to bring in my personal projects over the finish line at the appointed moment. The trouble with being one's own boss is that one usually has Homer Simpson as an employee.

I suppose I do have one good reason for my inconsistency amid a host of lame excuses. Because I am a Bohemian, I literally cannot work 9 - 5 hours on a creative project for many months before I begin to experience severe burnout and mental exhaustion. To quote Captain Kirk, "genius doesn't work on an assembly-line basis: you cannot simply say, 'Today I will be brilliant.'" It is often necessary for a writer -- for any artist -- to take a day, a week, even a month or a whole season, off a project, and let the creative well replenish itself. Otherwise the final product will resemble a loaf of bread left in the oven a few hours too long. Such is what I tell myself, anyway, when I miss a deadline.

In the last two months, however, I have finally managed to release a blog every Monday night. It is my earnest hope that I will continue to do this all throughout the coming year, even if it is just a few lines of well-meaning nonsense. The reason for this is simple. However Bohemian a man may be, he also requires discipline, which finds definite expression in the act of consistency. Most people think of themselves as undiciplined and inconsistent, but if they held their lives up to scrutiny they would see many small examples of these things in their daily activities. Everything from brushing one's teeth in the morning to taking the dog for a walk to going to the gym or yoga or dance class is an act of discipline. It is only because some of these acts are so deeply ingrained as to require no thought at all, and others pleasurable to a degree, that we do not see them as such. Disciplining yourself to consistency may be as much an act of self-hypnosis as anything else, a sort of Huck Finn confidence scam, except that you end up painting your own fence, and enjoying it.

When I was a boy, I was unable to maintain enthusiasm for anything for any length of time, including exercise. All my natural athletic talents atrophied because I was not able to slay the dragon of indiscipline until my mid-late 20s, by which the boat had sailed. From a creative standpoint, until I was probably in my early-mid 30s, my life was a litter of half-finished projects: I abandoned everything short of the finish line. After graduate school I was able to come to terms with this failing, and since then have generally gotten the better of it when it mattered. But I have also discovered that this is one dragon which will not stay dead. Any weakness on my part and he roars back to life, incinerating my sense of responsibility with his fiery breath.

In everyday life, I do not find consistency to be terribly difficult. I don't find it terribly easy, either, but I've grown comfortable with being uncomfortable in that regard. It's simply part of life, something necessary. When I finish this, I'm going to the gym. I won't really enjoy it, and I'd rather be doing a hell of a lot of other things, but I'll do it anyway. I'll be physically present but mentally absent, get the work in, and go home. Writing, however, is a different animal. One cannot write anything worth reading without totally focusing on the object at hand. And if one wants an audience of any size, then one must also be consistent enough in one's production to attract and maintain that audience. The best television shows in the world would have bombed flat if viewers had tuned in at the appointed time each week not knowing if they were getting a new episode or a test pattern.

This, then, is the contradiction of the writer's life. He's a lazy, shiftless, aimless bum, generally content to sit around in his wife-beater and sweats, eating pretzels and drinking beer and watching "Murder, She Wrote," rather than working on that goddamned novel; but he is also haunted by his own laziness, his own lack of production. Those half-finished stories gnaw at him and goad his conscience. He cannot truly enjoy his idleness when he knows he could be using the time productively.

All of this is a rambling, roundabout way of saying that in 2023 it is my intention to become much more consistent with writing both here and in the arena of fiction. I have fallen into some lazy habits of late, hitting the keys only when the spirit moves me, and overlooked the role this blog could play in my reclamation. By posting here consistently, week in and week out, every Monday night for the fifty-two weeks of the coming year, I hope to habituate myself once again to hitting deadlines -- both the ones I set for myself and the ones others set for me. Fifty-two blogs in 365 days is a lot of blogs, but hey, this is a blog about everything, and there is a hell of a lot of everything out there. Let's get after it.

BILLIONAIRE WORSHIP: WELCOME YEAR ZERO

What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness. What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome. What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak. The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it. -- Frederich Nietzsche, "Antichrist"

What do Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg have in common?

I wouldn't give you a nickel for the lot of them.

Oh, yeah, and they're billionaires. So chances are they probably don't care about my opinion. Or my nickel. But still, they can't have it.

Now, I must admit they are not just any billionaires. They're among the top 20 billionaires in the world, the poorest of them having $40,000,000,000 to his name, the richest $200,000,000,000. I write out all of these zeroes because only by doing so is it possible to get even a glimmer of understanding in regards to how rich they really are. At that level of wealth, there is nothing materially they cannot buy, no expense they cannot pay, and nothing -- including spaceflight -- they cannot finance. Someone once defined enlightenment -- Nirvana -- as ceasing to exist in the material plane, and in a very real sense these men and their ilk have done just that. They have shed every orindary human concern except, I suppose, the fear of death. No concern which darkens the brow of ordinary mortals such as you or I troubles them. They have ascended to a sort of Olympus, a rarified place where one has so much money that money itself becomes meaningless, and the only things worth having are those things money cannot buy. Or at least cannot buy as easily.

History shows us that men who have achieved, for all intents and purposes, unlimited wealth, are not satiated by its possession. Having scaled the Olympus, they seek new worlds to conquer. In the Britain of 200 years ago, the nouveau riche industrialist class found the one thing they could not purchase was respectability, so they made a pact with the decaying and bankrupt aristocracy of England: let us marry into your families so we can lay claim to your titles, and we will replenish your coffers with our gold.
In the America of today, men who have amassed titanic fortunes do not ease back and live lives of hedonistic luxury: they quest for political power and social influence. Greed has not led them to satsifaction, it has led them to more greed.

Why is this important? Because it seems to me that in the last few years a curious cultural shift has taken place around the world. Men of extreme wealth are now becoming pop culture heroes with passionately devoted fans, sometimes numbering in the tens of millions. Steve Jobs was the first billionaire that I can recall truly achieving this status: not just fame, but popularity, especially with the youth. The fact that he was in many ways a ruthless and unscrupulous man, whose image of kindliness and benificience was as crafted as a department store showroom, was simply ignored by his adoring fans. Mark Zuckerberg also enjoyed enormous popularity before he unmasked himself as a cretin, and Jeff Bezos, too, before his tendency to ape the characteristics of Bond villains became too gross to ignore. Donald Trump, who falsely claims to be a billionaire but does so with such relentless, shameless gusto it is accepted as a fact even by those who know it is a lie, is often held up as a model of business success by his supporters, who are somehow able to dismiss civil fraud convictions and bankruptcies as unimportant flyspecks on a shining window of success. And indeed, the fact that I am able to rattle off the names of a half-dozen billionaires so easily despite claiming not to care about them, says a lot about how the attainment of colossal wealth has replaced success in politics, sports, or the entertainment industry as the goldest coin of the realm just in the last decade or two. I know their names even though I don't particularly want to, and that, my friends, is real fame.

The rise of the billionaire class -- there are at present over 3,000 of these people on the planet -- is not a cause for concern. It is a cause for horror, because it points to a much deeper problem which underlays and to some extent all of our other problems. The decline of religious feeling.

Now, I myself am not religious. Spiritual, yes, but not religious. I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Hindu; I consider Buddhism a philosophy and not a religion, and though I have Jews in my family tree, I am not Jewish. But I recognize the power of religion in the field of moral training. Indeed, the Church of England was, for several hundred years or more, openly recognized in Britain as the agency responsible for teaching young men a strict moral code "while all but forgetting the name of Jesus." The social engineers of the British Empire understood that a strict moral sense -- however flawed it might be when examined objectively in retrospect -- was imperative if the Empire was to survive. The gradual collapse of this code in the face of relentless attacks by the left-wing intelligencia of Britain played a huge and seldom understood role in the death of the Empire.

In the United States, it was long taken for granted that America was a "Christian nation"; later, this was modified to "Judeo-Christian," but the principle was the same. This viewpoint alienated atheists and people from non Judeo-Christian religous backgrounds, but it served the purpose of casting a single net over the entire country, a net of shared values. Prior to the rise of totalitarianism on the one hand, and unfettered capitalism on the other, it also provided a moral underpinning to ordinary conduct. Neither power for its own sake nor wealth for the sake of wealth was encouraged in the realm of Christian thought. Since the end of the Second World War, however, Christianity has been markedly on the downgrade in the States, and Judaism in its American expression is now much less of a religion than it is an ethnic identity laden with traditions that look religious in character but feel secular in practice. Indeed, the Western world is secularizing rapidly, and with that secularization comes a new set of problems which Karl Marx once fretted over when laying down the tenents of communism. Communism, he believed, answered every question except, possibly, the question of the soul. Not that Marx believed in the soul per se; but he heard "the sigh of the soul in a soulless world." That is to say, the need to believe in something more than cold political and economic doctrines. And it is not an exaggeration to say that the ferocious moral decomposition which accompanied the rise of Communism was in no small part created by its failure to address the need for humans to believe in the divine, and to see a divine spark in themselves. Without some type of spirituality, the human being is simply meat, and meat gets cooked. Just ask Stalin. He tried to replace the Father, Son and Holy Ghost with Marx, Lenin and himself, and ended up wallowing in oceans of blood for his trouble. Those who carp endlessly about witch hunts, inquisitions, fatwahs, jihads and crusades when they denounce organized religions might wish to dwell on the fact that atheistic and quasi-atheistic ideologies like Communism and Nazism have killed far more people than Christianity or Islam. This is not a defense of religious persecution or theocracy: they are indefensible. But what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Organized religion can be extraordinarily dangerous, but so can organized secularism, with its tenents of moral relativism and its replacement of clear-cut ideas of right and wrong with mere psychology, in which no one is to blame for anything.

It's axiomatic that when a great power dies, be it an individual, an organization, a nation or a religious faith, a vacuum is created, and nature abhors a vacuum. While researching a completed but as yet unreleased novel of mine, I came upon this quote whose author I unfortunately cannot remember. I incorporated it into the story with modifications, but here it is in its original form:

"The longing in our hearts to worship, to devote ourselves to something, is a universal longing.
The absence of God has created a vacuum, and those who do not worship God will worship something else."

Which brings us back to billionaires.

Mr. Orwell, never short of observations, once acidly remarked on the tendency of Americans to admire success for its own sake, especially if that success was achieved in a bold, breathless, cruel sort of way. He found our fetishization of robber-barons and gangsters inexplicable except viewed through the lens of Fascism, which he described simply as "the worship of power." No better proof of this can be found in the somewhat sanitized Hollywood version of George S. Patton's famous, and very profane, speech to his troops, in which he stated:

"When you were kids . .you all admired the champion marble shooter. . .the fastest runner, big-league ball players, the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner.. . .and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed...The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans."

In America, as in other places which have adopted the American outlook, the necessity for arguments camoflaging base motives have dissolved over time. Our forefathers, the British, were not content, as Hitler was, to conquer the world simply for the sake of conquest and exploitation: they needed to believe the British Empire was a force for good in the world. And when they no longer believed this, when the sham could no longer be maintained, they had to let it die. They let it die reluctantly, but they let it die, and have struggled ever since to reconcile themselves with the people they once enslaved. Americans, on the other hand, have shrugged off the idea of moral authority and replaced it with the worship of success and power, which in America is synonymous with extreme wealth. We have abandoned the idea that we will win because we are right and embraced the idea that we are right because we win. The logic is chillingly, childishly simple: in a purely material world, the billionaire takes the place not only of the selfless hero, but of the saint; indeed, of God himself, because "he has more money than God." Except that no man, no matter how extraordinary, is a god, and when men assume or are burdened with the godly mantle, what we usually get looks more like Hitler than Jesus. The very existence of democracy, of republics, is founded on this stark fact. And yet the grotesque cult of billionaires continues to find new adherents, even as individual members of the pantheon -- Zuckerberg, Bezos, and soon perhaps, Musk -- are discountenanced by their amorality and blind greed.

I do not know what human beings ought to worship in the absence of the traditional God they are abandoning, but I do know that the one true blasphemy remaining in anyone's faith is to seek divinity within the billionaire class, or within any individual billionaire regardless of his politics or percieved "genius." In the end, the fetishization and deification of men like Musk and Bezos really is nothing more than a conscious acceptance of a counterfeit Christ, a dime-store Buddha, a graven-image Muhammad, with the worshipper seeing in these flabby little demigods their own deepest desires for wealth, fame and power independent of any code, any morality or convinction. Like Nietzsche's "Antichrist," which I quoted at the beginning of this essay and which deeply inspired Hitler, it is a faux religion which cannot help but lead to atrocity and disaster.

The band Ghost once wrote a song called "Year Zero," which mockingly comments on the first year of the reign of Satan following the fall of Christianity. The last stanza goes as follows:

He will tremble the nations
Kingdoms to fall one by one
Victim to fall for temptations
A daughter to fall for a son
The ancient serpent-deceiver
The masses standing in awe
He will ascend to the heavens
Above the stars of God

The song ends: "Hail Satan! Welcome, Year Zero."

I don't know if we've arrived at Year Zero just yet, but I'm beginning to sweat flipping calendar pages.

Ever Since I Left

Stick around, nostalgia won't let you down. -- Jimmy Eat World

Ever since I left California, I've been wondering when I would miss it.

I lived there just short of thirteen years. A quarter of my life. And those thirteen years were hardly wasted time. I was busy. In retrospect many years I was everlastingly working, sometimes seven days a week -- sometimes nearly 100 hours a week, independent of the time I spent writing. And yet even when I was unemployed, broke, and frustrated almost out of my mind, I was busy. There was always something to do that didn't cost much if any money. I could hike any number of mountain ranges and parks, from the Hollywood Reservoir to Pico Canyon to Wildwood Canyon to Cahuenga Peak. I could (though I did so only rarely) go to the beach in Santa Monica or Malibu. I could zip down to Hollywood and catch an old movie at the Egyptian, or go just a little further and swim beneath the palms of Park La Brea. From there I could hit the Farmer's Market and do some writing over a cup of coffee, occasionally spying a celebrity walking obliviously through the crowd. And once upon a time, I could get some excellent beer and a wicked marguerita pizza at Callendar's on Wilshire Boulevard, served to me by local legend Jimmy the Bartender. There were also, in Burbank, any number of comic book stores, curio shops, and secondhand clothing outlets where one could browse without buying anything: I was passionately in love with Book & Movie World on San Fernando Boulevard, and had a great fondness for Dark Delicacies on Magnolia. Los Angeles is nothing if not bursting with things to do.

There is, too, a mystique about Southern California and L.A. in particular. It's massive, noisy, rambling, dirty, gorgeous and crammed with history. The archieture, from Art Deco to Spanish Colonial, tells many a story and all of them fascinating -- I was always particularly fascinated by the homes in Beverlywood Canyon, where I ran into Kevin Costner and Christopher Nolan at different times, and by those south of my old place in Mid-City West near the Beverly Center, once you crossed 3rd Street. In the late afternoons, a beautiful whitish haze, like the filters you used to see in Tony Scott films, settled over everything, most especially the ever-present palm trees. Sunsets were drawn-out affairs, especially on -- go figure this -- Sunset Boulevard, which is precisely as beautiful, and as sleazy, as you'd expect it to be, depending where you end up on it. If you are an afficianado of movie or television history, you will soon begin to recognize one landmark after another no matter where you go. It's a curious thing indeed to stand on a spot once occupied by Guy Pierce, or William Shatner, or Sarah Michelle Gellar or Russel Crow, or for that matter, Humphrey Bogart or Marilyn Monroe. Many is the time I have finished watching some old TV show from the 80s, only to find myself, purely by accident, at the exact location at which it was shot. It's a surreal experience, at once amusing and a little frightening somehow -- frightening because places have no memory, and don't care who stood where or did what.

When I think of my time there, all those years hustling for work, and either not getting it and fretting myself into madness over that fact, or getting way too much of it and falling asleep at the wheel on my way home from work, I am struck by the sheer weight of the memories, and their ferocious intensity. L.A. is a very tactile city in every respect. The sky is a deeper blue, the air has a taste like burned paper, the light seems to be almost a living thing, and the heat can break your spirit at times, as can the terrible, terrible dryness of late summer, when the asphalt shimmers and the tar bubbles and you long for rain with all your might. Your shoes crackle over broken glass, and my cousin Scott once reflected, as we walked through Hollywood, how you never truly appreciate just how much it stinks of human and canine piss until you travel about it on foot. In every way, good and bad, L.A. reminds you that you are inside of it, part of it, one cell in a very large, obnoxious body.

I could go on endlessly about things of this nature -- midnight swims beneath the stars in February, chance encounters with famous folks in nightclubs, sixteen hour days spent on set, on location, or in windowless editing bays in Mid City, Hollywood, or Pasadena, the bull sessions on balconies overlooking the Sunset Strip at three in the morning when we were all exhausted and sharing our fears...but that would not really be getting at the core of things. Most of everyday life in L.A. is as prosaic as anywhere else. Groceries need to be bought, and bills need to be paid. Laundry needs to be folded and dishes washed. The cat has to be gathered up from his sleeping place beneath the orange tree before you go to the gym, and dinner has to be cooked before you can relax afterwards. It would be the same in Topeka or Eagle Rock or Jacksonville -- or for that matter, York, Pennsylvania. What sets L.A. apart in a way that has so far prevented my inborn nostalgia from kicking in, is the accursed traffic.

Everyone has heard of how bad the traffic is in Los Angeles, but like battle or childbirth, it must actually be experienced to be understood. Sometimes I think the acute depression I suffered for the last three years I lived there was no caused by exposure to the ghastly chemicals used in the special effects industry, or the cruel and capricious bosses (many of whom are practicing sociopaths), or the unfairness of the pay vs. the brutality of the work, or the way the whole industry thrives on stealing credit from those who actually deserve it -- no, it was the fucking traffic. Words are an insufficient medium to describe how much I hated crawling through no-end-in-sight jams on the 101 or 5 freeways, or worse yet, the impenetrable vehicular prison created by events at the Hollywood Bowl. Rage does not describe the feeling I had every day when it took me 3 hours to drive from Mid-City West to Malibu, a journey which ought to take about 45 minutes. I got so sick of this commute I ended up abandoning the accursed 10 freeway for a massive detour on the 101 that took me through the mountains to the Pacific Coast Highway, literally doubling the distance of my commute to 60 miles one way, but at least allowing me to move the entire time. Indeed, sometimes when I think back to my years in La La Land, my main memory is of me fulminating behind the wheel of my car because it was three in the morning and somehow I was still stuck in traffic, far from home, with no prospect of escape.

Since moving back East, I have encountered new challenges to temper, mood and mental health, but none so consistently daunting and rage-inducing as Los Angeles traffic. Indeed, when I made my as yet only return visit out there last Christmas, I immediately found myself stuck in a jam on the 5 south, which I suppose was the city's way of welcoming me "home."

While living there, I noticed that the happiest and most successful people I knew had all made their peace with L.A.'s traffic. They considered it the price of doing business and were quite philosophical about it. This is a state of mind I could never consistently achieve. I went so far as to buy books on Buddhism to help me cope with my hatred, and they did help, but they did not cure my condition. I suffer from depression. My depression manifests not as sadness but as anger. Being stuck in traffic triggers my depression and therefore, my angry state, and if I have a visual image of myself, a sort of 3rd person view of myself in the last few years I lived there, it is of a sweat-drenched, middle-aged man in a shitty old Honda Accord, raging incoherently because the three-mile trip home from the gym is taking him half an hour, and all the peace he discovered at the treadmill and heavy bag has been destroyed by frustration.

I am a nostalgic person by nature. When I was in junior high school, I was sent into fits of sentimental longing by Eddie Money's song "I Wanna Go Back," even though the experiences he was singing about belonged to my future and not my past. As an ex-girlfriend once pointed out, I also tend to romanticize things, even things in my recent past that I disliked when I was experiencing them. I don't think this is a very serious character fault, but the fact that I can regard the immensity of my experience in California so calmly, so unemotionally, says a lot to me about just how little I enjoyed being angry so often. Some people are rage-a-holics, but I have always disliked being angry, even though (and perhaps because) that emotion came over me so often. Outbursts of anger always make me feel foolish afterward, and often exhausted, discouraged and ashamed in the bargain. So I suppose anger, exhaustion, discouragement and shame overlay every memory I have of Los Angeles, acting as a kind of barrier to sentiment. I remember everything: I romanticize nothing.

How long this will last is anybody's guess. If my ex- was right, I will eventually begin to forget the effect all that wasted time and frustration had upon my psyche, and begin longing for midnight swims in the moonlight beneath the palms, spur of the moment trips to the Egyptian to catch a Friday night flick, Martinis at Maestro's with a good friend or a beautiful acquaintance -- all the things it is actually legitimate to sentimentalize about my former home. Perhaps at that point I will contemplate a return. If my life has proven anything to me, it is that I can do anything I actually set my mind to doing, provided I mull over the idea long enough, and thus wear away the edges of my fears. For now, however, the thought of crawling down Ventura Boulevard at two miles an hour, in the general direction of a shabby one bedroom apartment for which I am paying $2,000 amonth, makes my blood run as cold as the Pennsylvania winter which is now fast approaching.

WORDS MATTER: USE 'EM WISELY

When I was in college, I noted on my bill a rather hefty yearly charge called a "student activities fee." Inquiring as to just what this fee was actually for, I was told it created the slush fund used to hire entertainment acts for the college -- bands, comedians, speakers, and so on. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me until I realized that almost every band, comedian, etc. who came to the school charged admission at the door -- sometimes a very substantial admission. It seemed to me that if we were each paying $200 a year in student activity fees, the slush fund must rake in $800,000 annually. What's more, if the fee were charged each semester, as it may very well have been (I don't recall), the slush fund would actually take in $1.6 million every school year.

Now, I know that my school wasn't bringing in the kind of talent, or even booking the sheer number of events, that would cost 1.6 million bucks -- or 800K bucks, for that matter. A lot of the entertainers who came to my alma mater were of the sort who, frankly, would probably work for a sandwich and a beer. And when you factor in that every legitimate act also required a ticket paid for at the door, I began to realize that the "student activities fee" was simply a method of increasing our tuition under false pretenses. If the school had said, "We're upping tuition by $400/year" people would have been angry; by keeping tuition the same, but tacking on this fee for services not really rendered, they performed one of the oldest dodges in history: using pompous or comforting-sounding words to confuse people as to their real aim.

Politicians, con men, advertising agencies, and so forth all operate on the same principle, to wit: bury them in bullshit.

My father used to joke about how the titles of communist countries were themselves indications that a vast fraud was being perpetrated. East Germany's official title was “the German Democratic Republic,” but East Germany was neither democratic nor a republic, and its population of Germans was so small it was very nearly outnumbered by the millions of Soviet soldiers stationed on its soil. The father of all communist countries was, of course, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), but a “soviet” is an elected council of officials (fraud: the elections were rigged), “union” implies a voluntary coming-together of states (fraud: they were held together by force), communism is not socialism (they are related but not identical ideas) and a “republic” invests power in elected representatives (fraud: you can't have a republic with rigged elections). The same held true for all communist lands from Nicaragua to China. Whatever “democratic and republican” titles they slathered upon themselves, always there remained the same yawning abyss between the warmly humane title and the coldly inhuman reality of slave camps, barbed wire, psychiatric prisons and mass graves.

In life, one generally finds that fraud is best carried off when intent is masked. Con men and thieves operate under false pretenses, and so do governments. The thugs who come for you at three in the morning in dictatorships almost always couch their official names in beneficent-sounding terms, using words like “security,” “protection,” or “vigilance” in their title. Often they fall back on the stolid but trusty title of “police,” with whom they have absolutely nothing in common but the penchant for carrying handcuffs. Here in America, where there is still a need for at least lip-service to democratic traditions, we call the massive agency, whose principal task is to circumvent the Constitution, by the cozy-sounding sobriquet of “The Department of Homeland Security,” and dub that organization whose main job is to spy on American citizens with a thoroughness the East German Secret Police could only dream about, the “National Security Agency.”

(Likewise, two laws which many experts bemoaned as assaults on American liberty were were dubbed the “Patriot Act” and the “National Defense Authorization Act.")

Yet even in the harshest totalitarian societies, ones which do not even pretend to be in power for the public good, there is a rigid insistence on euphemisms, some of them quite grotesque, to hide the grisly truth of what the regime is doing. In Cambodia, during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, the men involved in mass exterminations that murdered one-third of the country's entire population carried the official title of “Keepers of the Peace.” In Nazi Germany, those arrested by the Gestapo were officially in “protective custody,” while those gassed or shot were subjected to "resettlement" and “special treatment.” This psychology extends even to outright criminal organizations, which have absolutely no claim whatever to legitimacy: the Mafia of Sicily, which traffics in everything from heroin to child pornography to sex slaves, used to refer to itself as “the Society of the Men of Honor.” Presumably it is a question of moral legitimacy: “the Society of Heroin Pushers, Child Pornographers and Sexual Slave Traders” just doesn't have the same ring.

As George Orwell once noted, clarity is the enemy of the lie, just as vagueness is the enemy of truth. Very few people who have evil intent will admit it, and very few institutions who perpetrate evil will give themselves a title which reflects that fact. To do so would not only sap them psychologically – not many people take long-term pleasure in being The Bad Guy – but make it easy for those they wish to rob, oppress and exploit to grasp their true motives and unify against them. If the Galactic Empire of Star Wars were around today, they would, in all likelihood, not refer to their planet-destroying mega-weapon as The Death Star, but rather “The Peacekeeper.”

When one listens to people who are lying or being evasive, which has occurred to me more than most human beings, I expect, having served in both law enforcement and Hollywood, the most outstanding characteristic of their speech is the refusal to speak simply, plainly and directly. Liars are much more likely to spin out a long-winded, discursive answer to a question than to lie more directly with a terse "yes" or "no." When one is operating from a dubious motive, it is not enough for people to evade or dissemble: there seems to be a psychological compulsion to place between liar and lied-to a kind of prism, which takes the light of falsehood and refracts it into something lively, colorful, almost beautiful. The fact that the Ministry of Love in Orwell's 1984 is a simply a gigantic torture chamber is not a subtle piece of writing, but it is entirely apropos for the story.

But you have observed, no doubt, that I wrote "falsehood" there instead of "lie." Have you ever noticed that when one is accused of something in criminal or civil court, their lawyer inevitably describes said charge as "full of falsehoods" instead of simply calling it "a pack of lies?" The urge, especially in formal or semi-formal settings, to be as indirect as possible, to use vague, inflated, pretentious and misleading language, seems to have risen to the level of a reflex, rather like the one that makes your knee jerk when the doctor taps you with the hammer. To call a dirty, disgusting little lie a "falsehood" or a "canard" or a "fabrication" is taken for granted, despite the fact that by doing so, one actually lends credence and power to the accusation, and indeed, one manages to sound guilty as hell in the doing. It's as if we cannot help ourselves but to lacquer the truth, even when it runs contrary to our own interests.

Some might be tempted to dismiss all of this as the mere carping of a writer who is frustrated by the inexactitude or laziness of people with language, but I assure you my issue runs much, much deeper. The truth is a precious thing. It is often a painful thing, but it is also precious, and it must be protected and if necessary, fought for. We live in an age of "alternative truths" and "choose your own reality" thinking. It is perfectly acceptable in many quarters to simply reject any objective fact which runs contrary to one's religious or political worldview. Yet the urge, the need, to justify the lies fitted in place of the missing truths still remains. A person advocating censorship, for example, will never admit they are a censor: through complex and often compelling rhetoric they will try to convince you that they are, in fact, a guardian of truth and virtue. On social media and in countless news threads on every topic imaginable, I have witnessed many truly brilliant and charismatic defenses of things which, if they were described in plain language, would be laughed or cursed off the stage. I have heard passionate arguments against freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, basic bodily freedoms (such as the right to refuse sexual advances) and even freedom of emotion. But these arguments, always and without exception, are couched in such a way that the liar's actual intention or action is disguised or turned upside-down, the motive buried beneath bullshit. And it is not merely the desire to deceive or appear virtuous which drives this behavior: the book-burner is afraid of being called a censor, because he or she knows that labels, by which I mean the words that make up labels, have enormous power. If they did not believe this, they would not want to burn the book.

In a few days it will mark nine months since Putin announced the "special military operation" to "denazify" Ukraine. In Russia, it remains a serious crime to refer to the "special military operation" as a war, despite the fact that 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, wounded or captured in that time, the fighting is actually increasing in ferocity, and there is no end in sight, only further escalation. But hey, don't call it a war, or ask why you're looking for Nazis in a country with a Jewish president. This might make the people angry.

Likewise, the anti-regime protests in Iran, which reflect deep-seated anger and frustration with the corrupt and repressive religious theocracy, are dismissed by those mullahs as being the product of "foreign agents" from America and Israel. Damn, are the CIA and the Mossad getting their money's worth, or what? A handful of "agents" have managed to ignite a massive, sustained protest movement which is now 70 days old. Pity those "agents" don't have the same track record where they actually exist! In any event, so long as the mullahs pretend that "Zionists and Crusaders" are the ones stirring the pot, they don't have to address the actual source of their people's anger.

My point here is that in neither case do the actors admit what they are doing or why they are doing it, for the simple reason that they can't. For Putin or Khameni to speak baldly about their real motives would also destroy their claims to legitimacy, and contrary to what you might think, the more absolute the power a leader possesses, the greater his actual need to claim legitimacy. Absolutism is a demonstratably invalid mode of government. It has been for at least 100 and possibly 200 years. In the absence of divine right, no human can claim absolute power legitimately, and therefore a whole pack of lies must be wrangled together to obfuscate and otherwise cover up the fact that a dictator is, in fact, a dictator. The time has not yet come in human affairs when even the most rapacious, bloodthirsty tyrant is ready to declare himself so and beat his breast while shouting that he wants power for its own sake.

As a writer, I have a great love and respect for words, as well as a healthy understanding of their influence. Because of this, however, I am also aware -- painfully aware -- that, as INXS once sang, "words are weapons, sharper than knives." At the core of nearly every evil action or intent is a stark and simple truth, and this truth is always surrounded by a comforting fabric of lies. The ability of humans to realize when they are being lied to, when words are being used to blind them to events and motives, to justify the unjustifiable and rationalize the evil or the stupid, is perhaps the most valuable skill one can possess in modern civilization. It is a kind of talisman, a cross which we can hold up to drive away the lying vampires that surround us, hungering for our blood. We should be relentless in our insistence on plain, clearly-worded, easily understandable speech from our government and our business leaders, and raise a royal ruckus when we don't get it. And that, folks, is no falsehood.

AS I PLEASE X

Before I resume blogs which devote themselves to a single question -- such as rating the HALLOWEEN films in order, discussing the abject failure of the promised Red Wave, ranting about how much I hate wokeism, or discussing mental health in an insane world -- the time has come once more for me to empty my head of accumulated thoughts. I'm a fellow who thinks constantly, more constantly than he would wish, and while many of my thoughts may be nonsense and objectively silly or stupid, once in awhile I come up with something worth mentioning. Or at least something I think is worth mentioning. Hence "As I Please."

* I just spent a half an hour reading at-the-time criticisms made of the music of Beethoven, Brahms, Debussey, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky and Wagner. Words like unbearable, smug, evil, vague, meaningless, ponderous, dull, and hideous were used. Among the things their music was likened to were: cow shit, bombs falling on music factories, a musical score smeared while the ink was still wet, and my own personal favorite, the observation that "there can be music that stinks to the ear." Something to remember when the critics don't like your work.

* I miss Instant Messaging. There was something special, and something uniquely exciting in a consciously child-like, silly way, about hearing the little musical charm on your PC from the next room, knowing it meant someone you wanted to hear from wanted to hear from you. In that sense I also miss e-mail. I can vividly remember a time when seeing five e-mails in my Inbox meant five human beings had actually written me messages, sometimes longform messages of surprising interest, humor, sadness or beauty. This of course was before I discovered spam, or rather before spam discovered me; also before e-mail began to give way to other forms of communication. Opening my e-mail accounts now means sifting through an descending avalanche of phishing scams, erectile dysfunction ads, and class action lawsuit notifications, and like as not if I find a human-composed message, it's of a professional nature. There's very little exictement in that.

* Learning to cook is an empowering experience. I've always had knowledge of the basics of cooking, but the higher combinations, i.e. actually following recipes and doing multiple tasks at once, timed to culminate perfectly in a “dinner is served!” moment, have always eluded me – until now. For the last two weeks, I have been using a meal delivery service which necessitates doing things like making sauces, baking, frying and chopping, all more or less simultaneously. I'm not only enjoying the process of learning and the much better food I'm eating as a result of my newfound knowledge, I find that actually handling all those ingredients does something to my brain, in much the same way handling soil does: there's a release of endorphins, a connection to reality, a feeling that we were really meant to be getting our hands dirty rather than fondling iPhones seven hours a day.

* I just said “I've always had knowledge--” That is a lie. When I was 18 years old I was so completely helpless in the kitchen that I could not even use a hot plate. The first time I tried to make Ramen noodles in college, I was left with a bubbling puddle of goo which was hideous to behold. People joke that they can't boil water: I literally couldn't make soup.

* I recently purchased a (used) Kindle because several books that I wanted to read were either too expensive to purchase in hardcover/paperback or simply unavilable in that medium. It's a nifty little device, but it just reaffirms the feeling I had when I got the original version of the iPad years ago: a book read electronically has no resonance. It has no substance. Reading it in that format lacks the tactile pleasure of reading it in physical form. As Rupert Giles once remarked on Buffy The Vampire Slayer: ”Books smell. Musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer, it has no texture, no context. It's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible, it should be...smelly.”

* On my Kindle, I just finished The Border Wolves by “Damion Hunter” a.k.a. Amanda Cockrell. This book may set a record for the most-delayed sequel in the history of anything. Cockrell wrote the first book in this historical fiction series, The Centurions, in 1981; Barbarian Princess in 1982; The Emperor's Games in 1984; and The Border Wolves in...2021. The total distance between Book 3 and Book 4 is therefore 37 years. I grew up reading the original trilogy, which was in my father's library, and I tip my hat to Hunter/Cockrell for managing, in large part, to recapture both the spirit and the essence of her earlier novels in this, the (supposedly) final book in the series. If you're a fan of historical fiction, especially the sort that is written with romance and adventure in mind, The Centurions series is worth your while.

* So far this year I am (as usual) behind on my reading list. Aside from The Border Wolves I've also read Fire and Blood, War as an Inward Experience, Johnny Carson, Now & Then, The Life and Death of Trotsky, The Life and Death of Lenin, Mine Were Of Trouble, and Passchendaele and the Somme: A Diary of 1917. I am currently reading American Nightingale. I mention this mainly because it's remarkable that I, a novelist, read so few novels anymore: of the ten books mentioned, only one is fiction. Also because I'm supposed to read 15 books this Year of our Lord 2022, and I've completed only nine. But I'll hit fifteen come hell or high water: I can't face the shame of failing (yet again) to complete my Goodreads Reading Challenge.

* Why don't I read more fiction? Because so much of it is poorly-written crap. That in itself, however, bothers me a great deal less than the inability of critics and readers to understand that fiction generally, whether in novelistic or screenplay/telepay form, is in a very bad way. George Orwell once lamented that we lived in an age where people had been fed poorly for so long they now preferred powdered milk and canned peaches to the genuine articles: I lament that the general decline in craft, discipline, artistry, boldness, and imagination has led to audiences who cannot distinguish between, so to speak, filet mignon and a McDonald's hamburger. There are definite reasons why artistry has been debased into mere commodity, and why modern writers cannot tell a story, or create memorable characters, or write convincing dialog; but for now it is enough to understand that this is the case. Good writing is on the downgrade, and the sooner this is accepted as fact, the sooner we can remedy the condition.

* I just watched the Netflix-produced, German language version of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. It is a remarkable film in the literal sense, in that there is much to discuss about it. It's brutal, graphic, grisly, depressing, well-acted, and extremely well-crafted. It is also curiously distant from its subjects. Unlike the 1979 film starring Richard Thomas, which hews closely to the source material, this movie takes some distinct POV liberties, injects extra anti-militarist sentiments (as if there weren't enough in a story widely regarded as the most ferocious antiwar novel of all time), and yet, with one or two exceptions, does not really let us get to know its characters. The previous cinematic version of this tale spent a lot of its energy making sure we, the audience, felt the full humanity of Paul, Tjaden, Kat, etc., etc., so that their deaths would hit home. This one invests in but one or two fo the characters, with the result that their futile ends mean much less to the viewer. It was a curious choice in an otherwise arresting film.

* Speaking of Germans and war, the present conflict in Ukraine, which has already killed 100,000+ people, has caused within Germany a sudden, unwanted, unwelcome, but entirely necessary understanding that pacifism is really only tenable provided there is someone else available to do your fighting for you. Since 1991, most of non-Russian Europe has been steadily disarming, smug in their belief the United States would come to their aid if it somehow became necessary, with the result that in 2014, Ukraine could not even resist the seizure of the Crimea by Russia. Now, watching Putin bomb defenseless cities, massacre civilians, launch systematic attacks against infrastructure with winter coming, and in short, do his best to imitate both Stalin and Hitler, modern Germans are waking up to the cruel reality that sometimes, in order to be free, one must fight, and one cannot fight without an army. God knows war ought to be the last resort of any nation under any circumstance, but the idea that it can be done away with simply by wishing it gone is childish nonsense. As Herman Wouk put it in The Winds of War, those who turn their swords into ploughshares will have their arms cut off by those who kept their swords.

And that is it for this evening. Next week I will sink my pen into something deeper. Perhaps I will even discuss my quest to obtain proper journalistic credentials so I can go to Ukraine. Until then, just remember that Christmas music really has no place on the airwaves before November 25.

YOUR SISTER'S A WEREWOLF: OR, WHY HOLLYWOOD DOESN'T CARE ITS FILMS SUCK

You gotta be fuckin' kidding me. -- Palmer, "The Thing"

I am a sucker for really bad movies. I don't mean the sort that are merely bad and therefore unpleasant to watch, but those which are so epically, fantastically, God-awfully terrible that they transcend their own shittiness and rise to the level of art. Movies which are objectively abysmal and yet eminently watchable, even enjoyable, for the sheer level of entertainment they unintentionally provide. Now, it is important to note here that to make the cut for a good-bad movie, there is one criteria which is truly crucial, and that is the fact that the film must take itself seriously even if no one else does. It cannot be tongue-in-cheek, or deliberately campy or show the slightest bit of comic self-awareness: it cannot wink at its audience, but must stare steadily at it, convinced that it is delivering legitimate cinema and not a steaming pile of elephant crap. Today I examine such a pile, THE HOWLING 2: YOUR SISTER IS A WEREWOLF.

A film with a title like this might, in your mind, disqualify itself from the category of good-bad, for the simple reason that it is utterly fucking absurd and therefore hints at the comedic self-awareness of which I just spoke. It is therefore important that you understand that the first film in this series, THE HOWLING (1981), was a legitimate horror film which has gone on to be regarded as a minor classic of the genre. Directed by Joe Dante and written by John Sayles and Terrence Winkless, it is that rarest of creatures: a really good werewolf movie, one which has an unforgettably creepy opening in which an investigative reporter, wearing a wire, confronts a suspected serial killer in a sleazy porno shop in downtown L.A. Combining cutting-edge practical effects, good actors delivering credible performances, some social comentary and even a little comedy, the original HOWLING did what a werewolf movie is supposed to do but usually does not: explore the beast within us all.

When THE HOWLING 2 debuted in 1985, it was expected that it would deliver on the promise of the first film. News that it would star none other than horror legend Christopher Lee undoubtedly bolstered fan expectations, as did the casting of Sybil Danning, whose blatant sexual allure was entirely in keeping with the werewolf theme of repressed sexuality -- bursting out, one might say, like 38DDDs out of a training bra. What's more, the film promised to take the audience to the darkest heart of Europe, where werewolf legends originated. The hints given by the previous movie, of a vast underground network of beings who walked as humans by day and wolves by night would be traced back to their twisted Old Country roots. What could go wrong?

Well, for starters, everything. Absolutely everything.

THE HOWLING 2 begins in Los Angeles, which, an insert title conveiently informs us, is "the city of angels." Karen White, the heroine of the previous film, is being laid to rest as her brother, Ben (Reb Brown), and her former co-worker, Jenny (Annie McEnroe), look on. After the funeral they meet Stefan (Lee), an "occult investigator" who tells Ben that, well, his sister was a werewolf, and died proving that werewolves were real and a menace to society. Oddly enough, Ben, a hard-headed cop from Montana, isn't buying this shit, but Jenny isn't so sure.

Cut to Transylvania, where werewolf queen Stirba (Danning), an aged hag living in castle, devours a beautiful young girl's life essence to regain her youth and beauty -- as well as a penchant for tearing off some or all of her clothes. No objections here, though the background nudity, and the S & M style clothing worn by her somewhat less attractive minions, begins to make the audience wonder just what the hell kind of movie this is going to be.

Cut to a punk club in downtown L.A., where Stefan has tracked Mariana (Marsha Hunt), a black female werewolf on the prowl for fresh meat. She finds it in a gang of extremely stupid punks, who she lures to a warehouse and slaughters, but not before an absolutely hilarious sequence in which her fellow werewolves smash bottles and boards over the punks' heads...because werewolves, as we all know, not only feast on human flesh, they like to chuck shit at their victims first. And speaking of victims, why the fuck does Stefan let Mariana lure the punks away from the club when he knows perfectly well they will all be butchered? Does he hate their music that much? His entire presence in the scene is pointless, though Lee looks terrific in punk sunglasses.

In the meantime, Ben returns to the crypt that night, anxious to prevent Stefan from desecrating his sister's corpse, only to witness her rise from the grave. After blasting a few werewolves who were there to remove her from consecrated ground, and seeing Stefan stick a silver spike in his sister's heart, Ben is finally convinced. Stefan tells Ben and Jenny about the werewolves and Stirba, and they had best kill her before the next full moon, because at that point, all werewolves everywhere will be revealed. Why this presents a particular danger I'm not sure, because it seems to me that a werewolf is much more dangerous if you don't know he or she IS a werewolf until they want you to (feeding time), but as The Critical Drinker likes to say, "the script needs the plot to happen," so off our trio goes to Transylvania.

There are some interludes here with Stirba that do nothing for the plot but exist mainly to get Sybil Danning to take off the rest of her clothes.
The queen of werewolves is a teenage masturbatory fantasy, who is generally either naked or wearing a sexy rock star outfit of supreme impractibility while waiting for her nemesis Stefan to show up so she can eat him. During the waiting period she holds orgies, which would be appealing if she didn't turn all fangy and furry in the process. It is truly degrading to see the actors howling like wolves as they pretend to have sex with each other while wearing furs and leather.

A lot more nonsense follows, during which we are treated to such scenes as a dwarf attacking an Uzi-toting werewolf with a Medieval mace, and a priest being murdered by a ridiculous foam-latex prop which I think was meant to be some kind of demon. There is even a scene where a guy's eyeballs explode because Stirba is like, singing at him or something. He dies because, as he screams theatrically when it happens, "I LOST MY EARPLUUUUUUGS!"

Jenny, who is as stupid as she is functionally useless to the story, is soon captured by a horny werewolf and taken to Stirba's castle, which of course prompts Stefan and Ben to go rescue her. To do this they have to shoot their way past an army of werewolves, and employ, quite literally, a holy hand grenade, which gives Lee an excuse to break into Latin. They then split up, with Ben rescuing Jenny and killing Mariana, and Stefan confronting and killing Stirba, though he himself is immolated in the process. Some other shit happens, but by this point even I, who have seen the movie at least 25 times, couldn't explain what it is or why it was filmed. And then the movie ends.

THE HOWLING 2 is remarkable for many reasons. First and foremost is the fact that the writers fucked up the lore from beginning to end: from the stakes through the heart to the garlic wielded by Jenny to the Transvylvanian setting, it is obvious that this began as a vampire script, but the lazy-ass producers, eager to cash in on the HOLWING name without doing any actual work, simply crossed out that word wherever they found it and subbed "werewolf" instead. Second is the atrocious acting. Both Brown and McEnroe are so appalling bad in their roles that Christopher Lee can actually be seen shaking his head in disgust, indeed almost in physical pain, while they deliver their lines, and the director later admitted he seemed to be "wishing himself away" when not on set. Reb Brown at least has charimsa of a sort -- he's sort of a poor man's Ryan O'Neal, though Ryan O'Neal was fairly poor to begin with -- but McEnroe might be the most annoying, shrill, talentless actress I have ever seen on film. Her voice is like a screech owl and without meaning to be cruel or sexist, having her disrobe in the same film as Danning is like racing Secretariat against a milkwagon nag. Third is the dialogue. A script with lines like, "You will die...but first you will know the love of a werewolf!" is one you can safely bet never had a second draft. Fourth is, well...everything else. Take Mariana, for instance. We are told at the beginning of the movie that she is a very special kind of werwolf who is immune to silver bullets and can only be killed by...titanium. Huh? What? How the fuck do you know this? Did someone once shoot a werewolf with a silver bullet and, when that failed to do the trick, bombard it with the periodic table of the elements until it finally dropped? How many bullets of copper, lead, gold, nickel, iron, aluminum, etc. were fired at baffled werewolves before titanium did the trick? Since Stefan has titanium weapons handy, her immunity ultimately makes no difference and it's baffling why they even added this to the story.

And that's really what gets me about the movie. It's absolutely nonsensical from first to final frame. The plot is basically an excuse for carnage and nudity to happen (sometimes at the same time), there is a complete absence of internal logic, and many scenes are either unnecessary or inexplicable. The only really intriguing part of the story is the fact that Stefan and Stirba turn out to be brother and sister, but since this relationship is never explained or defined or given any backstory, it's irrelevant, just like the titanium nonsense. And everything the script tells us simply leads to obvious and unanswered questions: Why should we care if all werewolves suddenly reveal themselves? Wouldn't it actually be easier to exterminate them if they came out in the open? Why did Stefan wait until Stirba was about to turn 10,000 years old before he tried to kill her? For that matter, why do Stirba's minions just let Stefan walk past them over and over again instead of killing him?

I suppose pointing out the flaws in a movie like this is as productive as counting crap in a sewer, but it brings me to my main point, which is the needless awfulness of the movie. There are obviously countless instances in which films tried and failed to be good. They failed because of restricted budgets, unforeseen logistical problems, script issues, inexperienced directors, miscast actors, unfilled plot holes, poor editing, and many other reasons. With slightly different luck, more time or more money, they may have reached their objective. This is not one of those instances. THE HOWLING 2 is a cash-grab of the worst sort, the kind that doesn't even try to be good, make sense, or even assert a clear right to exist. It's laughable, moronic trash, worth watching only as unintentional comedy. But beneath the chuckles there is a serious issue at hand, an issue that has plagued Hollywood for decades: a stubborn, self-destructive, mean-spirited, arrogant insistence that the goal in any situation is simply to exploit. Let me explain.

As I said before, THE HOWLING was a respectable hit, and rightly so. It's a good movie. The script is sharp and witty, the performances are strong, the practical effects are fantastic, and the direction is assured without being obstrusive. Nor does it make either the error of taking its material too seriously nor allowing itself to deteriorate into farce. When humor is called for, there's humor; when horror is called for, there's horror. It does its job and entertains.

This having been the case, the powers that be in Hollywood could have put the same effort into THE HOWLING 2. Nowhere is it written that a sequel must be inferior to the original. There are a number of cases where sequels match or even improve on their progenitors: STAR TREK II is worlds better than STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE. THE GODFATHER PART II and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY both stand confidently near the movies that spawned them. And THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, #2 in the original Star Wars trilogy, is almost universally regarded as being both slightly better than STAR WARS and markedly better than RETURN OF THE JEDI. So it can be done. And yet in the vast majority of instances, sequels grow markedly worse with each iteration. Hollywood execs will tell you it's the actors' fault: they want more money each movie, which cuts into the operating budget. The real reason is that the studio model is and always has been one of parasitical exploitation, and this applies to everything they do and everything they see. The mentality of Hollywood is that of a professional con man or ponzi scam artist, perpetually trolling for new victims. When one of them encounters a hot screenwriter, or an existing franchise, or even a good idea, he does not think, "How can I nurture this, build on this, so I can create something magnificent and lasting?" God, no. His sole thought is to wring it dry in such a way to make the most possible profit in the fastest way, and then to discard the husk and make good his escape. A studio executive doesn't care if his product is good, he just wants it to sell: the fact that making a good product will actually improve its chances of selling is entirely lost upon him. His mentality is a actually criminal mentality: every relationship is transactional and every transaction is rigged in his favor. Like a strain of virus, he sucks the host cell absolutely dry and then moves on to the next one, never sparing the previous victim a thought. Given this worldview, the fact that any good movies are made at all, much less good sequels, is actually a miracle in itself.

The tragedy of this pimp-like mindset is that many executives actually seem to regard the very idea of trying to make a good movie as unnecessary and even ridiculous. Like the con man, the thrill for these bastards is not in the process of moviemaking or even turning a profit per se, but in getting people to pay to see garbage. The joy is in the suckering, in the grift, in the con. John Landis discovered this the hard way a few years back when he was approached about a potential sequel to his seminal horror movie "An American Werewolf in London." The perspective producers told him their business model was to make a cheap, shitty film that would cash in on the name of the classic film, make its money back the first weekend before bad word of mouth could kill it, and then move on. Landis asked why they didn't simply try to make a good movie on the same budget. The producers reply was essentially, "Why bother?" The extra effort required -- not money, mind you, just effort -- was simply not worth it to them. And this brings me back to my main point:

THE HOWLING 2 is not just a terrible film, it is a pointlessly terrible one. Hollywood is awash with enormously talented writers, aspiring directors full of burning ambition, and would-be producers with just the right tough, crafty, scrappy personalities to get $10 performance out of a nickel's worth of expenditure. Employing such people on this project would not have increased the budget of this movie, but it would have led to a better one being made. And yet it wasn't done, because "why bother?" A franchise was available to be exploited, so they exploited it, thus ensuring that said franchise, far from producing a string of hits, collapsed into (arguably) the worst series of movies ever made under a single banner.

And even the sight of Sybil Danning naked can't made up for that.

HALLOWEEN HORROR (2022) - THE FINAL CHAPTER

If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. -- Douglas Coupland

Well, I did it, folks. I gave myself a goal and stuck to it: 31 horror movies in 31 days. And not just that. There was also gourd-buying, pumpkin-carving, and costume-wearing. I even nipped outside to watch a few minutes of the local parade. It's been many years since I kept the spirit of Halloween within me for this long and at this level of intensity, and I'm not gonna lie: it felt pretty good. A return to childhood, minus the candy-induced sugar crash. On the other hand, watching all these cinematic slaughters, these movie massacres, occasionally messed with my head. The idea that what happens on TV stays on TV and doesn't enter your thoughts and dreams is rubbish. See enough stage blood splatter, and some of it will get on you...metaphorically speaking. On more than one occasion I awakened in the middle of the night and had to check the locks on my front door. And this brings me to the sole point I wish to make before I reel off the remaining films on my list.

When I was a kid, I assumed adults outgrew the fears that routinely terrorized me and my fellows: monsters under the bed, monsters in the closet, monsters in the woods. When I think back, childhood is the most imaginative time of one's life. Even your humble correspondent, a novelist screen- and short-story writer, is not necessarily more or even as imaginative now as I was at the age of five, or eight, or ten. Children -- at least from my era, the pre-internet, pre-cell phone, pre-social media era -- largely existed in two worlds simultaneously: the actual, physical world, and the world of make-believe and misunderstanding. To a child, the imagined and misunderstood world is as real as the "real" one, and in many ways actually more substantive, immediate and important. A child's imagination is a kind of blaze which burns so bright it drowns out logic, reason and the evidence of one's senses. This overpowered imaginative faculty, the actual inability to discriminate between reality and fantasy, is perhaps what truly defines a child, and as the noted horror director Dario Argento once noted, no real horror is possible without imagination. This, as much as normal human instincts such as fear of the dark, sudden loud noises, being surprised or followed, etc., is why children are so often frightened out of their wits by the smallest of things. Yet even as a child, I understood that my parents and to some extent my (four years) older brother appeared decidedly unfrightened of that which terrorized me. On some level I believe I understood that certain fears were shed with age. And this is true. But it is also untrue. I am now fifty years old, and while my fears are decidedly more grounded in reality than they were at the age of, say, nine, I would simply be lying if I said that there were times when, after a night of scary films, I didn't feel a certain reluctance to get into the shower, or even to go to sleep. Nights when I had to make sure the doors were double locked to inhibit the non-existent lunatic killer from gaining entry. Nights when I made sure my feet were fully covered by the blankets so the non-existent monster could not grab them, because everybody -- every kid, I mean -- knows that blankets are 100% monster-proof. It's silly, it's undignified, it's even ridiculous, but it's also curiously wonderful. George Orwell once remarked that human beings do not die when their heart stops beating; they die when they lose the capacity to accept new ideas, and become ghosts endlessly living in a vanished past. I would add to this, and say that human beings do not grow old from mere chronological age: they grow old when they can no longer hear the inner call of the children they used to be. When they lose their power to be afraid of things that don't exist. When, in short, they lose their imagination and exist solely in the world of concrete objects. A body is little without a spirit, and it seems to me the function of a good horror movie is to remind us that we are all haunted -- in a good way -- by the child within us.

With all that said, and meant, I will now reel off the second half of my journey into unexplored horror territory:

Salem's Lot (2004): This miniseries was something like six hours long, so it counts as two movies, dammit. A more modern take on the 1979 TV movie starring David Soul I mentioned previously, this one stars Rob Lowe as a writer with a mysterious past who ends up confronting a voracious vampire in his own hometown. It's modestly entertaining and well-acted -- Donald Sutherland is particularly perfect -- but like the older version, and like the novel from which it sprang, it's poorly structured, has flabby internal logic and several sub-plots that go nowhere. The ending also lacks much in the way of sense. I enjoyed it...but not enough to watch twice.

Pontypool: This low-budget Canadian indie was a surprisingly refreshing take on the "sudden zombie outbreak" genre. With a small cast and taking place almost entirely within an isolated radio station, it follows our crusty, burned out shock-jock of a protagonist as he tries to cope with a flood of bad, panicky news that sounds like the beginning of the end of the world. The ending was too weird for my taste, but the first half really had my stomach in knots. Guerilla filmmakers would do well to use this as a masterclass in low-budget cinema.

The Lost Boys: To my surprise, I realized that despite seeing most of it a dozen times, I'd never actually sat down and watched this entire film from opening frame to closing credits. So I did. There's not much to say here except it's a hugely fun, rightfully iconic vamp romp which never takes itself too seriously but also manages to surefootedly avoid pure camp. Corey Haim is surprisingly good, and Keifer Sutherland is a natural as a vampire. (Read into that what you will.)

Prophecy: This 70s eco-horror flick is a cheese-fest but undeniably entertaining, featuring strong performances from Robert Foxworthy, Armand Assante and Talia Shire, among others. The monster looks like a bear with no skin, and one of the kills is unintentionally so funny I nearly blacked out laughing, but the environmental message, and the strong subplot about Native American rights, is even more timely today than when it was shot.

The Burning: This is a modestly entertaining, fairly well put together early-80s camp slasher, most notable for having Jason Alexander with a full head of hair, and Harvey Weinstein as a co-writer. The fact that its putative protag is a sleazy, geeky weirdo who creeps on girls in the shower -- and is also a coward -- makes a lot of sense when you think about what kind of person Weinstein actually was. A lot of his future sins are implied in the way men treat women in this flick. But it's not a bad slasher despite its flaws.

Quarantine: An American remake of the Spanish flick "Rec," this is a relentless exercise in mounting terror and tension, as a film crew, two firefighters and a pair of cops are trapped inside an apartment building full of people with a weaponized, fast-acting, easy-spreading form of rabies. After a sluggish start it picks up speed and keeps going until it crashes into a hellaciously brutal finish. American remakes of foreign horror movies almost always disappoint: this one delivers.

Triangle: When a storm capiszes their sailboat in the Bermuda Triangle, the survivors take refuge on a luxury liner only to find it abandoned -- save for one evidently psychopathic killer. And as it turns out, that is actually the least of their troubles. Triangle is a thoughtful, troubling, rather sad horror movie with a snappy pace, plenty of violence and strong, affecting performances. This is the sort of film that turns out to be something quite different than it appears to be, and probably needs to be watched twice to be fully appreciated.

Messiah of Evil: A woman goes looking for her missing artist father in an isolated seaside community, only to find a town seemingly controlled by the living dead. Despite the presence of the lovely Marianna Hill, and a few very charismatic set-ups for character deaths, this 1973 zombie film is too slow and far, far too weird to be very enjoyable.

House of Wax (1953): Vincent Price excels as a disfigured lunatic whose house of wax exhibits the corpses of his murdered victims to an unsuspecting public. Price's performance is lovely as the charming sculptor turned bloodthirsty madman. This is a fun, old-school classic originally shown in 3D, and features a very young Charles Bronson as a deaf-mute sculptor.

House of Wax (2005): A group of somewhat obnoxious teens comes upon a small town whose main attraction, a wax museum, is somewhat more sinister than it appears, and before you know it, they're fighting for their lives. A slick, better-than-average slasher of the "small town as killing jar" with a lot of familiar faces in it, it is not scary, but it is entertaining, and is now best remembered for letting the audience vicariously enjoy the gruesome death of Paris Hilton.

Hush: This is an excellent thriller-horror flick in which a deaf-mute novelist living in isolation deep in the woods is terrorized by a sadistic psychopath. Toyed with unrelentingly by her tormentor, our heroine must dig extremely deep -- in all ways -- if she wants to survive. While not mind-blowing and a touch implausible in more than one area, it's a refreshing take on the subject matter and full of tension and dread.

Storm of the Century: Stephen King's written-for-the-TV miniseries about a small island town isolated by a killer storm, and then tormented by the arrival of an evil man with supernatural powers, will probably hold your interest for its four-hour length, but it's nothing very special. The main issue is an overpowered villain: Colm Feore is a great baddie, but the material he has to work with here is above-average at its very best.

Halloween Kills: The second of the three new Halloween films is an incoherent, hyper-violent mess, featuring some of the very worst dialog I have ever heard in a major-release movie, and makes almost no use of its titular star, Jamie Lee Curtis. That having been said, this flick is so brutal, and Michael Myers depicted as such a relentless, unstoppable murder machine, breaking humans apart the way you'd crack a stick of fresh celery, that it's hard not to emerge from it slightly shaken. Some bad movies have a kind of charisma, a sort of gutty resonance, that produces a similar effect in viewers to an actually good movie. "Halloween Kills" may be one of these.

I am withholding "Halloween Ends" for a few days because, well, Halloween hasn't ended yet and I'm sure many people still haven't seen this (supposedly) final chapter in a franchise which has been slashing away in one iteration or another since 1979. What I propose to do a few days from now when the candy-corn settles is actually to rate all of the dozen or so of these flicks which have graced, and sometimes disgraced, silver screens, for most of my life. I'll begin with Carpenter's original, unassailable classic and finish with Green's controversial trilogy.

And with that slight cop out, I bid farewell to the season for 2022. It's been fun, in an extremely thorough sort of way. Just remember, as Sheriff Brackett once unironically quipped in the original movie of the same name: "It's Halloween. Everyone's entitled to one good scare."