Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 24
April 2, 2020
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.
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.
March 9, 2020
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
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
March 4, 2020
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.
* 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.
January 23, 2020
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.
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.
December 29, 2019
NO! I'M NOT TIRED OF WINNING
2019 was not an easy year for me, but it has been extremely fertile for my children. You know, my books. Those things I write, when I'm not watching re-runs of T.J. Hooker, hiking mountains, or drinking Irish whiskey.
I may have said this before, but when you publish anything, from a short story to an epic novel, there is a sensation that is probably akin to a parent watching their child climb into the schoolbus for the very first time. You've created this thing, nurtured and guided it and fallen in love with it...and now it's time to release it into the world. A world you know can be terribly cold, indifferent, and cruel. A world where your love counts for jack-fuck and cannot prevent so much as a skinned knee, much less a catastrophe. There is anxiety, and emotion, and fear. Yes, fear....
Are the other kids going to accept yours? Are the bullies going to target them? Will the teachers be nasty? Are the bus-brakes going to fail? The anxieties are many, and the greatest of them is not the disaster-scenario per se, but rather the fear they'll simply be ignored, like that poor kid the the Tears For Fears song "Mad World":
Hello teacher, tell me what's my lesson
Look right through me, look right through me...
As a parent-of-sorts, you know that even excellence is no guarantor of success. Robert Parker, the Dean of American Crime Fiction, said that All Our Yesterdays was the best book he'd ever written in his long career, yet nobody bought it. John Carpenter's version of The Thing is regarded as one of the greatest horror movies of all time, yet when it debuted in 1982, it flopped harder than a lead pancake. And who can forget Vincent Van Gogh, the all-time great artist who sold exactly one painting in his entire life?
Writers are amubulatory jars of insecurity and dread. I was not a stranger to literary accolades before 2019 showed its tricky and pugnacious mug, but while my debut novel, Cage Life, won three trophies in the first year and a half after its release, in the last year or so I had begun to feel a strange resentment toward that book. It seemed to be sucking up all the oxygen -- and sunlight -- in the room, distracting from the works that succeeded it. They weren't putting up the numbers I wanted them to. They weren't winning awards of their own. Some small part of me suspected I had become the literary equivalent of a one-hit wonder.
No more.
On May 6, my short story collection Devils You Know was named a Finalist in the Eric Hoffer Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing.
On October 30, my second book, Knuckle Down: A Cage Life Novel, was given Honorable Mention in the Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards.
On December 24, I was informed my "long short" story, "The Numbers Game," had won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award in the Novella category.
On December 29, I received notice that Knuckle Down had won the Best Indie Book Award in the category of Suspense.
On the very same day, I was also told that Sinner's Cross, a novel I released just two months ago, had won the Best Indie Book Award in the category of Historical Fiction.
Today, I finished my fifth interview as an author, this time with the Hard Hat Book Site. Their last interview was with Bob van Laerhoven, author of the much-acclaimed Return to Hiroshima. I'm okay being placed in that company. Unlike Groucho Marx, I would definitely join a club that had me as a member. But it didn't stop there: a few weeks ago, my alma mater, York College, featured me in an article in their quarterly magazine, which gave me a curious feeling of having come home in triumph.
Yeah, 2019 was in many ways a beast and a bitch. I had more deals fall through than you would probably believe, and long stretches where I licked pencil-stubs, thumbed through dog-eared stacks of unpaid bills, and wondered how the fuck I was going to get by for another week, much less another year. I've had fights with utility companies and cable providers, and while I made quite a bit of money, relatively speaking, through my writing, the IRS is going to have a field day come tax time with all those bloody 1099s.
Such is the fate of the writer. It's either feast or famine and there is usually a lot more famine than feast. But not this time.
When Donald Trump was running for office he claimed the American people would get "tired of winning" should he become president.
Evidently he doesn't understand the American people.
We never get tired of winning.
The Numbers Game
Devils You Know
Cage Life
Knuckle Down
Sinner's Cross
I may have said this before, but when you publish anything, from a short story to an epic novel, there is a sensation that is probably akin to a parent watching their child climb into the schoolbus for the very first time. You've created this thing, nurtured and guided it and fallen in love with it...and now it's time to release it into the world. A world you know can be terribly cold, indifferent, and cruel. A world where your love counts for jack-fuck and cannot prevent so much as a skinned knee, much less a catastrophe. There is anxiety, and emotion, and fear. Yes, fear....
Are the other kids going to accept yours? Are the bullies going to target them? Will the teachers be nasty? Are the bus-brakes going to fail? The anxieties are many, and the greatest of them is not the disaster-scenario per se, but rather the fear they'll simply be ignored, like that poor kid the the Tears For Fears song "Mad World":
Hello teacher, tell me what's my lesson
Look right through me, look right through me...
As a parent-of-sorts, you know that even excellence is no guarantor of success. Robert Parker, the Dean of American Crime Fiction, said that All Our Yesterdays was the best book he'd ever written in his long career, yet nobody bought it. John Carpenter's version of The Thing is regarded as one of the greatest horror movies of all time, yet when it debuted in 1982, it flopped harder than a lead pancake. And who can forget Vincent Van Gogh, the all-time great artist who sold exactly one painting in his entire life?
Writers are amubulatory jars of insecurity and dread. I was not a stranger to literary accolades before 2019 showed its tricky and pugnacious mug, but while my debut novel, Cage Life, won three trophies in the first year and a half after its release, in the last year or so I had begun to feel a strange resentment toward that book. It seemed to be sucking up all the oxygen -- and sunlight -- in the room, distracting from the works that succeeded it. They weren't putting up the numbers I wanted them to. They weren't winning awards of their own. Some small part of me suspected I had become the literary equivalent of a one-hit wonder.
No more.
On May 6, my short story collection Devils You Know was named a Finalist in the Eric Hoffer Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing.
On October 30, my second book, Knuckle Down: A Cage Life Novel, was given Honorable Mention in the Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards.
On December 24, I was informed my "long short" story, "The Numbers Game," had won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award in the Novella category.
On December 29, I received notice that Knuckle Down had won the Best Indie Book Award in the category of Suspense.
On the very same day, I was also told that Sinner's Cross, a novel I released just two months ago, had won the Best Indie Book Award in the category of Historical Fiction.
Today, I finished my fifth interview as an author, this time with the Hard Hat Book Site. Their last interview was with Bob van Laerhoven, author of the much-acclaimed Return to Hiroshima. I'm okay being placed in that company. Unlike Groucho Marx, I would definitely join a club that had me as a member. But it didn't stop there: a few weeks ago, my alma mater, York College, featured me in an article in their quarterly magazine, which gave me a curious feeling of having come home in triumph.
Yeah, 2019 was in many ways a beast and a bitch. I had more deals fall through than you would probably believe, and long stretches where I licked pencil-stubs, thumbed through dog-eared stacks of unpaid bills, and wondered how the fuck I was going to get by for another week, much less another year. I've had fights with utility companies and cable providers, and while I made quite a bit of money, relatively speaking, through my writing, the IRS is going to have a field day come tax time with all those bloody 1099s.
Such is the fate of the writer. It's either feast or famine and there is usually a lot more famine than feast. But not this time.
When Donald Trump was running for office he claimed the American people would get "tired of winning" should he become president.
Evidently he doesn't understand the American people.
We never get tired of winning.
The Numbers Game
Devils You Know
Cage Life
Knuckle Down
Sinner's Cross
December 22, 2019
AS I PLEASE, AGAIN
Christmas is here, and with it the time for traditions of all sorts. I like to think that everyone has two sets of traditions, the ones we follow publicly, such as putting up the tree, hanging the stockings over the fireplace, writing cards, and so on, and the private ones, which we celebrate either alone or with only our nearest and dearest. In this latest installment of the "As I Please" column of this blog, I will discuss some of my own traditions that hit me around holiday-time, as well as any and every other goddamn thing rattling around in my skull. T'is the season for giving, so I'm gonna give you pieces of my mind.
* Today I was sitting in a diner in Toluca Lake, when I heard the man next to me exclaim to his friend, “I paid $4,250 in rent per month for that place in West Hollywood and had homeless people shitting on my doorstep.” There is a very definite moral in there if you care to look for it: suffice to say I am looking with increasing seriousness at shaking the dust of Los Angeles from my feet and finding another state in which to hang my shingle. Of course there are many benefits to living here, including some which are totally unique to this city, but we also get earthquakes, mudslides, wildfires, the highest taxes in the Union, smog, terrible traffic, and, as this gentleman discovered, enormous rents which in no way guarantee that you won't step in something highly unpleasant when you leave your home.
* I have finally got round to watching DEADWOOD, the HBO series which ran for three years back in the mid-00's. I was reluctant for many years to engage with this series because, like ROME, it was prematurely canceled by that network and I was angry enough at the “fall of ROME” not to want to get my heart broken again by getting invested in something so soon doomed to die. However, the release of the DEADWOOD movie this year finally spurred me to watch, and I'm glad I did. This is terrific television. It rips all the gilding away from the Old West and presents it as it very likely was: dirty, disgusting, vulgar, disease-ridden, amoral, casually violent, brutally racist. I am particularly impressed with the performance of Ian McShane as the saloon-proprieter-gangster-pimp Al Swearegen. McShane is no stranger to me: I first noticed him in the 80s on several appearances of MAGNUM, P.I., and later as the cynical, dissolute reporter Phil Rule on the two epic mini-series THE WINDS OF WAR and WAR & REMEMBRANCE. Nobody, and I mean nobody, does cynical and dissolute like Ian McShane. I look forward to finishing the series and watching the movie.
* In 1977, my father took me to the Uptown Theater in Northwest D.C. to see a movie called STAR WARS EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE. In 2019, I accompanied my mother, brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew to the Arclight Cinema in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles to see a movie called STAR WARS EPISODE IX: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER. I don't know what feelings I have about the film just yet, except to say that it is much better, or much less awful, than its two predecessors, but I think it only fair I take some notice of the fact that seeing this particular movie, which supposedly brings the entire story to a close (it doesn't: Disney will kick that fucking pinata until there are no more coins), also brings to a kind of close a chapter of my life that began when I was an awestruck five year-old, watching Darth Vader emerge through the smoke.
* With Christmas nearly upon us, it's time for me to do the things I always do at Christmastime just for myself. The first is to watch the George C. Scott version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1985), which is not only the best of all the Scrooge movies I have ever seen, but in my estimation one of the greatest movies ever made. After this comes Bob Clark's “A CHRISTMAS STORY (1983), a film that hardly needs an introduction. I then watch the “Silent Night” episode of MAGNUM, P.I. and the two episodes of M*A*S*H that have the most moving Christmas themes: “Dear Sis” (7x15) and “Death Takes a Holiday” (9x5) [“Twas the Day After Christmas” (10 x 10) and “Dear Dad (1 x 12) also qualify.] The BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER episode “Amends” (3 x 10) is also very good Christmastime viewing.
* This particular Yuletide is also the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. It's very difficult for modern Americans to grasp the immensity or the savagery of that battle, so I'll try to put this in perspective. In the Iraq War, the United States lost 4,497 killed over a period of 8 ¾ years. In the Afghanistan War, we lost 2,216 over a period of 18 years. In the Battle of the Bulge, the we lost 19,000 dead in one month. Another 23,000 were reported “missing” (presumed dead or captured) and 47,500 more were wounded. Thus, approximately 89,500 men were killed, wounded or captured between December 16, 1944 and January 16, 1945. Some of the heaviest fighting occurred between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
* Speaking of Christmas, I have just completed watching the brooding, beautifully shot, darkly unpredictable Chris Carter show MILLENNIUM, which ran from 1996 – 1999. This series featured two Christmas-themed episodes of surprising beauty: “Midnight of the Century,” in which the show's hero, Frank Black, tries to mend fences with his estranged father, played by Darrin McGavin (“A Christmas Story”). The other is “Omerta,” in which Frank and his daughter Jordan deal with a repentant mobster played by John Polito (“Miller's Crossing”). It's very difficult to “do” Christmas without sinking into a swamp of saccharine emotions and Hallmark-channel pathos, but MILLENNIUM pulls it off with imagination and flair.
* One nation which knows how to do Christmas right is Great Britain. Just about every television show on the BBC turns out a Christmas special each year, but it was only in 2019 that I realized one of my all-time favorite television programs, SHERLOCK HOLMES (1984 – 1994) had produced such a special. It's a silly little thing, hardly worth mentioning, but it led me to a second, greater discovery, not Christmas-relayed directly but a kind of Christmas present. In 1992, the British channel ITV debuted a special program called “The Four Oaks Mystery” which featured “a four-part sequence of stories featuring the stars of four ITV detective shows of the time all separately working to solve the same mystery.” One of those four shows was SHERLOCK HOLMES. I had never even heard of this “sequence of stories,” but courtesy of YouTube, I was able to catch a “new” episode of a show that had been off the air for 23 years.
* I forgot to mention that the SHERLOCK HOLMES episode "The Blue Carbuncle" is another staple of my Christmas-themed TV watching. It's a terrific, touching tale that has the normally ice-blooded detective working overtime to save both a former jewel thief wrongfully accused of stealing a precious stone...and the bumbling amateur thief who really did nick it.
* One of the first things I noticed when I moved to California, in November of 2007, was the gung-ho, balls-out attitude everyone seemed to have toward Christmas and the holidays generally. Every other house was decked in lights, festooned with decorations and in some cases, with elaborate displays both traditional (the manger) and silly (enormous lighted blow-up dolls of Snoopy in a Santa hat). Jewish families often did “Kosher Christmas” by putting up trees festooned with dradels, Stars of David and blue tinsel and decorating their houses in blue and white lights with manorahs in the window. It took some getting used to, seeing “snow” made of cotton on front lawns, plastic icicles, and palm trees strung with Xmas lights, but I soon began to realize that the very climate here, which precludes most of what people think of as “winter weather,” also forces people to improvise. And while some dismiss it as another facet of the make-believe atmosphere which pervades this town, I admire the spirit: if you don't have it, fake it.
* I was planning a separate blog for this subject, but what the hell: my novel KNUCKLE DOWN: A CAGE LIFE MYSTERY was given Honorable Mention in the Writer's Digest Awards for 2019. The review of the book is excellent and I will be sharing it here, but for now, I just want to crow a little, and remind y'all that it would make a great Christmas gift, as would its x3 award-winning predecessor, CAGE LIFE.
And that, my friends, just about empties the bucket for this evening. No marbles left, except the one that says, “Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.”
* Today I was sitting in a diner in Toluca Lake, when I heard the man next to me exclaim to his friend, “I paid $4,250 in rent per month for that place in West Hollywood and had homeless people shitting on my doorstep.” There is a very definite moral in there if you care to look for it: suffice to say I am looking with increasing seriousness at shaking the dust of Los Angeles from my feet and finding another state in which to hang my shingle. Of course there are many benefits to living here, including some which are totally unique to this city, but we also get earthquakes, mudslides, wildfires, the highest taxes in the Union, smog, terrible traffic, and, as this gentleman discovered, enormous rents which in no way guarantee that you won't step in something highly unpleasant when you leave your home.
* I have finally got round to watching DEADWOOD, the HBO series which ran for three years back in the mid-00's. I was reluctant for many years to engage with this series because, like ROME, it was prematurely canceled by that network and I was angry enough at the “fall of ROME” not to want to get my heart broken again by getting invested in something so soon doomed to die. However, the release of the DEADWOOD movie this year finally spurred me to watch, and I'm glad I did. This is terrific television. It rips all the gilding away from the Old West and presents it as it very likely was: dirty, disgusting, vulgar, disease-ridden, amoral, casually violent, brutally racist. I am particularly impressed with the performance of Ian McShane as the saloon-proprieter-gangster-pimp Al Swearegen. McShane is no stranger to me: I first noticed him in the 80s on several appearances of MAGNUM, P.I., and later as the cynical, dissolute reporter Phil Rule on the two epic mini-series THE WINDS OF WAR and WAR & REMEMBRANCE. Nobody, and I mean nobody, does cynical and dissolute like Ian McShane. I look forward to finishing the series and watching the movie.
* In 1977, my father took me to the Uptown Theater in Northwest D.C. to see a movie called STAR WARS EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE. In 2019, I accompanied my mother, brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew to the Arclight Cinema in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles to see a movie called STAR WARS EPISODE IX: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER. I don't know what feelings I have about the film just yet, except to say that it is much better, or much less awful, than its two predecessors, but I think it only fair I take some notice of the fact that seeing this particular movie, which supposedly brings the entire story to a close (it doesn't: Disney will kick that fucking pinata until there are no more coins), also brings to a kind of close a chapter of my life that began when I was an awestruck five year-old, watching Darth Vader emerge through the smoke.
* With Christmas nearly upon us, it's time for me to do the things I always do at Christmastime just for myself. The first is to watch the George C. Scott version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1985), which is not only the best of all the Scrooge movies I have ever seen, but in my estimation one of the greatest movies ever made. After this comes Bob Clark's “A CHRISTMAS STORY (1983), a film that hardly needs an introduction. I then watch the “Silent Night” episode of MAGNUM, P.I. and the two episodes of M*A*S*H that have the most moving Christmas themes: “Dear Sis” (7x15) and “Death Takes a Holiday” (9x5) [“Twas the Day After Christmas” (10 x 10) and “Dear Dad (1 x 12) also qualify.] The BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER episode “Amends” (3 x 10) is also very good Christmastime viewing.
* This particular Yuletide is also the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. It's very difficult for modern Americans to grasp the immensity or the savagery of that battle, so I'll try to put this in perspective. In the Iraq War, the United States lost 4,497 killed over a period of 8 ¾ years. In the Afghanistan War, we lost 2,216 over a period of 18 years. In the Battle of the Bulge, the we lost 19,000 dead in one month. Another 23,000 were reported “missing” (presumed dead or captured) and 47,500 more were wounded. Thus, approximately 89,500 men were killed, wounded or captured between December 16, 1944 and January 16, 1945. Some of the heaviest fighting occurred between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
* Speaking of Christmas, I have just completed watching the brooding, beautifully shot, darkly unpredictable Chris Carter show MILLENNIUM, which ran from 1996 – 1999. This series featured two Christmas-themed episodes of surprising beauty: “Midnight of the Century,” in which the show's hero, Frank Black, tries to mend fences with his estranged father, played by Darrin McGavin (“A Christmas Story”). The other is “Omerta,” in which Frank and his daughter Jordan deal with a repentant mobster played by John Polito (“Miller's Crossing”). It's very difficult to “do” Christmas without sinking into a swamp of saccharine emotions and Hallmark-channel pathos, but MILLENNIUM pulls it off with imagination and flair.
* One nation which knows how to do Christmas right is Great Britain. Just about every television show on the BBC turns out a Christmas special each year, but it was only in 2019 that I realized one of my all-time favorite television programs, SHERLOCK HOLMES (1984 – 1994) had produced such a special. It's a silly little thing, hardly worth mentioning, but it led me to a second, greater discovery, not Christmas-relayed directly but a kind of Christmas present. In 1992, the British channel ITV debuted a special program called “The Four Oaks Mystery” which featured “a four-part sequence of stories featuring the stars of four ITV detective shows of the time all separately working to solve the same mystery.” One of those four shows was SHERLOCK HOLMES. I had never even heard of this “sequence of stories,” but courtesy of YouTube, I was able to catch a “new” episode of a show that had been off the air for 23 years.
* I forgot to mention that the SHERLOCK HOLMES episode "The Blue Carbuncle" is another staple of my Christmas-themed TV watching. It's a terrific, touching tale that has the normally ice-blooded detective working overtime to save both a former jewel thief wrongfully accused of stealing a precious stone...and the bumbling amateur thief who really did nick it.
* One of the first things I noticed when I moved to California, in November of 2007, was the gung-ho, balls-out attitude everyone seemed to have toward Christmas and the holidays generally. Every other house was decked in lights, festooned with decorations and in some cases, with elaborate displays both traditional (the manger) and silly (enormous lighted blow-up dolls of Snoopy in a Santa hat). Jewish families often did “Kosher Christmas” by putting up trees festooned with dradels, Stars of David and blue tinsel and decorating their houses in blue and white lights with manorahs in the window. It took some getting used to, seeing “snow” made of cotton on front lawns, plastic icicles, and palm trees strung with Xmas lights, but I soon began to realize that the very climate here, which precludes most of what people think of as “winter weather,” also forces people to improvise. And while some dismiss it as another facet of the make-believe atmosphere which pervades this town, I admire the spirit: if you don't have it, fake it.
* I was planning a separate blog for this subject, but what the hell: my novel KNUCKLE DOWN: A CAGE LIFE MYSTERY was given Honorable Mention in the Writer's Digest Awards for 2019. The review of the book is excellent and I will be sharing it here, but for now, I just want to crow a little, and remind y'all that it would make a great Christmas gift, as would its x3 award-winning predecessor, CAGE LIFE.
And that, my friends, just about empties the bucket for this evening. No marbles left, except the one that says, “Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.”
November 30, 2019
Why is "aspiring" a dirty word?
Aspiring: directing one's hopes or ambitions toward becoming a specified type of person.
Amateur: a person who engages in a pursuit, especially a sport, on an unpaid rather than a professional basis.
Professional: engaged in a specified activity as one's main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
I got into an interesting discussion today about this rather elderly tweet from an actress named Lolia Etomi, which was only recently brought to my attention. She wrote:
I'm an actor. Professionally. I even did extra & got the degree & everything. So please Fam/Friends, don't call me an "aspiring actress." The career isn't only legitimized by fame. After you pass the bar, I call you a lawyer. You're not just 'aspiring' before you become partner.
As you can see, she's frustrated, and possibly insulted and even hurt, by people calling her an "aspiring" actress and just wants to be called an "actress," full stop. I looked up her IMDB and while she does indeed have extensive high-level training in acting, she has just two credits, both for short films.
Now, I am not knocking short films. Hell no. I have been in short films, I've PA'd on short films and I have even paid others to PA or work as extras on them. Short films are a legitimate medium, actually a vital medium since they help train the next generation of actors, directors, writers, etc., and can also be a great forum for experimental work (see, for example, "Calle Lejos" on Amazon Prime). But if you're a film/TV actress -- as opposed to stage -- and your resume consists of two short films, you aren't paying your bills through acting. You aren't even paying for your coffee through acting. You want to be doing this, you are ASPIRING to do it, but you're not quite there yet.
Obviously I understand her frustration in the sense that acting is the thing she's dedicated her life and passion to and she wants to be regarded as an actress with no qualifiers. She feels like she's being condescended when people precede “actress” with “aspiring.” However, the example she uses in the Tweet strikes me as a logical fallacy/false comparison, and one which is indicative of a larger societal problem that I think needs some discussion. Ms. Etomi says fame doesn't legitimize the work, and she's absolutely right about that. A career is NOT legitimized by fame, not even a Hollywood career, where most “working actors” are still unknown to the public by name, and sometimes by face as well. But a career is legitimized by work, especially paid work, and that's where her lawyer comparison falls apart. To quote her own example, which is actually not a very good one, a practicing lawyer is just that -- a practicing lawyer. He has a degree, but he also has a practice, a job, a paycheck. If he doesn't, he is still a lawyer, but he gets the qualifier "unemployed." Ms. Etomi has training -- she has the degree -- but she doesn't yet have the paycheck. It's a distinction with a difference.
There has gotta be some kind of a bar you've got to meet before you can call yourself a real member of a profession, and in acting and most creative, artistic, or musical work that bar is, I believe, actually getting work and actually being paid for doing it. Not necessarily making a living at it, but at least being paid when you do work, and working with some level of frequency. That is, after all, what you're aspiring TO when you become an actor, writer, musician, comedian, etc., etc. That's the bar you're presumably trying to meet when you enter the profession.
To quote from my own experience, a lot of writers, including myself, take cheap shots from folks who think if you're not Stephen King or J.K. Rowling you're a deluded phony: but I don't think being called an aspiring actress when you haven't done anything other than a pair of short films qualifies as a cheap shot or an insult. I think it's an accurate assessment of where Ms. Etomi is as an actress at this particular moment of her career. Her problem, as someone pointed out to me today, is that she attaches a stigma to the word "aspiring" that shouldn't be there. In her mind, "aspiring actress" and "wanna-be actress" are the same thing, and that's why (I believe) she feels insulted.
But they are NOT the same thing at all.
If you're a white belt in jiu-jitsu, you have aspirations of being a black belt, but you're not a wanna-be: a wanna-be is someone who wishes and hopes and wants and dreams but doesn't put in the work to get there. Ms. Etomi presumably aspires to be a working actress who makes a living exclusively by acting and doesn't need a day job or a “side hustle.” Terrific. She's obviously willing to put in the work, too -- equally terrific. I hope she destroys Hollywood and wins 4 Oscars and needs dump trucks for all her cash. But I'm not sure she's entitled to demand others remove "aspiring" from "actress" on the basis of a lot of training and 2 short films.
Look at me. I have both an MA and an MFA in writing popular fiction from a very good school. I received an endowed scholarship from my writing program. My first novel was named “Book of the Year.” I have five literary awards, including the BIBA, which is one of the top-10 honors an independent author can receive. I was commissioned to write a screenplay and was paid for it (not paid well, mind you, or even ethically, but I was paid). I get royalty payments every month and have worked four contracted writing jobs this year alone, including one for Netflix. But I don't introduce myself to people as a writer. I introduce myself to people as a freelancer in the entertainment industry, because that's how I make most of my money. The day I make a full living off writing alone is when I will start introducing myself as a writer. It gives me something to ASPIRE to.
Aspiration is a good thing. Aspiration means that one wishes to become more than we presently are, which is probably the most noble state a human can achieve. Aspiration does not make us weak, it is a sign of strength. It is a sign of intelligence, too, in that we have goals, which stupid people almost never do (stupid people have wishes, which are quite different). Aspiration carries with it no taint. It is not the same as being the dreaded “wannabe,” who has a desire for a status but no plan to get there and no discipline to put a plan into effect even if they had one.
I wrote this not as an attack on Ms. Etomi, who is obviously free to feel any way she wants about how she is addressed, but because I feel the larger problem laid bare by the Tweet is one we must answer as a society. It's the idea that we can use this "I identify as X" mentality in aspects of our lives where it's not really up to us to make that identification. I identify as a Cubs fan, but it doesn't mean I can identify as a Cub and go play at Wrigley and collect a nine-figure paycheck for doing so. I can identify as a black belt in jiu-jitsu but if I go to a tournament I will be exposed as a fraud immediately if I am not the genuine article. Hell, I can identify as a Medal of Honor winner or a U.S. Army Ranger or a Navy SEAL if I so choose. I won't do it because I never earned the distinction. There are some titles you can just claim and it legitimately becomes so -- "I'm a Star Trek fan!" -- and there are other titles you actually have to go out there and earn. Simply wanting them is not enough. The stark fact is you are simply not entitled to be addressed by a title you haven't yet achieved.
I wrote this article with some reluctance and have been several months debating with myself whether I ought to publish it. I don't want to be viewed as attacking this young woman who was simply trying to make a point -- a point I'm sure many people agree with. But again, I do feel there are larger issues at stake and one of them is this ridiculous notion that there is no difference between wanting something and achieving it, between wish and reality. (Because, as Abraham Lincoln once noted: "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Five? No. Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.") And perhaps even more importantly, because it casts aspertions on the concept of aspiration which the word does not deserve. I do feel that Ms. Etomi is an aspiring actress, and I do not see the shame in it. Quite the contrary.
Amateur: a person who engages in a pursuit, especially a sport, on an unpaid rather than a professional basis.
Professional: engaged in a specified activity as one's main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
I got into an interesting discussion today about this rather elderly tweet from an actress named Lolia Etomi, which was only recently brought to my attention. She wrote:
I'm an actor. Professionally. I even did extra & got the degree & everything. So please Fam/Friends, don't call me an "aspiring actress." The career isn't only legitimized by fame. After you pass the bar, I call you a lawyer. You're not just 'aspiring' before you become partner.
As you can see, she's frustrated, and possibly insulted and even hurt, by people calling her an "aspiring" actress and just wants to be called an "actress," full stop. I looked up her IMDB and while she does indeed have extensive high-level training in acting, she has just two credits, both for short films.
Now, I am not knocking short films. Hell no. I have been in short films, I've PA'd on short films and I have even paid others to PA or work as extras on them. Short films are a legitimate medium, actually a vital medium since they help train the next generation of actors, directors, writers, etc., and can also be a great forum for experimental work (see, for example, "Calle Lejos" on Amazon Prime). But if you're a film/TV actress -- as opposed to stage -- and your resume consists of two short films, you aren't paying your bills through acting. You aren't even paying for your coffee through acting. You want to be doing this, you are ASPIRING to do it, but you're not quite there yet.
Obviously I understand her frustration in the sense that acting is the thing she's dedicated her life and passion to and she wants to be regarded as an actress with no qualifiers. She feels like she's being condescended when people precede “actress” with “aspiring.” However, the example she uses in the Tweet strikes me as a logical fallacy/false comparison, and one which is indicative of a larger societal problem that I think needs some discussion. Ms. Etomi says fame doesn't legitimize the work, and she's absolutely right about that. A career is NOT legitimized by fame, not even a Hollywood career, where most “working actors” are still unknown to the public by name, and sometimes by face as well. But a career is legitimized by work, especially paid work, and that's where her lawyer comparison falls apart. To quote her own example, which is actually not a very good one, a practicing lawyer is just that -- a practicing lawyer. He has a degree, but he also has a practice, a job, a paycheck. If he doesn't, he is still a lawyer, but he gets the qualifier "unemployed." Ms. Etomi has training -- she has the degree -- but she doesn't yet have the paycheck. It's a distinction with a difference.
There has gotta be some kind of a bar you've got to meet before you can call yourself a real member of a profession, and in acting and most creative, artistic, or musical work that bar is, I believe, actually getting work and actually being paid for doing it. Not necessarily making a living at it, but at least being paid when you do work, and working with some level of frequency. That is, after all, what you're aspiring TO when you become an actor, writer, musician, comedian, etc., etc. That's the bar you're presumably trying to meet when you enter the profession.
To quote from my own experience, a lot of writers, including myself, take cheap shots from folks who think if you're not Stephen King or J.K. Rowling you're a deluded phony: but I don't think being called an aspiring actress when you haven't done anything other than a pair of short films qualifies as a cheap shot or an insult. I think it's an accurate assessment of where Ms. Etomi is as an actress at this particular moment of her career. Her problem, as someone pointed out to me today, is that she attaches a stigma to the word "aspiring" that shouldn't be there. In her mind, "aspiring actress" and "wanna-be actress" are the same thing, and that's why (I believe) she feels insulted.
But they are NOT the same thing at all.
If you're a white belt in jiu-jitsu, you have aspirations of being a black belt, but you're not a wanna-be: a wanna-be is someone who wishes and hopes and wants and dreams but doesn't put in the work to get there. Ms. Etomi presumably aspires to be a working actress who makes a living exclusively by acting and doesn't need a day job or a “side hustle.” Terrific. She's obviously willing to put in the work, too -- equally terrific. I hope she destroys Hollywood and wins 4 Oscars and needs dump trucks for all her cash. But I'm not sure she's entitled to demand others remove "aspiring" from "actress" on the basis of a lot of training and 2 short films.
Look at me. I have both an MA and an MFA in writing popular fiction from a very good school. I received an endowed scholarship from my writing program. My first novel was named “Book of the Year.” I have five literary awards, including the BIBA, which is one of the top-10 honors an independent author can receive. I was commissioned to write a screenplay and was paid for it (not paid well, mind you, or even ethically, but I was paid). I get royalty payments every month and have worked four contracted writing jobs this year alone, including one for Netflix. But I don't introduce myself to people as a writer. I introduce myself to people as a freelancer in the entertainment industry, because that's how I make most of my money. The day I make a full living off writing alone is when I will start introducing myself as a writer. It gives me something to ASPIRE to.
Aspiration is a good thing. Aspiration means that one wishes to become more than we presently are, which is probably the most noble state a human can achieve. Aspiration does not make us weak, it is a sign of strength. It is a sign of intelligence, too, in that we have goals, which stupid people almost never do (stupid people have wishes, which are quite different). Aspiration carries with it no taint. It is not the same as being the dreaded “wannabe,” who has a desire for a status but no plan to get there and no discipline to put a plan into effect even if they had one.
I wrote this not as an attack on Ms. Etomi, who is obviously free to feel any way she wants about how she is addressed, but because I feel the larger problem laid bare by the Tweet is one we must answer as a society. It's the idea that we can use this "I identify as X" mentality in aspects of our lives where it's not really up to us to make that identification. I identify as a Cubs fan, but it doesn't mean I can identify as a Cub and go play at Wrigley and collect a nine-figure paycheck for doing so. I can identify as a black belt in jiu-jitsu but if I go to a tournament I will be exposed as a fraud immediately if I am not the genuine article. Hell, I can identify as a Medal of Honor winner or a U.S. Army Ranger or a Navy SEAL if I so choose. I won't do it because I never earned the distinction. There are some titles you can just claim and it legitimately becomes so -- "I'm a Star Trek fan!" -- and there are other titles you actually have to go out there and earn. Simply wanting them is not enough. The stark fact is you are simply not entitled to be addressed by a title you haven't yet achieved.
I wrote this article with some reluctance and have been several months debating with myself whether I ought to publish it. I don't want to be viewed as attacking this young woman who was simply trying to make a point -- a point I'm sure many people agree with. But again, I do feel there are larger issues at stake and one of them is this ridiculous notion that there is no difference between wanting something and achieving it, between wish and reality. (Because, as Abraham Lincoln once noted: "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Five? No. Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.") And perhaps even more importantly, because it casts aspertions on the concept of aspiration which the word does not deserve. I do feel that Ms. Etomi is an aspiring actress, and I do not see the shame in it. Quite the contrary.
November 21, 2019
Gone Too Soon Again: 5 More TV Shows That Shoulda Lasted Longer
The time has finally come for me to write the second installment in my "Gone Too Soon" series about television shows cancelled before their time. In the last episode (June 17, 2017), I wrote about five one-season wonders which might have offered us something truly grand...if only they hadn't been axed in or immediately after their first season. This list was by no means comprehensive, and reflected only personal tastes and sense of regret. In time I will examine yet more shows of this type, but today I wish to examine the other category of "gone too soon" television: series which lasted more than one year, yet still left me feeling as if they died considerably before their time.
As before, I have tried to avoid some of the most obvious choices on the menu. It is pointless, for example, to shed tears over the cancellation of the original STAR TREK after just three seasons: given the legacy of the show, one may as well mourn the death of a phoenix. Likewise, there are some shows, like AfterM*A*S*H which, had they been handled well from the start, might have been worth a few sobs, but in practice were so horrifically botched that their cancellation (in that case, after a season and a half) was more of a mercy than a tragedy. What I am talking about are series which, whatever their flaws may have been or however long they actually ran, left us feeling cheated rather than satisfied when they went off the air. So without further ado, here they are, presented in chronological order:
WKRP IN CINCINATTI (1978 - 1982). This sit-com about a failing radio station in one of America's least glamorous cities was a staple of my childhood. The day handsome, cocky program director Andy Travis (Gary Sandy) walks into the crumbling, failing station, he's warned by burned-out deejay Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) that "this is the bottom" -- and he's right. Cellar-low ratings, a hapless boss (Gordon Jump), and dysfunctional staff make Travis' job of turning WKRP (and yes, the KRP is for "crap") around an uphill battle. And in fact WKRP was an unusual take on the sit-com, in that laughs were not always the principal objective: a certain amount of social commentary was embedded within each of its four seasons, covering such topics as the Vietnam war, feminism, inter-ractial relationships, sexual harassment, payola, punk rock, the concept of "selling out" and even concert safety -- an entire episode is devoted to the aftermath of the deadly Who concert at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinatti which killed eleven people on December 3, 1979. Truthfully, many of the show's jokes fell flat: it was not consistently hilarious or even consistently funny. But it was consistently engaging, due to excellent characters and casting: Frank Bonnar, Loni Anderson, Gordon Jump, Richard Sanders, Jan Smithers and Tim Reid all turn in the sort of performances that leave you coming back for more. (The show is worth watching just for Bonnar's hideous plaid and white leather salesman's outfits). Indeed, Rcihard Sanders, who played the neurotic middle-American cartoon Les Nessman, may own one of the most famous sequences in television history when he reports in horror on a failed WKRP attempt to deliver Thanksgiving turkeys by throwing them out of a helicopter ("I swear I thought turkeys could fly!"). The reason I placed WKRP on this list is because the fifth season was to have been the one where Travis finally realized his goal of making WKRP the No. 1 station in Cincinatti, which would have been a fitting ending. Unfortunately, it got the axe at the end of season four, and so we never got to see ole Andy get to celebrate his hard-fought victory.
FRIDAY THE 13th: THE SERIES (1987 – 1990). The name of this not-well-remembered yet extremely influential TV show has led to a great deal of confusion as to its identity. It has nothing to do with Jason Voorhees, Crystal Lake or hockey-masked killers. Instead, it is the story of two cousins by marriage, Micki Foster (Elisabeth Robey) and Ryan Dallion (John D. Le May) and their mysterious mentor Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins) who own a shop in Toronto called Curious Goods. The cousins inherited the shop without knowing its inventory contained items cursed by the devil himself, and with Marshak's help, they try to reclaim the many hundreds of objects now wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting populace. Shot in the somewhat cheesy, zero-subtlety style of 80s horror movies, FRIDAY is dark, violent, and often deeply twisted -- one episode was directed by David Cronenberg! -- and the bloody, sometimes Quixotic quest to retrieve the devil's playthings often has our heroes questioning their own resolve and courage.
The ironic nature of the curses often made the stories explorations in morals and ethics: one memorable episode featured a wheelchair which could restore mobility to its user, provided she murdered those who made her a quadreplegic. Another featured a mediocre surgeon who could perform any operation successfully, if he "fed" his cursed scalpel with innocent victims beforehand. But the format was enormously flexible and thus we encountered vampires, werewolves, serial killers, demons, and ghosts, as well as scheming or desperate mortal men and women. The show was abruptly canceled toward the end of its third season because of a threatened boycott by angry Christian evangelists, but not before it influenced a host of shows which followed, including BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, ANGEL, FRINGE, and SUPERNATURAL. That being said, I'd sell part of my own soul for another two seasons of this particular Friday.
FOREVER KNIGHT (1992 – 1996). Another Toronto-based horror series which influenced those who came after it starred the likeable Geraint Wyn-Davies as Nick Knight, a 800 year-old vampire who is working off an emormity of guilt by working as a police detective. Knight, who is engaged in a quest to regain his humanity and atone for his innumerable sins, works the night shift with a cynical partner named Don Shcanke (John Kapelos) who has no idea he is a vampire, while trying to manage a complex relationship with a mortal coroner named Natalie (Catherine Disher). While cheesy -- especially in the first season -- this show is extremely addictive, in part because of Knight's vampire "family" -- the evil yet strangely principled LaCroix (Nigel Bennett), and the sensual and morally ambiguous Janet (Deborah Duchene), who continually interfere, and sometimes assist, in his "mortal" life. KNIGHT was a busy series, combining buddy-cop convention with an exploration of the vampire world and both the up and the down-sides of immortality, and utilizing lavish flashbacks to various points in Knight's long life. One of its outstanding facets was its ruthlessness: even the core cast members were not safe from being killed off or written out. It not only deeply influenced HIGHLANDER: THE SERIES, but was ripped off almost idea-for-idea by Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt when they crafted their BUFFY spin-off, ANGEL, in 1999. It ran three seasons, and while it completed, for all intents and purposes, its own story, there were a great many stories to tell.
MILLENNIUM (1996 - 1999). I once described this sadly half-forgotten Chris Carter TV series as a "baffling, frustrating, engrossing, charismatic prestidigitation of a show, one which defies categorization." MILLENNIUM was the story of Frank Black (Lance Henriksen), a retired FBI profiler who is hired by a mysterious consulting firm known as The Millennium Group to assist local law enforcement agencies with investigations that are beyond their expertise. Over the course of time, Frank begins to suspect the Group is much more than a mere think tank, and may in fact be a sort of cult making preparations for the end of the world. Written and shot in the same manner as his more famous series THE X-FILES, and featuring the same enormous range of storylines, MILLENNIUM will instantly appeal to fans of horror, atmosphere and the sort of stylization that Chris Carter, James Wong and Glen Morgan specialize in. Some episodes are thoughtful, others graphic and gruesome; some are hilarious, and others touching. It could be amazing, and it could also be infuriating. Never has a television show made so many changes of direction in such a brief run on the air: over the course of three seasons, it killed off or wrote out major characters on what felt like whims, shifted its central premise from forensic cop show to supernatural mystery to conspiracy theory, and in general, and went from having absolutely no sense of humor at all to turning every third episode into a comedy or a lark. And yet...damn. Besides Henriksen, who considers this his favorite role (he told me that himself), it boasts a superbly ambiguous performance by Terry O'Quinn as Peter Watts; a brief but pregnant series of appearances by Bill Smitrovich as Detective Bletcher; and fine turns by Megan Gallagher and Brittany Tiplady as Frank's strong but long-suffering wife and adorable (but not annoying) daughter. MILLENNIUM is a baffling show in many ways, and in others exasperating, but it had a charisma that is impossible to dismiss, and its cancellation -- ironically, just before the actual Millennium -- was a crushing blow. Although the series was to some small extent "resolved" by an X-FILES crossover that same year (1999), nothing was really resolved. Fans wanted more. So did the actors. And if you watch it all, so will you.
THE LOST WORLD (1999 - 2002). Okay, this one is more emotional than logical, but hey, it's my goddamned blog. THE LOST WORLD was based on the novel of the same name by Arthur Conan Doyle, and in essence, was kind of like THE LAND OF THE LOST for a different generation. The basic premise is that a crew of 19th century explorers end up marooned in a kind of "land that time forgot" on the edge of reality -- a place where dinosaurs roam, magic is real and all manner of witches, time-travelers, sub-human monsters and assorted weirdness stalk the land. Now, I must make several confessions here: the first is that I have always been a sucker for adventure shows of this or any other type, going back to childhood. The second is that the sheer ridiculous escapism of this show -- the concept is a mashup of TALES OF THE GOLD MONKEY, TARZAN and CHARMED -- got me through a tough time 20 years ago. The third is that the series lead, Jennifer O'Dell, was a crush of mine and I later met and befriended her when I moved to Los Angeles, so yeah, there are several soft spots at work here. But the fact remains that as cartoonish as it is, THE LOST WORLD is that rarest of shows -- the no-holds-barred, no-logic-applied adventure saga, which in this cynical age is rarely exploited. Before the Internet closed the mind's-eye of the world, kids used to dream of adventures somewhere between those of Indiana Jones and Doc Savage, and THE LOST WORLD offers just such adventures. Interestingly, the show was not cancelled due to low ratings but because of an embezzelment in the holding company's finances, ending things on a cliffhanger. It's too bad. The 10 year old in me needs closure.
ANGEL (1999 – 2004). It may seem strange to include here a series that cracked the mythical 100 episode mark in a list of "shows gone too soon," but I believe if ANGEL had been allowed to run its projected 7 seasons instead of only 5, it may have finally emerged from the shadow of its progenitor, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, to establish its own firm identity in the eyes of fandom. ANGEL spun off the eponymous vampire character played by David Boreanaz and took him to Los Angeles, where combined with a crew of extremely well-drawn sidekicks played by, at various times, Charisma Carpenter, Glenn Quinn, Alexis Denisoff, Amy Acker, J. August Richards, Andy Hallett and Mercedes McNabb. The conceit of ANGEL was simple, and as I said, identical to FOREVER KNIGHT: a formerly evil vampire wants to atone for his crimes by "helping the helpless" via a supernatural detective agency. Yet ANGEL was more than the sum of its pointy parts. It was also a tongue-in-cheek take on life in Hollywood and, being darker in tone than BUFFY, a really gritty examination of the nature of good, evil, revenge, immortality, morality, and whether redemption is even possible. Though it began to stumble and become more involuted and soap-oper-ish by the fourth season, it came roaring back in the fifth, in no small part due to the choice to bring James Marsters' character of Spike into the cast, and to flip the script and make our heroes, in a sense, the bad guys, by placing them in charge of the demonic law firm which had been the bane of their existence from the pilot episode. The final season was so good that one can only imagine where David Greenwalt and Joss Whedon were going to take it in the projected final two years, and while it ends on a gory and decisive note, I can't help but wonder what else might have been.
ROME (2005 - 2007). HBO Television has done some very good work over the years, but one of its best shows was also led to one of its stupidest decisions: the one to cancel what in essence was GAME OF THRONES before GAME OF THRONES even existed. ROME, set in the last years of the Roman Republic, when Julius Caesar was ushering in the age of Empire, and told primarily through the eyes of two Roman soldiers; rigid, principled Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and vulgar, brawing Pullo (Ray Stevenson). The series, however, was hardly about Roman military life, but the incredibly complex webs of political and personal intrigue that wealthy Roman families such as the Julii Clan (had to navigate to maintain and expand their power. "In the game of thrones you win or you die," and there was a lot of dying in ROME. Also a lot of torture and a lot of nudity. Intertwining with actual historical figures and events, it showed the complexity, granduer, cruelty, greed and brutality of the Romans in exacting detail, and anyone who considers the "vicious, clever, powerful female" a product of the GAME OF THRONES era might want to take in Polly Walker's terrifying performance as Atia of the Julii, a woman who will stop at absolutely nothing to protect her family's position. Actually, the acting is superb all around, with James Purefoy playing a viciously degenerate Marc Antony with relish while Ciarán Hinds' Julius Caesar is stately, predatory and full of icy grace. Max Woods, Tobias Menzies and Max Pircus are also excellent, and this is the sort of show which, despite killing its characters off with abandon, I could have watched for ten years running. Unfortunately, HBO deemed it too expensive and pulled the plug after just two short seasons, and has shown a baffling reluctance to either revive it or give its fans true closure with a feature film, the way they did with DEADWOOD. Oh well, we'll always have Pullo saying things like, "Here I come, girls! I'm gonna drink all the wine, smoke all the smoke and fuck every whore in the city!"
With that brilliant declaration, I bring the latest chapter of this series to a close. I have by no means exhausted the list of either one-season wonders or shows which simply ended before their time, but this will do for now. After all, I've gotta save something for chapter three, don't I?
As before, I have tried to avoid some of the most obvious choices on the menu. It is pointless, for example, to shed tears over the cancellation of the original STAR TREK after just three seasons: given the legacy of the show, one may as well mourn the death of a phoenix. Likewise, there are some shows, like AfterM*A*S*H which, had they been handled well from the start, might have been worth a few sobs, but in practice were so horrifically botched that their cancellation (in that case, after a season and a half) was more of a mercy than a tragedy. What I am talking about are series which, whatever their flaws may have been or however long they actually ran, left us feeling cheated rather than satisfied when they went off the air. So without further ado, here they are, presented in chronological order:
WKRP IN CINCINATTI (1978 - 1982). This sit-com about a failing radio station in one of America's least glamorous cities was a staple of my childhood. The day handsome, cocky program director Andy Travis (Gary Sandy) walks into the crumbling, failing station, he's warned by burned-out deejay Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman) that "this is the bottom" -- and he's right. Cellar-low ratings, a hapless boss (Gordon Jump), and dysfunctional staff make Travis' job of turning WKRP (and yes, the KRP is for "crap") around an uphill battle. And in fact WKRP was an unusual take on the sit-com, in that laughs were not always the principal objective: a certain amount of social commentary was embedded within each of its four seasons, covering such topics as the Vietnam war, feminism, inter-ractial relationships, sexual harassment, payola, punk rock, the concept of "selling out" and even concert safety -- an entire episode is devoted to the aftermath of the deadly Who concert at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinatti which killed eleven people on December 3, 1979. Truthfully, many of the show's jokes fell flat: it was not consistently hilarious or even consistently funny. But it was consistently engaging, due to excellent characters and casting: Frank Bonnar, Loni Anderson, Gordon Jump, Richard Sanders, Jan Smithers and Tim Reid all turn in the sort of performances that leave you coming back for more. (The show is worth watching just for Bonnar's hideous plaid and white leather salesman's outfits). Indeed, Rcihard Sanders, who played the neurotic middle-American cartoon Les Nessman, may own one of the most famous sequences in television history when he reports in horror on a failed WKRP attempt to deliver Thanksgiving turkeys by throwing them out of a helicopter ("I swear I thought turkeys could fly!"). The reason I placed WKRP on this list is because the fifth season was to have been the one where Travis finally realized his goal of making WKRP the No. 1 station in Cincinatti, which would have been a fitting ending. Unfortunately, it got the axe at the end of season four, and so we never got to see ole Andy get to celebrate his hard-fought victory.
FRIDAY THE 13th: THE SERIES (1987 – 1990). The name of this not-well-remembered yet extremely influential TV show has led to a great deal of confusion as to its identity. It has nothing to do with Jason Voorhees, Crystal Lake or hockey-masked killers. Instead, it is the story of two cousins by marriage, Micki Foster (Elisabeth Robey) and Ryan Dallion (John D. Le May) and their mysterious mentor Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins) who own a shop in Toronto called Curious Goods. The cousins inherited the shop without knowing its inventory contained items cursed by the devil himself, and with Marshak's help, they try to reclaim the many hundreds of objects now wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting populace. Shot in the somewhat cheesy, zero-subtlety style of 80s horror movies, FRIDAY is dark, violent, and often deeply twisted -- one episode was directed by David Cronenberg! -- and the bloody, sometimes Quixotic quest to retrieve the devil's playthings often has our heroes questioning their own resolve and courage.
The ironic nature of the curses often made the stories explorations in morals and ethics: one memorable episode featured a wheelchair which could restore mobility to its user, provided she murdered those who made her a quadreplegic. Another featured a mediocre surgeon who could perform any operation successfully, if he "fed" his cursed scalpel with innocent victims beforehand. But the format was enormously flexible and thus we encountered vampires, werewolves, serial killers, demons, and ghosts, as well as scheming or desperate mortal men and women. The show was abruptly canceled toward the end of its third season because of a threatened boycott by angry Christian evangelists, but not before it influenced a host of shows which followed, including BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, ANGEL, FRINGE, and SUPERNATURAL. That being said, I'd sell part of my own soul for another two seasons of this particular Friday.
FOREVER KNIGHT (1992 – 1996). Another Toronto-based horror series which influenced those who came after it starred the likeable Geraint Wyn-Davies as Nick Knight, a 800 year-old vampire who is working off an emormity of guilt by working as a police detective. Knight, who is engaged in a quest to regain his humanity and atone for his innumerable sins, works the night shift with a cynical partner named Don Shcanke (John Kapelos) who has no idea he is a vampire, while trying to manage a complex relationship with a mortal coroner named Natalie (Catherine Disher). While cheesy -- especially in the first season -- this show is extremely addictive, in part because of Knight's vampire "family" -- the evil yet strangely principled LaCroix (Nigel Bennett), and the sensual and morally ambiguous Janet (Deborah Duchene), who continually interfere, and sometimes assist, in his "mortal" life. KNIGHT was a busy series, combining buddy-cop convention with an exploration of the vampire world and both the up and the down-sides of immortality, and utilizing lavish flashbacks to various points in Knight's long life. One of its outstanding facets was its ruthlessness: even the core cast members were not safe from being killed off or written out. It not only deeply influenced HIGHLANDER: THE SERIES, but was ripped off almost idea-for-idea by Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt when they crafted their BUFFY spin-off, ANGEL, in 1999. It ran three seasons, and while it completed, for all intents and purposes, its own story, there were a great many stories to tell.
MILLENNIUM (1996 - 1999). I once described this sadly half-forgotten Chris Carter TV series as a "baffling, frustrating, engrossing, charismatic prestidigitation of a show, one which defies categorization." MILLENNIUM was the story of Frank Black (Lance Henriksen), a retired FBI profiler who is hired by a mysterious consulting firm known as The Millennium Group to assist local law enforcement agencies with investigations that are beyond their expertise. Over the course of time, Frank begins to suspect the Group is much more than a mere think tank, and may in fact be a sort of cult making preparations for the end of the world. Written and shot in the same manner as his more famous series THE X-FILES, and featuring the same enormous range of storylines, MILLENNIUM will instantly appeal to fans of horror, atmosphere and the sort of stylization that Chris Carter, James Wong and Glen Morgan specialize in. Some episodes are thoughtful, others graphic and gruesome; some are hilarious, and others touching. It could be amazing, and it could also be infuriating. Never has a television show made so many changes of direction in such a brief run on the air: over the course of three seasons, it killed off or wrote out major characters on what felt like whims, shifted its central premise from forensic cop show to supernatural mystery to conspiracy theory, and in general, and went from having absolutely no sense of humor at all to turning every third episode into a comedy or a lark. And yet...damn. Besides Henriksen, who considers this his favorite role (he told me that himself), it boasts a superbly ambiguous performance by Terry O'Quinn as Peter Watts; a brief but pregnant series of appearances by Bill Smitrovich as Detective Bletcher; and fine turns by Megan Gallagher and Brittany Tiplady as Frank's strong but long-suffering wife and adorable (but not annoying) daughter. MILLENNIUM is a baffling show in many ways, and in others exasperating, but it had a charisma that is impossible to dismiss, and its cancellation -- ironically, just before the actual Millennium -- was a crushing blow. Although the series was to some small extent "resolved" by an X-FILES crossover that same year (1999), nothing was really resolved. Fans wanted more. So did the actors. And if you watch it all, so will you.
THE LOST WORLD (1999 - 2002). Okay, this one is more emotional than logical, but hey, it's my goddamned blog. THE LOST WORLD was based on the novel of the same name by Arthur Conan Doyle, and in essence, was kind of like THE LAND OF THE LOST for a different generation. The basic premise is that a crew of 19th century explorers end up marooned in a kind of "land that time forgot" on the edge of reality -- a place where dinosaurs roam, magic is real and all manner of witches, time-travelers, sub-human monsters and assorted weirdness stalk the land. Now, I must make several confessions here: the first is that I have always been a sucker for adventure shows of this or any other type, going back to childhood. The second is that the sheer ridiculous escapism of this show -- the concept is a mashup of TALES OF THE GOLD MONKEY, TARZAN and CHARMED -- got me through a tough time 20 years ago. The third is that the series lead, Jennifer O'Dell, was a crush of mine and I later met and befriended her when I moved to Los Angeles, so yeah, there are several soft spots at work here. But the fact remains that as cartoonish as it is, THE LOST WORLD is that rarest of shows -- the no-holds-barred, no-logic-applied adventure saga, which in this cynical age is rarely exploited. Before the Internet closed the mind's-eye of the world, kids used to dream of adventures somewhere between those of Indiana Jones and Doc Savage, and THE LOST WORLD offers just such adventures. Interestingly, the show was not cancelled due to low ratings but because of an embezzelment in the holding company's finances, ending things on a cliffhanger. It's too bad. The 10 year old in me needs closure.
ANGEL (1999 – 2004). It may seem strange to include here a series that cracked the mythical 100 episode mark in a list of "shows gone too soon," but I believe if ANGEL had been allowed to run its projected 7 seasons instead of only 5, it may have finally emerged from the shadow of its progenitor, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, to establish its own firm identity in the eyes of fandom. ANGEL spun off the eponymous vampire character played by David Boreanaz and took him to Los Angeles, where combined with a crew of extremely well-drawn sidekicks played by, at various times, Charisma Carpenter, Glenn Quinn, Alexis Denisoff, Amy Acker, J. August Richards, Andy Hallett and Mercedes McNabb. The conceit of ANGEL was simple, and as I said, identical to FOREVER KNIGHT: a formerly evil vampire wants to atone for his crimes by "helping the helpless" via a supernatural detective agency. Yet ANGEL was more than the sum of its pointy parts. It was also a tongue-in-cheek take on life in Hollywood and, being darker in tone than BUFFY, a really gritty examination of the nature of good, evil, revenge, immortality, morality, and whether redemption is even possible. Though it began to stumble and become more involuted and soap-oper-ish by the fourth season, it came roaring back in the fifth, in no small part due to the choice to bring James Marsters' character of Spike into the cast, and to flip the script and make our heroes, in a sense, the bad guys, by placing them in charge of the demonic law firm which had been the bane of their existence from the pilot episode. The final season was so good that one can only imagine where David Greenwalt and Joss Whedon were going to take it in the projected final two years, and while it ends on a gory and decisive note, I can't help but wonder what else might have been.
ROME (2005 - 2007). HBO Television has done some very good work over the years, but one of its best shows was also led to one of its stupidest decisions: the one to cancel what in essence was GAME OF THRONES before GAME OF THRONES even existed. ROME, set in the last years of the Roman Republic, when Julius Caesar was ushering in the age of Empire, and told primarily through the eyes of two Roman soldiers; rigid, principled Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and vulgar, brawing Pullo (Ray Stevenson). The series, however, was hardly about Roman military life, but the incredibly complex webs of political and personal intrigue that wealthy Roman families such as the Julii Clan (had to navigate to maintain and expand their power. "In the game of thrones you win or you die," and there was a lot of dying in ROME. Also a lot of torture and a lot of nudity. Intertwining with actual historical figures and events, it showed the complexity, granduer, cruelty, greed and brutality of the Romans in exacting detail, and anyone who considers the "vicious, clever, powerful female" a product of the GAME OF THRONES era might want to take in Polly Walker's terrifying performance as Atia of the Julii, a woman who will stop at absolutely nothing to protect her family's position. Actually, the acting is superb all around, with James Purefoy playing a viciously degenerate Marc Antony with relish while Ciarán Hinds' Julius Caesar is stately, predatory and full of icy grace. Max Woods, Tobias Menzies and Max Pircus are also excellent, and this is the sort of show which, despite killing its characters off with abandon, I could have watched for ten years running. Unfortunately, HBO deemed it too expensive and pulled the plug after just two short seasons, and has shown a baffling reluctance to either revive it or give its fans true closure with a feature film, the way they did with DEADWOOD. Oh well, we'll always have Pullo saying things like, "Here I come, girls! I'm gonna drink all the wine, smoke all the smoke and fuck every whore in the city!"
With that brilliant declaration, I bring the latest chapter of this series to a close. I have by no means exhausted the list of either one-season wonders or shows which simply ended before their time, but this will do for now. After all, I've gotta save something for chapter three, don't I?
November 7, 2019
SINNER'S CROSS
Today I announce -- belatedly, but that's the way I do everything -- the release of Sinner's Cross, my first full-length novel in three years.
As a rule, I dislike self-promotion. When I finish a novel, I'd prefer to type, "The End," hand the book over to a crew of savvy marketing folk, and hop the first plane to Hawaii; but it is the lot of an independent author to do the lion's share of publicity himself, so here I am, with a story to tell about the story I've told.
Sinner's Cross is a novel of the Second World War, told from the perspectives of three very different men, two Americans and one German. The setting is the Huertgen Forest on the German - Belgian border, the time late 1944. At this point in the war, the Allies were grinding their way across the frontiers of the Third Reich, in fighting so savage and so costly that the forest in question was known to G.I.'s as "The Green Hell" or even more starkly, "The Death Factory." Entire infantry divisions were burned up like sugar in a fire, for terrain which seemed to be intrinsically worthless. It was a time when horror and heroism, fear and a sense of complete futility, were found in equal measure on both sides, and I thought it the perfect place to inaugurate a new book series, one which will cover the final half-year of the war in pitiless detail.
World War Two has always been a source of especial pride and fascination for Americans, but our novelists (like our historians) tend to "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative." Nowhere is this tendency more egregious than in our war movies, which since the war itself have been little more than orgies of disingenuous boasting, and have given two extremely false impressions: one, that the American soldier, because he was engaged in a righteous cause, was somehow more immune to terror, misery, doubt and pain than those who fought in less popular wars like Vietnam; and two, that his German opponent was a cowardly and incompetent dolt, a kind of Colonel Klink figure who could never shoot straight and was equal parts bully and coward. It is partly to attack these two false impressions, neither of which gives the American soldier his actual due, that I was inspired to write Sinner's Cross.
You see, gentle reader, I have always operated on a theory that if the German soldier was as stupid and gutless as he is inevitably portrayed in movies and many novels, the war would have been over in about two weeks, and victory no more worthy of honor than, say, washing a set of particularly dirty dishes. Yet the facts of the war were quite different. The Germans were, taken as a whole, exceptionally well-trained, well-motivated, and well-led, and to beat them required a job of very bloody, dirty, exhausting work. At the same time, "the Kraut" (as he was uncharitably known by American soldiers) was also a human being. He too felt terror and panic, loneliness and despair, and, particularly in the closing months of the war, a sense of bitter futility. One of the central horrors of all wars is the fact that the ordinary fighting man on any side has more in common with his opponent than with the politicians and generals who send him into battle, or the public which cheers him bloodthirstily on from a very safe distance.
To this end, I have divided Sinner's Cross into three distinct perspectives. They are:
HALLECK - a tough-as-nails Texan who drove cattle before the war, Halleck has zero interest in soldiering, he just happens to be damned good at it. And yet he is haunted by the grisly similarity between his former and present jobs: herding terrified masses toward the slaughter. Does this seemingly indestructable man have a breaking point?
BREESE - a handsome pretty boy straight out of Columbia University, the foppish Breese finds himself utterly inadequate not merely to his job (platoon leader) but to the demands of the war. Yet unlike the roles he took as as a collegiate actor, Breese can't fake his way through battle. He will have to learn. Or die. In the mean time, he may get a lot of people killed.
ZENGER - One of the most decorated paratroopers in Nazi Germany, "Papa Zengy" -- hitherto known for his ruthless determination -- is slowly and painfully developing a conscience as his battalion of elite soldiers melts away in the heavy fighting. For the first time in his life he begins to value the men before the mission, and in the end is fighting three different wars: one with the Americans, one with his own superiors...and one with himself.
Sinner's Cross was, in a very real sense, a lifetime in the making. I first became aware of the Huertgen Forest campaign when I was twelve or so years old, and found a book on the battle written by the prolific, readable and not too terribly professional historian Charles Whiting. Whiting may have been disinterested in scholarly research, but as a WW2 veteran himself he was able to capture the essence of the horror of the battle in a way the better-schooled historian could not. Whiting understood, as legions of tweed-clad professors couldn't, what it was like to crawl through icy mud while tracer bullets screamed overhead, wounded men cried out in pain and mortar bombs exploded only yards away. And it was his ability to recreate the terror and panic of warfare from the viewpoint of what we now call "grunts" -- both Allied and Axis -- that set me on the path which eventually led me to writing this novel, whose first lines I penned when I was twenty-eight. Because, while wars are won by grand strategy and industrial output, they are fought by human beings, and as a writer it is in human beings and not technology or logistics which interests me. Like Fast Eddie Felson in The Color of Money, I am a student of human moves, and no human movement is more profound than the one he or she makes under fire. Sinner's Cross is my attempt to put the reader in that uncomfortable, soul-baring place.
For a link to the novel in both paperback and e-book version, click here:
Sinner's Cross: A Novel of the Second World War
For links to some of my other WW2 fiction (novelettes):
Nosferatu
The Numbers Game
Shadows and Glory
As a rule, I dislike self-promotion. When I finish a novel, I'd prefer to type, "The End," hand the book over to a crew of savvy marketing folk, and hop the first plane to Hawaii; but it is the lot of an independent author to do the lion's share of publicity himself, so here I am, with a story to tell about the story I've told.
Sinner's Cross is a novel of the Second World War, told from the perspectives of three very different men, two Americans and one German. The setting is the Huertgen Forest on the German - Belgian border, the time late 1944. At this point in the war, the Allies were grinding their way across the frontiers of the Third Reich, in fighting so savage and so costly that the forest in question was known to G.I.'s as "The Green Hell" or even more starkly, "The Death Factory." Entire infantry divisions were burned up like sugar in a fire, for terrain which seemed to be intrinsically worthless. It was a time when horror and heroism, fear and a sense of complete futility, were found in equal measure on both sides, and I thought it the perfect place to inaugurate a new book series, one which will cover the final half-year of the war in pitiless detail.
World War Two has always been a source of especial pride and fascination for Americans, but our novelists (like our historians) tend to "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative." Nowhere is this tendency more egregious than in our war movies, which since the war itself have been little more than orgies of disingenuous boasting, and have given two extremely false impressions: one, that the American soldier, because he was engaged in a righteous cause, was somehow more immune to terror, misery, doubt and pain than those who fought in less popular wars like Vietnam; and two, that his German opponent was a cowardly and incompetent dolt, a kind of Colonel Klink figure who could never shoot straight and was equal parts bully and coward. It is partly to attack these two false impressions, neither of which gives the American soldier his actual due, that I was inspired to write Sinner's Cross.
You see, gentle reader, I have always operated on a theory that if the German soldier was as stupid and gutless as he is inevitably portrayed in movies and many novels, the war would have been over in about two weeks, and victory no more worthy of honor than, say, washing a set of particularly dirty dishes. Yet the facts of the war were quite different. The Germans were, taken as a whole, exceptionally well-trained, well-motivated, and well-led, and to beat them required a job of very bloody, dirty, exhausting work. At the same time, "the Kraut" (as he was uncharitably known by American soldiers) was also a human being. He too felt terror and panic, loneliness and despair, and, particularly in the closing months of the war, a sense of bitter futility. One of the central horrors of all wars is the fact that the ordinary fighting man on any side has more in common with his opponent than with the politicians and generals who send him into battle, or the public which cheers him bloodthirstily on from a very safe distance.
To this end, I have divided Sinner's Cross into three distinct perspectives. They are:
HALLECK - a tough-as-nails Texan who drove cattle before the war, Halleck has zero interest in soldiering, he just happens to be damned good at it. And yet he is haunted by the grisly similarity between his former and present jobs: herding terrified masses toward the slaughter. Does this seemingly indestructable man have a breaking point?
BREESE - a handsome pretty boy straight out of Columbia University, the foppish Breese finds himself utterly inadequate not merely to his job (platoon leader) but to the demands of the war. Yet unlike the roles he took as as a collegiate actor, Breese can't fake his way through battle. He will have to learn. Or die. In the mean time, he may get a lot of people killed.
ZENGER - One of the most decorated paratroopers in Nazi Germany, "Papa Zengy" -- hitherto known for his ruthless determination -- is slowly and painfully developing a conscience as his battalion of elite soldiers melts away in the heavy fighting. For the first time in his life he begins to value the men before the mission, and in the end is fighting three different wars: one with the Americans, one with his own superiors...and one with himself.
Sinner's Cross was, in a very real sense, a lifetime in the making. I first became aware of the Huertgen Forest campaign when I was twelve or so years old, and found a book on the battle written by the prolific, readable and not too terribly professional historian Charles Whiting. Whiting may have been disinterested in scholarly research, but as a WW2 veteran himself he was able to capture the essence of the horror of the battle in a way the better-schooled historian could not. Whiting understood, as legions of tweed-clad professors couldn't, what it was like to crawl through icy mud while tracer bullets screamed overhead, wounded men cried out in pain and mortar bombs exploded only yards away. And it was his ability to recreate the terror and panic of warfare from the viewpoint of what we now call "grunts" -- both Allied and Axis -- that set me on the path which eventually led me to writing this novel, whose first lines I penned when I was twenty-eight. Because, while wars are won by grand strategy and industrial output, they are fought by human beings, and as a writer it is in human beings and not technology or logistics which interests me. Like Fast Eddie Felson in The Color of Money, I am a student of human moves, and no human movement is more profound than the one he or she makes under fire. Sinner's Cross is my attempt to put the reader in that uncomfortable, soul-baring place.
For a link to the novel in both paperback and e-book version, click here:
Sinner's Cross: A Novel of the Second World War
For links to some of my other WW2 fiction (novelettes):
Nosferatu
The Numbers Game
Shadows and Glory
October 6, 2019
As I Please
For some years, George Orwell wrote a column in the London Tribune called simply “As I Please.” The title was not deceptive. The column had no particular focus, except to the extent that Orwell was generally focused on politics, world affairs and social change: he simply talked about whatever happened to interest, amuse or outrage him at a particular moment, be it German air raids or the degeneration of English beer; the things you could find prowling junk shops, or the best way to serve tea. Orwell was often justly attacked for possessing misanthropic views about the human race, and misanthropy and introversion are quite common elements in the makeup of writers, but they are hardly the only elements. In many ways, “As I Please” simply reflected Orwell's more positive characteristics: namely his intense curiosity about life and his love of useless (but often amusing and interesting) facts and anecdotes.
The other day I was putting the finishing touches on a blog I was quite pleased with, and quite literally reaching to tap the “save” button, when my knuckle chanced over the wrong key and the web-page upon which I was writing disappeared. An entire morning's writing disappeared with it. This exasperating little incident, so common in modern, electronicized life, got me thinking that perhaps I ought to take a page out of Orwell's book from time to time and pen an “As I Please” column of my own, one which did not require so much time and energy to compose, for use when writing a larger essay is impossible due to time constraints or computer mishaps. So on this cool and quiet Sunday I am going to do just exactly that, and leave you with a series of random thoughts, observations and memories. If nothing else, they may show you why I have always regarded Orwell as the greatest of all writers I have encountered on the page -- we think alike!
* In my Twitter feed, I have noticed that a large number of people who claim to be “writers” frequently make rather passionate arguments in favor of various types of censorship. They do not, of course, use the word “censorship” – no one who wants to censor your thoughts, writings, speeches or lyrics ever does – but the positions they advocate deserve no other description. Not only is this tendency cowardly and disgusting, it is also deeply hypocritical, for the very same lot who work themselves into a foam-flecked rage over men writing women, straight writing gay, white writing black, etc. are also the same who shriek like demented cats over the lack of racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity in novels, television shows and movies. As a straight white man, I have literally been told in so many words both A) I ought to write more characters of color or who belong to some type of minority group, and B) questioned as to whether I as a straight white man am “qualified” to write for gay characters or characters of color. Presumably such people desire a world where every completed creative endeavor resembles a kind of human rainbow, yet at the same time, they seem to desire a situation where only a rainbow can write a rainbow: in practical terms, this would lead to a world where, presumably, only (for example) a black gay female writer would be allowed to write anything at all. Yet I have to ask: why would she be qualified to write a straight white male? The people who say these sort of things, and make these self-contradictory demands, never seem to grasp what the inevitable result of this kind of logic must be: a world where no on is allowed to exercise their imagination or their qualities of empathy and projection, a world in which every creative person must stay in their own lane lest they be attacked for assuming a foreign point of view. Such a world could create nothing of literary or artistic value; by its very nature it would spend all of its time poking around the bona fides of a writer, trying to determine if some act of cultural or sexual theft had been committed. This ought to be obvious even to the stupidest person, yet uncountable numbers of people seem oblivious to it. The concept of the “slippery slope,” which used to be taught to our children in Civics classes from a very young age, has evidently found itself a casualty of the endless pogrom presently being conducted by our society against the concept of critical thinking.
*There comes a moment in everyone's life when they can no longer kid themselves and accept that their youth is finished. By a series of contortions worthy of Neo in THE MATRIX I was able to avoid accepting the arrival of middle age far longer than anyone I know, but some recent photos posted online by the woman to whom I lost my virginity have left me no doubt that it is here and has been for some time. The photos in question are of her oldest daughter, who is now 18 years old – the same age I was when met her mother.
*I have been a practicing libertarian since 2016, but my libertarian sentiments were probably awakened fifteen years ago or more, when I began to grasp that we had invested so much power in the presidency and the courts that congress, the most democratic and vital branch of government, seemed to be in danger of becoming little more than a figurehead, like the Senate after the consecration of the Roman Empire. The Trump Presidency has proven to me beyond on doubt that America is now in very much the same shoes as Rome was just before the death of the Republic. Militarily and economically we remain very nearly all-powerful, but morally and ethically we are in a state of collapse, and this collapse has manifested in an ever-increasing concentration of power into individuals, specifically federal and SC justices and the president. If you doubt this, ask yourself how important it is that the next president be stable and sane. A hundred years ago it scarcely mattered if he were either: now the fate of all humanity depends upon both. Technology is of course the principal architect here, because 100 years ago we didn't possess nuclear bombs, but the fact remains every election has become a GAME OF THRONES-esque exercise in holding one's breath in the hopes that the next king – or queen – isn't a fire-breathing lunatic. We must find a way to rein in the immense and unhealthy power of the presidency and the courts and return both institutions into balance they once shared with the third co-equal branch of our government, congress. Because as a rule of thumb, if you fear who occupies a particular office – I mean really fear it, in the mortal sense – then that office has too much power.
* Today, as I was leaving a diner after breakfast, the sun hit me rather uncomfortably on the face and I noted, not for the first time, that Southern California does not possess four seasons but only one and a half. I call them “summer” and “not-summer.” The interesting thing about these seasons is that when one is in the midst of of either, it is natural to believe the other does not exist. In August, in the San Fernando Valley, it is so mercilessly hot – 112 degrees is not unknown – that the very existence of such things as space heaters and wool socks strikes you as ridiculous. In February, when you require both to avoid freezing your toes off while you sleep, and the back yard is a swamp of cold mud, the notion that you will soon require both your air conditioning and your ceiling fan merely to get to sleep at night – and then only barely – comes off as equally nonsensical. In states where the typical "four seasons" model exists, life seems far less of a syllogism.
* A friend of mine caught me watching bare-knuckle boxing the other day and remarked about my “insatiable bloodlust.” He also made comments to the effect that a civilized society would not allow such things as mixed martial arts or bare-knuckle boxing even to exist, much less publicize, normalize and reward them. You can make a case that he is correct on both counts, but I believe such arguments to be of the debate-society type – all style and no substance. The brute fact is that there are many human beings who are in essence, hunters in a farmer's world. Such people require outlets for their savagery and it is far better for them to release their primal urges toward violence, risk-taking and adrenaline rushes via combat sports, bungee jumping, sky-diving, race-car driving, etc., etc. than it would be to ban such things and let these impulses build to the explosion point. To simply deny that humans have savage elements is as foolish and self-destructive as letting them run riot. The savage has his uses just as the civilized man does: it is merely a question of harnessing the primal energies in a modern way. As the character of Uncle Kelloway pointed out in “Piece of Cake,” apropos of R.A.F. pilots, “It's a good job these fellows are flying fighters for His Majesty; otherwise they'd be out robbing banks.”
* When I was about ten or eleven years old, my friend Erik and I engaged in a complex, extremely well-planned scheme to obtain a copy of PLAYBOY from the local store. I cannot begin to tell you how thoroughly we drew up our plans or how meticulous we were in executing them. We had an alibi for our absence from school, a store of money, and an expertly forged note, ostensibly from Erik's father, with which we were going to fool the clerk at the store. All this plotting came to naught, however – not because we were caught, but because we had forgotten about sales tax and were short something like ten or fifteen cents. I mention this story in large part because it goes to show both the immense curiosity which boys of that age have about women and sex, and also because such an event would never happen today. The existence of the Internet has utterly and completely de-mystified the female body as well as the sexual act, to the point that even very young children whose hormones are years from awakening know far more than is desirable or necessary about both. The effect that pornography and semi-pornographic imagery will have on the sexuality and social interaction of future generations is a cause for study, and perhaps for worry, too. There is, after all, something to be said for the air of mystery.
The other day I was putting the finishing touches on a blog I was quite pleased with, and quite literally reaching to tap the “save” button, when my knuckle chanced over the wrong key and the web-page upon which I was writing disappeared. An entire morning's writing disappeared with it. This exasperating little incident, so common in modern, electronicized life, got me thinking that perhaps I ought to take a page out of Orwell's book from time to time and pen an “As I Please” column of my own, one which did not require so much time and energy to compose, for use when writing a larger essay is impossible due to time constraints or computer mishaps. So on this cool and quiet Sunday I am going to do just exactly that, and leave you with a series of random thoughts, observations and memories. If nothing else, they may show you why I have always regarded Orwell as the greatest of all writers I have encountered on the page -- we think alike!
* In my Twitter feed, I have noticed that a large number of people who claim to be “writers” frequently make rather passionate arguments in favor of various types of censorship. They do not, of course, use the word “censorship” – no one who wants to censor your thoughts, writings, speeches or lyrics ever does – but the positions they advocate deserve no other description. Not only is this tendency cowardly and disgusting, it is also deeply hypocritical, for the very same lot who work themselves into a foam-flecked rage over men writing women, straight writing gay, white writing black, etc. are also the same who shriek like demented cats over the lack of racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity in novels, television shows and movies. As a straight white man, I have literally been told in so many words both A) I ought to write more characters of color or who belong to some type of minority group, and B) questioned as to whether I as a straight white man am “qualified” to write for gay characters or characters of color. Presumably such people desire a world where every completed creative endeavor resembles a kind of human rainbow, yet at the same time, they seem to desire a situation where only a rainbow can write a rainbow: in practical terms, this would lead to a world where, presumably, only (for example) a black gay female writer would be allowed to write anything at all. Yet I have to ask: why would she be qualified to write a straight white male? The people who say these sort of things, and make these self-contradictory demands, never seem to grasp what the inevitable result of this kind of logic must be: a world where no on is allowed to exercise their imagination or their qualities of empathy and projection, a world in which every creative person must stay in their own lane lest they be attacked for assuming a foreign point of view. Such a world could create nothing of literary or artistic value; by its very nature it would spend all of its time poking around the bona fides of a writer, trying to determine if some act of cultural or sexual theft had been committed. This ought to be obvious even to the stupidest person, yet uncountable numbers of people seem oblivious to it. The concept of the “slippery slope,” which used to be taught to our children in Civics classes from a very young age, has evidently found itself a casualty of the endless pogrom presently being conducted by our society against the concept of critical thinking.
*There comes a moment in everyone's life when they can no longer kid themselves and accept that their youth is finished. By a series of contortions worthy of Neo in THE MATRIX I was able to avoid accepting the arrival of middle age far longer than anyone I know, but some recent photos posted online by the woman to whom I lost my virginity have left me no doubt that it is here and has been for some time. The photos in question are of her oldest daughter, who is now 18 years old – the same age I was when met her mother.
*I have been a practicing libertarian since 2016, but my libertarian sentiments were probably awakened fifteen years ago or more, when I began to grasp that we had invested so much power in the presidency and the courts that congress, the most democratic and vital branch of government, seemed to be in danger of becoming little more than a figurehead, like the Senate after the consecration of the Roman Empire. The Trump Presidency has proven to me beyond on doubt that America is now in very much the same shoes as Rome was just before the death of the Republic. Militarily and economically we remain very nearly all-powerful, but morally and ethically we are in a state of collapse, and this collapse has manifested in an ever-increasing concentration of power into individuals, specifically federal and SC justices and the president. If you doubt this, ask yourself how important it is that the next president be stable and sane. A hundred years ago it scarcely mattered if he were either: now the fate of all humanity depends upon both. Technology is of course the principal architect here, because 100 years ago we didn't possess nuclear bombs, but the fact remains every election has become a GAME OF THRONES-esque exercise in holding one's breath in the hopes that the next king – or queen – isn't a fire-breathing lunatic. We must find a way to rein in the immense and unhealthy power of the presidency and the courts and return both institutions into balance they once shared with the third co-equal branch of our government, congress. Because as a rule of thumb, if you fear who occupies a particular office – I mean really fear it, in the mortal sense – then that office has too much power.
* Today, as I was leaving a diner after breakfast, the sun hit me rather uncomfortably on the face and I noted, not for the first time, that Southern California does not possess four seasons but only one and a half. I call them “summer” and “not-summer.” The interesting thing about these seasons is that when one is in the midst of of either, it is natural to believe the other does not exist. In August, in the San Fernando Valley, it is so mercilessly hot – 112 degrees is not unknown – that the very existence of such things as space heaters and wool socks strikes you as ridiculous. In February, when you require both to avoid freezing your toes off while you sleep, and the back yard is a swamp of cold mud, the notion that you will soon require both your air conditioning and your ceiling fan merely to get to sleep at night – and then only barely – comes off as equally nonsensical. In states where the typical "four seasons" model exists, life seems far less of a syllogism.
* A friend of mine caught me watching bare-knuckle boxing the other day and remarked about my “insatiable bloodlust.” He also made comments to the effect that a civilized society would not allow such things as mixed martial arts or bare-knuckle boxing even to exist, much less publicize, normalize and reward them. You can make a case that he is correct on both counts, but I believe such arguments to be of the debate-society type – all style and no substance. The brute fact is that there are many human beings who are in essence, hunters in a farmer's world. Such people require outlets for their savagery and it is far better for them to release their primal urges toward violence, risk-taking and adrenaline rushes via combat sports, bungee jumping, sky-diving, race-car driving, etc., etc. than it would be to ban such things and let these impulses build to the explosion point. To simply deny that humans have savage elements is as foolish and self-destructive as letting them run riot. The savage has his uses just as the civilized man does: it is merely a question of harnessing the primal energies in a modern way. As the character of Uncle Kelloway pointed out in “Piece of Cake,” apropos of R.A.F. pilots, “It's a good job these fellows are flying fighters for His Majesty; otherwise they'd be out robbing banks.”
* When I was about ten or eleven years old, my friend Erik and I engaged in a complex, extremely well-planned scheme to obtain a copy of PLAYBOY from the local store. I cannot begin to tell you how thoroughly we drew up our plans or how meticulous we were in executing them. We had an alibi for our absence from school, a store of money, and an expertly forged note, ostensibly from Erik's father, with which we were going to fool the clerk at the store. All this plotting came to naught, however – not because we were caught, but because we had forgotten about sales tax and were short something like ten or fifteen cents. I mention this story in large part because it goes to show both the immense curiosity which boys of that age have about women and sex, and also because such an event would never happen today. The existence of the Internet has utterly and completely de-mystified the female body as well as the sexual act, to the point that even very young children whose hormones are years from awakening know far more than is desirable or necessary about both. The effect that pornography and semi-pornographic imagery will have on the sexuality and social interaction of future generations is a cause for study, and perhaps for worry, too. There is, after all, something to be said for the air of mystery.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
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