Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 23
November 22, 2020
WHAT IT'S LIKE
Every now and again someone asks me what it's like to be an author. I'm never sure how I'm supposed to respond. After all, what's it like to be a surgeon? Or a plumber? Or a soldier? What's it like to be a fisherman or law clerk or stuntman? What's it like to be a financier or work at a soup kitchen? You can describe the details of your training and your everyday work-life in minute detail, but you can't really convey what it truly means to do the job unless you've actually done it.
Because describing what you do for a living presents such obvious difficulties from the start, it's probably best to simply say that before I am an author, and indeed after, I am also a human being. It is on that point that you and I are most likely to have a place of contact, something in common, a frame of reference from which we can operate. This is why I generally don't mention my status as a writer to people when I initially meet them – and sometimes, not for months afterwards. But I occasionally enjoy a challenge, so I am going to try to explain what a writer's life is like, at least at my particular level. (What it's like for Stephen King I couldn't possibly tell you.)
First and foremost: the writer, if he is a real writer and not a hobbyist or a poseur or dilletente, is always a writer. He is always on. Nearly everything he sees, observes, thinks about, or experiences is filtered through the lens of his creative faculty. What I mean by this is that reality, everyday reality -- walking around town, driving to the grocery store, jogging, watching a sunset -- has to pass through a kind of screen which lets the forgettable stuff pass but allows the interesting fragments to accumulate in what I call The Writer's Place, a portion of the brain which stores things that might later turn up in a story. Nothing, now matter how trivial or tragic, not even his dreams, are immune from this process. The writer is constantly gathering material, and this is process never stops. There is no "off" switch. In this sense he is both blessed and cursed. The blessing comes from the fact that he can take trivial incidents that others would certainly forget and turn them into pieces of mosaic; he can create art from the most random thoughts, ideas, glimpses, and happenings. The curse is that this faculty, never resting, intrudes on all of his experiences and emotions in the most vulgar and tasteless way. In the grip of terrible grief, the writer is still a writer. Part of him, a part without any sense of decorum or human feeling, is recording and filtering his own pain, evaluating it for its utility as source material for a future book. There are times that the writer cannot help but despise himself for this. As Thomas Harris wrote in Red Dragon, "Graham regarded his own intelligence as grotesque but useful, like a chair made from antlers. There was nothing he could do about it."
Actually writing a novel, or even a short story, is a very difficult thing to describe. The process by which the idea, or set of ideas, comes to a writer may develop over years or come in a single flash, and there is no set ways by which one arrives at the flashpoint. Sometimes a single image, a line or two of poetry, a bad dream or even a misheard lyric can result in a 400 page manuscript. It a species of magic, and like all magic suffers from explanation. But the other process, the one where the idea becomes the 400 page manuscript, is totally different and much more relatable to the non-writing, non-creative person, because it is simply a job of work. Granted, it is a job of highly peculiar work, but it is work nonetheless, a mechanical process. When the idea within a writer's mind takes on sufficient power and clarity to spark him to actual effort, the mechanical process finds its beginning. He begins with the obvious: the first sentence. But again, we are dealing with a commonplace which nonetheless has several hidden facets. The first sentence in any story is always the most difficult point in the whole process, with the exception of the very last. A boring or mediocre first sentence can kill a good idea in its cradle, and so the writer often spends hours, or days, staring at a blank screen or a blank sheet, considering and discarding various openings. Once he has selected the one he feels is right (notice I did not say "the right one") the words generally begin to flow more smoothly, but "more smoothly" is something of a trick phrase. More smoothly than what? Burlap? Sandpaper? A porcupine? When one is writing, one is extracting ideas which within the mind seem concrete and obvious, but when transferred to paper seem to consist mainly of smoke. What you see in your mind never entirely translates onto the page. Something is always lost, and yet at the same time, something is always gained: new ideas form over the old ones rather like creepers over an iron-wrought fence, leading to a final product which is neither what you originally envisioned nor anything entirely new and different. The baby is a hybrid, a kind of bridge between idea and action. I don't suppose any writer in human history has made a 1:1 translation between idea and draft. The whole undertaking is in essence as difficult as exactly relating not only the substance but the actual specifics, the dialog and colors and sounds, which occur within a dream.
During the writing of any piece, regardless of length, there are moments when the writer loses either his enthusiasm or his sense of direction. He either cools off on the very ideas that motivated him in the first place, or reaches a point of creative fatigue, or simply temporarily runs out of ideas. He may also end up writing something so different from what he intended that, like any unfortunate who finds himself lost, he stops and tries to take his bearings. Either way, progress ceases, and the dreaded "half-finished draft" is born. What separates the professional from the amateur writer in this case is simply the ability to power through these inevitable stoppages until inertia is overcome and momentum regained.
(Every self-styled "writer" has drawers full of scripts, plays, novels, and short stories...and none of them are finished. Until he comes to the point where he can complete his works, or most of them, he is a hobbyist, not a writer.)
This momentum may be regained in a few days, or it may take weeks, months, or even years. I have novels that I wrote in ten months, and other novels, of the same length, which took three times that long. I have short stories I finished in a week or even a day, and short stories that took two decades to complete. Unless I am working under a deadline, I rarely judge myself for this. The important thing to me is that the draft be finished, not necessarily the timeframe in which it is. And you must remember, writing is a steel cage death match with no rules, any means or methods used to cross the finish line on a story are fair play, and it hardly matters if the first draft is written in the blood of the saints or an unreadable piece of shit so long as it is complete.
The emphasis on completion at any cost, regardless of quality, is not a fetish. Once you have a draft in your hand, you can do anything: there is no limit on the number of drafts a story can be put through, and no idea so bad that it can't be fashioned into something better, or at least something different, rather like the proverbial knife that has had seven blades and five handles. But you can never get to that point if you keep stopping and going back to the beginning and starting again. A professional will see even what he comes to realize (or believe) to be a bad idea to its conclusion, because it can always be salvaged later. Nothing whatever can be made of a half-finished story...except a completed one. But knowing this and getting to that point are two different things, and so the writer is often haunted by his own half-finished works and damnably sensitive about them. Nothing rankles a writer so much as when a non-writing friend blithely, or perhaps contemptuously, asks, “That book of yours – when is it going to be finished?”
Because writing is a solitary process, the ordinary writer probably deals with more loneliness than most people, but it follows that this too is more faceted of a statement than it sounds. Writers being artists, they live in a constant relationship with their art which most others cannot understand. The process I described above separates them from other people, but this is not the only obstacle to forming and maintaining human relationships. Writers are often some form of introverts, comfortable only on their own ground and within their own sphere of interest. Writers of the Hemingway or Hunter Thompson type, who are life-devouring raconteurs and bon vivants, are a relative rarity and even they may be faking it to a degree. Writers make-believe for a living, so it is only natural that they are more comfortable in make-believe worlds than anywhere else. No writer worth anything has not fantasized regularly since childhood about living in some other universe, be it fantasy, science-fiction or something else entirely. This is not mere projection: it is a reflection of the discomfort they feel as human beings in a world that does not understand them, and which they themselves do not understand. It is a curious phenomenon indeed, for the true writer is a student of the human condition and of life itself, and he makes it his business to be an expert on worldly life; yet he is generally at odds with both humans and what we would call everyday reality. Perhaps it is this very alienation which allows him to make the observations, the deductions, the conclusions which escape those who are happier and better-suited to this world. Perhaps only one who is "in but not of" can truly understand the world. But this ability, like the other, comes with a price. Writers probably fantasize about being "normal" almost as much as they fantasize about being Captain Kirk, or Harry Potter, or Bilbo Baggins, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yet they can never be normal: normalcy is the one thing they may never be and still hope to be writers.
Because most people do not understand the writing process, writers are often unintentionally insulted by those around them. J.K. Rowling humorously observed that the movie studio suits she dealt with regularly seemed to act as if the Harry Potter books were crystals, or mushrooms, or slalagmites, forming by themselves almost independently of Rowling herself. Trapped in an endless series of meetings and conferences, she was continuously asked why the book wasn't further along – as if somehow it could write itself (magically, one supposes) while she was away from her computer. Nor did the suits grasp that writing is work, very hard work indeed, and that a novel, particularly a lengthy one, may take years to complete even if the writer scarcely takes a day off. Writers involved in lengthy projects often hit stumbling blocks or waste time proceeding down false paths, and these futile asides can absorb them for months, even years. In my own life, I have often noted that most people not only do not understand this, they take the opposite view to a logical absurdity. I have been told by more than one overweight computer programmer that what I do does not compare with what they do; when I point out that we both sit in chairs in front of computers all day, but they don't need any imagination to do their job and I require an enormity of it, they stare at me as if I had just insulted their mothers. But it is a fact that writing is not only imaginative but utterly exhausting work. To constantly tap the creative faculty requires from me more energy than I expend when swimming or hiking or going to the gym. I was never so famished after an hour in a martial arts studio as I was after three hours of graduate school classes devoted to the study of writing popular fiction. Brain work is hard word, and when you throw the creative side into action alongside the logical one, the energy drain is enormous.
There are factors which effect writers which many do not fully appreciate even within the writing community itself. George Orwell once remarked that we live in a political age, and that it was folly to believe writing in any form could not be affected (or tainted) by politics. This sad fact is more true today than it was in his lifetime, and this weight is felt by every writer intelligent enough to feel the contours of those forces which press against him and try to squeeze his thoughts and creativity into pre-arranged shapes, or worse yet, censor them entirely. Many novels, during the editing process, are filtered through "sensitivity reads" to screen for potential "bias, racism or unintentional stereotypes." This sounds reasonable on the surface, until one realizes that such things are often very difficult to quantify and come down to subjective judgments made by people with their own biases. One senstivity reader may find bias or stereotype in a novel; another may regard its depictions as spot-on accurate. Whose judgment is correct? The question and the answer are equally subjective in nature and so the writer finds himself hoping he lands the "right" reader, i.e. one who sees no evil in his work. This may seem only an inconvenience, part of the game so to speak, but the effect of this in the larger sense is to make many writers avoid certain topics entirely, or to bastardize their writing to please certain specific people within the industry rather than their readership. This has the most chilling possible effect on the writers of fiction, and the existence of social media, particularly Twitter, have only served as an impediment to freedom of thought, expression and creativity. There are a whole legion of creativity police who troll the net constantly, trying to impose their constipated views of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, politics, religion, and God knows what else on the rest of the world. These people are so full of contradictions and hypocrisy, and so nakedly confused as to their final object, that they would be figures of pity were they not so effective in murdering books, writing contracts, and movie deals.
The dilemma of a writer of my sort – straight, white, middle-aged, male – can be summed up in this simple exchange which I made up for your benefit, but which, I'm sad to say, not an exaggeration:
TWITTER: Put more black people in your novels.
WRITER: Okay.
TWITTER: What makes you think you're qualified to write about black people?
These sort of obstacles, of course, vary enormously depending upon whether the writer you know is traditional or independent. The traditional author has enormous advantages over the indie: he gets paid much better, is provided valuable services like editing free of charge, and is freed from the time-consuming and exhausting task of marketing himself. His reach is much greater and his books will probably be in physical bookstores. He may get a movie or a TV deal based on the success of his work, which will bring with it a hefty set of paychecks and possibly an entire second career as an executive producer. He also has the prestige associated with having a publisher. On the other hand, once he signs that contract, he is no longer his own master but is owned and operated by that publisher almost as a piece of machinery. What he writes, how long his book is, when it will be released, the subject matter of the book and even its cover art, are all decided by others. The writer becomes a mere employee instead of an artist; a draftsman rather than an artist. But it actually is worse than that. A mystery writer who also loves science fiction will not be allowed to publish that fiction under their own name, less they damage their brand by “confusing” their audience with this creative diversity. And God help the traditional writer of mysteries if he loses all enthusiasm for for mysteries. They will spend the rest of their contract, and possibly their entire career, cranking out lifeless hackwork for money.
The indie author has just one area of superiority over the traditionalist, but it is a large one. He can write anything he wants and publish it whenever he chooses. This freedom is what attracted me to the indie life and it is an intoxicating one. My “brand” is omni: I write whatever the hell I want, and should I happen to offend someone, efforts at punishing me would prove futile. I can't be boycotted, I can't lose my contract (I don't have one) and any attempt to subject me to public ridicule would simply raise my profile and increase my sales. On the other hand, my audience is smaller, my profile is lower, and my bank account very considerably lighter. I have eight writing awards in my trophy case, but you could spray a fire hose off a marquee in Times Square on New Year's Eve and not hit a single person who has heard of me or my works. There are months I can pay my rent on my royalties, and seasons where I can barely pay for my coffee with them. I live in a kind of gilded anonimity, with my integrity and self-respect fully intact, and my imagination as free as a wild animal; yet I remain dependent on a day job for the majority of my income, and am constanly wishing there was a third path open to me, one which gave me my freedom yet also allowed my work to reach, and be judged by, a much larger audience.
The problem of reach is an especially frustrating one, because it is circular in nature. In order to make money I have to sell books; in order to sell books people must be aware of my work; and in order for people to be aware of my work I need money to promote myself. Nothing is more galling than booking a promotion, seeing sales skyrocket, and then watching them plummet the moment the promotion ends, knowing your advertising budget is now exhausted. Beyond that, there are the constant, annoying demands of people for free or massively discounted copies of my books (autographed, no less). These demands would not bother me if the people in question were willing to write reviews of my books on such platforms as Amazon after the books had been read, but I have found that getting people to follow through with reviews is nearly impossible. Back in the days when Goodreads allowed authors to host book giveaways for free, I ran five in quick succession and had 2,844 people enter for a chance to win the works in question. Of the 45-odd winners, I would estimate eight, or perhaps ten, actually bothered to write reviews. I was very annoyed by this at the time, especially considering I was paying, in some cases, for book deliveries on the other side of the planet; but this review ratio, which is about fifteen or twenty percent, is much higher than the one I get from readers who buy my books online. My most-reviewed novel, Cage Life, has a review ratio of maybe three percent. The reviews are generally very good, which is of course pleasing, but honest to God, I wouldn't mind more critical or even poor reviews so long as the total number increased.
By now you may think the writer's life nothing but a litany of complaints. This is not the case, but I'd be remiss in my duty to the truth if I tried to paint more roses into this picture than actually tend to bloom. The life of any artist is full of frustrating contradictions and painful, even humiliating concessions to reality. This is true of the musician, the comedian, the painter, the actor and the poet; why not the writer, too?
Still, if there is no actual rose garden for such as me, there are roses, if only of the wild-blooming variety.
The first, I suppose, is the sheer pleasure that writers take in the selection and arrangement of words. Any writer worth his skin has a deep and abiding love of the language in which he writes and takes immense satisfaction in exploring its potentialities. Related to this, but separate from it, is a passion for the power of words as things in themselves. A writer is more aware than most of the power he possesses not merely to provoke people's emotions with words, but to establish a sense of atmosphere, or going further, an entire fictional world which (if the writer knows his business) may be as real to the reader as the one in which he physically exists. There are huge numbers of people, literally millions or tens of millions, for whom the worlds created by J.R.R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, J.K. Rowling, George R. R. Martin, or Anne Rice – just to name a few – hold considerably more charm than the real one. I don't have millions of readers, in fact it took me a very long time to have thousands, but I know, because I have been told, that some of them have lost themselves in worlds of my creation, if only for a few hours. This is a very heady experience indeed.
The power to create characters is an awesome one, but not merely for the obvious reason that the author controls their fates and thus assumes a god-like power which is entirely absent from his real life. Conjuring a really good character, by which I mean one which is not only real to the reader but deeply memorable, is a pleasure almost nobody living understands, but it carries with it the curious, contraidctory, perhaps completely indescipherable secondary power of creating something you cannot control. A fully realized character can be defined as that which can't be forced to act against its nature. More than once I have created a character who I intended to be brave, or cowardly, or treacherous, or noble, or this, or that, only to discover that said character had taken on character-istics which ran contrary to my plans; and having taken on these characteristics, could not be induced to act against his or her nature. This is frustrating, but it is also delightful, because it means that writing the novel contains as many surprises for the author as it will for the reader. We tend to think of Dr. Frankenstein as a cautionary example because his creation ran amok; but what if Frankenstein's monster had gotten up off the table and then invented the longer-lasting lightbulb, or learned to play the violin, or become the best damned mayor Ingoldstadt ever had? My point here is that we tend to think of losing control as an inherently negative experience; in fact it is nothing of the sort, a fact may writers eventually discover.
Seldom-discussed perks of the writing life are those moments in which a complete stranger contacts you to relate the joy they experienced while reading your works. Or a website, magazine or blog asks you to do an interview. Or some agency bestows upon you an award. Or you (coughs) look yourself up on Amazon and see that someone has written a lengthy, thoughtful review of one of your books, and you realize that you have effected them very deeply indeed. Even bad reviews can be tremendously heartening. A friend once pointed out to me that my black comedy novelette The Numbers Game had a scathing notice from a reader who found it deeply depressing; my friend then observed, “Wow. You really got under his skin, didn't you?” I thought a lot about this remark, and the more I thought about it the happier I became. I never write anything simply to shock or provoke, but if someone is emotionally affected by my work, even if they also happen to hate it, well, so much the better.
In addition to this, there is also the deep-body, I-just-drank-brandy-and-smoked-a-Cuban pleasure of getting notifications of sales in places like Mexico, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany or Japan. The idea that people on the other side of the world are reading my books is as intoxicating, in its own way, as any award I could ever receive. Being asked to autograph something, while not exactly an everyday occurrence for yours truly, is also a large if admittedly very shallow enjoyment.
There is also a species of wild rose known as the royalty check. I do not know why, but a royalty check, even a pathetically small one, carries with it a wonderfully illicit feeling of having gotten away with something – even more than that, of being rewarded for having gotten away with something. We are often told in our teenage years that we must give up our dreams and accept “real life,” as if “real life” by definition meant accepting that you will never get what you want. Every time I get one of these checks reminds me that it is possible to live in the “real world” and still accomplish goals others consider unrealistic or even fantastic. James Marsters, who played Spike on Buffy and Angel, once remarked in my presence that he felt he “stole the prize money” by landing the role that he did. Well, whenever a check shows up in my mailbox (electronic or literal), I feel as if I have made off with a fat sack of cash and jewels, like Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. There is part of me that will always wonder at the idea of people handing over hard cash for the product of my imagination; but it is a happy wonder.
And then there is this. Sometimes I will look down at a stack of my books and realize that I did this. I made this. I had ideas and the discipline and passion to bring them into physical being. I slaved over my keyboard for weeks, months, even years to bring this tight little bundle of paper pulp into a physical existence and offer it for sale. It began as an image in my mind, and now it exists. It's real. It has height, width, dimension, weight. And it will still be here when I am not. They say all we leave is bones, children and a tombstone, but authors leave something else. Fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years from now someone may enter a dusty secondhand bookshop and spy a dog-eared old copy of one of my books on a shelf and take it home with them, and I will live again, through my characters, if only for a few hours. To write a book is in a sense to extend a middle finger to the grinning specter of Death. He will get my body, but so long as one copy of one of my novels physically exists, he cannot extinguish my legacy.
Looking back on these passages I see I have probably failed in my object of answering the seemingly simple question of what it's like to be an author. The truth is the answer is different for everyone and no doubt many authors, reading this, would disagree with my opinions and conclusions, or point out the areas I have failed to illuminate. And this brings me to my concluding point. To be a writer is to attempt to do the impossible on a daily basis. Using only words on a page, one must create sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile experiences which are vivid enough within the reader's mind to supplant reality. Using only ideas, some of which may be contradictory, incomplete or incommunicable by language, he must nevertheless weave a story which is not only coherent and logical but interesting, even compelling. Using only his petty store of personal experiences, he must convince the reader that he, the author, ought to be taken seriously when he assumes the viewpoint of the hero, the monster, the martyr, the madman, the saint. All of this is functionally impossible. We, the writers, achieve it only because, as Carl Sagan once observed, writing is a species of magic, and magic by its definition is the achievement of the impossible through impossible means. So if you truly want to know what it means to be a writer, my suggestion is to try and pull a rabbit out of a hat, or make an elephant disappear, or saw a woman in half without breaking her skin. It can't really done, but I think you'll discover that's most of the fun of doing it.
Because describing what you do for a living presents such obvious difficulties from the start, it's probably best to simply say that before I am an author, and indeed after, I am also a human being. It is on that point that you and I are most likely to have a place of contact, something in common, a frame of reference from which we can operate. This is why I generally don't mention my status as a writer to people when I initially meet them – and sometimes, not for months afterwards. But I occasionally enjoy a challenge, so I am going to try to explain what a writer's life is like, at least at my particular level. (What it's like for Stephen King I couldn't possibly tell you.)
First and foremost: the writer, if he is a real writer and not a hobbyist or a poseur or dilletente, is always a writer. He is always on. Nearly everything he sees, observes, thinks about, or experiences is filtered through the lens of his creative faculty. What I mean by this is that reality, everyday reality -- walking around town, driving to the grocery store, jogging, watching a sunset -- has to pass through a kind of screen which lets the forgettable stuff pass but allows the interesting fragments to accumulate in what I call The Writer's Place, a portion of the brain which stores things that might later turn up in a story. Nothing, now matter how trivial or tragic, not even his dreams, are immune from this process. The writer is constantly gathering material, and this is process never stops. There is no "off" switch. In this sense he is both blessed and cursed. The blessing comes from the fact that he can take trivial incidents that others would certainly forget and turn them into pieces of mosaic; he can create art from the most random thoughts, ideas, glimpses, and happenings. The curse is that this faculty, never resting, intrudes on all of his experiences and emotions in the most vulgar and tasteless way. In the grip of terrible grief, the writer is still a writer. Part of him, a part without any sense of decorum or human feeling, is recording and filtering his own pain, evaluating it for its utility as source material for a future book. There are times that the writer cannot help but despise himself for this. As Thomas Harris wrote in Red Dragon, "Graham regarded his own intelligence as grotesque but useful, like a chair made from antlers. There was nothing he could do about it."
Actually writing a novel, or even a short story, is a very difficult thing to describe. The process by which the idea, or set of ideas, comes to a writer may develop over years or come in a single flash, and there is no set ways by which one arrives at the flashpoint. Sometimes a single image, a line or two of poetry, a bad dream or even a misheard lyric can result in a 400 page manuscript. It a species of magic, and like all magic suffers from explanation. But the other process, the one where the idea becomes the 400 page manuscript, is totally different and much more relatable to the non-writing, non-creative person, because it is simply a job of work. Granted, it is a job of highly peculiar work, but it is work nonetheless, a mechanical process. When the idea within a writer's mind takes on sufficient power and clarity to spark him to actual effort, the mechanical process finds its beginning. He begins with the obvious: the first sentence. But again, we are dealing with a commonplace which nonetheless has several hidden facets. The first sentence in any story is always the most difficult point in the whole process, with the exception of the very last. A boring or mediocre first sentence can kill a good idea in its cradle, and so the writer often spends hours, or days, staring at a blank screen or a blank sheet, considering and discarding various openings. Once he has selected the one he feels is right (notice I did not say "the right one") the words generally begin to flow more smoothly, but "more smoothly" is something of a trick phrase. More smoothly than what? Burlap? Sandpaper? A porcupine? When one is writing, one is extracting ideas which within the mind seem concrete and obvious, but when transferred to paper seem to consist mainly of smoke. What you see in your mind never entirely translates onto the page. Something is always lost, and yet at the same time, something is always gained: new ideas form over the old ones rather like creepers over an iron-wrought fence, leading to a final product which is neither what you originally envisioned nor anything entirely new and different. The baby is a hybrid, a kind of bridge between idea and action. I don't suppose any writer in human history has made a 1:1 translation between idea and draft. The whole undertaking is in essence as difficult as exactly relating not only the substance but the actual specifics, the dialog and colors and sounds, which occur within a dream.
During the writing of any piece, regardless of length, there are moments when the writer loses either his enthusiasm or his sense of direction. He either cools off on the very ideas that motivated him in the first place, or reaches a point of creative fatigue, or simply temporarily runs out of ideas. He may also end up writing something so different from what he intended that, like any unfortunate who finds himself lost, he stops and tries to take his bearings. Either way, progress ceases, and the dreaded "half-finished draft" is born. What separates the professional from the amateur writer in this case is simply the ability to power through these inevitable stoppages until inertia is overcome and momentum regained.
(Every self-styled "writer" has drawers full of scripts, plays, novels, and short stories...and none of them are finished. Until he comes to the point where he can complete his works, or most of them, he is a hobbyist, not a writer.)
This momentum may be regained in a few days, or it may take weeks, months, or even years. I have novels that I wrote in ten months, and other novels, of the same length, which took three times that long. I have short stories I finished in a week or even a day, and short stories that took two decades to complete. Unless I am working under a deadline, I rarely judge myself for this. The important thing to me is that the draft be finished, not necessarily the timeframe in which it is. And you must remember, writing is a steel cage death match with no rules, any means or methods used to cross the finish line on a story are fair play, and it hardly matters if the first draft is written in the blood of the saints or an unreadable piece of shit so long as it is complete.
The emphasis on completion at any cost, regardless of quality, is not a fetish. Once you have a draft in your hand, you can do anything: there is no limit on the number of drafts a story can be put through, and no idea so bad that it can't be fashioned into something better, or at least something different, rather like the proverbial knife that has had seven blades and five handles. But you can never get to that point if you keep stopping and going back to the beginning and starting again. A professional will see even what he comes to realize (or believe) to be a bad idea to its conclusion, because it can always be salvaged later. Nothing whatever can be made of a half-finished story...except a completed one. But knowing this and getting to that point are two different things, and so the writer is often haunted by his own half-finished works and damnably sensitive about them. Nothing rankles a writer so much as when a non-writing friend blithely, or perhaps contemptuously, asks, “That book of yours – when is it going to be finished?”
Because writing is a solitary process, the ordinary writer probably deals with more loneliness than most people, but it follows that this too is more faceted of a statement than it sounds. Writers being artists, they live in a constant relationship with their art which most others cannot understand. The process I described above separates them from other people, but this is not the only obstacle to forming and maintaining human relationships. Writers are often some form of introverts, comfortable only on their own ground and within their own sphere of interest. Writers of the Hemingway or Hunter Thompson type, who are life-devouring raconteurs and bon vivants, are a relative rarity and even they may be faking it to a degree. Writers make-believe for a living, so it is only natural that they are more comfortable in make-believe worlds than anywhere else. No writer worth anything has not fantasized regularly since childhood about living in some other universe, be it fantasy, science-fiction or something else entirely. This is not mere projection: it is a reflection of the discomfort they feel as human beings in a world that does not understand them, and which they themselves do not understand. It is a curious phenomenon indeed, for the true writer is a student of the human condition and of life itself, and he makes it his business to be an expert on worldly life; yet he is generally at odds with both humans and what we would call everyday reality. Perhaps it is this very alienation which allows him to make the observations, the deductions, the conclusions which escape those who are happier and better-suited to this world. Perhaps only one who is "in but not of" can truly understand the world. But this ability, like the other, comes with a price. Writers probably fantasize about being "normal" almost as much as they fantasize about being Captain Kirk, or Harry Potter, or Bilbo Baggins, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yet they can never be normal: normalcy is the one thing they may never be and still hope to be writers.
Because most people do not understand the writing process, writers are often unintentionally insulted by those around them. J.K. Rowling humorously observed that the movie studio suits she dealt with regularly seemed to act as if the Harry Potter books were crystals, or mushrooms, or slalagmites, forming by themselves almost independently of Rowling herself. Trapped in an endless series of meetings and conferences, she was continuously asked why the book wasn't further along – as if somehow it could write itself (magically, one supposes) while she was away from her computer. Nor did the suits grasp that writing is work, very hard work indeed, and that a novel, particularly a lengthy one, may take years to complete even if the writer scarcely takes a day off. Writers involved in lengthy projects often hit stumbling blocks or waste time proceeding down false paths, and these futile asides can absorb them for months, even years. In my own life, I have often noted that most people not only do not understand this, they take the opposite view to a logical absurdity. I have been told by more than one overweight computer programmer that what I do does not compare with what they do; when I point out that we both sit in chairs in front of computers all day, but they don't need any imagination to do their job and I require an enormity of it, they stare at me as if I had just insulted their mothers. But it is a fact that writing is not only imaginative but utterly exhausting work. To constantly tap the creative faculty requires from me more energy than I expend when swimming or hiking or going to the gym. I was never so famished after an hour in a martial arts studio as I was after three hours of graduate school classes devoted to the study of writing popular fiction. Brain work is hard word, and when you throw the creative side into action alongside the logical one, the energy drain is enormous.
There are factors which effect writers which many do not fully appreciate even within the writing community itself. George Orwell once remarked that we live in a political age, and that it was folly to believe writing in any form could not be affected (or tainted) by politics. This sad fact is more true today than it was in his lifetime, and this weight is felt by every writer intelligent enough to feel the contours of those forces which press against him and try to squeeze his thoughts and creativity into pre-arranged shapes, or worse yet, censor them entirely. Many novels, during the editing process, are filtered through "sensitivity reads" to screen for potential "bias, racism or unintentional stereotypes." This sounds reasonable on the surface, until one realizes that such things are often very difficult to quantify and come down to subjective judgments made by people with their own biases. One senstivity reader may find bias or stereotype in a novel; another may regard its depictions as spot-on accurate. Whose judgment is correct? The question and the answer are equally subjective in nature and so the writer finds himself hoping he lands the "right" reader, i.e. one who sees no evil in his work. This may seem only an inconvenience, part of the game so to speak, but the effect of this in the larger sense is to make many writers avoid certain topics entirely, or to bastardize their writing to please certain specific people within the industry rather than their readership. This has the most chilling possible effect on the writers of fiction, and the existence of social media, particularly Twitter, have only served as an impediment to freedom of thought, expression and creativity. There are a whole legion of creativity police who troll the net constantly, trying to impose their constipated views of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, politics, religion, and God knows what else on the rest of the world. These people are so full of contradictions and hypocrisy, and so nakedly confused as to their final object, that they would be figures of pity were they not so effective in murdering books, writing contracts, and movie deals.
The dilemma of a writer of my sort – straight, white, middle-aged, male – can be summed up in this simple exchange which I made up for your benefit, but which, I'm sad to say, not an exaggeration:
TWITTER: Put more black people in your novels.
WRITER: Okay.
TWITTER: What makes you think you're qualified to write about black people?
These sort of obstacles, of course, vary enormously depending upon whether the writer you know is traditional or independent. The traditional author has enormous advantages over the indie: he gets paid much better, is provided valuable services like editing free of charge, and is freed from the time-consuming and exhausting task of marketing himself. His reach is much greater and his books will probably be in physical bookstores. He may get a movie or a TV deal based on the success of his work, which will bring with it a hefty set of paychecks and possibly an entire second career as an executive producer. He also has the prestige associated with having a publisher. On the other hand, once he signs that contract, he is no longer his own master but is owned and operated by that publisher almost as a piece of machinery. What he writes, how long his book is, when it will be released, the subject matter of the book and even its cover art, are all decided by others. The writer becomes a mere employee instead of an artist; a draftsman rather than an artist. But it actually is worse than that. A mystery writer who also loves science fiction will not be allowed to publish that fiction under their own name, less they damage their brand by “confusing” their audience with this creative diversity. And God help the traditional writer of mysteries if he loses all enthusiasm for for mysteries. They will spend the rest of their contract, and possibly their entire career, cranking out lifeless hackwork for money.
The indie author has just one area of superiority over the traditionalist, but it is a large one. He can write anything he wants and publish it whenever he chooses. This freedom is what attracted me to the indie life and it is an intoxicating one. My “brand” is omni: I write whatever the hell I want, and should I happen to offend someone, efforts at punishing me would prove futile. I can't be boycotted, I can't lose my contract (I don't have one) and any attempt to subject me to public ridicule would simply raise my profile and increase my sales. On the other hand, my audience is smaller, my profile is lower, and my bank account very considerably lighter. I have eight writing awards in my trophy case, but you could spray a fire hose off a marquee in Times Square on New Year's Eve and not hit a single person who has heard of me or my works. There are months I can pay my rent on my royalties, and seasons where I can barely pay for my coffee with them. I live in a kind of gilded anonimity, with my integrity and self-respect fully intact, and my imagination as free as a wild animal; yet I remain dependent on a day job for the majority of my income, and am constanly wishing there was a third path open to me, one which gave me my freedom yet also allowed my work to reach, and be judged by, a much larger audience.
The problem of reach is an especially frustrating one, because it is circular in nature. In order to make money I have to sell books; in order to sell books people must be aware of my work; and in order for people to be aware of my work I need money to promote myself. Nothing is more galling than booking a promotion, seeing sales skyrocket, and then watching them plummet the moment the promotion ends, knowing your advertising budget is now exhausted. Beyond that, there are the constant, annoying demands of people for free or massively discounted copies of my books (autographed, no less). These demands would not bother me if the people in question were willing to write reviews of my books on such platforms as Amazon after the books had been read, but I have found that getting people to follow through with reviews is nearly impossible. Back in the days when Goodreads allowed authors to host book giveaways for free, I ran five in quick succession and had 2,844 people enter for a chance to win the works in question. Of the 45-odd winners, I would estimate eight, or perhaps ten, actually bothered to write reviews. I was very annoyed by this at the time, especially considering I was paying, in some cases, for book deliveries on the other side of the planet; but this review ratio, which is about fifteen or twenty percent, is much higher than the one I get from readers who buy my books online. My most-reviewed novel, Cage Life, has a review ratio of maybe three percent. The reviews are generally very good, which is of course pleasing, but honest to God, I wouldn't mind more critical or even poor reviews so long as the total number increased.
By now you may think the writer's life nothing but a litany of complaints. This is not the case, but I'd be remiss in my duty to the truth if I tried to paint more roses into this picture than actually tend to bloom. The life of any artist is full of frustrating contradictions and painful, even humiliating concessions to reality. This is true of the musician, the comedian, the painter, the actor and the poet; why not the writer, too?
Still, if there is no actual rose garden for such as me, there are roses, if only of the wild-blooming variety.
The first, I suppose, is the sheer pleasure that writers take in the selection and arrangement of words. Any writer worth his skin has a deep and abiding love of the language in which he writes and takes immense satisfaction in exploring its potentialities. Related to this, but separate from it, is a passion for the power of words as things in themselves. A writer is more aware than most of the power he possesses not merely to provoke people's emotions with words, but to establish a sense of atmosphere, or going further, an entire fictional world which (if the writer knows his business) may be as real to the reader as the one in which he physically exists. There are huge numbers of people, literally millions or tens of millions, for whom the worlds created by J.R.R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, J.K. Rowling, George R. R. Martin, or Anne Rice – just to name a few – hold considerably more charm than the real one. I don't have millions of readers, in fact it took me a very long time to have thousands, but I know, because I have been told, that some of them have lost themselves in worlds of my creation, if only for a few hours. This is a very heady experience indeed.
The power to create characters is an awesome one, but not merely for the obvious reason that the author controls their fates and thus assumes a god-like power which is entirely absent from his real life. Conjuring a really good character, by which I mean one which is not only real to the reader but deeply memorable, is a pleasure almost nobody living understands, but it carries with it the curious, contraidctory, perhaps completely indescipherable secondary power of creating something you cannot control. A fully realized character can be defined as that which can't be forced to act against its nature. More than once I have created a character who I intended to be brave, or cowardly, or treacherous, or noble, or this, or that, only to discover that said character had taken on character-istics which ran contrary to my plans; and having taken on these characteristics, could not be induced to act against his or her nature. This is frustrating, but it is also delightful, because it means that writing the novel contains as many surprises for the author as it will for the reader. We tend to think of Dr. Frankenstein as a cautionary example because his creation ran amok; but what if Frankenstein's monster had gotten up off the table and then invented the longer-lasting lightbulb, or learned to play the violin, or become the best damned mayor Ingoldstadt ever had? My point here is that we tend to think of losing control as an inherently negative experience; in fact it is nothing of the sort, a fact may writers eventually discover.
Seldom-discussed perks of the writing life are those moments in which a complete stranger contacts you to relate the joy they experienced while reading your works. Or a website, magazine or blog asks you to do an interview. Or some agency bestows upon you an award. Or you (coughs) look yourself up on Amazon and see that someone has written a lengthy, thoughtful review of one of your books, and you realize that you have effected them very deeply indeed. Even bad reviews can be tremendously heartening. A friend once pointed out to me that my black comedy novelette The Numbers Game had a scathing notice from a reader who found it deeply depressing; my friend then observed, “Wow. You really got under his skin, didn't you?” I thought a lot about this remark, and the more I thought about it the happier I became. I never write anything simply to shock or provoke, but if someone is emotionally affected by my work, even if they also happen to hate it, well, so much the better.
In addition to this, there is also the deep-body, I-just-drank-brandy-and-smoked-a-Cuban pleasure of getting notifications of sales in places like Mexico, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany or Japan. The idea that people on the other side of the world are reading my books is as intoxicating, in its own way, as any award I could ever receive. Being asked to autograph something, while not exactly an everyday occurrence for yours truly, is also a large if admittedly very shallow enjoyment.
There is also a species of wild rose known as the royalty check. I do not know why, but a royalty check, even a pathetically small one, carries with it a wonderfully illicit feeling of having gotten away with something – even more than that, of being rewarded for having gotten away with something. We are often told in our teenage years that we must give up our dreams and accept “real life,” as if “real life” by definition meant accepting that you will never get what you want. Every time I get one of these checks reminds me that it is possible to live in the “real world” and still accomplish goals others consider unrealistic or even fantastic. James Marsters, who played Spike on Buffy and Angel, once remarked in my presence that he felt he “stole the prize money” by landing the role that he did. Well, whenever a check shows up in my mailbox (electronic or literal), I feel as if I have made off with a fat sack of cash and jewels, like Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. There is part of me that will always wonder at the idea of people handing over hard cash for the product of my imagination; but it is a happy wonder.
And then there is this. Sometimes I will look down at a stack of my books and realize that I did this. I made this. I had ideas and the discipline and passion to bring them into physical being. I slaved over my keyboard for weeks, months, even years to bring this tight little bundle of paper pulp into a physical existence and offer it for sale. It began as an image in my mind, and now it exists. It's real. It has height, width, dimension, weight. And it will still be here when I am not. They say all we leave is bones, children and a tombstone, but authors leave something else. Fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years from now someone may enter a dusty secondhand bookshop and spy a dog-eared old copy of one of my books on a shelf and take it home with them, and I will live again, through my characters, if only for a few hours. To write a book is in a sense to extend a middle finger to the grinning specter of Death. He will get my body, but so long as one copy of one of my novels physically exists, he cannot extinguish my legacy.
Looking back on these passages I see I have probably failed in my object of answering the seemingly simple question of what it's like to be an author. The truth is the answer is different for everyone and no doubt many authors, reading this, would disagree with my opinions and conclusions, or point out the areas I have failed to illuminate. And this brings me to my concluding point. To be a writer is to attempt to do the impossible on a daily basis. Using only words on a page, one must create sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile experiences which are vivid enough within the reader's mind to supplant reality. Using only ideas, some of which may be contradictory, incomplete or incommunicable by language, he must nevertheless weave a story which is not only coherent and logical but interesting, even compelling. Using only his petty store of personal experiences, he must convince the reader that he, the author, ought to be taken seriously when he assumes the viewpoint of the hero, the monster, the martyr, the madman, the saint. All of this is functionally impossible. We, the writers, achieve it only because, as Carl Sagan once observed, writing is a species of magic, and magic by its definition is the achievement of the impossible through impossible means. So if you truly want to know what it means to be a writer, my suggestion is to try and pull a rabbit out of a hat, or make an elephant disappear, or saw a woman in half without breaking her skin. It can't really done, but I think you'll discover that's most of the fun of doing it.
October 31, 2020
Remembering Sean Connery
Today is Halloween, and normally I would reserve these pages for a discussion of same. Perhaps I will do this later. For now I want to say a few words about the late Sir Thomas Sean Connery, who has died at the age of 90 years, leaving behind a gigantic legacy, and depriving us of one of the very last of the truly iconic leading-men. The number of such men is very small naturally and in some senses is limited to a different era, and every one we lose permanently reduces the total figure and cannot be replaced. Actors like Sir Christopher Lee, Charlton Heston, Michael Caine (technically Sir Maurice), George C. Scott and Connery were and are marked not only by their success as actors, their fame, money, awards, and (in the cases of the British), knighthoods, but by the fact that they were of those generations that grew up in remarkably tough circumstances. Lee served in WW2 in many capacities in many theaters of war and was wounded at least once. Heston also served in WW2 in the horrible Aleutian Islands campaign and was badly hurt. Caine grew up dirt poor, survived the Blitz, and fought in Korea. Scott served in the Marines and later used to hire bodyguards "to protect people from me."
Connery's mum was a maid, his father a truck driver. He had very little education and joined the Royal Navy at 16 because he had no prospects. After he got out of the service, he worked as everything from an artist's model to a milkman and often had multiple jobs at the same time well into his 20s. All the odds were against him succeeding at anything, but he was gifted with good looks and athleticism and his parents had instilled in him an almost brutal work-ethic. His first seven years as an actor brought him a total of ten movie roles, until at last he landed a small but memorable role in the classic WW2 movie The Longest Day. It may have been this appearance that got him cast as James Bond in Dr. No the following year. The rest was cinematic history.
Like most movie stars, Connery's career was a roller-coaster ride. He made a total of seven appearances as Bond but, like Basil Rathbone with Sherlock Holmes, he began to feel bored, constricted and even resentful of the role which made him famous. Connery felt he was an actor of considerable range, power and charisma, and playing the cartoonishly suave secret agent was hardly a challenge. He aggressively sought out projects which conflicted with the Bond image and which offered him a chance to show the world what he could do. Some of the choices he made were terrible: films like Zardoz,Meteor, Rising Sun, The Avengers and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are the sort of thing actors do when they are desperate for work or cash, or are bored silly, or because the project they buy ain't the project they get -- a fairly common occurrence in the movie business. At other times he was wrongly overlooked by critics who were too busy attacking the film in which he appeared without paying heed to the quality of his performance: The Name of the Rose is such a movie.
But even many of his outright box-office failures were triumphs in their own way. Films like The Hill, about the cruel, even vicious condition of a disciplinary camp for British soldiers during WW2, The Offence, in which Connery plays a trauma-haunted cop who murders a man during a "routine" interrogation, or his sword-wielding, peacock-feather-hat-sporting character in Highlander, showed that he was considerably more than a handsome guy who could fire blanks at extras and deliver droll, slightly cruel one-liners on the set of a Bond movie. Hell, even a film as frustrating in its execution as Outland showcased Connery's ability to play toughness at different levels, and to layer heroic roles with angst and vulnerability.
In addition to simply good films, or flicks in which he was good but the project left something to be desired, Connery can be said to have appeared in a number of classics both major and minor, from the aforementioned Longest Day to the greatest of all Bond movies, the letter-perfect Goldfinger -- the only Bond film in which we really see the character sweat, and the story is all the better for it. He delivered a masterful performance in The Man Who Would Be King as a down-on-his-luck mercenary who goes crazy with power when primitive tribesman believe him to be a god. He used subtlety to convey both the heroic qualities and the flaws of a real-life British general on the losing side of a battle in the WW2 epic A Bridge Too Far. But many will best recall his Oscar-winning performance in The Untouchables as his signature masterpiece. His portrayal of Jimmy Malone, a broken-down old Chicago cop who has to overcome his own fear to help bring down Al Capone, not only revived his career, it demonstrated (after more than three decades in the business) that he was the sort of actor who could make you forget that Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro and Andy Garcia were even in the goddamned picture. A rather outre Irish accent aside, he was that good.
But the best Sean Connery story of all Sean Connery stories has nothing to do with his acting career. It is a piece of badassery from his youth, and it is the final image I intend to leave with you today.
Back in the 1950s, Connery was in a pool hall in Edinburgh, Scotland playing billiards and chatting up the ladies. He had brought with him a very nice leather jacket which he lay on the edge of the billiards table. He did not know that the pool hall was turf claimed by a local street gang called the Valdors, who were known for inflicting brutal beatings, face-slashings and stabbings on their rivals and any who defied their authority. The Valdors' uniform was a leather jacket. They didn't care for young men who were not Valdors wearing leather in their sight, so one of the Valdors went up to Connery's table and slammed his very expensive jacket on the floor, then gave him a look as if to say, "What are you gonna do about it, mate?"
The place went silent. Connery looked at the gangster and said, in what I assume was his best Connery voice: "I'll give you exactly five seconds to put that back."
The gangster stared at him for four seconds... and then put it back. Evidently he saw something in that big bastard he did not care to tangle with. But he was now humiliated. So he hatched a plan for revenge. He and five of his mates waited a few days, then tracked Connery down to the Palais nightclub where he was employed. When Connery got off work they chased him through the streets, meaning to beat him to a pulp and then take his jacket as a trophy.
Connery scaled a 15-foot fence to get away but found himself cornered on a balcony. He had to fight if he wanted to survive. It looked like the end, because as a rule, it is only in the movies in which he had yet to star that one man defeats six; but there were factors the gangsters hadn't calculated.
1) Connery was in training for the Mr. Universe competition and was then regarded as one of the strongest men in Great Britain. Photos available online reveal that he possessed a truly awesome physique on a 6'2" frame.
2) His strength coach was a retired British Army physical fitness instructor.
3) To increase his actual physical strength, and not just the appearance of his muscles, as well as to provide for himself, he worked days as a laborer, mainly on construction sites.
4) His night job at the Palais was bouncer.
The gangsters attacked, but they couldn't get at him more than 2 at a time because of the narrowness of the balcony. Big mistake. Connery beat the shit out of all of them, one pair at a time. According to Michael Caine, one of Connery's best freinds, during the fight, he actually smashed two of the Valdors' heads together coconut-style, knocking them both unconscious. Connery beat them so badly that after it was over, the battered gang leader actually offered him membership in the Valdors. Connery "very politely declined" and after that had no more trouble with the gang.
In the end, the reason Sean Connery played a badass so well is that he wasn't playing.
Rest in peace, Sir Knight. And please leave something up there for the rest of us.
Connery's mum was a maid, his father a truck driver. He had very little education and joined the Royal Navy at 16 because he had no prospects. After he got out of the service, he worked as everything from an artist's model to a milkman and often had multiple jobs at the same time well into his 20s. All the odds were against him succeeding at anything, but he was gifted with good looks and athleticism and his parents had instilled in him an almost brutal work-ethic. His first seven years as an actor brought him a total of ten movie roles, until at last he landed a small but memorable role in the classic WW2 movie The Longest Day. It may have been this appearance that got him cast as James Bond in Dr. No the following year. The rest was cinematic history.
Like most movie stars, Connery's career was a roller-coaster ride. He made a total of seven appearances as Bond but, like Basil Rathbone with Sherlock Holmes, he began to feel bored, constricted and even resentful of the role which made him famous. Connery felt he was an actor of considerable range, power and charisma, and playing the cartoonishly suave secret agent was hardly a challenge. He aggressively sought out projects which conflicted with the Bond image and which offered him a chance to show the world what he could do. Some of the choices he made were terrible: films like Zardoz,Meteor, Rising Sun, The Avengers and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are the sort of thing actors do when they are desperate for work or cash, or are bored silly, or because the project they buy ain't the project they get -- a fairly common occurrence in the movie business. At other times he was wrongly overlooked by critics who were too busy attacking the film in which he appeared without paying heed to the quality of his performance: The Name of the Rose is such a movie.
But even many of his outright box-office failures were triumphs in their own way. Films like The Hill, about the cruel, even vicious condition of a disciplinary camp for British soldiers during WW2, The Offence, in which Connery plays a trauma-haunted cop who murders a man during a "routine" interrogation, or his sword-wielding, peacock-feather-hat-sporting character in Highlander, showed that he was considerably more than a handsome guy who could fire blanks at extras and deliver droll, slightly cruel one-liners on the set of a Bond movie. Hell, even a film as frustrating in its execution as Outland showcased Connery's ability to play toughness at different levels, and to layer heroic roles with angst and vulnerability.
In addition to simply good films, or flicks in which he was good but the project left something to be desired, Connery can be said to have appeared in a number of classics both major and minor, from the aforementioned Longest Day to the greatest of all Bond movies, the letter-perfect Goldfinger -- the only Bond film in which we really see the character sweat, and the story is all the better for it. He delivered a masterful performance in The Man Who Would Be King as a down-on-his-luck mercenary who goes crazy with power when primitive tribesman believe him to be a god. He used subtlety to convey both the heroic qualities and the flaws of a real-life British general on the losing side of a battle in the WW2 epic A Bridge Too Far. But many will best recall his Oscar-winning performance in The Untouchables as his signature masterpiece. His portrayal of Jimmy Malone, a broken-down old Chicago cop who has to overcome his own fear to help bring down Al Capone, not only revived his career, it demonstrated (after more than three decades in the business) that he was the sort of actor who could make you forget that Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro and Andy Garcia were even in the goddamned picture. A rather outre Irish accent aside, he was that good.
But the best Sean Connery story of all Sean Connery stories has nothing to do with his acting career. It is a piece of badassery from his youth, and it is the final image I intend to leave with you today.
Back in the 1950s, Connery was in a pool hall in Edinburgh, Scotland playing billiards and chatting up the ladies. He had brought with him a very nice leather jacket which he lay on the edge of the billiards table. He did not know that the pool hall was turf claimed by a local street gang called the Valdors, who were known for inflicting brutal beatings, face-slashings and stabbings on their rivals and any who defied their authority. The Valdors' uniform was a leather jacket. They didn't care for young men who were not Valdors wearing leather in their sight, so one of the Valdors went up to Connery's table and slammed his very expensive jacket on the floor, then gave him a look as if to say, "What are you gonna do about it, mate?"
The place went silent. Connery looked at the gangster and said, in what I assume was his best Connery voice: "I'll give you exactly five seconds to put that back."
The gangster stared at him for four seconds... and then put it back. Evidently he saw something in that big bastard he did not care to tangle with. But he was now humiliated. So he hatched a plan for revenge. He and five of his mates waited a few days, then tracked Connery down to the Palais nightclub where he was employed. When Connery got off work they chased him through the streets, meaning to beat him to a pulp and then take his jacket as a trophy.
Connery scaled a 15-foot fence to get away but found himself cornered on a balcony. He had to fight if he wanted to survive. It looked like the end, because as a rule, it is only in the movies in which he had yet to star that one man defeats six; but there were factors the gangsters hadn't calculated.
1) Connery was in training for the Mr. Universe competition and was then regarded as one of the strongest men in Great Britain. Photos available online reveal that he possessed a truly awesome physique on a 6'2" frame.
2) His strength coach was a retired British Army physical fitness instructor.
3) To increase his actual physical strength, and not just the appearance of his muscles, as well as to provide for himself, he worked days as a laborer, mainly on construction sites.
4) His night job at the Palais was bouncer.
The gangsters attacked, but they couldn't get at him more than 2 at a time because of the narrowness of the balcony. Big mistake. Connery beat the shit out of all of them, one pair at a time. According to Michael Caine, one of Connery's best freinds, during the fight, he actually smashed two of the Valdors' heads together coconut-style, knocking them both unconscious. Connery beat them so badly that after it was over, the battered gang leader actually offered him membership in the Valdors. Connery "very politely declined" and after that had no more trouble with the gang.
In the end, the reason Sean Connery played a badass so well is that he wasn't playing.
Rest in peace, Sir Knight. And please leave something up there for the rest of us.
September 17, 2020
As I Please IV: New Life Edition
Never say never again. It's a worthwhile bit of advice, and one I did not take, because on August 3, 2020, after a hiatus of sixteen years, I not only traded one coast for another, I returned to the criminal justice system...something I swore I would never do.
In my personal experience, most people break pledges to themselves out of desperation or desire. In my case neither status obtained. My decision came about after three years of exhaustively, some might say tediously, weighing the decision. And now that I have made it, I have no regrets. I am still a paid part of the entertainment industry, but it is now a side-job and one I do remotely. As for novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories, well, I can write those from anywhere, and will. For me, the decision to return to the criminal justice fold was largely based on a need (I think that is the right word) to be a part of something that actually matters. Movies, television, and video games do impact people's lives, of course, often very profoundly, but there are levels of impact and it was important for me to be involved at a much higher level. It was also important for me to get away from the fundamental corruption of the industry, with its poisonous self-importance, ass-backwards values and hypocritical caste systems. In no other place on earth is the concept of failing upwards put into practice more assiduously, and in no other place does credit get distributed with less regard for those who actually do the work. Let me give you some specific examples. A few years ago, I was part of a four-man team who put together a gigantic online and television advertising campaign on extremely short notice. This campaign required long commutes, seven day weeks and immensely long hours. It was delivered on time and considered a massive success. Some time later I was informed, more or less in passing, that it had won not one, not two, but three Cannes Lions. As one British writer put it, Cannes is "arguably the ad industry’s most significant global awards festival." In other words, it's the Oscars of advertising. So I was part of a team that had won three advertising Oscars. And yet not only did I never receive a statue (in fairness, they do cost $1,200 euros each), I was never even formally notified that my team had won them. There was no letter, no phone call, not even a text message. There was no "thank you" from those who had employed us. There was nothing. And yet somewhere, someone who had never stayed up 'til 3 AM night after night after night putting this campaign together, who'd had no say in the day-to-day operations or artistic direction of the ads, who hadn't even introduced himself to the people who were doing all the goddamned work, has three of those statues on his desk. And got to go to France to collect them.
Another incident that stung me more than I would care to admit occurred when I was working for one of the premier make-up effects studios in Hollywood. I was once again part of a team, which in this case was working on six different television shows simultaneously. One of them was The Orville, a sci-fi show which required not only a staggering amount of foam latex prosthetics for those who were playing aliens, but also the very highest level of quality for each piece. Unlike The Walking Dead, which didn't require a great deal of care for the zombie masks, cowls and so on because the zombies (walkers) were seldom shot in close-up, The Orville's pieces had to pass the high-definition close up test. The smallest imperfection ruined the mask. When you need both quantity and quality, a great deal of ass-busting is required, and bust our asses we did. There was many the day I came home from the studio so exhausted I didn't have the strength to open a jam jar. And you know what? People noticed. Seth MacFarlane, the show's creator and star, invited us to his house when the season wrapped for the cast-crew party. This is something I would have dearly loved to do, not only for the obvious reason that it would have been a blast and a great memory, but because I fucking deserved it. It would have been the reward for months of back-breaking, time-consuming, attention-demanding labor. Yet the invitation was deliberately withheld from us until after the party had been thrown. My boss, who had a habit of preventing his employees from getting individual recognition or attention for their efforts, to the point where he intercepted boxes of crew shirts and gave them away to his friends rather than the people who had earned them, had decided he did not want us there. After all, the more of his people who showed up, the less attention would be given to him. So: I never met Seth MacFarlane, for whom I worked for an entire year.
A final example. I worked five seasons on a television show with a format similar to Top Chef. (It was not, I hasten to add, Top Chef.) Though I slaved like a stevedore on that show, working all afternoon, evening and night into the next morning every other day, I was denied credit. Although my role was crucial, I was technically "shadow crew," which is an old Hollywood trick which allows studios to pay crew without allowing them any credit for what they do. This detestable practice is even more common in the world of video games, where those who do virtually all the work are enjoined from getting any credit whatsoever.
I could, if I wished, fill pages with such incidents, many of which happened to me, some to friends or colleagues of mine. I could fill even more pages with stories of those who ended up with their names on scripts they did not write, or won awards like Emmys they did not deserve. And I could scribble a volume on how certain people in positions of power exploited -- sexually exploited -- their employees or simply abused them. At one studio I remember my boss using his employee, an effects artist, as a mistress and personal assistant, and punishing her at work for arguments they had in their private relationship. This is the textbook definition of sexual harassment, but when I told him this, he said, "She won't do anything about it. She's got no self-respect." However, I think I've made my point. Life is unfair everywhere, but the natural unfairness of life is not an excuse to tolerate, to champion, and to perpetuate a system where idiots and assholes hold all the marbles. In any event, things like this are only a small part of the reason I left. They just made it easier when the time came.
I don't wish to give the impression that I left in a state of bitterness or regret. Not hardly. The thirteen years I spent in Los Angeles were probably the most dynamic and certainly the most accomplished of my life. The experiences I had there, the people I met and worked with, some of whom I had grown up watching on television or seeing in movies, were incredible and sometimes even surreal. I got to do, on some level or other, nearly everything I had set out to do, and quite a bit I had never imagined doing. And I am also very proud of having left on my own terms. Most people who want to work in The Industry last 6 months to 2 years in L.A., and leave only because financial pressures drive them away. Many -- probably most -- never make one dime in the field they wanted to become a part of. But I was getting work until the very day I left, including writing work, which is damn near impossible to land. And unlike some, I never fucked anyone over to get it. I never put my name on a script I didn't write, or claimed credit for things I never did, or stole a job from a friend and mentor because I saw it as my big break. I never let a corrupt system corrupt me, and I'm proud of that, too.
Did I accomplish everything I wanted on the scale I wished to accomplish it? Hell no. I'd be lying if I said that was the case. I had some painful near-misses and some crushing disappointments. Like everyone else in the business, I sometimes went months when the phone didn't ring and I wondered if I'd ever work again. But as I said, I'm not finished with the entertainment industry, and so far, it hasn't shown itself to be finished with me. Hollywood (the industry, I mean) is a remarkable place, and I suppose one day I will return, because like the Mafia or the Irish Republican Army, once in, you're never truly out.
Having caught you up on the reason this blog has been dormant for the last two months, I'd now like to get to the As I Please part of As I Please. These are random observations and thoughts which have occurred to me during the months I didn't have time (or an internet connection) to write this blog.
* Driving across the United States, I once again learned that the Southwest is beautiful, interesting and raw -- one minute it's 107 degrees, the next you are crawling through a thunderstorm so violent the lightning in the distance is welcome for the flashes of illumination it provides. One minute you're in pure desert, the next curving through gigantic rock formations so ancient even Father Time can't remember when they were built. Once you penetrate the Midwest, however, the scenery begins to dull. Missouri is wild country, and you can well imagine why Confederate guerillas made it ungovernable during (and after) the Civil War, but as you exchange it for Illinois the boredom begins. From my home state through Indiana and Ohio, across a corner of West Virginia and into Pennsylvania, the geography is pancake-flat and the scenery, minus a few large cities and some picturesque river crossings, about as boring as boring can be.
* When I finally got access to wi-fi, I streamed The Highwaymen, a Netflix movie about the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson. I was reluctant to watch this movie despite being interested in the subject matter, because Costner's movies tend to aggravate me. No matter who he is playing, no matter what the genre of film, no matter how unlikely the scenario, there is always a scene in which his character bullies and humiliates some other man who in real life could probably beat the shit out of him. It's almost as if he has a clause in his contract. But this movie was surprisingly good, and while Costner does manage to squeeze in the requisite scene where he thrashes a much bigger, stronger guy, this time I didn't mind, because Highwaymen is much more than a period piece cops-n-robbers movie. It's about how proud men deal with age, and with change; it's also about the culture, and the cult, of celebrity. Both are still relevant even after the 100 years that have passed since Bonnie and Clyde finally paid for their sins.
* I'm 48 years old and still can't order a plate of hot wings without wearing most of them by the end of the meal.
* The word "activist" is soft coin indeed nowadays. Like "hero," it has been applied to so many who don't deserve it that it has lost almost all meaning. Among my parents' generation, and my own, an activist was someone who lived for a cause and was willing to undergo all sorts of hardships, discomforts and risks, including the risk of physical injury, imprisonment, economic ruin or even death, to see their cause triumph. Today, an activist is someone who clicks "like" on a Facebook page or shares memes on Instagram or Twitter. To dub people who are politically active on social media, but nowhere else, as "activists" is an insult to the people who got blasted by water cannons, savaged by dogs, smashed by clubs, and in some cases shot dead, while fighting for things like civil rights. Let's be a little more careful with our words.
* Speaking of words: the following have lost nearly all meaning due to overuse/misuse: communism, feminism, fascism, socialism. Racism is on the verge of being a meaningless word since the definition of it is constantly changing and expanding to include more and more behaviors, thoughts, attitudes, tones of voice, opinions, and even body language. I was told yesterday that saying "I don't see color" is covert white supremacy, as is the scientifically accurate statement that "there is only one race -- the human race." I sometimes seriously wonder if Trump is funding the people who find racism and white supremacy behind every tree, because they are doing much to get him re-elected.
* Twenty years ago, in York, Pennsylvania, there was a big gray-haired man who shambled around town wearing oversized headphones and carrying a sack containing God knows what. He was dubbed Pub Claus, for his resemblance to Santa mixed with his propensity for occupying barstools, diner counters, anywhere he could set up shop with his books, music player, and sundry items. I saw him everywhere I went, from the street outside the courthouse to the local diner, and he annoyed the shit out of me. He was always blathering about anime and in short, behaving like what I considered to be a classic weirdo. Tonight I encountered him again, at the restaurant where I am writing this. His technological level has improved, but he's still the same weird old dude. The major difference is my reaction to him. I am now pleased and delighted that he is still getting at it, still being true to his own unapologetic weirdness. And it saddens me that twenty years ago I wasn't human enough to celebrate his decision to live a free life, untroubled by the judgments and opinions of others.
In my personal experience, most people break pledges to themselves out of desperation or desire. In my case neither status obtained. My decision came about after three years of exhaustively, some might say tediously, weighing the decision. And now that I have made it, I have no regrets. I am still a paid part of the entertainment industry, but it is now a side-job and one I do remotely. As for novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories, well, I can write those from anywhere, and will. For me, the decision to return to the criminal justice fold was largely based on a need (I think that is the right word) to be a part of something that actually matters. Movies, television, and video games do impact people's lives, of course, often very profoundly, but there are levels of impact and it was important for me to be involved at a much higher level. It was also important for me to get away from the fundamental corruption of the industry, with its poisonous self-importance, ass-backwards values and hypocritical caste systems. In no other place on earth is the concept of failing upwards put into practice more assiduously, and in no other place does credit get distributed with less regard for those who actually do the work. Let me give you some specific examples. A few years ago, I was part of a four-man team who put together a gigantic online and television advertising campaign on extremely short notice. This campaign required long commutes, seven day weeks and immensely long hours. It was delivered on time and considered a massive success. Some time later I was informed, more or less in passing, that it had won not one, not two, but three Cannes Lions. As one British writer put it, Cannes is "arguably the ad industry’s most significant global awards festival." In other words, it's the Oscars of advertising. So I was part of a team that had won three advertising Oscars. And yet not only did I never receive a statue (in fairness, they do cost $1,200 euros each), I was never even formally notified that my team had won them. There was no letter, no phone call, not even a text message. There was no "thank you" from those who had employed us. There was nothing. And yet somewhere, someone who had never stayed up 'til 3 AM night after night after night putting this campaign together, who'd had no say in the day-to-day operations or artistic direction of the ads, who hadn't even introduced himself to the people who were doing all the goddamned work, has three of those statues on his desk. And got to go to France to collect them.
Another incident that stung me more than I would care to admit occurred when I was working for one of the premier make-up effects studios in Hollywood. I was once again part of a team, which in this case was working on six different television shows simultaneously. One of them was The Orville, a sci-fi show which required not only a staggering amount of foam latex prosthetics for those who were playing aliens, but also the very highest level of quality for each piece. Unlike The Walking Dead, which didn't require a great deal of care for the zombie masks, cowls and so on because the zombies (walkers) were seldom shot in close-up, The Orville's pieces had to pass the high-definition close up test. The smallest imperfection ruined the mask. When you need both quantity and quality, a great deal of ass-busting is required, and bust our asses we did. There was many the day I came home from the studio so exhausted I didn't have the strength to open a jam jar. And you know what? People noticed. Seth MacFarlane, the show's creator and star, invited us to his house when the season wrapped for the cast-crew party. This is something I would have dearly loved to do, not only for the obvious reason that it would have been a blast and a great memory, but because I fucking deserved it. It would have been the reward for months of back-breaking, time-consuming, attention-demanding labor. Yet the invitation was deliberately withheld from us until after the party had been thrown. My boss, who had a habit of preventing his employees from getting individual recognition or attention for their efforts, to the point where he intercepted boxes of crew shirts and gave them away to his friends rather than the people who had earned them, had decided he did not want us there. After all, the more of his people who showed up, the less attention would be given to him. So: I never met Seth MacFarlane, for whom I worked for an entire year.
A final example. I worked five seasons on a television show with a format similar to Top Chef. (It was not, I hasten to add, Top Chef.) Though I slaved like a stevedore on that show, working all afternoon, evening and night into the next morning every other day, I was denied credit. Although my role was crucial, I was technically "shadow crew," which is an old Hollywood trick which allows studios to pay crew without allowing them any credit for what they do. This detestable practice is even more common in the world of video games, where those who do virtually all the work are enjoined from getting any credit whatsoever.
I could, if I wished, fill pages with such incidents, many of which happened to me, some to friends or colleagues of mine. I could fill even more pages with stories of those who ended up with their names on scripts they did not write, or won awards like Emmys they did not deserve. And I could scribble a volume on how certain people in positions of power exploited -- sexually exploited -- their employees or simply abused them. At one studio I remember my boss using his employee, an effects artist, as a mistress and personal assistant, and punishing her at work for arguments they had in their private relationship. This is the textbook definition of sexual harassment, but when I told him this, he said, "She won't do anything about it. She's got no self-respect." However, I think I've made my point. Life is unfair everywhere, but the natural unfairness of life is not an excuse to tolerate, to champion, and to perpetuate a system where idiots and assholes hold all the marbles. In any event, things like this are only a small part of the reason I left. They just made it easier when the time came.
I don't wish to give the impression that I left in a state of bitterness or regret. Not hardly. The thirteen years I spent in Los Angeles were probably the most dynamic and certainly the most accomplished of my life. The experiences I had there, the people I met and worked with, some of whom I had grown up watching on television or seeing in movies, were incredible and sometimes even surreal. I got to do, on some level or other, nearly everything I had set out to do, and quite a bit I had never imagined doing. And I am also very proud of having left on my own terms. Most people who want to work in The Industry last 6 months to 2 years in L.A., and leave only because financial pressures drive them away. Many -- probably most -- never make one dime in the field they wanted to become a part of. But I was getting work until the very day I left, including writing work, which is damn near impossible to land. And unlike some, I never fucked anyone over to get it. I never put my name on a script I didn't write, or claimed credit for things I never did, or stole a job from a friend and mentor because I saw it as my big break. I never let a corrupt system corrupt me, and I'm proud of that, too.
Did I accomplish everything I wanted on the scale I wished to accomplish it? Hell no. I'd be lying if I said that was the case. I had some painful near-misses and some crushing disappointments. Like everyone else in the business, I sometimes went months when the phone didn't ring and I wondered if I'd ever work again. But as I said, I'm not finished with the entertainment industry, and so far, it hasn't shown itself to be finished with me. Hollywood (the industry, I mean) is a remarkable place, and I suppose one day I will return, because like the Mafia or the Irish Republican Army, once in, you're never truly out.
Having caught you up on the reason this blog has been dormant for the last two months, I'd now like to get to the As I Please part of As I Please. These are random observations and thoughts which have occurred to me during the months I didn't have time (or an internet connection) to write this blog.
* Driving across the United States, I once again learned that the Southwest is beautiful, interesting and raw -- one minute it's 107 degrees, the next you are crawling through a thunderstorm so violent the lightning in the distance is welcome for the flashes of illumination it provides. One minute you're in pure desert, the next curving through gigantic rock formations so ancient even Father Time can't remember when they were built. Once you penetrate the Midwest, however, the scenery begins to dull. Missouri is wild country, and you can well imagine why Confederate guerillas made it ungovernable during (and after) the Civil War, but as you exchange it for Illinois the boredom begins. From my home state through Indiana and Ohio, across a corner of West Virginia and into Pennsylvania, the geography is pancake-flat and the scenery, minus a few large cities and some picturesque river crossings, about as boring as boring can be.
* When I finally got access to wi-fi, I streamed The Highwaymen, a Netflix movie about the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson. I was reluctant to watch this movie despite being interested in the subject matter, because Costner's movies tend to aggravate me. No matter who he is playing, no matter what the genre of film, no matter how unlikely the scenario, there is always a scene in which his character bullies and humiliates some other man who in real life could probably beat the shit out of him. It's almost as if he has a clause in his contract. But this movie was surprisingly good, and while Costner does manage to squeeze in the requisite scene where he thrashes a much bigger, stronger guy, this time I didn't mind, because Highwaymen is much more than a period piece cops-n-robbers movie. It's about how proud men deal with age, and with change; it's also about the culture, and the cult, of celebrity. Both are still relevant even after the 100 years that have passed since Bonnie and Clyde finally paid for their sins.
* I'm 48 years old and still can't order a plate of hot wings without wearing most of them by the end of the meal.
* The word "activist" is soft coin indeed nowadays. Like "hero," it has been applied to so many who don't deserve it that it has lost almost all meaning. Among my parents' generation, and my own, an activist was someone who lived for a cause and was willing to undergo all sorts of hardships, discomforts and risks, including the risk of physical injury, imprisonment, economic ruin or even death, to see their cause triumph. Today, an activist is someone who clicks "like" on a Facebook page or shares memes on Instagram or Twitter. To dub people who are politically active on social media, but nowhere else, as "activists" is an insult to the people who got blasted by water cannons, savaged by dogs, smashed by clubs, and in some cases shot dead, while fighting for things like civil rights. Let's be a little more careful with our words.
* Speaking of words: the following have lost nearly all meaning due to overuse/misuse: communism, feminism, fascism, socialism. Racism is on the verge of being a meaningless word since the definition of it is constantly changing and expanding to include more and more behaviors, thoughts, attitudes, tones of voice, opinions, and even body language. I was told yesterday that saying "I don't see color" is covert white supremacy, as is the scientifically accurate statement that "there is only one race -- the human race." I sometimes seriously wonder if Trump is funding the people who find racism and white supremacy behind every tree, because they are doing much to get him re-elected.
* Twenty years ago, in York, Pennsylvania, there was a big gray-haired man who shambled around town wearing oversized headphones and carrying a sack containing God knows what. He was dubbed Pub Claus, for his resemblance to Santa mixed with his propensity for occupying barstools, diner counters, anywhere he could set up shop with his books, music player, and sundry items. I saw him everywhere I went, from the street outside the courthouse to the local diner, and he annoyed the shit out of me. He was always blathering about anime and in short, behaving like what I considered to be a classic weirdo. Tonight I encountered him again, at the restaurant where I am writing this. His technological level has improved, but he's still the same weird old dude. The major difference is my reaction to him. I am now pleased and delighted that he is still getting at it, still being true to his own unapologetic weirdness. And it saddens me that twenty years ago I wasn't human enough to celebrate his decision to live a free life, untroubled by the judgments and opinions of others.
July 31, 2020
ALL APOLOGIES
A few years ago I was in Vancouver for work purposes, and as I enjoyed my first-ever sampling of Canadian bacon in Canada, I mentioned to one of my traveling companions, a marketing expert, that I maintained a blog on Goodreads.
"Do you have a regular release date for it?" He asked me immediately.
"No," I said. "I try to produce one a week but it just never seems to happen."
"Bad," he said. "Very bad. The key to a successful blog is consistency. However often it comes out, it should always be on the same day at the same time. That's the only way to maintain and build a readership."
I was annoyed, in large part because I knew he was one hundred percent correct. One of the ironic aspects of being a writer, of course, is that while we essentially live to write, we are generally undisciplined and Bohemian in our habits, making consistency very difficult. We fight against deadlines (look at George R.R. Martin, for God's sake), forget meetings, stumble over release dates, and try to make up for procrastination with speed. In short, we lack consistency. All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I'm sorry my blog has been so inert for the last month or more. My main excuse, which actually does rise to the level of an explanation, is that I just completed a 2,650-mile move from California. The move came on relatively short notice, and required frantic weeks of work, because it isn't easy to deconstruct a life that took almost thirteen years to build, and transport that life across a continent during a global pandemic.
Having said all that, I am pleased to report that the last six weeks or so have given me a tremendous amount of ammunition for future blogs. The word "tremendous" has perhaps become discountenanced by the presidency of Donald Trump, but seriously folks, I have many subjects upon which I plan to opine in the coming weeks, and when I finally get completely settled here on the East Coast, I hope (notice that I don't promise: Bohemian, remember?) to finally get this blog the consistency my friend the marketing expert insisted that it have.
"Do you have a regular release date for it?" He asked me immediately.
"No," I said. "I try to produce one a week but it just never seems to happen."
"Bad," he said. "Very bad. The key to a successful blog is consistency. However often it comes out, it should always be on the same day at the same time. That's the only way to maintain and build a readership."
I was annoyed, in large part because I knew he was one hundred percent correct. One of the ironic aspects of being a writer, of course, is that while we essentially live to write, we are generally undisciplined and Bohemian in our habits, making consistency very difficult. We fight against deadlines (look at George R.R. Martin, for God's sake), forget meetings, stumble over release dates, and try to make up for procrastination with speed. In short, we lack consistency. All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I'm sorry my blog has been so inert for the last month or more. My main excuse, which actually does rise to the level of an explanation, is that I just completed a 2,650-mile move from California. The move came on relatively short notice, and required frantic weeks of work, because it isn't easy to deconstruct a life that took almost thirteen years to build, and transport that life across a continent during a global pandemic.
Having said all that, I am pleased to report that the last six weeks or so have given me a tremendous amount of ammunition for future blogs. The word "tremendous" has perhaps become discountenanced by the presidency of Donald Trump, but seriously folks, I have many subjects upon which I plan to opine in the coming weeks, and when I finally get completely settled here on the East Coast, I hope (notice that I don't promise: Bohemian, remember?) to finally get this blog the consistency my friend the marketing expert insisted that it have.
June 11, 2020
I'M OPENING MY OWN ONLINE BOOKSTORE
A few days ago my third novel, Sinner's Cross, won the Literary Titan Gold Medal. This is the third accolade it has collected since I released it in October of last year, and in celebration of this feat, I am announcing the soft open of my online bookstore, Books By Miles Watson.
Granted, it isn't the catchiest title, but as an independent author who has to do his own advertising, I have to plug my name into everything I do -- at least for now.
The reason I am opening my own store for paperbacks is very simple. Ever since the debut of my first novel, Cage Life, I have received requests for autographed and dedicated copies of my novels. However, unless I'm at a book signing, which nowadays is not going to happen anyway, I've always had to refuse. The cost of ordering my own author copies from the printer, and then remailing them to readers, is simply prohibitive. Even now, with this arrangement, it may still be a financial drain, but I'm willing to give it a try regardless. One of the few genuine joys of being an independent author is that you get to put the personal touch on nearly everything you do. You get to connect with readers as much or as little as you desire, and to a great extent, captain your own ship.
For the afformentioned budgetary reasons, I cannot offer this service to foreign readers. This grieves me because I do sell a goodly number of books in Canada, the U.K., and Australia, as well as a few in continental Europe and even Japan. Perhaps one day I'll be able to work something out on that score, but for now only domestic shipping works, and that by media mail, which is very slow, but has the advantage of shipping to Alaska and Hawaii as well.
At present the bookstore features all six of my works which are in paperback. That means the novels Cage Life, Knuckle Down: A Cage Life Novel, and Sinner's Cross, and the novellas The Numbers Game and Nosferatu, as well as my short-story collection Devils You Know . I have discounted the books to prices somewhat lower than Amazon offers, but I can't promise buying from me will be cheaper due to your local taxes and modest but definite shipping costs. I can promise that they will be autographed and, if you desire, personalized within reason.
One final note. This is a SOFT opening. I have by no means worked out all the kinks in the system and the site is still very much a work in progress. Please be patient if you encounter bugs or glitches, but more importantly, please let me know if you did so I can fix the problem. A technological mastermind, I am not.
The bookstore is at...
https://www.mileswatsonauthor.com/
Hope to see you there.
Granted, it isn't the catchiest title, but as an independent author who has to do his own advertising, I have to plug my name into everything I do -- at least for now.
The reason I am opening my own store for paperbacks is very simple. Ever since the debut of my first novel, Cage Life, I have received requests for autographed and dedicated copies of my novels. However, unless I'm at a book signing, which nowadays is not going to happen anyway, I've always had to refuse. The cost of ordering my own author copies from the printer, and then remailing them to readers, is simply prohibitive. Even now, with this arrangement, it may still be a financial drain, but I'm willing to give it a try regardless. One of the few genuine joys of being an independent author is that you get to put the personal touch on nearly everything you do. You get to connect with readers as much or as little as you desire, and to a great extent, captain your own ship.
For the afformentioned budgetary reasons, I cannot offer this service to foreign readers. This grieves me because I do sell a goodly number of books in Canada, the U.K., and Australia, as well as a few in continental Europe and even Japan. Perhaps one day I'll be able to work something out on that score, but for now only domestic shipping works, and that by media mail, which is very slow, but has the advantage of shipping to Alaska and Hawaii as well.
At present the bookstore features all six of my works which are in paperback. That means the novels Cage Life, Knuckle Down: A Cage Life Novel, and Sinner's Cross, and the novellas The Numbers Game and Nosferatu, as well as my short-story collection Devils You Know . I have discounted the books to prices somewhat lower than Amazon offers, but I can't promise buying from me will be cheaper due to your local taxes and modest but definite shipping costs. I can promise that they will be autographed and, if you desire, personalized within reason.
One final note. This is a SOFT opening. I have by no means worked out all the kinks in the system and the site is still very much a work in progress. Please be patient if you encounter bugs or glitches, but more importantly, please let me know if you did so I can fix the problem. A technological mastermind, I am not.
The bookstore is at...
https://www.mileswatsonauthor.com/
Hope to see you there.
June 2, 2020
A FEVER IN THE BLOOD
Four years ago, I released a short story called "A Fever in the Blood." In it, a young man's violent tantrum over an obnoxious woman's cell phone conversation sparks a disturbance, which ignites a riot, which in turn explodes into a citywide insurrection in -- wait for it -- Washington, D.C. When the police fail to quell the violence, which is directed at all the real and perceived symbols of oppression and exploitation in our country, the National Guard is called in, followed by private security firms (by which I meant Blackwater), and lastly, the regular military. Meanwhile, as a street fight takes place outside of the White House, the President flees to a nuclear-proof bunker at an "undisclosed location" and...well, I'm going to stop right there. You probably get the picture, and hey, I don't want to spoil the ending.
I wrote "A Fever in the Blood" for my short-story collection, Devils You Know. I was never under the faintest impression that the book, which in 2019 was named a Finalist in the Eric Hoffer Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing, would make me any money. Short story collections, like novellas, are not moneymakers unless you happen to be a household name as an author, which I most certainly am not. Nevertheless, I was pleased to get the collection out there. It consisted of thirteen short stories which struck tones of horror, acidic social commentary, satire, drama, tragedy and black comedy, and I tackled some controversial subjects, including Nazism, the Confederacy, the psychology behind a would-be mass shooter's actions, a Second American Civil War, and the nature of evil in a world that has increasingly abandoned the concept of morality. "A Fever in the Blood," however, was the only story in the book that made me nervous -- nervous, I mean, as to the reaction people might have to the subject matter. A writer wants to be identified with his stories, but for obvious reasons, he does not always want to be identified as approving of what happens in them. We live in a world that has grown increasingly stupid, increasingly unable to recognize irony, sarcasm or satire, and to top it off, has made a habit of shooting the messenger if he doesn't sugar-coat the message. Writing is not seen as a dangerous profession, indeed it is looked upon as the opposite of one, but it's worth noting that among the very first people to be shot or hauled off to concentration camps at the beginning of a dictatorship are the writers. Likewise, in this hateful "cancel culture" of ours, the writer -- often the purveyor of controversial ideas -- is the first to find himself on the figurative chopping block for both his capacity to outrage and his unwillingness to appease.
My own favorite writer, George Orwell, famously noted that in an age such as ours, it is naive to think that a writer can escape politics. Even the very act of trying to escape from them by writing "neutral" material is in itself a political statement. Yet when I sit down to write a story, I do not necessarily do so with a conscious "message," in my mind. Many of my stories are just that: tales meant to entertain. Others are meant to make you think, but merely in a philosophical way, while still others are there to work the adrenal glands or the emotions, and never mind "higher purpose." But "A Fever in the Blood" carried with it, almost against my will, an accurate description of how I felt about the modern world. The frustration, the disillusionment, the existential dread felt by the character who triggers the riot were mine, and they were real. The terrible, ironic acts of vengeance taken by the mob were also real, in the sense that they were fantasies which I'd had, or overheard, at various times in life. Even the story's ending, steeped in sarcasm, reflected my feeling, which oddly enough I do not believe to be true but nevertheless do feel at times in my heart anyway, that the definitions of sane and insane are surprisingly mobile.
Publishing books is, in a sense, very much like painting houses for a living. When you are painting the house, your every thought and movement is devoted to getting the job right. But when you're finished, and the paint is dry and the check clears, you do not brood about what you just did, nor revel in it either; you move on to the next project. Reflection occurs, but too much reflection is dangerous. The job of a writer is to move forward, and you can't do that if you're stuck in the past, reliving past glories or fretting over past failures. I published Devils You Know in 2016, and promptly forgot about it until the judges at Hoffer named it a Finalist at the beginning of 2019. Then I forgot about it again -- more accurately, it settled in the back of my mind. But over the course of the last few days, I have come to realize that what I had intended as black comedy and social satire was actually in the nature of a prediction. And now the prediction is coming true.
Living in Los Angeles, I have seen firsthand the effects of the protests/riots/looting expeditions which are occurring everywhere since the (let's call it what it is) police murder of George Floyd. My old neighborhood was hit and hit hard. My present neighborhood is rather like a castle expecting a siege. Today I saw shops boarding up in expectation of being looted. My phone jangled with warnings about the curfew. I can hear fireworks and helicopters, and see police prowlers and the occasional khaki flash of a National Guard humvee. What chills me more than anything, however, are the images of Blackwater mercenaries standing outside the White House, and masked soldiers standing in deep ranks on the steps of the Capitol. It's as if I am witnessing, in slow motion and with a few editorial changes, my own story come to life.
I realize that in the last few months we have all had our fill of "experts" opining about every goddamn subject under the sun, from viruses to vaccines, from racism to recession. I have zero wish to add one more voice to the gigantic chorus of know-it-alls that chokes social media, news outlets, and the Internet generally. I don't pretend to have a cure for America's economic and social problems, and I distrust anyone who claims to. But I do know this: the anger and frustration that moved me to write "A Fever in the Blood" was real, and the people who are taking to the streets now, today, even as I write this, are moved by variations on that same anger. The murder of Floyd, and the pent-up energy and angst of people coming out of two months of quarantine are undoubtedly huge motivating factors, but they merely triggered the explosion. The powder was already there.
In my story, the government chooses not to care about, or even to try to understand, the source of the people's rage: its only reaction is to crush them. I chose this ending because in my personal experience, bullies, and people who benefit from unjust systems, can only justify their own existence at the top of the food chain by doing what Orwell called "retreating into stupidity" -- a stupidity of choice, where one refuses to draw conclusions from evidence, rejects any notion of self-examination, and dismisses the very idea of context. Everything is dealt with at the shallowest, the most immediate, and the most self-centered level.
Unfortunately, I see no evidence that our real-life government is moving on a different course from the one I thought I was grossly fictionalizing in "Fever." Despite everything that has happened, despite the size, scope, and racial diversity of the protesting masses, and their surprising persistence, the only fact our leaders have seemed to grasp is that they themselves -- their bank accounts, their grip on power -- are now in jeopardy. That's it. That's the sum of the realizations which seem to have taken place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I would like to be an optimist, and say that this fever, like most in life, will soon burn out, that passions will cool, that the point will finally be made or be believed to have been made, and we will all get back to the process thus interrupted, of returning to a semblance of pre-Covid normal life. I would like to believe that though we seem to be just one trigger-happy Guardsman away from a massacre that might trigger genuine insurrections of the sort not seen in this country since the assassination of Martin Luther King, that everybody will step back from the brink, wipe their collective forehead, and find a way to turn all this anger into positive, lasting change. But I have a nasty feeling, which I dearly pray is wrong, that we are about to see a large-scale example of life imitating art.
A Fever In The Blood
May 11, 2020
MOVIE REVIEW: HARRY BROWN
As promised...or threatened...here is another movie review. Like the last one, it is about a violent film whose driving thematic force is vengeance. Unlike the last one, it's got Michael Caine, Iain Glenn and Liam Cunningham and David Bradley, among others, and that ought to be enough to pique your interest even if you don't care for cinematic mayhem. Next time out, I promise I'll review something with absolutely no violence in it at all.
Movies like HARRY BROWN (2009) seldom get a fair analysis. They either rub the viewer's social-political convictions the wrong way, in which case he attacks the film for the wrong reasons, or they rub the viewer's convictions the right way, in which case he purrs for reasons which are equally specious and have nothing to do with the movie's objective quality. In this review I endeavour to avoid the trap and review it as a film and not some kind of backfisted political polemic.
In this flicktoon, Michael Caine is the eponymous Harry Brown, a lonely pensioner living in a run down housing project ("estate") in one of South London's nameless, crime-ridden semi-slums. The opening sequences, shot almost without dialog, reveal the bare emptiness of Harry's life. He wakes up and reaches for his wife, who isn't there. He eats breakfast alone listening to the (bad) news on the radio. He visits his comotose wife at the hospital, taking the long route because he wants to avoid the local street gang. He then goes to a pub and has a pint with his only friend, Len Attwell (David Bradley, best known as Argus Finch and Walder Frey) at a pub rub by taciturn publican Sid Rourke (Liam Cunningham of Game of Thrones fame) and plays some chess. Then he goes home and sips whiskey in his empty flat, living on the fumes of a once-happy life. Harry's daughter passed away when she was thirteen, his wife is dying, and he contemplates the last act of his time on this planet in a kind of dignified but morose quietude. He just wants to be left alone to his routines, but Fate has other plans. Len, who is being tormented by the local pack of thugs, wants some vengeance and tries to enlist Harry, who tells him to go to the police. Disgusted, Len goes off and before we know it, the police are knocking on Harry's door to tell him Len has been brutally murdered. Harry buries his friend, yells at the seemingly impotent police (represented in this film by three actors: Emily Mortimor as a dogged do-gooding sergeant, Charley Creed-Miles as a cynical, street-smart detective, and Game of Thrones vet Iain Glenn as their smooth careerist boss) and proceeds to get very drunk at the pub. Incautiously flashing his cash, he is trailed down to the canal by one of the pack, who tries to rob him at knife point, only to discover that Harry may be old, but he hasn't forgotten the survival skills the Royal Marines drummed into his head. Exit one thug from this vale of tears, and enter Harry Brown, improbable vigilante.
I pause here to emphasize that Harry, even after the murder of his mate, has no intention of pursuing any kind of vengeance against the guilty parties. He remains a sad old man who now plays chess by mail because he has no friend left to play chess with. It's only after he more or less involuntarily and accidentally kills one of the thugs that the taste of blood seems to awaken the sleeping monster within him.
As I stated, Harry is a long-retired Royal Marine who saw heavy and brutal action during the worst of the Irish Troubles, a guerilla war fought almost without rules, where assassination, ambush and torture were everyday occurrances carried out by all parties without mercy. Applying the lessons he learned during those Troubles, as well as the fact the punks don't suspect an old man capable of doing more than wetting his Depends, Harry employs surveillance, deception, kidnapping, and torture to obtain the weapons he needs to further his revenge plans and to find out just precisely what happened to his friend the night he was killed, and then gets busy killing those responsible. This pits him against his principal target, a vicious young psychopath named Noel Winters (Ben Drew), who runs the gang, and also serves a sub-lieutenant for much larger ring of heroin dealers. It also brings him to the attention of the the police, who begin to suspect the old man may be more dangerous than he looks.
If this sounds a lot like "Death Wish," and all the other vigilante-vengeance films you've ever seen since, hold your horses, mate, because "Harry Brown" is playing an old game with some fairly strong cards, including one or two you probably haven't seen before. Let me deal the deck:
First, there's Michael Caine. In his incredibly long and fertile career he has turned in some amazing performances, but it's arguable that he has never been much better than he is here, as the lonely, anguished Harry Brown. Caine, who grew up in the same kind of poverty depicted here, and in almost the same neighborhood, brings a terrible pathos to his character. Indeed, he himself noted that what differentiates Harry Brown from other vigilantes is that Harry is a victim rather than offender. He has done everything society and decency have told him to do -- serve his country, get married, have a child, obey the law, be "respectable" -- and his reward is to live a life of loneliness and fear in a crumbling ghetto where you can't even walk a straight line for fear of being mugged or just beaten to death for the hell of it. To get justice for his dead friend requires unchaining a beast inside of him he has had leashed for decades. He doesn't want to do it. He feels he has to. His principle seems to be, if I may quote William Tecumseh Sherman, that "War is the remedy our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want."
Second, the movie does not make the mistake of depicting Caine as unrealistically tough, savvy, or cold-blooded. On the contrary. His age and infirmity are displayed in every scene. He kills his first victim out of instinct, not intention, and on several occasions his age cause him to fail, or at least blunder, at critical moments. Indeed, the movie's most memorable, and now infamous, line -- "You failed to mainatin your weapon, son!" -- delivered right before he blows a drug dealer's brains out, is actually a grandfatherly criticism of the dealer's sloppiness with a pistol, which is the only thing that saved Brown's life in the confrontation. Yet even as he murders the man, he feels it necessary to explain why. This is not something Paul Kersey of "Death Wish" would have done. Harry is a vigilante, but he he's a vigilante who wants to retain his sense of decency.
Third, the film is shot at a much higher standard than most. Daniel Barber (director) and Martin Ruhe (director of photography) do a marvelous job of depicting both the ugly, menacing squalor of the Estate -- a depressing vista of graffiti-scarred walls, broken windows and sinister shadows -- and the neat, clean, homey little flat in which Harry Brown lives, which seems to represent the decency he is in a sense fighting for. The movie is almost Noirish in its use of darkness and decay (both architectural and human) to set a mood and create an atmosphere. The truly loathsome character of Stretch (Sean Harris), with his emaciated body, knife scars and needle tracks, is a kind of walking proof of this. Harry isn't just fighting bad guys, he is fighting the putrescence and decay they bring with them.
Now, there are a few moments when the movie overplays its hand by hammering away at the idea that the British police are utterly helpless to protect anyone or even bring justice to those who have been attacked. The riots that take place late in the film are shot specifically to show that the thugs are in control and the police merely spectators -- the shot of Iain Glenn driving calmly and contendently away from the riot because he has made his show of force and token arrests sums up the attitude of the entire film, and it is a somewhat simplistic attitude, even if the surface realities ring true. (Britain is, after all, a country which forbids individuals to carry any impliment of self-defense other than a rape whistle, and which often prosecutes people who act in self-defense as if they themselves were the criminals.)
This statement brings me back to my opening comments. Vigilante movies are seen by the left as "Fascist" because they express a barely-concealed desire harbored by millions of people all over the "civilized world" to chuck due process down the nearest sewer and just blast every violent criminal they see right out of his boots. They point out that social problems are the chief cause of criminality, especially the sort of mindless violence depicted frequently and graphically in this film, and it makes no sense to attack the problem with more violence when you could address its causes by fighting things like poverty, unemployment, systemic racism, systemic classism, overpoulation, and so on.
Right-wingers, on the other hand, tend to revel in these films because they feel justifiably frustrated by a "system" that seems to coddle vicious criminals while ignoring the rights of decent, law-abiding people: a few well-placed bullets, these folks argue, would do more than all the rehab programs, parole officers, and probation sentences in the world put together.
The truth is that both attitudes are understandable and both attitudes contain their own contradictions. A free society can't simply execute its criminals the way you'd shoot grouse and remain free; but it's also true that "freedom" has little meaning if the streets outside your flat are run by criminals who think they can rob, rape and murder with impunity. If "Harry Brown" fails at anything, it is probably in overestimating the power of a pistol to solve deep-rooted societal problems. After all, if you gun down the local gang, you are simply creating a vaccuum for the next gang. If you form a posse of vigilantes to ensure the next gang gets slaughtered before it has a chance to unpack, you run the very real risk of becoming a gang yourself -- witness the history of the Sicilian Mafia, which originated as a more or less sympathetic band of guerillas fighting absentee Italian landowners in the 19th century and ended up the go-to guys for heroin and human trafficking in the Mediterranean. But -- and I want to stress this -- Harry himself isn't trying to solve deep-rooted societal problems. He is not the leader of a movement. He wants justice. He wants revenge. And he wants to be able to walk through that goddamned underpass without being hassled. A gun is the most effective way to achieve these goals, and so that's what he uses. As the saying goes, capital punishment may not deter crime, but it sure as hell will deter the sumbitch they put in the chair.
HARRY BROWN is a obviously a dark and brutal film, and not always easy to watch. It holds a lantern to a very dark and slimy corner of human existence, one where viciousness is commonplace and hope and human decency seems to be in very short supply. What's more, the solutions it offers themselves appeal to the daker impulses of human nature and are of highly questionable morality and result. But you can't have light without shadow, and shadows are just as much a part of human existence as the thing that creates them. Just ask Harry.
Movies like HARRY BROWN (2009) seldom get a fair analysis. They either rub the viewer's social-political convictions the wrong way, in which case he attacks the film for the wrong reasons, or they rub the viewer's convictions the right way, in which case he purrs for reasons which are equally specious and have nothing to do with the movie's objective quality. In this review I endeavour to avoid the trap and review it as a film and not some kind of backfisted political polemic.
In this flicktoon, Michael Caine is the eponymous Harry Brown, a lonely pensioner living in a run down housing project ("estate") in one of South London's nameless, crime-ridden semi-slums. The opening sequences, shot almost without dialog, reveal the bare emptiness of Harry's life. He wakes up and reaches for his wife, who isn't there. He eats breakfast alone listening to the (bad) news on the radio. He visits his comotose wife at the hospital, taking the long route because he wants to avoid the local street gang. He then goes to a pub and has a pint with his only friend, Len Attwell (David Bradley, best known as Argus Finch and Walder Frey) at a pub rub by taciturn publican Sid Rourke (Liam Cunningham of Game of Thrones fame) and plays some chess. Then he goes home and sips whiskey in his empty flat, living on the fumes of a once-happy life. Harry's daughter passed away when she was thirteen, his wife is dying, and he contemplates the last act of his time on this planet in a kind of dignified but morose quietude. He just wants to be left alone to his routines, but Fate has other plans. Len, who is being tormented by the local pack of thugs, wants some vengeance and tries to enlist Harry, who tells him to go to the police. Disgusted, Len goes off and before we know it, the police are knocking on Harry's door to tell him Len has been brutally murdered. Harry buries his friend, yells at the seemingly impotent police (represented in this film by three actors: Emily Mortimor as a dogged do-gooding sergeant, Charley Creed-Miles as a cynical, street-smart detective, and Game of Thrones vet Iain Glenn as their smooth careerist boss) and proceeds to get very drunk at the pub. Incautiously flashing his cash, he is trailed down to the canal by one of the pack, who tries to rob him at knife point, only to discover that Harry may be old, but he hasn't forgotten the survival skills the Royal Marines drummed into his head. Exit one thug from this vale of tears, and enter Harry Brown, improbable vigilante.
I pause here to emphasize that Harry, even after the murder of his mate, has no intention of pursuing any kind of vengeance against the guilty parties. He remains a sad old man who now plays chess by mail because he has no friend left to play chess with. It's only after he more or less involuntarily and accidentally kills one of the thugs that the taste of blood seems to awaken the sleeping monster within him.
As I stated, Harry is a long-retired Royal Marine who saw heavy and brutal action during the worst of the Irish Troubles, a guerilla war fought almost without rules, where assassination, ambush and torture were everyday occurrances carried out by all parties without mercy. Applying the lessons he learned during those Troubles, as well as the fact the punks don't suspect an old man capable of doing more than wetting his Depends, Harry employs surveillance, deception, kidnapping, and torture to obtain the weapons he needs to further his revenge plans and to find out just precisely what happened to his friend the night he was killed, and then gets busy killing those responsible. This pits him against his principal target, a vicious young psychopath named Noel Winters (Ben Drew), who runs the gang, and also serves a sub-lieutenant for much larger ring of heroin dealers. It also brings him to the attention of the the police, who begin to suspect the old man may be more dangerous than he looks.
If this sounds a lot like "Death Wish," and all the other vigilante-vengeance films you've ever seen since, hold your horses, mate, because "Harry Brown" is playing an old game with some fairly strong cards, including one or two you probably haven't seen before. Let me deal the deck:
First, there's Michael Caine. In his incredibly long and fertile career he has turned in some amazing performances, but it's arguable that he has never been much better than he is here, as the lonely, anguished Harry Brown. Caine, who grew up in the same kind of poverty depicted here, and in almost the same neighborhood, brings a terrible pathos to his character. Indeed, he himself noted that what differentiates Harry Brown from other vigilantes is that Harry is a victim rather than offender. He has done everything society and decency have told him to do -- serve his country, get married, have a child, obey the law, be "respectable" -- and his reward is to live a life of loneliness and fear in a crumbling ghetto where you can't even walk a straight line for fear of being mugged or just beaten to death for the hell of it. To get justice for his dead friend requires unchaining a beast inside of him he has had leashed for decades. He doesn't want to do it. He feels he has to. His principle seems to be, if I may quote William Tecumseh Sherman, that "War is the remedy our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want."
Second, the movie does not make the mistake of depicting Caine as unrealistically tough, savvy, or cold-blooded. On the contrary. His age and infirmity are displayed in every scene. He kills his first victim out of instinct, not intention, and on several occasions his age cause him to fail, or at least blunder, at critical moments. Indeed, the movie's most memorable, and now infamous, line -- "You failed to mainatin your weapon, son!" -- delivered right before he blows a drug dealer's brains out, is actually a grandfatherly criticism of the dealer's sloppiness with a pistol, which is the only thing that saved Brown's life in the confrontation. Yet even as he murders the man, he feels it necessary to explain why. This is not something Paul Kersey of "Death Wish" would have done. Harry is a vigilante, but he he's a vigilante who wants to retain his sense of decency.
Third, the film is shot at a much higher standard than most. Daniel Barber (director) and Martin Ruhe (director of photography) do a marvelous job of depicting both the ugly, menacing squalor of the Estate -- a depressing vista of graffiti-scarred walls, broken windows and sinister shadows -- and the neat, clean, homey little flat in which Harry Brown lives, which seems to represent the decency he is in a sense fighting for. The movie is almost Noirish in its use of darkness and decay (both architectural and human) to set a mood and create an atmosphere. The truly loathsome character of Stretch (Sean Harris), with his emaciated body, knife scars and needle tracks, is a kind of walking proof of this. Harry isn't just fighting bad guys, he is fighting the putrescence and decay they bring with them.
Now, there are a few moments when the movie overplays its hand by hammering away at the idea that the British police are utterly helpless to protect anyone or even bring justice to those who have been attacked. The riots that take place late in the film are shot specifically to show that the thugs are in control and the police merely spectators -- the shot of Iain Glenn driving calmly and contendently away from the riot because he has made his show of force and token arrests sums up the attitude of the entire film, and it is a somewhat simplistic attitude, even if the surface realities ring true. (Britain is, after all, a country which forbids individuals to carry any impliment of self-defense other than a rape whistle, and which often prosecutes people who act in self-defense as if they themselves were the criminals.)
This statement brings me back to my opening comments. Vigilante movies are seen by the left as "Fascist" because they express a barely-concealed desire harbored by millions of people all over the "civilized world" to chuck due process down the nearest sewer and just blast every violent criminal they see right out of his boots. They point out that social problems are the chief cause of criminality, especially the sort of mindless violence depicted frequently and graphically in this film, and it makes no sense to attack the problem with more violence when you could address its causes by fighting things like poverty, unemployment, systemic racism, systemic classism, overpoulation, and so on.
Right-wingers, on the other hand, tend to revel in these films because they feel justifiably frustrated by a "system" that seems to coddle vicious criminals while ignoring the rights of decent, law-abiding people: a few well-placed bullets, these folks argue, would do more than all the rehab programs, parole officers, and probation sentences in the world put together.
The truth is that both attitudes are understandable and both attitudes contain their own contradictions. A free society can't simply execute its criminals the way you'd shoot grouse and remain free; but it's also true that "freedom" has little meaning if the streets outside your flat are run by criminals who think they can rob, rape and murder with impunity. If "Harry Brown" fails at anything, it is probably in overestimating the power of a pistol to solve deep-rooted societal problems. After all, if you gun down the local gang, you are simply creating a vaccuum for the next gang. If you form a posse of vigilantes to ensure the next gang gets slaughtered before it has a chance to unpack, you run the very real risk of becoming a gang yourself -- witness the history of the Sicilian Mafia, which originated as a more or less sympathetic band of guerillas fighting absentee Italian landowners in the 19th century and ended up the go-to guys for heroin and human trafficking in the Mediterranean. But -- and I want to stress this -- Harry himself isn't trying to solve deep-rooted societal problems. He is not the leader of a movement. He wants justice. He wants revenge. And he wants to be able to walk through that goddamned underpass without being hassled. A gun is the most effective way to achieve these goals, and so that's what he uses. As the saying goes, capital punishment may not deter crime, but it sure as hell will deter the sumbitch they put in the chair.
HARRY BROWN is a obviously a dark and brutal film, and not always easy to watch. It holds a lantern to a very dark and slimy corner of human existence, one where viciousness is commonplace and hope and human decency seems to be in very short supply. What's more, the solutions it offers themselves appeal to the daker impulses of human nature and are of highly questionable morality and result. But you can't have light without shadow, and shadows are just as much a part of human existence as the thing that creates them. Just ask Harry.
May 5, 2020
BOOK REVIEW: BLACK THURSDAY
Goodreads is a site devoted to -- spoiler alert! -- books, so perhaps releasing movie and album reviews on this platform may strike you as nonsensical. When you think about it, however, we live in a culture where it is chic to buy baseball hats with NFL teams on them, so I ought to be forgiven, nicht wahr? In any event, here is a book review to go along with the movie review I released earlier today. It will be accompanied by an album review, because hey, I'm procrastinating on two major fiction projects and this makes me feel less guilty somehow. Today's choice is BLACK THURSDAY by Martin Caiden.
Thursday, October 14, 1943, was and remains known to the U.S. Air Force as "Black Thursday." It has the same meaning that Pickett's Charge has to the South, or Waterloo to the French. On that day, so long ago, what became the Eighth United States Air Force took on the Nazi Luftwaffe over Schweinfurt, Germany, in an epic air battle that has become synonymous with both courage and disaster.
1943 was a pivotal year for both World War II as a whole and the air war over Europe. The British, who were experts at conducting night bombing raids of Germany, had tried and failed to repeat those successes by day, and felt large-scale aerial warfare over the Third Reich was a suicide mission. The United States Air Forces thought otherwise, and from mid-late 1942 onward began to bomb Germany during daylight hours. By late 1943, the air war battle between the USAAF and Luftwaffe was raging full force, with the Germans narrowly holding the upper hand. At that time, American fighter aircraft did not have the range to escort the heavy bombers very far into Europe, which meant the B-17 "Flying Fortresses" had to go it alone against enemy fighters while trying to hold formation and bomb German targets -- a harrowing and often very bloody prospect. Indeed, many American servicemen regarded the successful completion of the requisite 25 missions necessary to go back home to the States as physically impossible.
Despite the losses and the psychological strain on the pilots, American strategists viewed bombing as a relatively cheap way to wreck the German war machine and bring the war to a victorious conclusion much sooner than otherwise might occur. One target which particularly appealed to them was the Nazi ball-bearing industry, whose product was vital for literally every type of war machine Hitler employed, from aircraft to tanks to trucks to searchlights and everything in between. A major source of ball-bearings was the German city of Schweinfurt. Thus a massive -- by 1943 standards, anyway -- raid of nearly 400 heavy bombers was planned, in the hopes of destroying the bearings factories. Between the bombers and the factories, however, were 1,200 German aircraft flown by battle-hardened pilots in the best aircraft Hitler possessed, and supported by an elaborate system of warning systems, defensive countermeasures and antiaircraft guns. After mechanical difficulties and bad weather forced nearly 100 bombers to turn back to England, only 291 remained to attack Schweinfurt, and on Black Thursday, 65 were shot down en route, over the target or crashed while flying home. Another 140 were damaged, in many cases beyond repair. The targets were hit and hit hard, and perhaps as many as 100 German aircraft shot down during the day-long battle, but the damage to the bearings industry was much less than the Allies had hoped for, and the losses to the group nearly 20%.
With BLACK THURSDAY, author Martin Caiden has done more than recounted a series of facts: he has, as much as a writer can, actually put the reader into the hearts and minds of the planners and the pilots -- and gunners -- of the B-17s who had to fly that ill-fated mission. No dry history this, but an almost novel-esque work which layers history, tactics, strategy and a blow-by-blow account of the raid, while simultaneously taking the deepest possible dive into what it meant to fly a B-17 in combat -- the mechanical wonders, the physical effort, the psychological strain, the raw courage and the vital teamwork. I really cannot emphasize how swiftly this book moves or how frightfully well it conveys the horror and confusion of a bombing raid carried out under continous attack by flak guns, rockets, aerial mines, and hundreds upon hundreds of enemy fighters. There are many touching and some tragic, and even a few funny, stories about how pilots, bombardiers, navigators, and gunners coped, or failed to cope, with the horror.
The structure of the book is interesting. Caiden was a pilot and understood fliers and flying and machinery, and he wants the reader to grasp what it means to move through the air in 30 tons of aircraft -- the work involved, the physics. So he breaks down the chapters into the overall strategy, the tactics, the logistics, the everything involved in carrying out a 300-bomber raid over a hostile nation. Then we get the action. Caiden makes extensive use of firsthand accounts and official records to record the event from the POV of those involved. He makes us feel it, the successes and failures. (One entire chapter is devoted to the improbable escape to Spain, through Germany and France, of one airman shot down during the attack.) At the same time, he explains the tactics and strategy of the Luftwaffe, praising their courage, ingenuity and determination at every point. While he is obviously partisan, using "we" and "our" for the Americans, he does not make the error of presenting the Germans as mere foils for American greatness. They won this battle, and while they too paid a steep price to do so, Caiden does not let us forget it. The scenes where American ground crews wait in vain for bombers that will never return, the times when accidents kill as many Americans as a lost battle, the pathetic image of the lone survivor of an entire squadron staring through tear-blurred eyes at row after row after row of empty bunks never again to be filled by their former occupants, will stick with you when the book is finished.
If the book has a weakness, it is that he uses German records only for the purposes of recording losses and measuring bomb damage. There are no interviews with Luftwaffe fighter pilots who flew against the raid, or the Luftwaffe commanders who directed the battle. He does not tap into official histories from the other side of the hill. By doing so he would have greatly improved an already amazing piece of history and research, and given us a broader and deeper, and also a more balanced, account of the battle. However, this may not have been his objective to begin with. As I said, Caiden is a partisan writer: he wrote this book to impress upon us the courage of the American airman and the tremendous struggles and sacrifices he had to make to win the daylight air war over Europe, not to tell both sides of the story. Still, I consider this a pity. Anyone who has ever read firsthand accounts written by German fighter pilots knows that they are frightfully honest and thoroughly professional in their assessments of American tactics, equipment and flying abilities, and such additions would have only enhanced Caiden's book.
Having said that, I loved this work. It reads almost like a novel and it has none of the overly technical, burdensome discussions of metallurgy, aerdodynamics, and what-not that made what many consider his seminal work, THE FORK-TAILED DEVIL, impossible for me to read cover to cover. That book has terrific anecdotes and exhaustive research, but it gets in its own way with all the nuts and bolts: BLACK THURSDAY does not make that mistake. Indeed, by examining what is generally regarded as a terrible defeat for American forces, it shows a courage and an even-handedness which is often lacking from WW 2 histories written by Americans, who tend to fall into rather craven "greatest generation" worship in hopes of selling more copies. Such worship is unnecessary. Our grandparents never asked to be regarded as gods, merely people who did their duty, as MacArthur put it "as God gave them the light to see it." This book casts powerful light on their courage and determination without deifying them, and deserves to be read.
Thursday, October 14, 1943, was and remains known to the U.S. Air Force as "Black Thursday." It has the same meaning that Pickett's Charge has to the South, or Waterloo to the French. On that day, so long ago, what became the Eighth United States Air Force took on the Nazi Luftwaffe over Schweinfurt, Germany, in an epic air battle that has become synonymous with both courage and disaster.
1943 was a pivotal year for both World War II as a whole and the air war over Europe. The British, who were experts at conducting night bombing raids of Germany, had tried and failed to repeat those successes by day, and felt large-scale aerial warfare over the Third Reich was a suicide mission. The United States Air Forces thought otherwise, and from mid-late 1942 onward began to bomb Germany during daylight hours. By late 1943, the air war battle between the USAAF and Luftwaffe was raging full force, with the Germans narrowly holding the upper hand. At that time, American fighter aircraft did not have the range to escort the heavy bombers very far into Europe, which meant the B-17 "Flying Fortresses" had to go it alone against enemy fighters while trying to hold formation and bomb German targets -- a harrowing and often very bloody prospect. Indeed, many American servicemen regarded the successful completion of the requisite 25 missions necessary to go back home to the States as physically impossible.
Despite the losses and the psychological strain on the pilots, American strategists viewed bombing as a relatively cheap way to wreck the German war machine and bring the war to a victorious conclusion much sooner than otherwise might occur. One target which particularly appealed to them was the Nazi ball-bearing industry, whose product was vital for literally every type of war machine Hitler employed, from aircraft to tanks to trucks to searchlights and everything in between. A major source of ball-bearings was the German city of Schweinfurt. Thus a massive -- by 1943 standards, anyway -- raid of nearly 400 heavy bombers was planned, in the hopes of destroying the bearings factories. Between the bombers and the factories, however, were 1,200 German aircraft flown by battle-hardened pilots in the best aircraft Hitler possessed, and supported by an elaborate system of warning systems, defensive countermeasures and antiaircraft guns. After mechanical difficulties and bad weather forced nearly 100 bombers to turn back to England, only 291 remained to attack Schweinfurt, and on Black Thursday, 65 were shot down en route, over the target or crashed while flying home. Another 140 were damaged, in many cases beyond repair. The targets were hit and hit hard, and perhaps as many as 100 German aircraft shot down during the day-long battle, but the damage to the bearings industry was much less than the Allies had hoped for, and the losses to the group nearly 20%.
With BLACK THURSDAY, author Martin Caiden has done more than recounted a series of facts: he has, as much as a writer can, actually put the reader into the hearts and minds of the planners and the pilots -- and gunners -- of the B-17s who had to fly that ill-fated mission. No dry history this, but an almost novel-esque work which layers history, tactics, strategy and a blow-by-blow account of the raid, while simultaneously taking the deepest possible dive into what it meant to fly a B-17 in combat -- the mechanical wonders, the physical effort, the psychological strain, the raw courage and the vital teamwork. I really cannot emphasize how swiftly this book moves or how frightfully well it conveys the horror and confusion of a bombing raid carried out under continous attack by flak guns, rockets, aerial mines, and hundreds upon hundreds of enemy fighters. There are many touching and some tragic, and even a few funny, stories about how pilots, bombardiers, navigators, and gunners coped, or failed to cope, with the horror.
The structure of the book is interesting. Caiden was a pilot and understood fliers and flying and machinery, and he wants the reader to grasp what it means to move through the air in 30 tons of aircraft -- the work involved, the physics. So he breaks down the chapters into the overall strategy, the tactics, the logistics, the everything involved in carrying out a 300-bomber raid over a hostile nation. Then we get the action. Caiden makes extensive use of firsthand accounts and official records to record the event from the POV of those involved. He makes us feel it, the successes and failures. (One entire chapter is devoted to the improbable escape to Spain, through Germany and France, of one airman shot down during the attack.) At the same time, he explains the tactics and strategy of the Luftwaffe, praising their courage, ingenuity and determination at every point. While he is obviously partisan, using "we" and "our" for the Americans, he does not make the error of presenting the Germans as mere foils for American greatness. They won this battle, and while they too paid a steep price to do so, Caiden does not let us forget it. The scenes where American ground crews wait in vain for bombers that will never return, the times when accidents kill as many Americans as a lost battle, the pathetic image of the lone survivor of an entire squadron staring through tear-blurred eyes at row after row after row of empty bunks never again to be filled by their former occupants, will stick with you when the book is finished.
If the book has a weakness, it is that he uses German records only for the purposes of recording losses and measuring bomb damage. There are no interviews with Luftwaffe fighter pilots who flew against the raid, or the Luftwaffe commanders who directed the battle. He does not tap into official histories from the other side of the hill. By doing so he would have greatly improved an already amazing piece of history and research, and given us a broader and deeper, and also a more balanced, account of the battle. However, this may not have been his objective to begin with. As I said, Caiden is a partisan writer: he wrote this book to impress upon us the courage of the American airman and the tremendous struggles and sacrifices he had to make to win the daylight air war over Europe, not to tell both sides of the story. Still, I consider this a pity. Anyone who has ever read firsthand accounts written by German fighter pilots knows that they are frightfully honest and thoroughly professional in their assessments of American tactics, equipment and flying abilities, and such additions would have only enhanced Caiden's book.
Having said that, I loved this work. It reads almost like a novel and it has none of the overly technical, burdensome discussions of metallurgy, aerdodynamics, and what-not that made what many consider his seminal work, THE FORK-TAILED DEVIL, impossible for me to read cover to cover. That book has terrific anecdotes and exhaustive research, but it gets in its own way with all the nuts and bolts: BLACK THURSDAY does not make that mistake. Indeed, by examining what is generally regarded as a terrible defeat for American forces, it shows a courage and an even-handedness which is often lacking from WW 2 histories written by Americans, who tend to fall into rather craven "greatest generation" worship in hopes of selling more copies. Such worship is unnecessary. Our grandparents never asked to be regarded as gods, merely people who did their duty, as MacArthur put it "as God gave them the light to see it." This book casts powerful light on their courage and determination without deifying them, and deserves to be read.
MOVIE REVIEW: RAMBO - LAST BLOOD
To keep myself busy when not working, I am going to be reviewing movies, books, and any other damn thing I can think of in these pages until further notice. These reviews will not take the place of my regular blogs, but run alongside them and perhaps encourage me to write more of them. I am beginning with a randomly selected film: RAMBO: LAST BLOOD. Please do not take this choice as indicative of the sort of movie, or for that matter book, that I will be reviewing, for my taste in entertainment is as eclectic as my own fiction. That having been said, let's get to it....
The fifth and final installment of the RAMBO franchise goes back to its roots...and keeps digging. I tuned in to this movie expecting a paper-thin plot stretched over two hours of mindless, bloody violence. What I got was a serious dramatic film. The mindless, bloody violence is just a bonus.
The fascinating thing about LAST BLOOD is that it connects so neatly to the original 1982 movie on an emotional and dramatic level. FIRST BLOOD, after all, was not a cartoon action film but a thoughtful, painfully moving drama about a troubled, lonely Vietnam vet who is hounded and bullied by a small-town sheriff (played by the just-deceased, yet immortal Brian Dennehy) until he snaps. FIRST BLOOD, though bloody and brutal, contains only one actual killing, and that an accident. The movie is really an allegory for how America treated its veterans after the Vietnam war, and is neither jingoistic nor a revenge fantasy. In other words, it has something deep to say. The movies that followed it? Not so much. Sylvester Stallone, surrendering to his own egotism, made enjoyable but incredibly shallow "one man army" popcorn flicks designed to retroactively "win" Vietnam and later, the Cold War. Even RAMBO (2008), the fourth installment, which humanized our aging hero a little, proved to be somewhat of an empty exercise, a fairly well-crafted movie that had no resonance. This movie is neither egotistical nor shallow nor empty. It has a lot to say and largely says it very well.
As LAST BLOOD opens, an aged John Rambo now lives on his deceased father's Arizona ranch, seemingly enjoying if not peace, then at least a sturdy truce, with his demons and his past. The connection to humanity he has longed for exists in his companions, the matronly Carmen(Adrianna Barazza), and her lovely neice Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal), who Rambo has "adopted" as a de facto sister and daughter, respectively. Unfortunately, Gabrielle longs for contact with her real father, a bottom-feeder who lives over the border in Mexico, and decides to visit him against Rambo's advice. Rejected by her dad, and then set up by her jealous, evidently sociopathic childhood "friend," Gabrielle finds herself drugged, imprisoned, and forced to work as a prostitute for two vicious Mexican gangsters, Hugo and Victor Martinez (Sergio Peris-Mencheta and Oscar Jaenada). Rambo, naturally goes hunting "south of the border" for his little girl, but things don't go so well for him, and here is where I will interrupt the narrative to explain why this film is so good, and why it's such a crying shame the critics savaged it so badly.
As I said before, the middle three RAMBO films had their merits, but were hardly deeper than a sidewalk puddle in terms of emotional or intellectual content. In LAST BLOOD, however, the first half of the movie is devoted entirely to examining the bond between John and Gabrielle, and perhaps even more importantly, to examining the darkest aspect of Mexico's dark side -- the way the narco trade and gangsterism, fed by America's lust for cocaine, have corrupted the country to the point where the "shadow system" now operates in broad daylight, feeding off human perversion. The brutality of the sex trade -- human trafficking at its ugliest -- is shown with a gruesome fervor that has zero voyeurism in it, and the nameless Mexican city through which Rambo wanders like a vengeful, obsessive ghost is presented not as inherently wicked, but rather afflicted by a curse: the curse of rampant greed. I am not exaggerating when I say that I could have watched a whole mini-series shot in the vein and tone and atmosphere of the movie's first two acts, an atmosphere of darkness, loneliness, revelation, pathos and mounting tension. Director Adrian Grunberg and cinematographer Brendan Galvin shoot these sequences in a way not easy to forget, and the screenplay, by Stallone and Matt Cerulnick, while not exactly Shakespeare, is gritty and efficient. Rambo, until the film's third and final act, is shown not as a superhuman killing machine with bulging muscles but an aged, desperate father trying to keep the lid on his own violence. His first confrontation is not even violent. His second turns out very poorly indeed...for him. Yet all the while we know the tempest is brewing beneath its screwed-down lid. In a sense, Rambo, at this age, rather like a war dog who doesn't really frighten people off the porch anymore...but should, because he can't learn any new tricks, and the ones he knows are more than sufficient to supply the local morgue 'til the year 2150.
The last act of LAST BLOOD is exactly what you'd expect, and requires very little in the way of commentary, except to say that giving John enough time to fortify a compound before you attack it is a terrible idea, and that if you want to avoid seeing your still-beating heart clenched in his scarred and powerful fist before you depart this vale of tears, you should not kidnap his adoptive daughter. Indeed, and although I love mayhem movies, I found myself a little underwhelmed by how predictable everything was at the climax. The linear progression of bad guys into ouch-inducing booby traps is, at this point, a numbingly familiar cliche even within the franchise. Here is where a more sophisticated screenwriter might have thrown in a twist, or kept the nuances of the first two acts going somehow, but let's face it, a RAMBO movie has to deliver the gore in great quantities. So there you have it: hoodlums tartar, hoodlums flambé.
Incidentally, I truly believe some of the critical backlash against this movie is a kind of flip-of-the-script on THE LAST JEDI controversy. There, you had a film so "woke" the critics were too cowardly to call it out for the trash audiences knew it was. Here, you have a film so "slept" that critics couldn't wait to call it racist, Mexican-bashing, etc., etc. But its depictions of the narcos are if anything, probably too tame. These are some of the worst, and I mean the very worst, people drawing oxygen on this troubled planet. At least the Sicilian and American Mafias...hell, even the Aryan Brotherhood...at least pretend that they stand for something more than rapacious greed and rabid violence. Narcos do not. They deserve to be, oh, I don't know, tortured and beheaded and their severed heads hurled from a moving pickup truck into the street.
(Now wherever did I get that image from?)
Seriously, folks, LAST BLOOD, while no masterpiece even as an action film, is nonetheless an action film that aspires to be more than a series of explosions and gruesome, well-choreographed kill sequences. Like FIRST BLOOD, it has a message, and if the message is perhaps as simple as the SHANE-like idea that the violence you do in life forever dogs your heels, that's more than you'll find in every Vin Diesel movie ever made.
The fifth and final installment of the RAMBO franchise goes back to its roots...and keeps digging. I tuned in to this movie expecting a paper-thin plot stretched over two hours of mindless, bloody violence. What I got was a serious dramatic film. The mindless, bloody violence is just a bonus.
The fascinating thing about LAST BLOOD is that it connects so neatly to the original 1982 movie on an emotional and dramatic level. FIRST BLOOD, after all, was not a cartoon action film but a thoughtful, painfully moving drama about a troubled, lonely Vietnam vet who is hounded and bullied by a small-town sheriff (played by the just-deceased, yet immortal Brian Dennehy) until he snaps. FIRST BLOOD, though bloody and brutal, contains only one actual killing, and that an accident. The movie is really an allegory for how America treated its veterans after the Vietnam war, and is neither jingoistic nor a revenge fantasy. In other words, it has something deep to say. The movies that followed it? Not so much. Sylvester Stallone, surrendering to his own egotism, made enjoyable but incredibly shallow "one man army" popcorn flicks designed to retroactively "win" Vietnam and later, the Cold War. Even RAMBO (2008), the fourth installment, which humanized our aging hero a little, proved to be somewhat of an empty exercise, a fairly well-crafted movie that had no resonance. This movie is neither egotistical nor shallow nor empty. It has a lot to say and largely says it very well.
As LAST BLOOD opens, an aged John Rambo now lives on his deceased father's Arizona ranch, seemingly enjoying if not peace, then at least a sturdy truce, with his demons and his past. The connection to humanity he has longed for exists in his companions, the matronly Carmen(Adrianna Barazza), and her lovely neice Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal), who Rambo has "adopted" as a de facto sister and daughter, respectively. Unfortunately, Gabrielle longs for contact with her real father, a bottom-feeder who lives over the border in Mexico, and decides to visit him against Rambo's advice. Rejected by her dad, and then set up by her jealous, evidently sociopathic childhood "friend," Gabrielle finds herself drugged, imprisoned, and forced to work as a prostitute for two vicious Mexican gangsters, Hugo and Victor Martinez (Sergio Peris-Mencheta and Oscar Jaenada). Rambo, naturally goes hunting "south of the border" for his little girl, but things don't go so well for him, and here is where I will interrupt the narrative to explain why this film is so good, and why it's such a crying shame the critics savaged it so badly.
As I said before, the middle three RAMBO films had their merits, but were hardly deeper than a sidewalk puddle in terms of emotional or intellectual content. In LAST BLOOD, however, the first half of the movie is devoted entirely to examining the bond between John and Gabrielle, and perhaps even more importantly, to examining the darkest aspect of Mexico's dark side -- the way the narco trade and gangsterism, fed by America's lust for cocaine, have corrupted the country to the point where the "shadow system" now operates in broad daylight, feeding off human perversion. The brutality of the sex trade -- human trafficking at its ugliest -- is shown with a gruesome fervor that has zero voyeurism in it, and the nameless Mexican city through which Rambo wanders like a vengeful, obsessive ghost is presented not as inherently wicked, but rather afflicted by a curse: the curse of rampant greed. I am not exaggerating when I say that I could have watched a whole mini-series shot in the vein and tone and atmosphere of the movie's first two acts, an atmosphere of darkness, loneliness, revelation, pathos and mounting tension. Director Adrian Grunberg and cinematographer Brendan Galvin shoot these sequences in a way not easy to forget, and the screenplay, by Stallone and Matt Cerulnick, while not exactly Shakespeare, is gritty and efficient. Rambo, until the film's third and final act, is shown not as a superhuman killing machine with bulging muscles but an aged, desperate father trying to keep the lid on his own violence. His first confrontation is not even violent. His second turns out very poorly indeed...for him. Yet all the while we know the tempest is brewing beneath its screwed-down lid. In a sense, Rambo, at this age, rather like a war dog who doesn't really frighten people off the porch anymore...but should, because he can't learn any new tricks, and the ones he knows are more than sufficient to supply the local morgue 'til the year 2150.
The last act of LAST BLOOD is exactly what you'd expect, and requires very little in the way of commentary, except to say that giving John enough time to fortify a compound before you attack it is a terrible idea, and that if you want to avoid seeing your still-beating heart clenched in his scarred and powerful fist before you depart this vale of tears, you should not kidnap his adoptive daughter. Indeed, and although I love mayhem movies, I found myself a little underwhelmed by how predictable everything was at the climax. The linear progression of bad guys into ouch-inducing booby traps is, at this point, a numbingly familiar cliche even within the franchise. Here is where a more sophisticated screenwriter might have thrown in a twist, or kept the nuances of the first two acts going somehow, but let's face it, a RAMBO movie has to deliver the gore in great quantities. So there you have it: hoodlums tartar, hoodlums flambé.
Incidentally, I truly believe some of the critical backlash against this movie is a kind of flip-of-the-script on THE LAST JEDI controversy. There, you had a film so "woke" the critics were too cowardly to call it out for the trash audiences knew it was. Here, you have a film so "slept" that critics couldn't wait to call it racist, Mexican-bashing, etc., etc. But its depictions of the narcos are if anything, probably too tame. These are some of the worst, and I mean the very worst, people drawing oxygen on this troubled planet. At least the Sicilian and American Mafias...hell, even the Aryan Brotherhood...at least pretend that they stand for something more than rapacious greed and rabid violence. Narcos do not. They deserve to be, oh, I don't know, tortured and beheaded and their severed heads hurled from a moving pickup truck into the street.
(Now wherever did I get that image from?)
Seriously, folks, LAST BLOOD, while no masterpiece even as an action film, is nonetheless an action film that aspires to be more than a series of explosions and gruesome, well-choreographed kill sequences. Like FIRST BLOOD, it has a message, and if the message is perhaps as simple as the SHANE-like idea that the violence you do in life forever dogs your heels, that's more than you'll find in every Vin Diesel movie ever made.
April 28, 2020
NOSFERATU wins the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award!
Nowadays it's more important to accentuate the positive, so I am more pleased than usual to announce that my story Nosferatu has won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award in the category of Novella. This is my second literary award of 2020 and my tenth overall, but it is the first for this tale, which happens to be one of my favorites, since it combines two genres I love: horror and historical fiction.
Nosferatu is the story of Lieutenant Colonel Hannibal Raus, a tough but principled German soldier fighting on the Eastern Front during World War Two. Raus is a product of the old-school, pre-Nazi German army, famous throughout the world for its iron discipline, is strongly in favor of Hitler and blind to the true nature of the man and his regime. When Raus is wounded in battle, he is taken to a field hospital for a blood transfusion, and there encounters a doctor named Stefan Mingra, who proceeds, over the course of the story, to give Raus an education in just what Nazism really stands for.
Without revealing too much, I can say that the incidents recounted in this tale are based on actual events which occurred more than once during the Eastern campaign, which raged from 1941 - 1945 and killed an estimated 32 million people. And that, I suppose, is where the horror element in the novella really lies. This is more faction than fiction.
Now, I must make a small confession. While this story took the gold in the Novella category, technically speaking it is not a Novella (17K - 40K words), but rather a Novelette (7.5K - 17K), known in the States as Long Short Story. Actually, the designations for all books are wobbly at best, but here is the standard used in Britain:
Flash Fiction: 53 - 1,000 words
Short Stories: 3,500 – 7,500
Novelette/LSS: 7,500 – 17,000
Novellas: 17,000 – 40,000
Novels: 40,000 + words
I use the word "Novelette" because "Long Short Story" is so contradictory it is actually distracting. I mean, what the fuck is a long short story? Isn't that like being a little bit pregnant or mostly dead?
At this point you may think I'm rambling pretty far from the initial topic, but I'm not. See, one of the reasons I became an independent/small press author is because I cannot stand to be placed within a box. When I sit down to write something, I often have no idea of how long the finished product will be, and as a result, end up with many stories which are hard to market. You see, when I was flirting with the big leagues years ago -- big leagues meaning big agents, big publishing houses -- the first thing I noticed was how little interest they had for things like short stories, short story collections, novellas and, in essence, every form of writing that isn't a novel. Back in 2010, when I couldn't find any markets for my mid-length fiction, I asked a fellow author if he had any advice. His response was, "Yeah -- writer shorter fuckin' stories!" And indeed, my WW2 novel Sinner's Cross, which has won the Best Indie Book and Book Excellence Awards, only exists because I took a 20,000 word novella called "Bone Meal," which was unsaleable, and expanded it into a full-length novel. But not every story lends itself to this sort of expansion, and as I'm a fairly prolific writer, and have amassed a fairly large body of work over the years, I found much of it was ignored because it did not fall within the parameters of "what sells." And this made me mad as hell. Why should good stories be left unread because they don't fit a particular box?
Now, this is not an attack on the traditional publishing industry, merely an observation. The point of agents is to interest publishing houses in writers. The point of publishing houses is to make money off writers by offering products that will move off bookshelves both physical and virtual. Short stories are for magazines, short story collections, long shorts and novellas are only marketable when the author in question is a huge name (think Stephen King). The result of this is that entire subsets of the literary art form, which have existed for centuries and which have produced some of our best fiction, have withered to the point of near non-existence. (This, incidentally, is why King continues to put together collections of shorts and novellas: he is worried that the mediums are dying, and he has enough fans to ensure that they won't, at least while he's still at the keys.)
This brings me back to Nosferatu. Like my novella The Numbers Game, which also won the Pinnacle Award (last year), it is a story that could not be told at a length which fit either magazine or novel parameters. Both tales were "too much story" for shorter lengths, but could not be expanded any further than they were without ruining them. Thus, going in, I knew they'd be tough sells anywhere. Being a stubborn bastard, I wrote them anyway, just as I released my short story collection, Devils You Know, even though I knew it would never really make me any money. Some times you have to do what is right for you as an artist and a human being rather than what is right for you as a bloke with rent and bills to pay. Winning awards is perhaps no substitute for money, but then, it wasn't meant to be. For a writer, recognition is a commodity in and of itself.
Nosferatu is the story of Lieutenant Colonel Hannibal Raus, a tough but principled German soldier fighting on the Eastern Front during World War Two. Raus is a product of the old-school, pre-Nazi German army, famous throughout the world for its iron discipline, is strongly in favor of Hitler and blind to the true nature of the man and his regime. When Raus is wounded in battle, he is taken to a field hospital for a blood transfusion, and there encounters a doctor named Stefan Mingra, who proceeds, over the course of the story, to give Raus an education in just what Nazism really stands for.
Without revealing too much, I can say that the incidents recounted in this tale are based on actual events which occurred more than once during the Eastern campaign, which raged from 1941 - 1945 and killed an estimated 32 million people. And that, I suppose, is where the horror element in the novella really lies. This is more faction than fiction.
Now, I must make a small confession. While this story took the gold in the Novella category, technically speaking it is not a Novella (17K - 40K words), but rather a Novelette (7.5K - 17K), known in the States as Long Short Story. Actually, the designations for all books are wobbly at best, but here is the standard used in Britain:
Flash Fiction: 53 - 1,000 words
Short Stories: 3,500 – 7,500
Novelette/LSS: 7,500 – 17,000
Novellas: 17,000 – 40,000
Novels: 40,000 + words
I use the word "Novelette" because "Long Short Story" is so contradictory it is actually distracting. I mean, what the fuck is a long short story? Isn't that like being a little bit pregnant or mostly dead?
At this point you may think I'm rambling pretty far from the initial topic, but I'm not. See, one of the reasons I became an independent/small press author is because I cannot stand to be placed within a box. When I sit down to write something, I often have no idea of how long the finished product will be, and as a result, end up with many stories which are hard to market. You see, when I was flirting with the big leagues years ago -- big leagues meaning big agents, big publishing houses -- the first thing I noticed was how little interest they had for things like short stories, short story collections, novellas and, in essence, every form of writing that isn't a novel. Back in 2010, when I couldn't find any markets for my mid-length fiction, I asked a fellow author if he had any advice. His response was, "Yeah -- writer shorter fuckin' stories!" And indeed, my WW2 novel Sinner's Cross, which has won the Best Indie Book and Book Excellence Awards, only exists because I took a 20,000 word novella called "Bone Meal," which was unsaleable, and expanded it into a full-length novel. But not every story lends itself to this sort of expansion, and as I'm a fairly prolific writer, and have amassed a fairly large body of work over the years, I found much of it was ignored because it did not fall within the parameters of "what sells." And this made me mad as hell. Why should good stories be left unread because they don't fit a particular box?
Now, this is not an attack on the traditional publishing industry, merely an observation. The point of agents is to interest publishing houses in writers. The point of publishing houses is to make money off writers by offering products that will move off bookshelves both physical and virtual. Short stories are for magazines, short story collections, long shorts and novellas are only marketable when the author in question is a huge name (think Stephen King). The result of this is that entire subsets of the literary art form, which have existed for centuries and which have produced some of our best fiction, have withered to the point of near non-existence. (This, incidentally, is why King continues to put together collections of shorts and novellas: he is worried that the mediums are dying, and he has enough fans to ensure that they won't, at least while he's still at the keys.)
This brings me back to Nosferatu. Like my novella The Numbers Game, which also won the Pinnacle Award (last year), it is a story that could not be told at a length which fit either magazine or novel parameters. Both tales were "too much story" for shorter lengths, but could not be expanded any further than they were without ruining them. Thus, going in, I knew they'd be tough sells anywhere. Being a stubborn bastard, I wrote them anyway, just as I released my short story collection, Devils You Know, even though I knew it would never really make me any money. Some times you have to do what is right for you as an artist and a human being rather than what is right for you as a bloke with rent and bills to pay. Winning awards is perhaps no substitute for money, but then, it wasn't meant to be. For a writer, recognition is a commodity in and of itself.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
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