Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 23

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

MAKING LEMONADE

You can be forgiven for not wanting to read anything more about the God-damned Coronavirus. At this point, we -- the country, I mean -- is already mentally exhausted from anxiety, bad news and the psychological effects of self-quarantine and social distancing ... and, truth be told, the battle is only in its first round. We have a lot more ahead of us yet, for the crisis has not even hit its peak. Now, as a rule, it's never a good sign when you start panting a quarter-mile into your five-mile run, but there is good news. The present situation, surreal and unpleasant and frustrating as it is, has yielded some surprising benefits.

It so happens that these benefits, or most of them, involve things which money cannot buy. In capitalist society, such things are generally frowned upon or dismissed with contempt, but one of the net gains of this crisis is that it may force a certain re-evaluation of the modern, uniquely American form of capitalism. Those without a grasp of history, which is most everyone, seem to believe that the atmosphere of rampant consumerism in which we live is a normal, healthy thing which is part of our birthright, and unless one signs onto this creed, one must be a communist at heart. This is hardly the case. The idea that shiny objects should fill the length and breadth of our desires is a relatively new one: it is a direct result of America's victory in the Second World War, which found us possessing more factories than any other nation in the world, an unlimited supply of raw materials, and a populace grown bored with wartime rationing that now had money to burn. It was artificially kept going, long after the postwar boom had faded into an echo, by a series of fiendishly clever tricks, foremost of which was the idea that people could, and indeed should, buy things on credit they could not otherwsie afford. Indeed, the entire idea of savings died an ugly death within my own lifetime. Credit replaced savings as the means by which Americans measured their purchasing power, leading to the present situation, where the vast majority of our citizens no longer have any money in the bank at all, and live paycheck to paycheck beneath staggering burdens of high-interest debt they will never be able to repay. The pallative for this is the afformentioned shiny objects. We all own tons of shit we don't really need, and in many cases, do not even enjoy owning, but we've been so habituated to want things that our desire to get the highest-definition TV or the very latest mobile device has replaced, in our own minds, the actual pleasure that comes with obtaining something truly valuable. Now, I am hardly immune to this cultural brainwashing, but circumstances have now made me aware, or perhaps simply reminded me, that there is a whole category of "shiny objects" that life offers completely gratis, if one is simply willing -- in this case, forced -- to notice.

When the lockdown orders were announced here in California, I felt a certain smugness, because I, as a writer and a freelancer by trade, already lived a life of semi-isolation. It was not always necessary for me to leave the house to go to work...or even to put on pants...and obtained at least half of all my exercise by hiking local mountains, parks and trails, activities that do not require any social interaction at all. With my vast collection of DVDs and books, as well as a sprinkling of video games, I considered myself well-equipped to do nothing in isolation for as long as it was deemed prudent and patriotic to do so. Put another way: My shiny objects would see me through the storm better than yours, fools!

Just a few days into the quarantine, however, I began to experience some psychological strain. Until that moment I had not realized the degree to which I was dependent on going swimming, or meeting friends for lunch now and again, or ducking into a diner for breakfast or for dinner, or stopping at a pub to drain a pint or two, or cruising down to Hollywood to watch an old movie at the Egyptian Theater, just to obtain some psychological relief from isolation and, well, shiny objects. When I had the chance to do these things, I did not always avail myself, but now that I no longer had the option, damn it, I missed them all like crazy.

My stir-craziness got me walking again. And not my normal half-hour walk that I take to get fresh air or wind down before bed, which always follows the same course around the neighborhood, to the point where I don't even pay attention to my surroundings. I mean walks that go on for up to two hours and take me all over town. I haven't walked so much, so consistently, in probably 25 years, and during my travels I made a series of discoveries that have helped me cope with the anxiety, the frustration, the boredom and the routine of Life in the Age of Corona.

The first observation is that, with very few people going to work and not much open to go to anyway, only a tiny fraction of folks are driving. This has had the most astounding effect on air quality that can be imagined. I have lived in Los Angeles for 12 1/2 years, and have grown used to the idea of haze, smog, low visibility and air that tastes like ozone or burnt paper. Indeed, on my hikes, its normal for the city to be half-drowned in a dull grayish fog and the horizon simply blotted out completely. It's a rare day indeed when, from the top of a mountain, I can see the gleam of the sun on the water off Santa Monica Pier, which is only 14 miles away. Well, a few days ago I made the same hike to the same point, and saw Catalina Island... which is 58 miles distant.

The truth is that the air, the sky, the clouds, and most especially the mountains that horseshoe around Burbank from the north-northwest to the southeast, are so sharply rendered in my vision that, in the case of the mountains, I can make out the most minute details of their slopes – folds in the earth, vegetation, everything. The air, too, smells wonderful all the time: today, while walking, I was almost blown over by the scent of orange and lemon blossoms, and at night the smell of jasmine hangs in the hair in a way that is difficult to describe unless one has inhaled it. At night, the air is wonderfully crisp and sharp and clean-scented, and I can see more stars in the heavens than I have ever seen before in this normally cloudy, light-crowded city.

As I trample around, I have taken notice of things that used to move past me without intruding upon my consciousness, most notably flora. I have roses and orchids in my own yard, but along Burbank Boulevard the empty sidewalks are awash in cherry blossom petals, and the private gardens of homes along the side-streets where I live are full of
colors that stagger me: oranges that seem to paint the air, flame-yellows, vivid imperial purples, soft blues. I have noticed funny little details, too, such as the fact that many flowers close their petals when it gets cold. Probably everyone on earth knew this but me -- and indeed, I knew it once too, but forgot it longer ago than I care to remember.

Meanwhile, on the sidewalks themselves, children -- and some adults -- have been hard at work with colored chalk. This is an old American ritual that had very nearly gone out of existence, but which has come back full force and then some in the last few weeks. The most common sights are hopscotch squares, drawings and affirmations -- I am especially fond of the affirmations. "Tough times don't last, but tough people do" is one I saw a few days ago. Simple, positive messages like "Stay safe!" "Be Well!" "Breathe!" and "Take Care!" are everywhere. Some folks have written damn-near essays on positivity that sprawl across quarter blocks. Today I saw a paen to First Responders that took up an entire driveway.

Normally, when walking I see only a few people here and there, usually being led by their dogs, and very few of those I encounter give me more than a disinterested grunt of greeting as we pass on the street. Now people are out in strength, cycling, skate-boarding, jogging and pushing prams, and the politeness I encounter astonishes me. Los Angeles is not a friendly town: most everyone here is either so nakedly out for themselves or just plain suspicious of strangers that they avoid eye contact, much less conversation. Not anymore. This morning a man -- speaking from safe distance -- told me the entire pedigree of his dog while we waited for his wife to come out of the coffee shop so I could go inside. (The dog's name was Chewbacca; his parents were, I was told, Darth Vader and Princess Leia).

I freely admit that I myself have dropped, to some degree, the Daniel Craig scowl I generally wear everywhere I go, and have found myself opening up to my neighbors through the fence, something I have previously avoided in the nearly 7 years I've lived in my house. I found myself humiliated to realize that there are some great people in my neighborhood that I never troubled to get to know, and as evidence of this I point the fact that, "Do you need anything?" was the first sentence out of the mouths of two of my neighbors when the lockdown hit. It turns out that the quality of tribal kindness known as "neighborliness" is also free, and feels pretty good.

Because food is more difficult to obtain -- not scarce or more expensive, just more of a pain in the ass to get in quantity -- I have been utilizing the skills poverty taught me 20-odd years ago to make do with less, and to utilize every aspect of what I have and waste nothing. Take my oranges for example. I have an orange tree in my backyard which is ridiculously fertile, and no matter how many I eat or give away (I just mailed 6lbs to my mother), some of them, quite a few of them, always go bad in the end. But not this time. This time I have been gathering, juicing, and freezing them a dozen or fourteen at a time, so that nothing goes to waste. I have even taken to grinding the skins into zest for use in other dishes. It is the same with the windfalls of grapefuit, lemon, lime and tangerine that I find in alleys and on sidewalks around my house. I used to walk past them as they slowly rotted. Now I gather them up and use them in my breakfast shakes. The natural generosity I have mentioned above also applies to others' and their own fruits: I have passed more overflowing baskets of lemons on sidewalks festooned with notes that say FREE LEMONS - TAKE ALL YOU WANT this season than all the others I've lived here combined. Nobody wants to see any waste nowadays, and everyone seems to want to demonstrate that they care about others. This applies even to the "little free libraries" that abound around Burbank. Most of them now have anti-bacterial sanitation wipes inside of them, and nobody ever seems to steal these things, despite the ongoing shortage.

Isolation has also made me more communicative. I am now spending hours on the phone each day with friends I have not spoken with in months or in some cases, years. Listening to the problems that others have faced, and the solutuons they have formulated in this time, reminds me that we are all going through this together. America in recent years has become increasingly obsessed with identity politics, and the general consequence of this was a splintering effect -- the national tribe became a thousand sub-tribes divided along economic, racial, ethnic, religious, sexual and political lines, and these in turn divided again and again as new hypens and buzz-words were thrown into the mix, until our entire society became atomized. All of this horseshit has been put on pause. We are now in an us-them situation with "us" being humanity and "them" being the virus. As with the last world war, during which rationing made it at least theoretically impossible for a rich person to buy more food or more sundries than a poor one, the net effect of pandemic is a actually a leveling and a uniting one.

Now, I don't want to romanticize what is happening or slap some kind of watery feel-good facepaint over an ugly situation. We are in the soup, and the temperature is only going to rise over the next month or two. Too many people are still acting selfishly and irresponsibly, and far too many of our politicians are behaving in a manner which, if they were serving in the wartime military, would get them cashiered and possibly shot for criminal negligence. It's no use whistling past this particular graveyard. At the same time, however, there is nothing to be gained and much to be lost by pretending that there is no upside. COVID-19 is a bitch, but it is a bitch that has reminded us of several important facts, the most basic of which is that a temporary suspension of our frantic quest to acquire shiny objects carries with it opportunities to enjoy those things about life which don't cost us anything at all.

SINNER'S CROSS WINS AGAIN

I am very pleased to announce that my third novel, 2019's Sinner's Cross, is now a Book Excellence Award Winner for the category of Action. This is Sinner's second honor, having won the Best Indie Book Award for Historical Fiction just months after it was released.

Anyone who knows me knows that, like most writers, I am uncomfortable with self-promotion, but it's part of my job as an indie author to crow when crowing is warranted. Sinner's Cross is most definitely the best book I have yet written, and considering how limited my funds have been to do promotional work for it, to take two major awards in less than six months is a remarkable achievement. So I'm remarking on it. (coughs)

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Sinner's Cross is a WW2 novel told from the perspectives of three very different men -- two Americans and one German. My goal with the novel was simultaneously to tell "the story of an event" (a single battle in late 1944), and the three men's reactions to it as human beings. It is not a book about strategy, tactics, or weapons. It is not a wide-eyed homage to the "Greatest Generation." And it is most certainly not warmed-over wartime propaganda. It is simply about the reaction of human beings to confusion, discomfort, uncertainty, terror, and the most intense stressors imaginable. Anyone who has ever read anything I've written knows that placing ordinary people in extreme situations is my hallmark, and Sinner's Cross is perhaps the most extreme example of this trait. A friend of mine who saw heavy combat in Vietnam told me he felt "exhausted" after reading the first act, and I took this as a tremendous compliment. That having been said, though there is plenty of action in the story, it has hardly a tale of "hot lead and cold steel," either. Each of the characters -- Ed Tom Halleck, Bobby Breese and Martin Zenger -- are archetypes meant to represent a different aspect of the human condition. It is my hope that the reader will see glimpses of their own personalities in these characters, and perhaps come to discover how they might react in a similar situation...for better or for worse.

I have often stated that my main motivation for becoming an independent author was to avoid being branded and thus forced to work within the confines of a single genre. (I don't read in just one genre, so why would I write in only one?) As it happens, my first two books were gritty crime novels, often categorized as suspense or mystery/suspense. My third was a short story collection consisting of horror tales, dystopia, black comedy and only the devil knows what else. Sinner's Cross is my first novel in the genre of historical fiction, but as you can see, the good people at the BEA decided the pace relentless enough to give it top honors in a different category entirely. And -- big surprise! -- I'm completely on board with that. Never mind the short stories and novellas, before I'm done, I intend to have written a full-length novel in just about every genre you care to name, including fantasy, science fiction, erotica, romantic suspense...pick your category. To me, story-telling is an essential part of the human heritage, and there is no need for snobbery and little excuse for incuriousness. There is something to be learned from every genre. There is, after all, a reason why tales, legends, fables, books and plays from thousands of years ago are still told. One of my favorite exchanges in one of my favorite movies, Amadeus, goes like this:

Mozart : I am fed to the teeth with elevated themes! Old dead legends! Why must we go on forever writing about gods and legends?

Baron Van Swieten : Because they do! They go on forever. Or at least what they represent. The eternal in us. Opera is here to ennoble us. You and me.

I dunno about opera (due deference to my cousin Kelly, the opera singer), but I do know about fiction. And I know how restless my curiosity is and how much joy I take in the selection and arrangement of words and the telling of tales. Sinner's Cross was a bitch to write, but the struggle was also rewarding and necessary: I paraphrase General Patton, I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a book about war that didn't feel like a war to the author when he wrote it.

So, gentle reader, if you have the time, why not head over to Amazon or Barnes & Noble and give Sinner's Cross a try? I guarantee one thing: you won't forget the experience.

Sinner's Cross: A Novel of the Second World War

As I Please III

Recent events forced me to take an unscheduled sabbatical from this blog, thus depriving the great masses of my insight (coughs) for something like six weeks. How they survived I don't know, but now that I'm back, I have a few random observations to make, and nothing says "random observations" like the As I Please column. In case you've forgotten, or never cared in the first place, "As I Please" was a format invented by George Orwell about 80 years ago which I have shamelessly stolen. So without further ado, here I go....

* ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD is the first Quentin Tarantino movie I have seen since 1994's PULP FICTION that I actually enjoyed. One movie reviewer described it as "a glorious love letter to the movies," but it is actually a glorious love letter to late 1960s Hollywood, which is not quite the same thing.
Although the movie lacks a plot, and is as self-indulgent and occasionally boring as every other Tarantino film, it is missing the gleeful, capering sadism (including the sexual sadism) of just about every other movie he has ever made. The cinematography is lush without being distracting, and his reconstruction of 60s Los Angeles is impressive. Brad Pitt is unusually charismatic, grounded and likable in his role as tough-stuntman-turned-humble-gofer Cliff Booth, but Leonardo DiCaprio stuns as fading actor Rick Dalton, an insecure drunk trying to force a second wind into his flagging career. Both characters are sides of an archetypal coin I have had a chance to examine up close lo, these last 12-plus years: a coin that represents those who have spent their lives in the movie industry onlt to discover, in middle age, that it doesn't love them and won't remember them when they are gone.

* One distressing effect of COVID-19, the "novel coronavirus," is to make everyone an expert about epidemiology. People who, a few months ago, were insisting essential oils were as effective as vaccines against, say polio or rubella, are now calmly dispensing wisdom about how to avoid getting this unusually nasty strain of the flu. Since the later 90s, I have oft witnessed this phenomenon among Americans: a belief that reading a newspaper article, hopping onto Wikipedia, or watching a few YouTube videos or participating in a Reddit thread make them experts on a subject which, moments ago, they knew nothing about and cared even less. The ordinary person becomes an instant expert on everything from military tactics to the efficiacy of psychological profiles at the drop of a figurative hat. If this were merely annoying I would not comment about it, but in the case of an infectious disease it is downright dangerous. We have already seen the direct effect of the anti-vax movement; rumor-mongering and pseudo-science cost lives. In this case it could cost them in very large numbers indeed. America has plenty of doctors, scientists and public health officials who actually know what they are talking about. Listen to them (Mike Pence, not so much).

* The disastrous failure of Mike Bloomberg's presidential campaign is immensely satisfying to a very broad spectrum of Americans regardless of political affiliation. This has less to do with feelings about how Bloomberg might or might not have functioned as president than with his naked and completely shameless attempt to simply purchase the office. Say what you want about Trump, and I have, but he did not buy his presidency. However dull and insensate Americans have become in regards to grasping the behaviors necessary to avoid sliding into dictatorship or oligarchy, we still seem to understand that a tycoon with unlimited money should not simply be able to purchase the presidency like so many pounds of cheese.

* Speaking of Trump, I hope he is happy to have systematically destroyed or dismantled most of the governmental apparatus which was in place to fight global pandemics just like COVID-19. His obsession with destroying everything Obama touched, which seems to have been rooted equally in spite and some vague, unfocused desire to placate parts of his Obama-hating base, cased him to...well, I don't normally go for block quotes, but here is an article from FORBES that sums up his actions nicely:

The Trump administration recently requested $2.5 billion in emergency funds to prepare the U.S. for a possible widespread outbreak of coronavirus. Critics, though, are pointing out that money might not be necessary if the administration hadn’t spent the past two years largely dismantling government units that were designed to protect against pandemics.

The cuts started in 2018, as the White House focused on eliminating funding to Obama-era disease security programs. In March of that year, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, whose job it was to lead the U.S. response in the event of a pandemic, abruptly left the administration and his global health security team was disbanded.

That same year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was forced to slash its efforts to prevent global disease outbreak by 80% as its funding for the program began to run out. The agency, at the time, opted to focus on 10 priority countries and scale back in others, including China.

Also cut was the Complex Crises Fund, a $30 million emergency response pool that was at the secretary of state’s disposal to deploy disease experts and others in the event of a crisis. (The fund was created by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.)

Overall in 2018, Trump called for $15 billion in reduced health spending that had previously been approved, as he looked at increasing budget deficits, cutting the global disease-fighting budgets of the CDC, National Security Council (NSC), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Health and Human Services (HHS) in the process.

* I was going to write an uninformed rant about how irritating it is when someone who runs for their party's nomination for president, and fails, always "suspends their campaign" instead of formally dropping out. I assumed this was simply a petulant refusal to admit defeat. However, I took the 5 minutes necessary to find a credible source on the subject, and learned that if a candidate suspends their candidacy instead of dropping it, they can continue to raise funds to pay off their campaign debts, and also retain control of any delegates they have aquired in the primaries come convention-time. By taking these five minutes I learned something important and avoided looking stupid, two things I generally enjoy.

* Speaking of petulant refusals to admit defeat: Deontay Wilder recently lost his heavyweight titles to Tyson "The Gypsy King" Fury by seventh-round knockout. Unlike their first fight, this one was a blowout: Fury beat the brakes off Wilder, knocked him down multiple times, half-closed his eye, busted his lip and turned his ear into a blood-faucet. It was a flat-out ass-kicking, but after the loss, Wilder blamed his defeat not on the vastly superior boxing skills of Fury, but on a ridiculous 45-lb lighted costume, complete with crown, helmet and body armor, which he wore during his ring entrance. This costume, which Wilder referred to as "my uniform," supposedly tired out his legs during the short walk from dressing room to ring apron. Now, I have followed combat sports of all types since the 1980s and have heard a lot of excuses for defeats, but this one may actually take the cake. Wilder trains in a 45-lb vest and is known for his freakish ability to carry his knockout power into the later rounds of fights. To blame his costume for his defeat almost certainly guarantees he will be defeated again when he meets Fury for a third time this summer. To admit a mistake is the first and most important step in never repeating it, but it is an art which seems to be dying out in the world. (See the apology Trump never made about gutting our health organizations just before a global pandemic)

* The murder of rapper Nipsey Hussle and the death of NBA legend Kobe Bryant both prompted massive outpourings of public grief, especially here in Los Angeles, where both made their names and fortunes. I did take note, however, of some bitter remarks to the effect that "every time we (black folk) get some success, they (white folk) take it away from us." I shouldn't have to comment on the stupidity of this observation as it pertains to these two particular deaths, but I will anyway. Nipsey Hussle, at the time of his death, was still an active member of the Rollin' Sixties (Neighborhood) Crip set, the largest and one of the most violent of all Crip sets in L.A., and he was murdered by another Rollin' 60, i.e. by a fellow black man and gangbanger. In a sense, he died the way he lived -- violently, while still claiming gang affiliation. Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter accident caused, evidently, by bad weather and possibly pilot error, a tragedy which was nonetheless the sort of death only a very wealthy man could possibly suffer. The need some people have to put individual, personal tragedies into some broader, conspiratorial context is one of the salient features of our age and shows how little some people have actually changed within their own minds as the world changes around them.

* Every now and again I'm asked how I feel about reading bad reviews of my work. My answer is always twofold and the same: Firstly, and just to state the facts, I have had very, very few bad reviews in my writing career, so it has yet to become a factor in my daily life. Second, it's my strong feeling that anyone who actually pays to read my work has the right to speak their mind about it, and while I'd prefer they keep their claws in their sheaths and be diplomatic, it's not for me to tell them to do so. I rarely hold back in my own reviews of films, books, albums and so forth, so why should others be asked to do so when dealing with my work? Provided there are no libelous or slanderous claims made against me, have it it, if you feel the need. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

* Building on this, I'd like to register how much I hate the character of Rose Tico in the latest STAR WARS trilogy and how little I am intimidated by the effort to classify criticism of this character or the actress who portrays her as racist, sexist, or any other "-ist." I have no ill will toward Kelly Marie Tran, but she's a terrible actress, and even if she wasn't, the character of Rose Tico is so poorly conceived and poorly written that she was almost certainly unsalvageable regardless of who portrayed her. I mean, really, if Al Pacino or Denzel Washington had portrayed Jar Jar Binks, would the character have been less annoying? Have we really reached a point where a woman or a person of color is immune from criticism on that basis alone? Because it seems to me that is simply sexism and racism by another name. Correct me if I am wrong, but the goal we are working towards as a society is the day when people are judged entirely on performance and character, yes? How can we do that if we have different sets of rules based on things like sex, gender, age, race and ethnicity?

* David Roback, half the driving force behind the legendary band Mazzy Star, died the other day from cancer at the age of only 61. A little over a year ago I had a chance to see one of the (so it turned out to be) final performances of this wonderful group at the Majestic Theater in Ventura, California. It had been an ambition of mine to see them play live since the summer of 1994, when I heard "Fade Into You" on the radio, and it was well worth the wait. I intend to write more fully about the impact of Roback upon my life, and the lives of countless others, very soon, so I will just say here that it was a great privilege to be one of his fans, and I will always hold his music very dear indeed.

And with that I wrap up both this installment of my blog and the As I Please column. I'm sorry for my absence, but sometimes life gets in the way of writing -- even for a writer.

THE SCAR IS YOUR REWARD

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog called “Life On 1£ A Week,” in which I described an era in which, despite a college education and a professional job, I lived somewhere around the poverty line. It was far and away the most popular of the essays I'd written up 'til that time, garnering many hundreds of views, and I'm convinced the popularity of the epistle stemmed from the fact that the concept of “middle class poverty” has become familiar to all too many Americans. This seeming contradiction in terms is a fact of life for millions or even tens of millions of people. They come from middle-class families, possess college educations and often land salaried jobs with benefits, yet often live not merely paycheck-to-paycheck but hand-to-mouth, one financial disaster away from destitution.

I don't want to bore you with charts, graphs and statistics, but I will tell you this. In the 1950s, it was possible to buy a house, a car, and send two children to college on a single middle-class salary. That is not nostalgia talking, but stark fact. As a nation, we waved bye-bye to those days a long time ago and won't be seeing them again. Inflation has rendered the dollar a shadow of its former self, while wage increases have in no wise kept up with steadily rising prices. This is the hard reality in which we live, and it is getting worse: in most middle-class families it is now necessary for both parents to work full-time jobs, and nearly everything they “own” is in fact leased to one extent or other – the house, the cars, sometimes even the furniture. College has become extortionately expensive, yet yields far less returns economically for graduates than it once did. Middle-class people of all races still see the acquisition of a four-year degree as the key which will unlock a middle-class-or-better existence for their children, in the face of mounting evidence that all said degree will accomplish is to plunge said children into debts they will never escape. America remains the only nation in the First World to view its youth as a resource to be exploited by lending institutions, and Betsy DeVoss, acting on the whims of her master (who is acting on the whims of his master, The Swamp he pledged to drain) has made sure that student loan debts cannot be discharged through bankruptcy.

Middle-class poverty is a subject about which I know a great goddamned deal, because I have lived most of my life in its chill and bony bosom. I do not say this out of self-pity: in the 1.0 version of my adult life, when I was in law enforcement, I knew my choice of career would only lead to big bucks if I were on the take (I wasn't, if you were wondering). In the 2.0 version, well, anyone who works as a writer, or in the entertainment industry, knows full well what they are getting into before they even get into it. The chances of “making it” are feeble indeed, and even obtaining steady employment is an accomplishment and a half (the most commonly uttered question in Hollywood, including the Other Hollywood known as pornography, is, “Are you working?”). The fact is, I do what I do because I love it, because I am good at it, because I am driven to do it and can't conceive of doing anything else. I would be lying, however, if I said that the baggage that comes with MCP does not weight heavily upon my back from time to time.

When you grow up middle-class, you grow up with a set of expectations about your own future which is perhaps not well-founded in reality, but which nonetheless come to you with your mother's milk and form a part of your world view. You believe that you will begin your adult life at the middle-class level and either maintain that level or rise to the next. Nobody, or very nearly nobody, ever believes they will sink into the working class or, even more terribly, into some form of working poverty. So when you get there, wherever there is, it's understandable if you land more like an anvil than a feather. Yet the effects are often more subtle than you might think, and effect our outlook in ways we do not always understand.

In my personal experience, people who are born poor, working class or at the very lowest rung of the middle class never exhibit any shame that their clothes were inferior, their speech poorer, or their cars older and rustier, than many other folks. They exhibit no shame because they feel no shame: they were where they expected to be, living the lives they expected to live. Their expectations were lower because their horizons were necessarily narrower. And this applied to me as well. When I was living life “on 1£ a week” twenty years ago in Pennsylvania, and was so poor I couldn't afford to repair my broken car, I moved into a crumbly old neighborhood and spent most of my weeks living within a few hundred yards' radius of my apartment. My days were bed – shower – work – home – bed. Many was the month I didn't travel more than a few blocks in any direction from where I resided, but because of this, rather than in spite of it, I never experienced any embarrassment over my wretched condition. It never occurred to me to be embarrassed, because everyone I encountered was at least as bad off as I was, if not worse (I may not have had heat in the cruel Pennsylvania winter, but I had a roof and a bed). I had no points of positive comparison, and for the fellow who is broke, that is often a blessing in disguise. Because instead of being humiliated by his poverty, he is to some extent unaware of it, and to the extent that he is aware – say, when he is hungry and can't afford to eat, as I was on so many cold, bleak, lonely winter nights – he feels not shame but a sense of solidarity with those around him, similarly suffering. The arrogant heartlessness with which I had always regarded the poor, the homeless, the wretched died a slow, painful, overdue, and well-deserved death in those years.

But living in Los Angeles made me more aware and self-conscious of my working poverty than I would be elsewhere. When I resided in Pennsylvania, I was sometimes flush, sometimes broke, but the way I was treated by others never really varied. With the usual exceptions caused by human personality, I got back what I gave. If I behaved badly, badly was I treated. If I behaved kindly, I was treated kindly in turn. L.A. isn't like that. If I had a penny – never mind a nickel, a fucking penny – for every smile, nod or greeting I've offered that wasn't returned, or which was regarded with a stare conveying disgust at my presumption, I'd be rich as Croesus. If I had a Lincoln log for every time I've met someone, seemingly friendly, who later dropped me like the proverbial hot rock the moment they grasped I couldn't further their own industry career, I could rebuild the Tower of Babel. And if I had two of any type of animal for all the times I've been snubbed, dismissed or flat-out insulted because I wasn't wearing the right clothes, driving the right car or living in the right apartment, well, I'd be able to stock Noah's Ark in no time flat. It's fair to say, however, that the openness with which working poverty is disdained in La La Land at least possesses the virtue of honesty, and in any case, that same disdain probably exists almost everywhere: it is simply better masked.

A few years ago I let my gym membership lapse. Laziness had nothing to do with it: the fees were too high considering how little work I was getting at the time, so I took to hiking as my principal means of exercise, because hiking is an activity that requires no expense other than the few dollars' worth of gas burned up in driving to and from the trails. In time, however, the slackness of my muscles and the flabbiness of my waistline told me it was time to smash the piggy bank and get back to the ole iron. And this decision ushered in a series of petty incidents which led me to a conclusion, not so much about working poverty/lower middle-class life, as about myself.

When I returned to the gym, the first thing I noticed was how down-at-heel, how out of place, how completely de trop I looked in comparison with two-thirds (if not three quarters) of the membership. Not only was I older by ten to twenty years than the average person in my field of vision, I was also dressed far too shabbily to blend in regardless. My ball cap, purchased in London and once black, was now a sun-blasted khaki. My tank top had undergone a thousand washings and showed it in its frayed edges and flaked logo. My shorts were camouflage pants given to me by a friend in the Marines almost twenty years ago, which I had cut off with a pair of scissors. My socks were new, but cheaply bought, and my shoes little more than dirty scraps of fabric and worn-out rubber, held together by trail dust. Even my noise-canceling headphones, an expensive gift from my brother, were jacked up in the extreme: the plate covering the battery was missing, and in the excessive heat one of the ear pads had fallen off and been lost, giving the whole set a lopsided appearance.

I'm a relic, I thought. Even my iPod is older than these kids.

It didn't stop there. When you're poor, you don't replace things, you repair them. My gym towel was not white but dishwater gray. The surface of my boxing gloves had flaked off, exposing the padding, and even my jump rope looked like a chew-toy. Everything I owned was of the past. I was of the past. And poor. The scholarship kid at Eton. I felt embarrassed. I didn't want to be around all these handsome wanna-be actors and gorgeous wanna-be models. I didn't want to see how battered my body was next to theirs. I didn't want their brand-new sneakers and designer clothing and two hundred dollar haircuts as a contrast. My first workouts were conducted consciously at times when the gym would be as close as it could get to empty. Later, when that proved impossible, I nudged my way through the crowd with downcast eyes, unspeaking, just trying to get in and get out as fast as possible, before I set off some kind of poverty-detection alarm.

One day I arrived at the gym in a particularly ugly frame of mind. Too many bills, not enough work – that kind of thing. It's a "mood indigo" known to millions in this gig economy, no need to elaborate. On that day I was too distracted by my anger and restlessness to care about how I looked in comparison with the young soap-opera studs and the glamorous runway babes. I was too deep in my own head to give a damn (or a shit) about the pecking order. I needed to burn off a lot of energy, and fast, before somebody (maybe me) got hurt. So I held my head up. I stepped aside for nobody. I locked on a game face more appropriate to a boxing ring than a gym in Burbank, and I stormed through not one but a series of workouts – treadmill, heavy bag, free weights, machines. At one point I was on a leg press, pushing up some serious weight, ignoring the glare of the BMW-driving Armenian muscle-head who was impatiently awaiting use of the machine. In fact, I was doing a few extra sets just to spite him.

That was when it happened. I shifted my weight, my right foot came down on the pedal a little too far to the side, and as it struck the steel a puff of dirt briefly haloed around my shoe. I realized in that moment that what I was seeing was the residue of the eight-mile hike I had taken the previous day in the Santa Monica Mountains. A tough slog, that one – three of the eight miles were spent in the ascent, the weather had been brutally hot, and I had failed to pack sufficient water. I'd felt moderately lucky to get back to my car in one piece, and come home sunburned, footsore, and exhausted. Yet here I was the very next morning, slogging away on the iron and pounding the heavy bag, despite my soreness and the twangs of arthritis pain in my left foot. It was something to be proud of at the ripe old age of 47, was it not?

I studied my shoe, which happened to lay in a slant of light streaming down from the overhead windows. Moments before I had been ashamed of it. Not only was the thing completely worn out and dirty, it was crusted everywhere with clots of old, faded foam latex, somewhere between the color of baby shit and yesterday's vomit. But that latex had dripped upon those shoes during any number of seemingly endless days I'd spent shooting molds for "The Walking Dead" or "The Orville" or some other television show in a hot, noisy, uncomfortable effects shop buried deep in the bowels of the San Fernando Valley. Each blot of rubber represented, in its own unaesthetic way, a physical manifestation of the dream which had driven me 2,460 miles across the United States to Hollywood. It was not that I cared a damn about make-up effects; I had simply wanted to be “in the industry” and here I was, twelve years after my Buick had rattled into town on nearly bald tires, still making a go of it. Indeed, as I glanced around the gym, looking at all those sleek-faced, hard-bodied youngsters in their designer workout clothes, so desperately and obviously hoping to be discovered, I had to chuckle inwardly at the knowledge that me and my shitty shoes had spent more time on set, on location, and on studio lots than all of them combined. They were wannabees. I was.

I got up and looked at myself in the mirror. Took in the headphones with their exposed battery and missing earpad, the frayed, sun-bleached tank top, the cut-off camouflage shorts, the 99-cent store socks, the worn-out shoes. Then I looked beyond that to the man beneath. Saw the naked forehead where lush hair had once grown, the flecks of gray in the sideburns, the fine wrinkles on the backs of my hand, the scars on my right shin. Even the sweat that glistened and beaded and ran down my flesh. I realized in that moment that these were all things to be proud of in their own unique ways. The knots, the scars, the gray hair. Even the things that lay beneath them – the anxiety, the depression, the fear. All earned. All won in the course of living an adventurous if not prosperous life. All the weathering one might expect from a fella who took a road less traveled, and then left that to hack his own path through the wilds beyond.

Three novels. A short story collection. Five feature films. Two hundred episodes of television. A black belt in White Tiger Tae Kwon Do. Three, count 'em, three, Best Indie Book Awards. The 2016 Book of the Year. The Hoffer Award Finalist. The Shelf Unbound Runner-up. The Writer's Digest Honorable Mention. The Pinnacle Award. Two Masters degrees. The first person ever to get the Endowed Scholarship at Seton Hill University. Miles Watson, late of London, Paris, Rome, Vancouver, Philipsburg, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, a man who had once been in a high-speed chase on the 60 Freeway while working as a private investigator. A man who had made a point of hunting down and getting drunk with the stars of his favorite television shows. A man that had a dream and stumbled after it.

What the fuck did this guy have to be ashamed of?

I started this missive talking about a certain type of poverty. I am shifting gears to talk about middle age, because the feelings the two conditions produce in the ordinary American are more or less identical.

In my middle thirties, I began to experience for the first time some erosion of energy and physical health. This is a normal time for such experiences but I took it badly. Very badly indeed. I had, after all, been young my entire life, so I took the powers of youth for granted, saw them as permanent institutions rather than temporary advantages that would have to be relinquished over time. By forty I had made peace with the losses and found a way to make gains in the face of entropy. But in that regard I am somewhat lucky because society, and to some sense biology, are stacked on the side of the XY chromosome. I am at the age where some of my old flames now tell me they feel like old women. They tell me, “Gravity's a bitch. My hair is turning gray. I have stretch marks from my last kid. I look at old pictures of myself on Spring Break and I want to cry, and now I have menopause to look forward to in five or ten years.” I understand the feeling, if not the specifics, because it's a cast-iron bitch to compete with the ghost of your former self. If I were to walk into a room aside the 1995 or even 2003 versions of myself, no one would even venture a glance at the 2019 version.
But here's the thing: it's meant to be. Life may be understood backward but its lived forward, and nobody's yet discovered a reverse gear. So while we live in a youth-dominated, youth-worshiping culture that makes the elderly feel like human garbage and the no-longer-young feel as if they're irrelevant and slightly shameful, we can't let it get us down or determine how we feel or behave. And here I tie this back in with poverty. Poverty, or lack of money, if you prefer a broader term, is an inhibiting condition by its very nature, but many of its inhibitions are either illusions or simply obstacles. They are not barriers. In the last twelve years I have had an adequate or more-than-adequate cash flow maybe a sixth of that time, I developed tinnitus and arthritis and experienced depression and anxiety. Yet the last twelve years have been, by far, the most fertile and productive of my life. All the accomplishments I listed above and various others happened between 2008 and now, in other words, between the ages of 36 and 47. Had I thought in these terms a few years ago, taken a longer view of this epoch of my life, I'd never have hung my head. Not for one moment. And neither should you.

So, if you're reading this and you have stretch marks, or scars, or this or that is sagging or receding or going gray, and you're pockets are empty and you're starting to feel unwanted and unwelcome, a disappointment to yourself, a 1.0 in a 3.0 world, I want you to take a moment and look at that part of you and do what Conan the Barbarian did when they finally released him from the Wheel of Pain: blow it a kiss and say, “Thank you.” Because that which does not kill us may scar us, batter us, humiliate us and push us the fuck around, but in the end, as the old saying goes, it only makes us stronger. And more interesting, too.