Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 21

COMING ATTRACTIONS

As some of you may have noticed, it has been more than a minute since I have released any new fiction, and considerably longer than that since I've published a novel. This is not due to any lack of industry on my part, but three factors: the accursed global pandemic, the equally accursed horror novel I've been working on for something like five years now, and my change of location from West to East Coasts. There was a bonus factor as well: the so-called legitimate publishing world was calling me with its strangely alluring siren song.

When the pandemic struck in early 2020, I was on a tremendous roll, raking in awards left and right and getting, for the first time, serious critical praise as well. I really thought I was on the cusp of a massive professional breakthrough, but the pesky virus had other plans, and accelerated my decision to swap the left side of the country for the right, and the entertainment industry for the business of criminal justice. This put me out of serious writing action for at least six months. It also prevented me from doing much in the way of book promotion. However, when the dust settled, and I could finally write again, I realized I still had many, many months of work ahead of me on my epic horror novel if I even wanted to finish the first draft. From a creative standpoint I felt as if I was in a tunnel whose only light was probably the headlamp of an oncoming train.

Now, it is my policy never to work on more than one creative project at a time. Like most of my policies I don't follow it strictly, but I do try to pay it as much respect as I can muster, and for very practical reasons. When I was an aspiring young writer, I was endlessly starting short stories, novels, screenplays, and poems without finishing any of them. I would start project "A," lose interest, and begin project "B," meaning to return to "A," when "B" was complete. The problem was, I never finished "B" either: "B" was thrown over for "C," who was abandoned for "D," who in turn got the push for "E" -- and so on and so forth and such. This eventually led me to adopt as a principle the idea that unless and until "A" was finished -- at least as a draft -- "B" could exist only in my head. As a working philosophy, it was better than most. It not only forced me to actually finish writing projects, it allowed ideas to mature more fully within my mind as they waited for their turn on the written page.

Like most maxims, however, it has a downside. When I began my epic horror novel, I assumed the first draft would not take much longer than any of my previous novels: roughly one year. But somehow, the more I wrote, the further away the finish line seemed: I was reminded of that episode of the original Doctor Who where they trap the villain, Sutekh the Destroyer, in a time tunnel whose exit recedes infinitely before him. Years passed and still the goddamned thing wasn't complete, not even as a first draft. Then, early this year, I was tapped to help a former gangster write his memoirs of life in the New York mob. Having been paid quite a sum to go about this task, it had to take prioiorty. Still, a gentleman is occasionally permitted to break his own rules. Most recently I did this with release of "The Brute," a horror short, but prior to that I also published the novelettes "The Numbers Game" and "Seelenmord." And I continue to cheat here and there, which belatedly brings me to the point of this blog. There are, or will be, quite a few more releases under my name coming over the next few months.

For starters, a paperback version of my previously electronic-format-only novelette "Shadows and Glory" is now available on Amazon. This tale about a son and his father was included in my short story collection DEVILS YOU KNOW (2016), but was long enough to merit, I felt, stand-alone publication as a very small e-book. As you know by now, I am a big fan of the long short story, which was once one of the most popular mediums of fiction in the world but is now almost extinct: I am also a fan of physical media, especially as it pertains to reading. So: "Shadows" can now be read the old-fashioned way.

In the next few weeks, a completely new novelette of 20,000 words called "Deus Ex" will be debuting on Amazon in both e-book and paperback formats. "Deus Ex" is an alternative history thriller about a ruthless dictator determined to escape the consequences of his own downfall. It is part of my ongoing campaign to escape the confines of my own literary wheelhouse, and I'd be willing to bet cash money (assuming I had any) that you've never read anything quite like it.

The really big news is that the sequel to my most decorated novel, SINNER'S CROSS, is only a few months from bookshelves real and electronic. I have never written anything with more determination not to let myself or the reader down, and subjected it to an excruciating drafting process that has lasted five years or better. All the survivors of the first book are returning: whether they make it 'til the final page is another matter entirely. One of my many goals with this series, which I envision will cover a total of seven novels or so, is to highlight forgotten battles and emphasize the participation of ordinary men in history's greatest conflict, the Second World War. These books are not paens, they are elegies. If you want panting tributes to heroes in the style of Spielberg and Ambrose, look elsewhere. This is the real shit, fiction inspired by decades of reading firsthand accounts and primary sources.

2022 will also see the release of my dark novelette "Wolf Weather," which plays whorehouse contortionist and straddles the lines between horror, fantasy and allegory.

Beyond that? Well, I hope to finish that goddamned horror novel early next year, but whether I do or not, I have yet another historical novel in the bullpen. It's finished, polished, ready to go: the only question is whether I will release it through the independent imprint, One Nine Books, or try to go mainstream with a traditional publishing house. Time will tell. I really have no beef with traditional publishing, but when I'm told my books require a "sensitivity read" I tend to lose interest quickly. Contrary to urban legend, I'm
just not that sensitive.

I could say a little more, but I don't want to jinx myself by setting release deadlines I may not be able to meet. I'm Miles Watson, not George R.R. Martin. You can tell by the size of my bank account.

STAR WARS: PONDERING THE PREQUELS

The dreadful STAR WARS sequel trilogy, shat out by Disney via Jar Jar Abrams and Rian "I Can Do No Wrong" Johnson, has got me thinking that the time has come for me to re-assess, or perhaps more accurately re-observe, another much-reviled trilogy in that franchise: the prequels.

These three films, helmed by series creator George Lucas between 1999 - 2005, were set a generation before the original trilogy, and told the story of the downfall of the Galactic Republic and the Jedi Order, and more specifically, how do-gooding Anakin Skywalker fell to the Dark Side and became the dreaded Darth Vader. Reaction to these movies was, to say the least, passionate. Critics were cruel, and the fan base divided between older ones, who tended to hate them, and the younger, who embraced the prequels to the point of preferring them to the originals. When Lucas, who was somewhat embittered by the criticisms he recieved, sold the Star Wars franchise to Disney some years later, many believed it had been "saved" from its creator and that a renaissance era was dawning.

Well, we all know how that turned out, don't we?

So much ink has been spilled about the sequel trilogy that I will spare you from a lengthy diatribe on the subject -- at least for now. Suffice to say that these films, aside from their intolerable insistence on pushing political ideology, their relentless box-checking, their boring Mary Sue protagonist, their complete absence of internal logic, their jarring inconsistency with each other, and their flagrant and deliberate disrespect for the classic characters, are also bankrupt of any good or even sensible ideas. The first film is a noisy, unimaginative remake of the original STAR WARS. The second is an excruciating vandalism of everything that made the original trilogy special, slathered with self-righteous political messaging from first to final frame. The last is a lively but incoherent and ultimately farsical attempt to fill plot holes not with substance, but explosions. Try as I might, and I did try, I could find no virtue in any of these movies. There is nothing to be learned from them in terms of characterization, dialog, or storytelling. They are are glib, shiny and hollow and ultimately without weight or substance as Christmas tree ornaments. It would have been better if they had never been made. And this circles me back to the prequels.

Looking back on them after an interval of twenty-odd years, what stands out immediately is jarring differences between them and both the sequels and the original trilogy. They are decidedly their own selves, the direct execution of one man's vision, and possessing a very clear objective in terms of the type of story they wish to convey and the methodology by which they mean to convey it. Taking a longer and more thoughtful look (I re-watched all three prior to writing this), I was struck by how clearly the merits of the prequels shone in my eyes, relative to their many, many faults. When I originally saw THE PHANTOM MENACE in 1999, and to a lesser extent ATTACK OF THE CLONES in 2002, I could a tale unfold about their cons, but the pros were, in my mind, hard to come by. Time has allowed me a clearer perspective.

Firstly, it's important to understand that the first film in the series, THE PHANTOM MENACE, was not intended by its creator to service the fans of the original trilogy, but to appeal to their children. With MENACE, Lucas made a kids' movie replete with physical comedy, sight gags, fart jokes, and a child protagonist who got to go on what amounted to a series of lengthy theme-park rides. The childish nature of many of the sequences belied the complex, some might say turgid plot of the movie, which was full of Byzantine intrigue. Indeed, one of the curious features of MENACE is the way it alternates in tone between DUNE and a Saturday morning cartoon. The effect is almost schizophrenic, but it could be said that at least the film has something for every age group. Now, before I advance, this is not meant as an apologia for what my friend Matt once described as "an objectively bad film," but merely a partial explanation of why its charms, such as they are, were lost on a Generation X who had anticipated a movie made for them, not their 10 year-old kids. The subsequent movies in the trilogy shed the bulk of the juvenile and sophomoric elements, most notably by reducing the role of Jar Jar Binks from a central player (MENACE) to a small part (CLONES) and finally to an unspeaking extra (SITH), which is one of several reasons why the first film feels so much like a stand-alone in comparison with the two films that followed. I do maintain, however, that MENACE is much easier to enjoy if one looks at it through the eyes of a tween, just as the first two Harry Potter books go down more smoothly for a grownup if one remembers that they become increasingly more adult in execution as the series wears on.

Having said that, it's worth noting that MENACE, while justly attacked for its wooden dialog, petrified performances, sluggish pacing, muddled storyline, and cavalier dismissal of its most interesting characters, does a number of things fairly well, even brilliantly, if one can sift through the litter of Jar Jar's antics or George Lucas' taste for cringe-inducing dialog and pointless cut scenes. And this brings me to my second observation:

The "creative surround" we witnessed in the original trilogy was quite simple and easy to understand, as was the nature of the storyline. On the one hand was the evil, autocratic Galactic Empire; on the other was the do-gooding, democratic Rebellion determined to bring it down. Details were scanty at best, because the plot, drawing on classic themes known to everyone, did not require backstory, any more than the characters, all of whom were equally classic archetypes familiar to every culture on earth. In the prequels, however, Lucas traded the broad brush for a much finer one: the Galactic Republic we are introduced to in MENACE is a huge, fractious and complicated entity, essentially well-meaning but ponderous and rotten with corruption. Even the Jedi, supposedly the moral guardians of the galaxy, are presented as being pedantic, dogmatic, narrow-minded, and prone to blunder. In short, the "good side" is neither overly sympathetic nor particularly admirable. It is simply a representation of the long-term effects of success: arrogance, apathy, tolerance for corruption, and that particular form of cynicism which allows strongly-held beliefs to deteriorate into empty, meaningless rituals. (When Padme goes to the Senate for help, she quickly discovers that the policy-making body of the galaxy is so choked by bribe-money and red tape it may as well be one of her enemies.) In short, by the end of MENACE, we understand that while the Sith are evil, and their plans nefarious and self-serving, the soil they till is fertile precisely because the "good" have let their muscles go soft and their guard fall dangerously low. This more nebulous, shady-gray atmosphere of morality off-puts many fans, but to me the richness and complexity of the universe we see is beguiling, because it is different. What's more, the canvas we see in the prequels presents a universe which seems real and adheres to a unifying plot architecture. Unlike the sequel trilogy, in which the universe we are presented feels improvised and underdeveloped to the point of nullity, the prequels make us intimately familiar with how both the Republic and the Jedi functioned.
George Lucas clearly did not want to repeat the thematic simplicity of the earlier films, choosing instead a storyline which is so tangled that at times it seems to make no sense at all. Indeed, there are plot elements in MENACE and CLONES that simply do not compute. But not wanting to repeat oneself is one of the hallmarks of real artistry, and this fact should at least be acknowledged before criticisms about the story are made.

This takes me to observation three, which is that the series is a tragedy: even MENACE, which is the most upbeat of the trio, ends with the death of Qui-Gon and a sense of unease about the return of the Sith and the future of Anakin Skywalker. Unlike the original trilogy, which despite its grim middle chapter was the story of good underdogs defeating evil overdogs of the very worst sort, the prequels are the story of downfall -- the downfall of people, of relationships, of a social order, of individual worlds and an entire galaxy. Most of the characters we meet are either killed off, driven into exile, or survive only as twisted wreckage of their former selves. Viewed as a piece entire, the prequels are not less drenched in blood and anguish than Macbeth or Richard III. Those looking for emotional uplift are looking in the wrong place, but many still attack the films for their depressing tone, which is quite as stupid as feeling betrayed by the downbeat conclusion of Romeo and Juliet. These cards were always on the table.

My fourth observation is that the prequels are in a very real sense not about Anakin Skywalker, Padme Amidala or Obi-Wan Kenobi; not about the Republic or the Jedi or even the Sith, but rather Darth Sidious, a.k.a. Chancellor Palpatine. It is really his story, just as it could be argued that the original films are actually Darth Vader's story. Sidious' machinations are the axis upon which every event in the series, from the huge space battles to the fates of individual characters, turn and turn again. Sidious/Palpatine is certainly one of the greatest villains ever created in cinema, a man with no redeeming qualities at all, driven by an insatiable desire for power and domination, whose Force abilities, mighty as they are, pale in comparison with his his Machiavellian cunning. To Sidious, if I may double paraphrase Matthew Stover, other beings are either threats or assets, to be destroyed or used according to the categorization. He has no sentiment, no pity, no mercy, no remorse, no loyalty, no shame, no better angels within his nature. Even his fellow Sith regard him as a shadow on the Force, an event horizon, a black hole, and little wonder: he regards them as disposable, and does dispose of them when the need arises. Any positive emotion he projects -- charm, warmth, affection -- is a fraudulent, a sort of stage trick calculated to achieve an exploitative end. He is fathomless, an expression of evil in a human body, who did not fall or get pushed or seduced into the shadows but began there, ended there,
He engineers a galactic civil war which claims billions of lives solely for his own personal benefit, and manages to be the supreme commander of both factions under different aliases, surely the greatest feat of villainy imaginable: in the game Sidious plays with the universe, whichever side wins, he seemingly cannot lose. And yet, at the same time, he possesses a singular weakness which serves as a substitute for psychological depth, and which lays the seeds, in REVENGE OF THE SITH, for his own eventual destruction in RETURN OF THE JEDI: not capable of comprehending the emotion of love, he dismisses its power. This crack in his armor prevents him from becoming boring, a villainous version of the "Mary Sue" born-perfect hero.

One more observation: like the original trilogy, the prequels do not push a divisive political message, but rather -- and like the best science-fiction and fantasy stories -- an extremely inclusive philosophy. The difference betwixt politics and philosophy is not really very subtle, but it is seldom recognized or discussed. Here are two definitions lifted from the interwebs:

1. "Ideology refers to a set of beliefs, doctrines that back a certain social institution or a particular organization. Philosophy refers to looking at life in a pragmatic manner and attempting to understand why life is as it is and the principles governing behind it."

2. "Political philosophy embodies value assumptions about the nature of the ultimate good. Political ideology is emotional, programmatic, and mass in character."

Pay special attention to these words. The original STAR WARS, like STAR TREK, LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER, are united in the inclusivity of their basic message, as well as the universiality and eternal nature of the ethical questions they posed. Only a truly wicked or deficient person could be put off by the themes of curiosity, love, friendship, sincere conviction, devotion to duty, respect for differences, etc., etc. which each of these franchises brings to bear. Well, unlike the sequel trilogy, the prequels manage to delve deep into the politics of their universe without becoming an unveiled, hammer-over-the-head, 1:1 allegory for the platform of a certain political party. The ultimate story is kept on a level of "democracy vs. fascism" or even more broadly, "good vs. evil," and not the obvious "left vs. right," with its resulting implication that one side is correct and the other misguided and villainous. Put more simply, whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, Labour or Tory, Green or Conservative, the prequels do not set out to alienate you, or tell you that your own personal politics are wrong-headed. They serve as a warning to everyone who cares to listen: evil is seductive and relentless, and good must not only be ever vigilant, but open-minded, if it is to survive.

A final observation. Like "V" -- the double mini-series and short-lived sci-fi TV series of the early-mid 1980s -- the prequels are a story about how democracy dies and the means by which it is slain. The Republic, corrupt and hapless as it is, is still far better than the alternative, just as the virtuous if dogmatic Jedi are far more appealing than the treacherous and violent Sith: but this moral superiority does not save them. In both cases, which are really the same case, the good falls to the bad, just as Anakin Skywalker falls to the Dark Side. It is not Lucas' contention that evil is stronger -- he specifically refutes this in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK -- but it is his assertion that evil "quicker, easier, more seductive," and that it takes character and hard work to resist its pomps. Indeed, seduction is central to the plot of nearly all STAR WARS movies, with special emphasis on the idea that it is a form of voluntary victimization. Though Sidious attacks the Republic from within, it is not he but the Senate that ultimately issues the killing blow when they ringingly endorse his bid for supreme power at the climax of REVENGE OF THE SITH. When Padme remarks to Bail Organa, apropros of Palpatine dissolving the Republic and declaring himself emperor, "So this is how democracy dies: to thunderous applause," she is unintentionally foreshadowing the self-congratulatory tone her husband Anakin will assume when he becomes a Sith Lord. Having made the leap from light to dark, Anakin -- now Darth Vader -- blithely justifies the massacre of his former Jedi bretheren and the destruction of the Republic he was sworn to defend, and in so doing cheers his own self-chosen downfall. And Vader pays the steepest possible price for the abandonment of his Jedi ideals.

There are other positive observations I could make in defense and support of the prequels. Aside from some of the best fight sequences you are likely to see, and an ever-growing sense of menace and impending doom as the films succeed one another, these would include the excellent chemistry between Hayden Christiansen and Ewan McGregor, who come off as a bickering married couple; a form-fitting performance from Liam Neeson as the worlds-weary Jedi Qui-Gon Jinn; and a wonderful star turn by Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine/Sidious, who doesn't chew the scenery...until we really want him to.

Of course, none of what I have written here obviates my obligation to point out that the prequels are, at best, deeply flawed and somewhat frustrating films. THE PHANTOM MENACE, pared down to what is necessary, would not clock in at greater than an hour, and pared down to what is purely enjoyable, probably not much longer than 20 minutes. ATTACK OF THE CLONES meanders for well over an hour through dialog of often painful stupidity before partially redeeming itself in an extended orgy of cathartic mass violence. And REVENGE OF THE SITH, far and away the best of the three, is still lumbered with the flaws of the previous two, and is further hobbled by the fact that nearly all its deleted scenes would have dramatically improved the movie. No amount of rose-colored tint can make Jar Jar Binks less annoying, or fill in the crater-sized plot holes of the first two flicks, or improve the dialog or the clunky, awkward performances which sprang from it; no rationalizing can make up for the misuse of characters like Maul, Dooku, Amidala and Grievous, who are either underused, introduced too late in the series to be fully effective, or, in Padme's case, have their roles gutted at the climactic moment by poor editing choices. However, all of this being true, it does not change the fact, either, that the prequels, for all their warts and brown spots, were an original idea placed within a rich and realized universe where internal logic largely held together, and that they told a very complex and adult story in a sweeping, overflowing manner which is not less appealing for the clumsiness of its execution. Ultimately, the prequels are not great or even particularly good films taken as a single mass, but they have a sincerity, a charisma, a passion for their own existence which reminds me of an imaginative, hyperactive, somewhat inarticulate man spluttering out a fairy tale of his own composition. There is nothing cynical about them, and unlike Sidious -- or Disney -- they have no political "message" or taint of self-righteousness. They expound, but they do not lecture. Time has been surprisingly kind to them, and I firmly believe that in another twenty years, they will still be enjoyed on some level or other by the masses of fandom, while the sequel trilogy will be mercifully and justly forgotten.

ELEGY FOR A (NAZI) CHILD STAR

A man dies twice. Once when he takes his last breath, and once when someone says his name for the last time. -- Egyptian axiom

I think we would all agree that the words "child star" carry with them a taint, an element of tragedy, which does not apply to the adult version of stardom. Notwithstanding the qualification of "child," which implies a reduced value of the stardom in question, the history of Hollywood is also a history of child exploitation and the brief and often destructive quality of fame as a whole. But "Hollywood" is a curious word in itself, is it not? It simultaneously describes a town, an area of a great city, a mentality, and an entire industry; and it follows that this industry is alive and well in many places outside of the physical location of Hollywood, and indeed, of the United States. Put another way, Americans neither have a cornered market on making movies nor on the dubious morals and practices of the movie industry. Every nation has its own characteristics and quirks, its own peculiarities which govern the way its popular culture is conceived and manufactured, but when one takes a good step back and looks at the movie industry, not only in other lands but in other times, one discovers there is much more that is familiar than that which is strange. A tragic end to those who have been called "child stars" is, sadly, not only a common story anywhere cameras roll, but anywhen. And this takes us to the brief and somwhat incandescent life of Klaus-Detlef Sierck, a boy who came to stardom in Hitler's Germany.

Sierck was born in Berlin-Charlottenburg, in the Weimar Republic, on March 30, 1925, the son of the theatrical and movie director Hans-Detlef Sierck and the actress Lydia Brinken. Klaus-Detlef was what we in America would call "Second Generation Hollywood" -- born into the business, and therefore, perhaps anyway, fated to become part of it. In 1928, when Klaus-Detlef was just three years old, his parents divorced, and his father soon married the Jewish actress Hilde Jary. Whether this encouraged Lydia to join the Nazi Party I do not know, but she did in fact join it, and after Hitler's ascension to power in 1932, was able to legally bar Hans-Detlef from seeing his only son, by virtue of his having disgraced himself by marrying a Jewess.

Despite this social stigma, Papa Sierck enjoyed a prosperous career in Germany for a few years, first as a theatrical director and later as a contracted film director for UFA, a leading German movie studio. At that point, life was not easy for Jews in Germany nor for gentile Germans who were married to them, but what we now describe as "The Holocaust" was still some years away. Eventually, however, he saw the handwriting on the wall, and he and Hilde emigrated to the United States, where he took the name “Douglas Sirk” and became a leading director in Hollywood for many years: indeed, his first feature was a violently anti-Nazi movie called "Hitler's Madman," which debuted in 1943.

Meanwhile, in Germany, and no doubt encouraged by his mother (and his genes), Klaus-Detlef entered the world of acting in 1935, when he was just ten years old, in the short film "The Seeds Are Growing." This was the first of thirteen movies in which he would appear in gradually ever-larger roles. They included "Serenade" (1937), "A Prussian Love Story" (1938), and "The Immortal Heart" (1939). It was after this that Klaus really came unto his own, with a breakout performance in the mega-hit "Cadets." This film, directed by the ardent and very technically adept Nazi Karl Ritter, is a superb example of how political messages are best served to the masses as entertainment rather than overt propaganda. Set during the 7 Years War, it is the story of a group of German military school cadets, mostly very young children, who take up arms against a Russian invasion and make a heroic defense of an abandoned fort. German boys went crazy over the film, driving huge box office numbers and most definitely romanticizing the idea of war as a right of passage, and dying for the Fatherland as the ultimate act of patriotism, concepts very dear to Hitler's heart.

A much more overt appeal to Nazi ideology came in 1941's "Chin Up, Johannes!" in which Klaus-Detlef starred as Johannes von Riedel, a sullen German kid who grew up in South America with his expatriate father and must now adjust to life in the Third Reich. The film depicts Ridel as a prissy, intolerable brat who is eventually sent to a special Nazi school to learn "German values" -- meaning, in this case, the ethic of the Nazi Party, which prized physical toughness, obedience to authority, and loyalty to the group. Johannes at first rejects and is rejected by his schoolmates, but eventually begins to "get the message," whereupon his life, and his relationship with his father and aunt, improve and he becomes a happy and enthusiastic member of Hitler's youth. This movie is as bad as it sounds, lacking all of the subtlety of "Cadets," and is also boiling over with unintentional, but comical, homo-eroticism: only its depictions of life at the school have any interest to the viewer. Sierck's performance, however, is effective: he's meant to come off as a little shit, and he does, quite credibly. Perhaps unfortunately for him, Joseph Goebbels, the German minister for propaganda, detested the film, considering it too obvious and saccharine to make effective propaganda and this may have contributed to Klaus' eventual fate. (Goebbels was notorious for his vindictiveness toward artists of any kind who he felt had crossed, vexed, disappointed or otherwise angered him: merely appearing in a movie he hated could spell ruin for an actor's career).

Despite this, Klaus-Detlef had one more moment of cinematic glory to come. In 1942, he appeared as Young Prince Heinrich in the big-budget smash, "The Great King." This film, a biopic of Frederick the Great, was meant as a morale-builder for Germans anxious about the overwhelming odds they were facing during WW2. Both Hitler and the Nazis idolized Frederick, who had managed to save Prussia from a vastly superior alliance of nations very similar to the one Germans themselves faced during the 7 Years War of 1756 - 1763. Reminding the German people of Frederick's success in the face of overwhelming odds was a much-used propganda device during the Nazi era. In any event, "The Great King" proved to be Klaus-Detlef's final cinematic appearance, for though we know he was part of a theater company in Kattowtz for some or all of 1942, he was soon to recieve his draft notice.

Whether Goebbels accelerated this process out of spite, as he had with some others, is unknown; as a member of the class of 1925, Klaus-Detlef would have been eligible for conscription in May of 1943 anyway, and Germany did not exempt actors from military service (though it did permit them furlough to make pictures when possible). His opinions on the Nazis, on the war, and on the role he was about to play in it are unknown, but he did end up in uniform, specifically as a fusilier in the Panzer-Grenadier-Division "Großdeutschland," which is in itself a fact of some interest. The GD, as it was known, was widely regarded as “the” elite unit of the regular German Army, with special emphasis on spit and polish, Prussian-style drill, and comradeship ritial, and for a long time was volunteer-only, though as it grew larger in size and the war situation more dire, it eventually found less noble ways of filling its ranks. Members were entitled to wear special insignia, and were expected to show courage far above that expected of an ordinary German soldier. By all accounts, they did.

The GD spent most of its service on the Eastern Front as a “fire brigade,” rushing from one crisis point to another, inflicting and suffering enormous casualties and participating in most of the great battles of that part of the war. It was by no means uncommon for its units to return from action having suffered 90% losses, with sergeants in command of rifle companies and lieutenants in command of battalions. The odds were overwhelmingly against survival for any length of time, and like millions of others, Klaus-Detlef's number came up double zero.
He was killed in action at Novoaleksandrovka in the Ukraine, possibly on March 6, 1944, though the German magazine Film-Kurier (Issue No. 45) lists his demise as occurring on May 22, 1944. His grave is located in the Ivaniwka military cemetery. He was either eighteen or a newly-minted nineteen years of age at the time of his death.

Klaus-Detlef's father went on to become a prolific and very successful, if not very critically appreciated, director in America, operating under the name "Douglas Sirk" and directing a very impressive 30 films between 1943 and 1959, when he abruptly retired. His work, known for its melodramatic themes and lush visual style, eventually went through a successful critical re-appraisal: Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo del Toro and Pedro Almodóvar have all cited him as an influence. One critic noted that while his films were generally dismissed at the time as melodramas catering toward women, they contained deeper subtexts; the themes were not always what they appeared to be.

Sirk seems to have spent the rest of his life searching for a way to fill the void his son's death left within him. He had not seen much if anything of Klaus-Detlef since 1928, and nothing at all since 1937. It is doubtful there was any communication between them, especially once the Second World War began in 1939. But we do know that Klaus-Detlef was not only Sirk's only son, he was his only child, and the pain of losing him thrice over -- first through divorce, then through Hitler's anti-Jewish laws, and finally through death -- must have been excruciating, and, in the nature of emotional pain, perhaps grown more unbearable over time. The American movie star Rock Hudson, who was born the same year as Klaus-Detlef, and who made 9 films with Sirk, described the director as "like ol' dad to me, and I was like a son to him." It is quite possible this relationship offered Sirk a balm for his pain, never having been allowed to either be a father to Klaus nor oversee his professional development as an actor. An online article I found talks about Sirk's direction of the controversial "A Time to Love and a Time to Die" (1958), one of his last movies:

'A Time to Love and a Time to Die,' a sympathetic story of a young Nazi soldier on the eastern front, was greeted with head-scratching bewilderment when it first appeared. It was only thirteen years after the war had ended. The world was still recovering from the revelations of the Nazi atrocities, and here was Sirk making what seemed like an apologia for the Nazis and sympathetically portraying the hardships and devastation ordinary Germans had had to bear during a war that they unleashed on the world. But today it can be seen for what it was: a devastating picture of the destruction that war visits on everyone, victims and perpetrators alike—and one of his most heartfelt films. It was also an unvarnished attempt to reconcile with his estranged and long-lost son.'

I noted at the beginning of this elegy that "child star" has a tragic connotation and that fame itself is inherently tragic in many ways, not least of which in its tendency to go much faster than it arrives, and to leave no traces behind. Klaus-Detlef Sierck would seem to embody this sense of tragedy to a Shakespearian degree. While fame itself did not necessarily destroy him -- we simply don't know if Goebbels had a hand in his going into the GD or not -- it did not save him, and like Klaus himself, was quickly forgotten. I am unsure what the moral of his story is, only that it makes me want to live a little more fully while I myself am here, and to whisper the name of all the Klaus-Detlef Siercks of the world once in a while...and thus keep them living.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN

Just a brief note to bid you season's greetings on this, my favorite of holidays. It's true that I don't have much to do on Halloween since I moved back East, but like Scrooge with Christmas, I try to keep the spirit of Halloween with me all year 'round and regardless of location. Why, this very night, I took my $3.95 "Pumpkin Master" drill and bored some holes in an albino pumpkin, the first belated step to turning it into a hockey mask jack o'lantern. At the rate I'm going, I'll have a first rate lantern by, oh, Thanksgiving.

Now, every year at this time I watch as many horror movies as time allows. This season was no different, but I thought I'd share a quick list of what I watched, as it will prove useful in later discussions about the genre of horror, why we humans created it, and why we go to such lengths to maintain it. It is, after all, a curious facet of humanity, that we seek out at this time of year the very thing we avoid the rest of it -- the experience of being frightened. Hell, we actually pay for the privilege!

What I've seen so far:

The Thing (John Carpenter)
The Fog (John Carpenter)
Halloween (John Carpenter)
Halloween (David Gordon Green)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Dwight H. Little)
Frankenstien Must Be Destroyed (1969)
The Prowler (1981)
The Walking Dead (Seasons 4 - 6)
The Raincoat Killer (documentary series)

Not a very extensive or very diverse list, to be sure, but then again, I don't have as much free time on my hands as I used to in the days of Hollywood gig work. I'll tuck in a few more during the post-Halloween "grace period" I always give myself, say to the end of the first week of November, and we'll have ourselves a good fireside chat about what scares us. T'il then, don't take any candy from strangers.

TIPS FOR NEW WRITERS

I often get asked if I have any advice for aspiring or newfangled writers. The truth is that I do, quite a bit of it actually, but when the subject comes up, I'm usually unprepared to answer the question. Either it comes at me in drive-by fashion, when I'm walking down the hall or sharing an elevator, or otherwise in a social setting, when I'm half in the bag or have a mouthful of pizza between me and the answer. The present being neither circumstance, I'd like to take a moment to discuss what I think constitutes good advice. It comes from years of experience and by virtue of many, many mistakes, some humiliating, some merely expensive. It is very broad advice -- I have already discoursed on specific writing techniques in this blog, and will do so again in the future -- but it is not without its uses, especially to those new to the game.

1. Write. Writing is like athletics. If you want to be good, you have to practice. I do not necessarily mean the hoary collegiate technique of the writing prompt, but simply writing for its own sake. Write anything. Write ideas. Write feelings. Write opinions. Write nonsense. Keep a journal or a diary and write in it every day. Watch dramatic scenes on television or film and then write them out as if they were a novel. Scribble ridiculous crossover fan-fiction. Just write. Don't necessarily have any objective or purpose in mind. Don't think about whether it's any good. Don't worry about publication. Don't worry about plagiarism or imitating someone else's style. Simply create a playspace within your own head, where you are free to do anything you want, and then do it. Do it badly, do it wrongly, but do it. Discover what works and what doesn't. From all of this, you will not only develop your own voice through trial and error, you will also keep your creative faculty in tone. Writing, I have found, becomes easier the more you do of it. Those who regard every word they produce as solemn and sacred are also the sort who suffer from "writer's block," an affliction which only exists in those who don't keep their creative muscles warm and limber.

2. Read. I have occasionally encountered self-described authors who boast that they never read, but have produced novels nonetheless, conjured out of pure talent. Needless to say (though I will say it anyway), their novels are always and without exception, rubbish. Reading is the key to writing -- period. And one should read everything, from trash to classics, from comic books and screenplays to the throwaway potboilers meant to be abandoned on beach towels or airplane seats. Read erotica, fantasy, mystery, science-fiction. Read autobiographies and biographies and books about war. Read poetry. Read old army manuals. Read. You will never develop a voice of your own until you have listened to a thousand other voices.

3. Finish. Nearly everyone I knew in Hollywood had a half-finished script which was going to turn the industry on its head. Nearly everyone I knew in graduate school had a half-finished novel which was going straight to the bestseller lists. But "going" is a curious and tricky thing, is it not? It implies that one will one day be "arriving." For most of these folks, the day of arrival never came. Great ideas are commonplace, but without ruthless determination, they remain ideas. The true hallmark of a writer is not the ability to conjure a great story, or to outline it in meticulous detail, or to start it in a fury of creative passion, but to finish it. Amateurs are "going," professionals get there. Exactly how they get there I will explain in other points below, but for this one, I will simply say that the goal when one begins is to get across the finish line by any means necessary, and the best way to do this is to remember that a first draft is just that: a first draft. It doesn't have to be good, it has to be finished. A book or a short story which is 99% finished may as well be unwritten. It's an either/or situation. All or nothing.

4. Act quickly on inspiration. Every now and again, a writer gets hit with a really good idea. We know it is a good idea because it excites us, gets us out of bed at 3AM, prevents us from concentrating on anything else. In these circumstances it is crucial to act immediately, or as soon as circumstances possibly allow, and begin writing. Again, it hardly matters if what is set down is any good, merely that it get to paper at once. The initial momentum one gets from a creative epiphany is very powerful stuff, but there is no second wind: that first jolt runs as far as it runs, and then it's up to you to carry it across the finish line, which may yet be many miles distant. It is absolutely fatal to sit on a burning hot idea for too long: it will cool and congeal, and you will lose all impulse to act upon it. That original blaze of enthusiasm, once extinguished, can never or almost never be rekindled.

5. Having said that, sometimes it's okay to let the cookie bake . Not every idea we have comes fully developed. Most come as images, scraps, fragments, titilating hints, which, when we examine them closely, don't have a lot of logic or substance. In some cases these are enough to start and even finish the process if writing a story. Often, however, they are not. I have had ideas which I turned into stories in a few days or even a single day, and others which I turned over in my mind for years or decades before I acted upon them. Many a great idea has been ruined because the author did not give the idea time and thought to develop it to its true potential. So how do we make a distinction? Well, as a general rule, the simpler an idea, the easier it is to act upon; the more complex, the lengthier the process of getting it to paper in a manner which will do it justice.

6. Perfect is the enemy of good. When people tell me, "It's all well and good for you to say 'finish the story,' but how do I do that when I've never finished anything?" Well, for starters, you have to let go of the idea that your first draft has to be good, or even half-decent. Hell, it can be a steaming pile of beetle-infested camel dung so long as it is complete. The purpose of a first draft is to exist. Quality is not the objective but merely completion. To finish a draft is success. Its level of quality is almost irrelevant. I cannot stress this enough.
One of the stigmata of amateur writers is the belief that laboring and sweating over every sentence they write possesses some kind of inherent virtue. This belief, which is often sincere but just as often tied to a form of arrogance, is the main reason most "aspiring writers" are always "aspiring" and never just "writers." Obviously, it is better to produce a good first draft than a bad one, but again, the real goal is to get that damned draft in hand, because...

7. everything can be fixed by the drafting process . There is no story so badly written, so terribly concieved and executed, that it cannot be enormously improved by subsequent drafts. It may take 20 drafts to get to that point, and the point may merely be mediocrity, but vast improvement is always possible. The beauty of drafting is that it is an open-ended process: one can continue it for years if necessary, and if the writer has any talent at all, at some point it will always achieve at least a large portion of its object.

8. Expanding on this, learn how to take criticism. I am referring here to the editing process, which is different, but often intertwined, with the drafting process. I myself usually write three or four drafts before I submit my work to my editor, but every writer has his or her own beliefs on when a story is ready for a second-party review. Regardless of timing, however, at some point or other, be it third draft or thirteenth, a serious writer will hire an editor to review their work, clean up technical errors, and make suggestions about story and style. This is a critical moment, because it is the first time their work is subjected to outside scrutiny, and many of their cherished ideas, scenes, characters and dialog may suddenly be under attack. An amateur writer will always respond defensively and even angrily to this attack, but it is important to remember that such assault is precisely what you are paying the editor for. You do not have to agree with the criticism or take the suggestions, but you must listen, and you must take time to consider the arguments brought against your execution and weigh them carefully. To do this you must get around your own ego, which is often nothing but a nuisance and an impediment. I have often had stormy emotional reactions to the critiques of my editor, but time has shown me that he is right somewhere around 80% of the time. And this brings me to my last point, which is that the writer must trust and respect their editor, and if they do not, they must move on and find and editor with whom they can have a healthy, productive relationship -- but "healthy and productive" doesn't mean smooth and painless. Your editor is paid to give you a beating, but it is a constructive one, and if you can't take it and can't learn how, you really have no business in the realm of traditional publishing.

9. Expanding on this: Writing is the business of rejection. If you intend to go the traditional route, by which I mean submitting short stories and novels to magazines, literary agencies, and traditional publishing houses, in the hopes of seeing them in print, you must steel yourself for plenty of rejection. Most writers are extremely thin-skinned, modestly delusional egotists, and believe everything they produce is genius; but most magazines, agents and imprints are swamped up to their gills in such self-proclaimed geniuses and are looking for any excuse to shitcan your submission and shoot you a form-letter rejection. And when they do this, when they tell you they aren't interested in that story it took you three years to write, you can neither appeal nor retaliate. You simply have to take it, which is incredibly trying. It helps enormously to know, going in, that having doors metaphorically slammed in your face is part of what you are signing on for when you decide to become a writer. That won't make the initial round of rejections any less painful, but it may allow you to endure that pain more stoically, a characteristic shared by every professional writer.

10. Curb your expectations. Very few people understand how little money is involved in the publishing game, whether self, indie or traditional. Self-publishing, whether through Amazon or some other means, is something of a Catch-22 in regards to profits. To sell any books at all, whether print or electronic, takes considerable promotional effort, and these promotions cost money. What makes the matter so damnably difficult are two factors. First, real profit lies in print sales -- paperbacks and hardcovers -- but these are expensive, and unknown authors with no publishing promotional muscle behind them are unlikely to attract many buyers. The logical answer is to discount the print books, but to create a physical book costs a certain amount of money, and the printer has to make a profit, so even if the author is willing to take bare-bones percentages, the printer is not. So what, you say? Most people favor electronic books nowadays? Well, and once again, unknown authors, without publishers behind them, are unlikely to make sales in a glutted market unless they combine paid promotions with self-promotions in which the price of their e-books is reduced to something like 99 cents a copy. Considering the royalty on 99 cents is, viz the Amazon model, about 33 cents a unit, it takes 300 sales to make $100. When one takes into account the fact that most self-published authors average one sale a day,
you see that turning any profit at all is largely a pipe dream.

Micro-and-very small imprint publishing is not much better. These houses do not have much money and they usually lack much influence, which in the publishing industry comes down to advertising and the ability to get bookstores to carry your books. This naturally inhibits sales and forces the author to work as his own promoter -- and authors, often introverts by nature, are notoriously bad at promotion. You may or may not receive a small advance, say $1,000, but your royalties may never exceed this, in which case your total profit for the entire book might stand at that initial $1,000. But even if you get a more substantive advance and the book sells some thousands of copies in a reasonably short time, your royalty percentage would be 20 to 30% for a hardcover sale, 15% for a trade paperback, and (perhaps) 25% for an eBook. But these percentages come from the publisher's revenue on the sales, not the gross profits, so the slice is that much smaller. Example: you get a $2,000 advance on yourr novel, then sell 1,000 books at $10 a copy; your profit is roughly $2,500. However, the advance is taken out of your royalties, so your actual profit is $500.

But what about big-time publishers? The same story obtains on a larger scale. A Big Six publisher may give you a $15,000 advance against royalties, but it will also make you wait up to two years before it can put your book on shelves, because the slots ahead are generally booked out to that length or something close to it. Thus you get a check for $15,000...and then nothing for two years, whereupon the book, at our (very) imaginary price of $10/copy must sell 6,000 copies before you recieve your first royalty check. That averages to $7,500 for the first two years, whereupon you may make absolutely nothing more, ever, if you don't hit the threshold I have described above.

I could go on about this last point, but I don't want to discourage anyone. I am simply trying to lay a few cards on the table in regards to what authors can expect money-wise when they publish. Money can be made, and is made, but it generally not the sory of money that allows one to quit their job or change their lifestyle. Sometimes it is merely cigarette and beer money, and sometimes there is no profit at all, and even a net loss, despite respectable sales, due to the e-book price and royalty structure, versus how much it costs to pay a promotion to sell your book. Novices who blow up the market with their first novels and become hugely wealthy bestselling authors -- J.K. Rowling, E.L. James, Dan Brown, etc. -- are extreme examples, lottery winners, flukes. As the saying goes: you can make a killing in writing, but not a living. Playing cold percentages, t will most likely either be your side-hustle or a hobby.

So there they are. Ten tips for new writers. The thoughts are my own and other writers of greater stature might think very differently, but this is my soapbox, and I preach in my own way. I do apologize for turning the final tip into an essay, but I wouldn't have written it if I didn't think the point needed to be made and made clearly. Writing is not an easy hobby, much less an actual line of work: it helps to understand just what the hell you're getting into before you take the ride.

BOXING AS A BAROMETER OF THE RACIAL STRUGGLE

I happened to be living in Los Angeles when the George Floyd protests swept through the city last year. They were for the most part peaceful, but there were outbursts of fairly severe rioting and looting, especially in my old neighborhood of Mid-City West. I will always remember what it was like to see the vehicles of the National Guard rolling through my streets at night, while in the distance helicopters throbbed and the voices of an angry crowd could be heard, almost like waves at the ocean. It seemed terribly surreal and dystoptian, but in a sense it also seemed overdue.

These protests had very complex and deep-rooted origins, and were no doubt exacerbated by the need of people to expend energy after months of pandemic lockdown conditions, but at the heart of them, obviously, was race. Race is an issue over much of the globe -- including Africa -- but in the United States it has a peculiar character. The U.S. was not the last country in the Americas to rid itself of chattel slavery, that distinction falls to Brazil, but we practiced it so long, and on a scale so vast, that it became part of the social fabric of the nation -- even that quite substantial part of the nation which rejected it. And contrary to popular opinion, racism did not create American slavery. Racism, as a philosophy, was cobbled together as a means of justifying its existence. And it was here, really, that the true poison was introduced into our bloodstream, for the justification persisted after slavery itself was forcibly abolished and destroyed.

The mechanics of racism are now, in 2021, as peculiar as the mechanics of slavery were in 1859. The idea that a person could be bitterly anti-slavery and yet also deeply racist is difficult for the modern mind to grasp, but it was a common syndrome before the Civil War and remained one when the war finally ended. Nobody today would admit that they wanted a return of race-based chattel slavery, but this does not prevent millions from holding opinions almost morally indistinguishable from those of an antebellum slaveowner. Indeed, it is not difficult to coax forth statements even from people who would laugh at the idea that they themselves harbor any form of racism or racial self-loathing (they are ultimately the same), which expose the ugliness of their inner beliefs.

What does this have to do with boxing, you ask? Quite a bit, actually. Sports are and always have been a kind of cultural barometer of the nation which embraces them. In the U.S., a nation which prides itself on its virility, we have had a highly complex relationship with our combat sports, most especially boxing. Boxing, which became fashionable 20 years after the Civil War, was an enormously popular sport with "white America" when racial laws and social mores prevented, or at least made very difficult, whites and blacks from fighting each other. Those who controlled our social order frowned on the idea of white and black fighters mixing it up because they did not want blacks thinking that punching whites in the face was something to be encouraged. Psychology also came into play: one of the means by which slavery and later, Jim Crow, were perpetuated was the idea that the black man, by allowing himself to be enslaved for so long, was not actually a man at all: he he might be physically strong but he was mentally and spiritually weak. He was something less than, inferior, near-human but not quite. The heavyweight champion then, by extension, could not be black, since to be heavyweight champ was by accepted definition to be the man, the ultimate specimen of the sex. This at any rate is a thesis maintained by some who study social phenomena. Even Martin Luther King, Jr. made reference to it, albeit not in the context of boxing.

In point of fact, blacks and whites often fought during the early years of professional boxing, which is generally agreed upon as coming into existence in 1885, when the first heavyweight champion was crowned. Blacks, however, were not "encouraged" to fight for world titles, and many were simply denied the opportunity for the entirety of their careers. Racism itself was not always the main factor: many promoters who would have been happy to book black fighters in title contests were simply frightened of potential race riots. George Dixon, a black Canadian, won the world bantamweight championship in 1888, and as Carolyn Lee Adams wrote:

Dixon’s life was marked by the times in which he lived. Post-Civil War America was rife with fierce racism, and Dixon’s career was a lightning rod for this hate. Dixon participated in a “Carnival of Champions” at the Olympia Club in New Orleans. When Dixon beat the brakes off Jack Skelly, his white opponent, the reaction of the crowd was so dangerously intense that many promotions put a halt to mixed-race bouts.

Further proof of this is offered in the heavyweight championship reign of Jack Johnson. Johnson was the first black man to hold the title, and in the span of his reign (1908 - 1915), he was the target of much harassment and vitriol, even from the government. A black heavyweight champion was intolerable to the social order, and when Johnson was finally knocked out by Jess Willard, a white man, the powers that be made sure no black man would challenge for the crown for many years afterward. Jack Dempsey, a white fighter who held the title from 1919 - 1926, confirmed this in his autobiography. Often criticized for never fighting a black challenger, Dempsey, who had frequently fought and beat blacks as a contender, remarked that it was the politics of boxing which prevented it: his promoters "didn't want another Jack Johnson situation" where the outcome of any fight might end in a race riot.

Eventually they got this "situation" anyway, in "The Brown Bomber," Joe Louis, who was champion so long (1937 - 1949) that the public finally came to accept that the best man -- not the best white man, but the best man -- was going to win and should in fact win. Indeed, as the 20th century hit and then surpassed its halfway mark, a marked racial change slowly began to make itself felt in the boxing world. The sport, which had always had a massive number of whites in every weight class, especially American whites, and in top contention / championship level, began increasingly to become a black and, in the lower weight classes, a Latino concern. The last "lineal" white heavyweight champions of the 20th century were Rocky Marciano (1952 - 1956) and Ingemar Johansson (1959 - 1960). From 1960 - 2009, the lineal title was held exclusively by black fighters. This was bitter medicine to some, but as the years wore on, it became accepted that the time of white Americans, or indeed, any white men period, holding "the most prestigious title in pro sports" was over: done and dusted. It was never, or very rarely discussed in an open way, but many seemed to feel that black men, who were already dominant in basketball and to a somewhat lesser extent football, had now inverted the earlier stereotype of "not being men:" they alone seemed to possess the masculinity necessary to dominate combat sports at the premier level. This surrender of masculine agency by American whites was a curious phenomena, in some sense understandable, in some sense disgusting, and in a final sense slightly amusing, as many disgusting things tend to be. When I was growing up in the 80s, it was taken as a matter of course that one "always bet on the black guy" (one of the biggest laughs in 1988s THE NAKED GUN came when Leslie Nielsen's character uttered this line). Commenting on ROCKY IV (1985), the black director Spike Lee notoriously remarked that "the only way you'll ever see two white men fight for the heavyweight title is in a movie."

The fact that a comment as blatantly racist as this did not provoke much if any outrage or even notice by the big public goes far in underscoring the perculiar dynamics of race in the United States, but it also highlighted the unspoken belief that possession of the heavyweight title by a particular race was still seen as a confirmation of its athletic and masculine primacy. This was doubly bizarre and distasteful when one considers that the idea of national superiority manifesting itself through sports was concieved first by the Nazis, who used the medal count at the 1936 Olympics to tout their theories of Aryan supremacy (though the Jesse Owens story is inspiring, Germany completely dominated the count with 89 medals, 33 of which were gold; the next-highest contender was the U.S., with 56 medals and 24 golds). Later still, the Soviet Communists, who in effect were not less bload-soaked than the Nazis, took up the idea that athletic domination proved the superiority of their ideology. One almost had to struggle to remember that sports are competitions between people before they are confrontations between races or ideas.

As recently as 1996, this mentality was on display with THE GREAT WHITE HYPE, a comedy about an attempt by cynical boxing promoters to create, more or less out of thin air, a white contender to challenge a dominant black champion. It is taken for granted by everyone throughout the movie that such a thing is an impossibility, and indeed it proves to be; yet it is also taken for granted that the public will pay to see the mismatch: whites out of hope for a white champion, and blacks, presumably, to see the white guy get knocked out. The fact that everyone regards these response as natural and inevitable, both in the movie and among the audience, is at the core of the problem.

The individual nature of boxing, and the savagery of it, have been coupled with humanity's curious need to find avatars and proxies, to transpose identity, to choose champions who represent us as people. A nation of tens or hundreds of millions, or even a race of billions, places its hopes within one man, and takes his victory as their victory and his defeat as their defeat. This is fascinating and absurd, and has elements of tragedy in it, as Jerry Cooney, Jerry Quarry and Tommy Morrison could tell you. And it could be argued that the way "white America" adapted to this percieved humiliation was to switch mental gears, and begin to swap racial for nationalistic enthusiasm. Instead of being proud that the heavyweight champion was white, they could instead take pride in the fact that the heavyweight champion was, from 1960 - 1998, always an American. Race did not leave the picture by any means, but at the most convenient possible time it was overlaid with nationalism: and crowds of Yanks chanting "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" when an American fought a foreigner were at any rate preferable to mobs screaming racial slurs at a fellow citizen. It was progress of a dubious sort, but it was distinctly progress. Then another curious thing happened. Black men -- whether American or not -- lost what might be called their collective grip on the crown.

It has been said that if you live long enough, you will see the wheel turn all the way 'round.
When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, it unlocked a gigantic population of perspective and actual athletes from both the former Soviet republics and Eastern European countries who had been debarred from professional competition by virtue of Communist ideology. These people -- these white people -- made themselves felt slowly but steadily throughout the 1990s in many sports, but probably none so dramatic as boxing. When Spike Lee made his comment, there was no virtually no prospect of a white man of any nationality taking any version of the heavyweight title. Within a few years of him uttering it, there was no version of that title which was held by a black man. Indeed, the last black champion to hold the lineal heavyweight crown was Lennox Lewis, who retired in 2004. Since then, mostly Ukranian and Russian fighters held the various titles, and the lineal title has been in white hands since 2009. It is presently held by Tyson Fury, a white British gypsy, who took it from Wladimir Klitschko, a white Ukranian. It is a similar story in other weight classes. At the time of this writing, and notwithstanding vacancies, between 140 lbs and heavyweight, there are no lineal black champions at all. This is a state of affairs that was unimaginable only 20 years ago.

Now, you could be forgiven for asking why I claim any of this matters at all. Many factors play into why a man chooses to become a prize fighter, and they are generally economic before they are anything else. The decline of "white fortunes" in boxing for 50-odd years certainly had more to do with a decline in white participation than any other factor, and whites participated less because the economic circumstances of Italians, Irish and other white ethnic subgroups improved, removing the necessity of fighting for a living. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the decline of those white fortunes did not sit well with "white America" and had to be dealt with psychologically, just as it did sit well with "black America" and became part of what might be called black identity. But that is why the subject is in fact important. It matters not because it is happening and has happened, but because the reaction of the world to the shift of control over the "most prized title in sports" from one race to another has mostly been indifference. Nobody, or very nearly nobody, seems to care that Tyson Fury is white, because few people view the possession of his title as proof of anything except that he is the best heavyweight on the planet. There is no significance to him holding the crown beyond that, no racial or ethnic subtext. In the buildups to Fury's two fights with Deontay Wilder, a black American heavyweight, I did not see one mention, anywhere, of the hated and disgusting phrase "Great White Hope." Nor did I even seem much in the way of nationalistic drum-beating, such as I witnessed years ago when Ray Mercer fought Lennox Lewis, or Mike Tyson fought Frank Bruno. Even what is called "black Twitter" took Wilder's loss more with humor than upset: there was some upset, certainly, but Wilder's attempts to make excuses for his defeat were met with ridicule, and no one framed the fight as "Wilder lost" but rather "Fury won." This is telling. When a "side" doesn't want to admit defeat, they always frame the defeat in terms of mistakes their "side" made, and never credit the "enemy."

I view this is a progress. Perhaps it's a sorry commentary on the human race (or just myself), but this seeming breakdown of tribal reactions to athletic contests strikes me as proof that people are waking up to the absurdity of loading deeper meanings into a fight between two men -- and beyond that, seeing a need to identify with a fighter because he shares the same racial characteristics and for no other reason. In time, the racial demographics of boxing champions will shift again, and it will be telling to observe our cultural barometer and gauge the extent to which anyone notices or cares.

As I said at the opening, the mechanics of racism (and by extension, nationalism, which is kissing cousin to racism) are bizarre and complicated. They lie deeply rooted in our history, and often manifest in subtle or unconscious ways. We learned a great deal about how ideas have evolved in this country in 30 years by contrasting the difference in public reaction to the Rodney King beating vs. the murder of George Floyd. Likewise, the means by which athletic contests are reported in the press and discussed on social media can give us a surprisingly clear picture of where we have made progress humans, and where there is still much work to be done.

The Best of the Bad: Death Wish 3

In Sun Valley, California, there is a small, run-down, flybown convenience store owned by a Korean who sits like a judge behind an inch-thick pane of grimy bulletproof glass. Every morning for a year I stopped in this store to buy a small styrofoam cup full of the world's worst coffee. It only cost a few quarters, but even then I was overpaying: the coffee was too strong, too hot, and tasted rather like the contents of an ashtray. Almost any coffee I have ever consumed, including that black muck they sell at 7/11 which resembles boiled mud, is superior in flavor and texture to the stuff I bought from this convenience store. And yet every morning, and sometimes once in the early afternoon, I'd slip away from my desk at Optic Nerve Studios and buy myself another round.

On the surface this decision made no sense. Not only did we possess our own coffee machines, there was no shortage of better-tasting options available within a short drive of the effects studio. Yet week in and week out for nearly a year I took my custom to that store, knowing full well it might be robbed while I was there. I did this for one reason and one reason alone: I had developed a taste for it.

We all like things that are bad for us, but most of those things look, taste, or feel good. This coffee looked shitty, tasted worse and gave me mild anxiety attacks. Nevertheless I enjoyed it. It is part of the general perversity of the human condition that it is even possible to take pleasure in what ought to be unpleasurable experiences, and it for this reason that I am a connoisseur of bad movies.

I don't mean bad movies in the ordinary sense. I cannot take any pleasure in films that are merely bad -- The Last Airbender, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Conan the Destroyer, The Specialist, Harbinger Down, 30 Days of Night, Fantasic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Rising Sun, etc. and so on. And I am not referring to the ordinary "guilty pleasure" movie which the viewer knows is trashy, sappy, mediocre etc. but has some kind of sentimental or emotional hold on them. Oh no. The sort of good-bad or great-bad film I am referring to is something quite distinct from the merely shitty or stupid-but-fun. It is a flick which is undeniably, irredeemably awful yet at the same time possesses an enormous charisma -- something that rivets your gaze to the screen, haunts you when the movie is over, and keeps you coming back for additional viewings years or even decades after your first encounter.

It so happens I have a personal Hall of Fame for Great Bad Movies, and after 100+ blogs here on Goodreads I think it's time it and you were introduced with this, the first installment of my BEST WORST MOVIES OF ALL TIME.

I'd like to begin with a personal favorite, one I saw not long after it came out in theaters, one I have enjoyed with guilty relish for no less than 34 years, and recently just watched again. It is (drum roll) Death Wish III.

It will be noted that the original Death Wish (1974) was a very serious film which is in many circles considered a minor classic in its genre. Directed by Michael Winner and starring Charles Bronson, it is the story of a prosperous architecht named Paul Kersey whose family is brutally destroyed by vicious criminals. Kersey, a lifelong pacifist, is unable to achieve satisfaction through the overloaded, broken-down criminal justice system and becomes a merciless vigilante, stalking the streets of New York City with a revolver and very cruel intentions. Death Wish was not really a story of revenge, for Kersey never finds the men who murdered his wife and raped his daughter. Rather, it was an expression of frustrated rage at a skyrocketing crime rate, a backlogged court system, and a perception that the streets of America's cities were owned by the criminal and not the police or the ordinary citizen. Some people labeled the film fascist in sentiment, while others saw it as a brutally frank examination of way high-minded principles collapse at contact with brutal realities. Either way, it is a legitimate movie and a starkly disturbing one.

The sequel, Death Wish 2 (1982), was by no means as composed or purposeful as the first. Indeed, it is mere exploitation. In it, Kersey is once again beset by criminals who destroy what is left of his family, and this time embarks on a quest to exterminate the actual culprits as opposed to any random hoodlum that gets in front of the muzzle of his .38 Detective Special. Although certainly a guilty pleasure -- Charles Bronson is always a kind of savage joy to watch, especially when blowing bad guys into hell -- it lacks the outrageousness necessary to qualify as great bad cinema. Thankfully, the requisite components are to be found in abundance in the sequel, Death Wish 3.

By 1985, the team of Winner and Bronson had evidently given up even making the pretense of having anything meaningful to say about crime, morals, society, or the human need to take revenge. At the same time, they declined the obvious course, which was to simply repeat the admittedly successful mid-level mayhem of the previous two flicks -- in each film, a little over a dozen people are killed. Instead, Winner & Co. charted a bold new course into the unexplored waters of OUTRAGEOUS CARTOON VIOLENCE.

Of course, violence by itself, even cartoonish violence you can't possibly take seriously, doesn't make for a great-bad film. No, and again no. One must mate the cartoon with THE BEST GOOD-BAD DIALOGUE YOU'RE LIKELY TO HEAR. Throw in OVER THE TOP ACTING AT ITS FINEST (even the stunt men in this film overdo it) and A WONDERFULLY FUNKY SOUNDTRACK (by Jimmy Page...yes, that Jimmy Page) you have the great-bad classic that is Death Wish 3.

Like a Mafia debt collector, this flicktoon lets you know right away what its intentions are. Before the credit sequence is even complete, Paul Kersey's best friend Charlie has been beaten to death in his own Bronx apartment by a group of street gangsters. Why? Who cares? Bronson -- I mean Kersey -- has been wronged, and the only option is nuclear. Indeed, the line between Kersey doing nothing and Kersey mowing down every man, woman and child in the room is so fine as to be of questionable existence. But before he can act, he's thrown into jail by devious NYPD Inspector Shriker (Ed Lauter), a frustrated, hard-bitten cop who, realizing Kersey is The Vigilante, wants to blackmail him into tackling the street gang terrorizing his Bronx precinct.

Of course, while Kersey's cooling his heels in jail, he meets Manny Fraker (Gavin O'Herlihey), the sadistic psychopath who runs the gang that murdered Charlie. The best part of Manny isn't his name, which everyone in the movie pronounces "Mandy," it's his reverse mohawk. (That's right, ole Fraker shaved the center of his skull, just so you know he's not only bad news, he's bad taste.) Well, the two men, oddly enough, do not get along. Fraker says things like, "Tell you what, I'm gonna kill a little old lady, just for you. Catch it on the six o'clock news." In response, Kersey says -- well, Kersey doesn't say much. He's the strong silent type. He stares at you, and the stare says, "Prepare to meet your horrible death, you ambulatory jar of street scum."

Accepting Shriker's offer, Kersey takes up residence in Charlie's apartment and proceeds to study Fraker's gang, which conveniently operates directly beneath his window, and even more conveniently possesses a dress code which essentially tells onlookers HELLO, I AM A CRIMINAL DEVIANT: ASK ME HOW I WILL LATER RAPE AND MURDER YOU. The costume designer for Death Wish 3 was, in my estimation, someone who came of age in 1953, right around the time Marlon Brando roared into Wrightsville on his Triumph motorcycle in The Wild Ones, and believed that even in 1985, street gangsters wore leather visor caps, Perfecto biker jackets, studded belts, pastel bandannas, day-glo facepaint, and other shit you'd see in an old video by the Village People. He also assumed that in an age when Mac-10s were readily available, most thugs would still employ that redoubtable weapon of the 50s, the switchblade.

(Incidentally, it still amazes me how much Perfecto biker jackets and switchblades still show up on television when a pill-popping hack writer needs a couple of ready-made goons. As recently as the turn of the millennium, television shows were still putting bad guys in these outfits and carrying these weapons: they may as well have been wearing chain mail and carrying crossbows.)

Kersey opens his campaign against the Sutter Avenue & Belmont gang by buying used car and parking it outside his apartment building. While dining with some neighbors, he hears the car being broken into and goes outside to see two thugs stripping it bare. The following conversation, worthy of Shakespeare, ensues:

WHITE THUG: Let's get the fucking car open!
BRONSON: Excuse me, please. Hey! What's the problem?
BLACK THUG: What?
BRONSON: With the car. What's the problem?
BLACK THUG: Get outta my fucking face!
WHITE THUG: We're stealing the fucking car! What's it to you?
BRONSON: It's my car!
BLACK THUG: (laughing, removing switchblade) Now you gonna die!

With no expression on his face and the most casual of movements, Bronson slips a .38 out of his sport coat and blows both men away, then walks back inside and resumes his dinner.

I think it was at this point, at the age of thirteen, that I realized how good this movie was going to be. I stopped the film, got a bag of Doritos and a Coke, and rewatched this scene, tears of laughter running down my beardless face.

The next act of the film sees Kersey waging low-intensity war against the gang, which is sluggish to realize this enemy is in their midst. The most memorable sequence here, and the most notorious, perhaps, of this notorious film, is known as The Death of The Giggler.

The Giggle has his own Wikipedia entry. Here it is:

The Giggler is a high ranking member of the Street Punk Gang in Death Wish 3. He is called The Giggler because of the way he laughs whenever he commits a crime. He is portrayed by Kirk Taylor.

[I should note here that Kirk Taylor and I used to share a barber when I lived in Burbank, California.]

The Giggler is not only high-ranking, he is popular with his fellows, because he is a very good thief, which is why he is deeply unpopular with the long-suffering local citizenry. In one scene, he escapes Kersey after robbing a woman, and taunts him as he gets away. He should have quit while he was ahead, because later, when he robs Kersey of his camera, our hero responds by removing his .475 Wildey Magnum, which fires a big-game hunting cartridge, and shoots the Giggler in the back, more or less causing him to explode (and also cease giggling). The entire neighborhood pours out into the streets in celebration, including a woman who, standing over the Giggler's mangled corpse, screams in ecstasy: "It's the creep who stole my pocketbook! Dead! Praise God! Praise God he's gone!"

The death of the Giggler makes Manny Fraker very angry ("They killed the Giggler, man...THEY KILLED THE GIGGLER!") He unleashes a curiously elaborate plot to kill Kersey which contains notes of Bond villainy, in that he could simply mow Kersey down with his Uzi, but elects to employ a coked-out assassin who doesn't even have a gun (this assassin is beaten senseless with a tire iron and then thrown off a roof). Fraker finally, successfully retaliates at last by committing various rapes and murders of those close to Kersey, and then kills Kersey's improbably young-and-hot girlfriend by burning her to death in her car. This follows a long tragic trend in the DEATH WISH movies (probably stolen from DIRTY HARRY movies), in that any love interest of Kersey's is bound to die. But killing Kersey's loved ones is less effective than Fraker hopes, and here is where shit gets completely crazy, and DEATH WISH 3 graduates to the realm of the surreal.

Up 'til this point, the movie has been quite violent, but nothing out of the ordinary for an urban "action thriller" of its type. Perhaps eight people have died. But it's now that Kersey gains access to a belt-fed .30 machine gun and a rocket launcher, at the same time Fraker decides to descend upon the neighborhood with a huge army of imported thugs. What follows is more akin to a World War Two movie than an urban vigilante flick. The last 20 - 30 minutes of this movie are a nonstop orgy of violence. Cars and buildings explode. People get set on fire. Whole mobs get mowed down by gunfire, stabbed or beaten to death. Kersey leads the frustrated people of the neighborhood against the Punks, and the Punks lose. One internet genius calculated that over the course of this movie, there are no less than 75 kills over 90 mins, or 0.833 kills per minute; but this does not do the savagery of DEATH WISH 3 any justice, for as I said, over the first 2/3 of the movie there are "only" about eight murders. Therefore the remaining 67 take place in the final act. I'm not sure the opening sequence of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN has a higher body count.

The script saves the best for last. Kersey and Shriker, having shot their guns empty thinning the ranks of the Punks, scramble back to Charlie's for more ammo. There they are confronted by Manny Fraker, who is determined to rid himself of his nemesis once and for all. Unfortunately for Manny, he discovers his pistol is little match for an anti-tank rocket launcher, with the result that he and his reverse mohawk are, in the words of one reviewer, "obliterated." The death of their fearless leader takes the heart out of the remaining Punks, and Shriker allows Kersey a head start out of the burning city. The final shots, as the credits roll, show Kersey calmly carrying his luggage through the smoke and mayhem, with plenty of spring in his step despite having just killed at least 50 people.

Looking back on these hastily-written lines, I can see they in no way do justice to the magnificent mayhem that is this movie. It is truly horrible, despite boasting a fairly impressive cast which includes not only Bronson, Lauter and O'Herlihey, but also Martin Basalm, Alex Winter and Marina Sirtis; and despite being helmed by Michael Winner, a director who was capable of creating films of minor classic status (like the original DEATH WISH and THE MECHANIC). What distinguishes it from a merely bad film, however, is its relentless commitment to its own awfulness. There is no attempt to make the movie "rise above" its subject material and indeed, sequences like the chubby black woman screaming "PRASIE GOD!" over the body of a murdered man consciously invite laughter. So too does the ridiculous costume designs for the villains, which are not as silly, as, say those seen in THE WARRIORS, but are pretty goddamned bad. One gets the sense that a bargain-basement prop house was raided by the producer, which is why the motorcycles look second or third-hand, the outfits are all mismatched, and in the cases of a few extras, some face-paint and a toilet plunger take the place of a leather jacket and a gun.

But it gets worse. The script, if you want to call it that, is awash with howlingly bad lines, the scraped-thin story is full of absurdity and plot holes, and the film's moral seems to be the best way to deal with criminals is to indiscriminately fire machine guns at them. Indeed, it is taken as a fait accompli that the system is hopelessly broken and that only vigilantism can produce results: "I hate creeps, too," Shriker tells Kersey early in the flick. "But I can't do anything about it: I'm a cop!" Moreover, neither Fraker nor Kersey avails themselves of the numerous opportunities they have to simply shoot the other one dead on the street at almost any point in the movie. It's simply an excuse for 90 minues of vicarious, cathartic carnage. One is supposed to leave the theater feeling purged. And the curious thing is, one does. This abysmal belch of a movie, which is stupid as well as irresponsible and silly, is also incredibly satisfying to watch. It plays on the hatred we all have of bullies, as well as the secret belief, shared by all men, that if we could just slaughter criminals instead of giving them due process, our world would be a much better place.

It's probably a mistake to read anything deeper into a movie like this, but I will try. It's often said that vigilante films are an expression of fascist sentiment. This is probably true, but it is not the whole truth; this must include an admission that they are also a very healthy way of releasing fascist impulses within ourselves. Films like Sidney Lumet's THE OFFENCE or William Wellman's THE OX-BOW INCIDENT take hard looks at vigilantism, and show us the potential consequences of circumventing due process. Even the original DEATH WISH contained a discussion of the moral quandary vigilantism poses to those who would take up the noose in the name of justice. But the DEATH WISH 3's of the world serve a different purpose, which is perhaps a not less necessary one. They let us release all of our pent-up aggression against the bad people of the world, and all of our frustration with the sprawling abstraction known as "the system" without actually harming anyone. Surely that gives me an excuse to watch the fucking thing once a year?

Many years ago, writing a review of DW3 on Amazon, I penned the following poem. Of all the hundreds of Amazon reviews I've written, this is the only one I ever put to verse. I think it sums up the flick better than this entire blog. Here it is:

We are the nameless gangsters

of Center Avenue and B

we wear facepaint and rob all day

no bloody good are we

Our leader's name is Mandy Fraker

he does a lot more than talk

he kills treacherous Hector with a knife

and wears a reverse mohawk

But Fraker's reign was blighted

like medical waste on a beach in New Jersey

by the vigilante, that man named Paul

that man named Paul Kersey

Paul Kersey it must be said

was not as young as he could be

his mustache was gray, his gait was slow

but his Wildey was a sight to see

He put the fat guy's head through prison bars

and shot those car thieves dead

and when the Giggler from him tried to take

he giggled his last instead

A tunnel great the Wildey blew

trough Giggler's heaving breast

he fell to the ground spitting blood out his mouth

and began his eternal rest

"THEY KILLED THE GIGGLER!" The punk did scream

yes they killed him, just like a rat!

which prompted our leader Mandy Fraker to say:

"They had no business doin' that."

So upon Paul Kersey we chose to unleash

a villain known to all as CUBA

but Kersey beat his ass with a big tire-iron

threw him off the roof and said "BOO-YA."

At long last we'd had quite enough of this spit

and summoned our gang army in all of its glory

looking like roadies from that band Judas Priest

and rejects from West Side Story

Our colorful crew might have scared those old folks

made even old Bennett say, "Fargit!"

but all it did to that man Paul Kersey

was present one big hell of a target

And when that blond thug had his Excellent Adventure

and Counselor Troi had "expired"

Fraker and Kersey they had their showdown

and the great rocket launcher was fired

Mandy was blown all over the Bronx

and the old folks' hearts did quicken

and for us in the gang we had but one consolation

our leader takes exactly like chicken!

AS I PLEASE VI: STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS EDITION

As I write this, a thunderstorm rumbles outside my windows. I will let my thoughts follow the sound.

I know that there are many here in the East who view thunderstorms as annoyances, inconveniences, or just flat-out pains in the ass. If you own a dog, for example, a bad thunderstorm will drive them into a state of panic. Likewise, if you live in certain areas, such a storm almost invariably knocks out the power, if only for a minute or two. And of course if you're driving, or just planted a garden, or were eating al fresco, the arrival of the storm will throw a proverbial monkey wrench in your plans. But I for one am grateful to have them again. In the thirteen years I lived in on the West Coast, I heard thunder exactly twice, and on neither occasion did it happen to rain. The thunderstorm as I understand it simply does not exist there.

Returning to the East after such an interval, I was struck by the many small differences between this part of the country and that one. The sky there is bluer, the clouds whiter, and the horizon much larger. The natural vegetation, such of it as exists, is of the desert variety -- cacti, succulents, palm trees. The air is always dry, and the sunlight much more powerful. In the early evenings, the sun turns white as it sets, and casts an appropriately whitish haze over the palms and the buildings. This haze is probably caused by pollution, but it is highly atmospheric and quite beautiful, rather like the filter-laden cinematography of a Tony Scott film.

I never met Tony Scott. I never met his more famous brother Ridley, either, but I worked for him, albeit in a curiously roundabout way. For some months, I labored long and hard doing post-post production on Prometheus. My job was to review every frame of B-roll footage shot on that movie, which amounted to several thousands of hours. (For the uninitiated, "B-Roll footage" is defined by Wikipedia thusly: "In film and television production, B-roll is supplemental or alternative footage intercut with the main shot.") I watched the footage and labeled it. When I was done, I was re-hired and asked to re-watch all of it, except this time, I was asked to look out for anything which might be useful in a "Making Of" documentary and then to mark it and dump it into Final Cut Pro. Since much of what I watched was actors like Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pierce and Michael Fassbender muttering things on hot mikes that they never, ever intended for anyone else on this planet to hear, I was often greatly amused and sometimes mildly shocked by what I heard. Over time, I grew to know them intimately without ever meeting them. I became, in a sense, both their confessor and their stalker, their psychiatrist and their peeping tom. When they argued, when they joked, when they made plans to have a drink after work, when they gossiped about other actors, I heard it all. It was like this with the entire cast, the crew, and yes, "Rids" himself -- that's what his friends call Ridley Scott, and in a sense I am his friend even if he isn't mine.

Sometimes I think about the knowledge I have of all these people, and the weird, one-way sense of intimacy I have with them, and the old Van Halen song "I'll Wait" comes into my head.

You've got me captured I'm under your spell
I guess I'll never learn
I have your picture yes I know it well
Another page is turned
Are you for real, it's so hard to tell
From just a magazine
Yeah, you just smile and the picture sells
Look what that does to me
I'll wait 'til your love comes down
I'm coming straight for your heart
No way you can stop me now
As fine as you are
I wrote a letter and told her these words
That meant a lot to me
I never sent it, she wouldn't have heard
Her eyes don't follow me
And while she watches I can never be free
Such good photography!

This is the classic obsessed-fan song, written before the internet even existed and made stalking people so much easier than it was in 1984. There is a sadness to it, a sense of hopelessness ("I never sent it/she wouldn't have heard/her eyes don't follow me") but also a faint but discernible sense of menace. The subject feels imprisoned by his own love, which of course is not love but obsession; at the same time he feels empowered by it, entitled by it. He's coming for her, this woman of his fantasies, and she cannot stop him. Fucking brilliant. But David Lee Roth has never had an equal when it comes to lyrical wordplay. I do believe that in high school, I would have sold my soul to see him sing with Van Halen, but alas, Sammy Hagar was at the helm, and remained there for many, many years. However, while I am not patient, I am persistent, and in 2015, I finally got my high school wish, and saw the re-united band, with Wolfgang Van Halen in place of Michael Anthony, rock the Hollywood Bowl for the finale of their North American tour. A friend of mine at the show said he'd seen Van Halen play seventeen times over the years, and never heard Eddie play better than he did that night in his own backyard. I say "backyard" because Eddie & and the boys were really from Pasadena.

Now, that same friend once drove me to Pasadena on Halloween Night. We had just seen the classic 1978 horror movie on a revival run at the AMC in Burbank, and he desired to show me all of its shooting locations. Halloween was set in a fictional Illinois town, but shot mostly in Pasadena. Thus it was that I ended up standing, bathed in the glow of a full moon, in front of the notorious Meyers House, which is now an insurance office but looks exactly the same today as it did in '78, right down to the interior. I am not easily spooked anymore, but when I went around the side of the house and peered through the window, just like Michael does at his sister in the film's opening, and saw that the interior looked just about the same as it had IN the damned film, I was overtaken with a case of the creeps. I guess you never entirely recover from the things that scare you as a child. But as another friend of mine pointed out to me years ago, exactly what scares you falls into one of two general camps.

The first type of horror, he posited, is based on things which can actually happen in the real world. Fatal Attraction, Jaws, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Black Christmas, The Shining, Alien, The Vanishing, When A Stranger Calls, Halloween, and even A Nightmare on Elm Street are all movies which play on our natural, animal fear of being stalked and hunted and killed. The second type of horror is based on things which cannot happen in real life, but which play on our superstitions and perhaps more intangible dread, not of death per se, but of what may wait after it: The Exorcist, The Ring, The Changeling, The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, The Omen, Hellraiser, Insidious, The Conjuring, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Candyman, The Blair Witch Project, etc., etc. It was my friend's contention that people tended to be frightened of one general scenario or the other: either the lunatic in the woods, or the ghost story. I myself fall into the former category. The lunatic with the axe, who attacks without warning and for no discernible reason, is much more frightening to me than the ideal of demons or ghosts.

Having said that, I once lived in a haunted house. Many years before it had been a funeral home, and various fittings for the crematory remained in its vast basement. It was a huge, cavernous old beast of a property, so large the landlord subdivided it into no less than five apartments, each with multiple tenants. We referred to it as "The Church" because a cross made from railroad ties had been fixed to its upper story. I was warned before moving in that it was frequented by ghosts, but shrugged the stories off as nonsense. Then, one night in the middle of a terrific blizzard, I had the most curious experience. On that particular weekend I was alone in the place, my two roomates being away, and The Church not being in the best neighborhood, I made sure to lock the main door, which opened into an alley, and then to lock my hallway door and finally, to double-lock the door which opened directly onto the sidewalk. I also placed a large Special Forces knife by my bedside, and went to sleep. Some hours later I woke to a fantastical scene: the street door was ajar, and the ice-cold air pouring in through the crack was meeting with the raw heat of the radiator to create billowing, smoky clouds of pure white. Sitting up in bed and grasping for my knife, I saw also that the hook which secured the inner door was no longer snugly in its eye bolt but jittering almost nervously against the door. I jumped down, knife in hand, and flung the street door open. In front of me was an absolutely pristine vista of pure snow, probably ten inches deep. Not one footprint marked that pure, unbroken surface. What's more, I knew that even the landlord could not unlock the deadbolt of my door from the outside, as it was blind-headed. The only explanation was that someone, perhaps a pranking roomate, had opened it: but my interior door had also been locked, which would have made that impossible. I replaced and relocked the street door and then went through the apartment, checking everything for an intruder, and arrived finally in the kitchen. Here was the only other door, and it was still locked. It opened into a kind of wooden vestibule, a mud room of sorts, albeit one without an outer door. I entered the mud room and before me lay more deep, utterly pristine snow. No one had come this way, either, not even a cat.

Relocking everything, and keeping my knife ready, I eventually went back to bed, wondering that the hell had just happened. I had no explanation then, and I don't have one now, either, except that a ghost may have been involved. The spirit haunting the place was reputed to be mischievious, and he certainly had his fun with me that cold and snowy night.

In those days we heard sirens all the time, and I'm hearing some now, as the thunderstorm's violent, lightning-struck fury eases to a gentle rain. It's curious how memory works that way, connecting past and future in a kind of circuit. A few minutes ago I was sitting here, a middle-aged man with my shirt off, writing away in 97 degree temperatures that only broke when the storm did; and yet in my mind, it was freezing cold, that special kind of sharp, bracing cold you get during a heavy snowfall when the wind is steady, and I was a half-naked 20 year-old college kid clutching a knife and looking for a ghost. Interestingly, the distance between where I sit now and where I stood then is, according to my computer, exactly one mile. One mile, but half a lifetime. I did not know it then, but I had already written three stories which eventually ended up in my short-story collection Devils You Know: "The Action," "Shadows and Glory" and "Roadtrip." At the time only one had been published, and I was still struggling hard with my own nature. Even as a drunken 20 year-old college student with failing grades and a permanent erection, I knew that anything which distracted me from my true calling was a waste of time, and worse than that, self-destructive. This knowledge poisoned all of my pleasures, but it did not prevent me from seeking them. And for many years to come I was to wage a merciless war with myself, a war that could not have a winner but only degrees of loser, before I finally acknowledged what those close to me had known for years: I was a writer. However I labeled myself, whatever job I might possess at the time, I was a writer first and foremost and that was where my destiny lay. But destiny is a curious thing. Everyone has one, but few of us embrace it, and there is no compulsion to do so. There is not even a penalty which one can conventionally measure for refusing. Nor is there a visible reward for accepting the obvious, not even something as ill-defined as "happiness." Because embracing one's destiny does not necessarily make one happy: it simply solves a puzzle. It quiets down an argument. It signs a treaty that ends a stupid war and encourages the former combatants to plant gardenias in the muzzles of their cannons while they share a pint of beer. That's all it does. There's no parade, no bag of gold. You just get to do the thing you're supposed to be doing, that you were put on this earth to do. That's all. And that should be enough. Sometimes, it even is.

The storm is now over, as is this rambling exercise in discursion. I offer it merely as an example of how my own consciousness, a writer's consciousness, moves from subject to subject within his own mind, occasionally forming a coherent, narrative circle but just as often cracking away like a badly planned fireworks show. Or a summer thunderstorm. The trick, I suppose, is to get from it whatever you can.

GOOD WOLF/BAD WOLF: OR, HOW TO BE HAPPY IN HELL

12/8/21 NOTE: I am reluctantly removing this entry after deciding it is not in keeping with the spirit of this blog. I knew what I was trying to say here, but what ended up on the page was so far removed from those sentiments that you would need a bloodhound to find them. This is a thing that happens to writers sometimes. We begin with clear intensions, but the path we travel is so tangled by emotion that we end up in a completely different and much darker place. There is a dose of irony in this, because I have often blogged about the dangers inherent in erasing the past, even when it is embarrassing, ugly, or in this case, just incoherent and silly, but as a writer I also feel as if something as personal as a blog must reflect the actual personality of that writer and not his shadow aspect. Put another way, God put erasers on pencils for a reason.

I may return "Good Wolf/Bad Wolf" here after reshaping it to fit my original intent, or I may simply consign it to the electronic ether. Until then this note will serve as an explanation for the big ol' gap in my archives.

ALL THE WAY UP: THOUGHTS ON A LIFE LIVED COMPLETE

Cohn: I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.
Jake: Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.
– Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

William Smith died the other day. His passing got a little ink, literal and figurative, but largely went unnoticed and uncommented upon. This is the way of celebrity, especially in Hollywood, where fame burns down to quickly-forgetten ashes; but it is even more harshly true of those in the business who are not famous, merely familiar.

You know who I'm talking about – sort of, anyway: Those actors whose names you don't know, but who seem to turn up everywhere: television shows, commercials, classic films and others not-so-classic. Except perhaps in some long-forgotten youth, they are never the stars, but move around them in either friendly or antagonistic orbits. They play bad guys, crusty homicide detectives, curmudgeonly or doting dads, stern judges, old friends, kindly uncles, buffonish politicians, shrewd reporters, irascible neighbors, mediocre generals, long-suffering bosses. There is seldom glory in their roles: if they aren't being shot dead or beaten up, they are quite frequently the butt of insults and ridicule, and when they play a good guy (or gal), they are always to the left or the right of the hero, never in the center of the frame. They carry his coat, reload his gun, jump in front of the bullet meant for his body. They wash out his mouthpiece or sign his check or light his cigar and tell him he (or she) done good.

The catch-all term for this sort of thespian is “character actor.” The term doesn't make any sense, since every actor is playing a character...but never mind that. My point is merely that character actors may make a living, even a very good living, and end up with their name in hundreds of credits and even some legendary moments in cinematic and television history; but somehow no one ever seems to know, or even care, much less recall, what their names are when they walk off the stage for the last time. I suppose there is an implication in the shortness of our memory and the disrespect that underlies it: that somehow these folks, despite all of their success, aren't really worthy of serious attention. They aren't sexy, glamorous, charismatic, or even terribly interesting – not compared to the stars, anyway. They're just there, reliably, like an old pair of boots.

I myself have always had a fascination with character actors. Even as a small child I loved the way they kept turning up in the re-runs of my youth, so familiar and yet so unknown. I noted that some tended to play a type of character while others were more diverse in their appearances. I noted as well that some were better actors or had more presence than others. But I liked and respected them all. There was one, however, who caused me more fear and awe than he did affection, and his name, I eventually learned, was William B. Smith.

Smith was perfectly engineered by nature to play bad guys. He was huge and heavily muscled, with a savage-looking face and a hoarse, growling, rusty voice; and his eyes looked as black as the devil's. There were times when he would smile at the protagonist of a movie or a TV show and it was like the smile of death, if death also happened to be a sadistic psychopath. When I was growing up, William Smith turned up everywhere, and sometimes I wondered what he was like in real life: an arrogant thug, like the characters he usually played? A tough, tactiturn professional, like Charles Bronson? A slow-witted trouper, not villainous but not so terribly bright, either?

When I took it upon myself to learn more about the life of William Smith, at first I could not actually believe what I was reading. It sounded so much like a badly-drawn hero in a badly-written movie that I had to double and triple-check my sources before I came to believe what I was reading. No human, or at any rate very few humans, could crowd so many accomplishments into the 88 years they spent turning oxygen into carbon dioxide as did this man: off the top of my head (among actors anyway) only the late Sir Christopher Lee comes to mind as a life as fully realized as Smith's was. He was not a bull-fighter, but he was damned near everything else you can think of, and contrary to what poor pathetic Jake says in THE SUN ALSO RISES, he did live life all the way up. And then some.

Most of the following information comes directly from Smith's website, but I have taken some pains to verify it, at least as much as time has permitted. Even with the occasional possible error, however, it is a staggering record of achievement, something to both humble and inspire. I do not think Smith would be offended by my plagiaristic reworking of his biography here:

Smith was born in 1933 on a ranch in Missouri. He learned to ride “almost before he could walk” and his knowledge of horseflesh was to come very much in handy in later life. When his family moved to Southern California, he ended up as a studio extra in movies like “The Ghost of Frankenstein” and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” He was too young to serve in WW2, but enlisted in the Air Force in 1951. It is unknown if his affinity for languages was discovered there or earlier in his schooling, but he achieved fluency in five languages, including Russian, German, French and Serbo-Croatian. He was recruited by the fledging National Security Agency (NSA), and during the Korean War, he flew secret surveillance-gathering missions over Communist-bloc nations.

After military life, Smith “continued the education he began while in the service, studying at Syracuse University, the University of Munich, the Sorbonne in Paris, and finally at UCLA where he graduated Cum Laude with a Master’s degree and worked toward a Doctorate. Bill would also later teach at UCLA.” He was not, however, merely a bloodless, ivory-tower intellectual. He was Air Force Light-Heavyweight Boxing Champion, a champion discus thrower at UCLA, and a two-time 200-lb. World Arm Wrestling Champion. He was also an outstanding bodybuilder (more about that later). While living in California he volunteered as a firefighter, specializing in battling SoCal's notoriously dangerous and violent wildfires.

Smith was working toward a doctorate when he was re-discovered by Hollywood. During this early period of his acting career he was busy on many TV series, including classics like “Perry Mason” and “The Mod Squad” (and camp-classics like “Batman”), but was also very popular in Westerns, appearing in “Daniel Boone,” “Wagon Train,” “The Virginian,” and “Gunsmoke.” In 1965, he secured a starring role on “Laredo.”

During the 1970s, he transitioned from playing cowboys to playing bikers, appearing in a staggering eleven motorcycle movies, generally as a gang leader. Throughout that decade and all through the 80s he was a much-demanded bad guy on TV, appearing on “Kung Fu,” “Columbo,” “Mission Impossible,” “Ironside,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “The Rockford Files,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Kolchak, The Night Stalker,” “Police Story,” “Logan’s Run,” “Vegas,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Dukes of Hazard,” “Simon & Simon,” “Buck Rogers” and “The A Team.” He was also a regular on “Hawaii Five-O” in its final season. In 1982 he had a memorable role in CONAN THE BARBARIAN as Conan's intimidating but thoughtful father, who teaches Conan the “Riddle of Steel.” (For my money, this enigmatic speech is one of my favorite moments in cinematic history.) Other classics/notorious films in which he made his presence felt were “Any Which Way You Can,” “Red Dawn,” “Rumblefish,” “The Outsiders,” and the cult-classic “Maniac Cop.”



Smith's visible toughness was backed up by his physical prowess as an athlete. In addition to his other accomplishments, he was a black belt in Kung Fu and Karate both, and “among his outstanding feats of strength are strict reverse curl of his own body weight and 5,100 continuous sit ups.” He appeared as a cover model for numerous bodybuilding magazines. Among his various accolades:

A Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Bodybuilding and Fitness (1995)
Honorary Member, Stuntmen’s Association of Motion Pictures (2000)
Golden Boot Award in 2003 (for his contributions to the Western genre)
Southern California Motion Picture Council Award in 2005
Silver Spur Award in 2008 (again, for his contributions to Westerns)
Muscle Beach Venice Bodybuilding Hall of Fame in May (2010)

I think this would be enough for any man, but not for William Smith. Because for all the muscles, the martial arts, the growling villain roles, behind even his obviously powerful intellect, lay the soul of a literal poet. Smith composed poetry for much of his life, which he published in a volume rather prosaically entitled THE POETIC WORKS OF WILLIAM SMITH: THE WORDS AND IMAGES OF A HOLLYWOOD LEGEND.

I do not yet own this book (gimme time) but I was able to peruse a sampling of his poetry via his website. Two of them struck me with particular force. The first, “Ode to a Mirror,” for its brilliant point of view: that of the mirror and not the people who gaze into it:

I know a thousand faces that don’t know me
I have seen ’em all, sad and gay, caged and free
Blue, moist eyes crying and yearning for love
Brazen, black ones glaring coldly above
Selfish, evil souls have rehearsed before me
Revealing their greedy plots to me only
So many times I’ve tried to reach out
To aide and soothe those riddled with doubt
There were those who thought they had it all
Sad, puny wretches with hearts so small
And then those poor bastards who were driven
Hoping that their sins would be forgiven
They’d cry and weep ’bout their lonely past
Swearing that their lives were pure and chaste
Yet only to themselves do they lie
And only by themselves will they die
But when out of rage they shatter me
My crumbling pieces shall set me free
Never more will I mirror their sniveling frailty
For my shards mean not seven years, but eternity

The second, “The Reaper,” affected me because I know that Smith, who shot his first movie around 1942, and his last in 2020, had thought a great deal about the decline of his body, the death of old friends, and what it meant to be in the final act of his life. In this poem he examines perhaps his own attitude toward impending doom, at once sad and cynical and jauntily defiant:

I remember when my friends and I
Thought that youth and games would never die
We cherished the girls, grog and laughter
Ribald at night, meek mornings after
But now malt’s too strong and girls too young
All our stories old, our song’s been sung
We mumble in search of long dead wit
Humor now is the daily obit
Our high is sharing a friend’s demise
He was a fine lad, echo our lies
While we gloat that it’s him not me
Knowing that they always fall by three
Wallowing secure ’cause Sam was third
Surely there’s time ’fore my taps are heard
Then there’s news of the death of old Hugh
Well, hell, that clown never paid his due
Nights alone you feel the Reaper’s chill
Then at dawn there’s a fine, undead thrill
Check pulse, poke liver, no pain, no fear
Hit the bars ’cause he’s dead, you’re still here
No canes or taxis for you today
On this fine and smogless first of May
Jauntily out the door to the street
Gaily you greet all those that you meet
Then as you stroll you think of old Hugh
The wind sighs, “He was younger than you”
As a maverick tear rolls from your eye
You know you gotta laugh instead of cry
You’ve done some bad and you’ve done some good
You wouldn’t change things even if you could
’Cause through the years you’ve run a good race
The Reaper chased and couldn’t keep your pace
So toast those that live and those that die
And while you can, spit in the Reaper’s eye.

Smith passed away, fittingly, in the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital on July 5, 2021. I imagine that his body, laid into a casket or committed to flames, was completely exhausted, worn out, used up – not by age, but by the sheer wear and tear of living life all the way up. And never mind the goddamned bullfights.