Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 5

SUNDAY EPIPHANY

Whenever I need escape from reality, I reach no further than my stack of physical media -- specifically, TV shows, and more specifically, TV shows from the 70s, 80s and 90s. This morning, feeling a little groggy, not terribly motivated, and grasping that everything responsible I planned for yesterday I must now do today since, well, I didn't do it then, I heated up some cold coffee, plonked on the couch and watched two episodes of MURDER, SHE WROTE. I was immediately struck by the fact that in the first episode, the guest-bad guy-murder victim was played by Martin Landau, whilst in the second it was John Saxon. I met both of these legends when I lived in Los Angeles, and this got me thinking about just how weird life truly is. At least my life, anyway.

In my present iteration as an advocate for victims of crime, I live in what might be called the realest of all possible worlds. To paraphrase a frequently-used line on CSI, I meet people on the worst days of their lives, and spend, in some cases, years helping them navigate through a clumsy and impersonal justice system which often fails to deliver anything resembling justice. It's an exhausting job, morally and mentally, and can be enormouslsy frustrating as well, but also richly rewarding at times. It is at any rate a job that matters. It is fascinating to contrast it with the jobs I previously held in the entertainment industry, most notably my work in video games and make-up effects.

In my years in La La Land, I worked on only God knows how many video game titles at seven different trailer houses. I also worked on approximately 200 episodes of television and (at least) six feature films in some capacity or other. These occupations stand at the opposing pole of my present work -- all my time, all my effort devoted to make-believe. To worlds that do not exist, have never existed. Whether it was an episode of THE WALKING DEAD or a game trailer for a new iteration of Call of Duty, the things with which I was busying myself were entirely imaginary. I remember once, walking off The Lot (formerly Warner Hollywood Studios), where I had been on some trifling errand for TRUE BLOOD, and contrasting the hushed, disciplined set I'd just visited with the noisy reality outside the soundstage. Production, whether in video games, television, or film, is a brutal grind. All the talking heads I see on the internet who gloat when "Hollywood" suffers another strike, mass layoffs, production shut-downs, etc., etc. clearly do not understand that the "Hollywood elites" they so despise are never, or only slightly, effected by these disasters. Hollywood was designed and built to protect its ruling class. The people who pay are working class to middle class grips, gaffers, electricians, production assistants, camera operators, teamsters, craft services people, etc., etc. whose jobs are just as demanding physically as any blue collar occupation you can name, but also require much longer hours. The longest shift I ever pulled on location (it was the failed pilot for WONDER WOMAN) was twenty-four hours, almost every second of which was spent on my feet. The longest shift I ever worked on a video game trailer was twenty-nine hours (and the longest week, just under 100 hours). As people who read this blog know, I once worked 30 straight days on a VG project, and the average shift was 15 hours long. An none of this was considered remarkable or impressive in any way. It is simply accepted as part of the business.

What kept me going in this grist mill for just short of thirteen years? Well, for one, I'd always wanted to work in the industry, and every dream comes with a cost. I wanted to play, so I had to pay. But beyond that, working in Hollywood, while incredibly time-consuming and physically exhausting, did not tax my creative energy in any way. I'd come home tired and often dirty, but with my mind at full charge. I was able to do an enormous amount of writing in those 12 3/4 years, and indeed, most of the works I've published were produced between 2010 - 2020, when I was working the longest hours.

In my present job, the work I do is neither physically demanding nor does it call for long hours. It is a rare thing indeed for me to work a moment over forty hours a week. The punishment, as I said above, is psychological and spiritual. Dealing with vicarious trauma is itself traumatic, and so too is trying to deal with the anger, disappointment, and frustration of people who can't lash out at the person who actually wrong them, and try to vent that frustration on "the system," which manifests as me and people like me. I do not naturally possess a diplomatic nature. My personality tends to mirror energy: what you give is what you get. But as an advocate I have to hang my natural inclinations on a hook for nine hours every day and pretend I'm in the State Department. And this too comes with a cost. As various psychologists have noted, it is not actually possible to suppress an emotion -- the harder you tamp it down, the more violently it will release itself later, in one form or another. At various times in the last four years I have suffered from insomnia, migraine, acute and chronic anxiety, mild depression, mental exhaustion, and outbursts of emotional hysteria or rage -- inappropriately violent responses to minor setbacks like misplacing keys, burning toast or banging a shin. Anytime I was depressed in Los Angeles, and I was frequently depressed in Los Angeles, the depression was either due to personal tragedies like breakups, or professional disappointments in the writing sphere. I was seldom depressed by my work, except when there was a dearth of it (everyone in the industry lives in the shadow of unemployment at all times). The fact is, that for all the struggles I went through in the industry, all the setbacks and humiliations I endured, I never entirely lost the little-kid thrill of being part of "movie magic." I never once walked onto a set or a location and felt anything less that child-like wonder at playing a role in the process of bringing a TV show or a movie to life. Even in my darkest hours, when I was suffering both from chemical and human toxcicity at a famous (and infamous) effects studio, I took a great deal of pride in participating in a cultural phenomenon. I think this is partially because I was both a creator and a consumer of the product in question.

When I decided to leave L.A. and change professions, I chose advocacy in part because it seemed a job of consequence, of significance, that mattered in the Real World. In writing this blog, however, I have come to understand that the fantasy world to which I was once in servitude is not less real or even significantly less consequential, because life, human life anyway, is not lived entirely in the Real World. All of us spend a very large portion of our lives doing things like reading novels, watching television shows and movies, playing video games, and otherwise living in worlds of make-believe. When I watch MURDER, SHE WROTE, or play Resident Evil X, or read Errol Flynn's SHOWDOWN, I am quite deliberately immersing myself into fantasy. And I would argue with great force that fantasy is as necessary to human life as all the other needs in the hierarchy -- food, water, shelter, sex, love. Let's face it: life, real life, is largely nothing but suffering, and while advocates are necessary, so too is escape. The world's sharp corners can be too sharp to endure sometimes: its sound and fury too defeaning, too bewildering to face. In these moments the "book-pipe-fire" atmosphere is critical for both sanity and relief. To lose oneself is at least a great a pleasure as to find oneself, and fantasy is the shortest and perhaps the only healthy route to this destination. It is certainly better for you than drugs or booze. James Caan once famously remarked that the local garbage man played a more important role in society than any actor, and I always tended to agree. Now? Well, I came into this essay believing that what I do now is far more important than what I did in Hollywood, but I leave realizing that people like Martin Landau and John Saxon do not matter less because they spent their entire lives devoted to make-believe. And neither does Miles Watson.

BOOK REVIEW: JAMESON PARKER'S "AN ACCIDENTAL COWBOY"

In the dark night of the soul, it is always three A.M.

In my life, many books have inspired me and left deep, very welcoming marks on my spirit. But only four have actually triggered a physical reaction, a heart-hammering response to what I was reading: "The Keep" by F. Paul Wilson, "Red Dragon" by Thomas Harris, "Pet Sematary" by Stephen King"...and "An Accidental Cowboy" by Jameson Parker. This is not a perfect book, but it is a terrific one, so much so that I felt compelled to reach out to its author and tell him just how terrific it was (and yes, he was kind enough to respond).

Full disclosure: Jameson Parker was a staple of my youth. And by portraying A.J. Simon on the long-running and excellent detective show SIMON AND SIMON, he fooled me into thinking he was just like his character: tough and resourceful in a pinch, but also snobbish, fussy and very much a city-slicker, the sort who would get annoyed if the wine was a degree off in temperature or the salad fork was in the wrong arrangement next to the soup spoon. In reality, Jameson is an outdoorsman, horseman, hunter and all-around dude. In other words (if you know the show, you'll understand the reference) he's more like Rick Simon than A.J....but never mind.

COWBOY is the story of how Jameson, who was a remarkably hot acting property in Los Angeles the 1980s (for example, he also starred in John Carpenter's cerebral horror movie PRINCE OF DARKNESS in 1987), ended up living and loving the life of a small-time rancher in the Sierras, a place where being a hot actor counts for less than a shovelful of horseshit. A bullet runs through his tale: actually two of them, fired point-blank by an unstable and psychopathic neighbor, who blasted Jameson twice over a piddling dispute involving Jameson's dogs. Unlike his character, which would have shrugged off such trauma with a quirky remark, the real-life man had to deal with the trauma, the aftereffects, the post-traumatic stress. How he did that is this book.

COWBOY is a memoir told in the style of an introspective thriller, suspense story or even mystery. I say that because Jameson begins in the 90s, when he has already turned his back on Hollywood to a degree, and is trying to learn how to cowboy from the very best cowboys and ranch hands that California has to offer. He takes us through the complex, beautiful and often brutal mechanics of ranch life, from the glory of riding 1,200 pounds of quarter horse to the exhausting, sweat-drenched reality of herding cattle, to the disgusting necessity of lancing a balloon-sized abscess full of pus on a heifer's jaw with a jackknife, and back again. If you ever wondered whether cowboys still exist and what they do in the twenty-first century, from Stetson to rowel, saddle horn to horseshoe, it's all here. But the dusty reality of ranch life is only part of the story. Jameson also reveals to us that he is terribly depressed, socially anxious, panic-prone, rage-filled, and generally screwed up. He doesn't tell us why: he merely hints at it. As the story progresses, the hints, in the form of flashbacks, pile up, but like a good poker player, he doesn't show his hand. At last, somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of the way through the book, he sticks his jackknife into his own mental abscess, and tells us how one of the more successful TV actors in Hollywood ended up turning his back on L.A., the industry, and acting generally -- not out of choice per se, but because it was where his life led him, perhaps in the same way a divining rod leads a man to water. Parker was a skilled and accomplished actor, but his heart belonged elsewhere, and if you'll forgive the phrase, when the bullet hit the bone, he stumbled on this fact. He truly was an accidental cowboy.

As a writer, Jameson is the real deal. There are touches of Hemingway in both his style and his philosophy, but his scope of reference, the combination of historical facts about California cowboying and amusing personal tales, the erudite phrases and the poetic prose, the see-saw between the Olympian and the vulgar, are a flair all his own. Once in a while he'll overload a sentence in the way of the (talented) amateur, but this book is only amateurish in the literal sense of the word, an amateur being "one who plays the game for the game's own sake." J.P. is not flattering his own vanity or putting on airs by attempting a book. He is not a spoiled actor whose lunging ego has caused him to foray into a strange arena in which he does not belong. He is gifting us his talent by succeeding in writing a work of lasting value. He not only shines light on the sadly dying breed of the contemporary cowboy, but examines with terrifying honesty the aftereffects of casual violence on a human being. The pre-victimization Parker had it all: looks, fitness, talent, intelligence, character, money, and a degree of fame. His willingness to expose just how little any of this mattered in the aftereffect of his trauma is worthy of admiration, and serves as a valuable exploration of human weakness, and also human resiliency. We even get tantalizing glimpses -- all too few for my taste -- of the perils and pitfalls of being a once-successful actor struggling to remain relevant in Hollywood after cancellation and middle age take ahold of him. There are so many great quotes in this book that to single out any one of them would do injustice to the others. You have to read this, and read all of it, to appreciate how damned good it is.

In short, AN ACCDIENTAL COWBOY is a terrific book. It takes a little patience here and there, because Parker is telling the story at his pace (the way a cowboy would), but its well worth the wait. I look forward to reading everything else he has written.

SINNER'S CROSS: A HISTORICAL FICTION COMPANY FIVE STARS

The following was sent to me today by the Historical Fiction Company, who have reviewed my WW2 novel SINNER'S CROSS. I am adducing it here in its entirety along with a link to the book itself.

Sinner's Cross Review

In the Author’s Note, Miles Watson states,

“This is a story about human beings, not technology, places or dates.”

It is true.

The text comprises three main parts plus an Epilogue, with each part describing the experience of battle from a different character’s focalised perspective. Watson’s writing is honey smooth, gliding over characters and descriptions with deftness, bringing to the fore a slightly different narrative voice for each of the three main characters. The characters consist of two Americans and one German, all of them caught up in a horror they know is both futile and brutal. This narrative does not glorify war, nor does it glorify warriors. Rather, it shows them as ordinary human beings caught up in a maelstrom not of their making, and over which they have no control.

Part One introduces Sergeant Halleck, a laconic Texan cowboy. The author carefully reveals his nature through both description and flashback:

“Halleck came from people who regarded a slight change of facial expression as adequate to convey the pain of a severed limb.”

“Some prairie wolves had gotten among the cattle, scattering them into the darkness, and amid a ringing chorus of blasphemies the cowboys had leaped into their saddles and tried to round them up by a sliver of moonlight. Sunrise found Halleck alone and empty-headed with exhaustion, trying to get eighteen frightened, bellowing longhorns across a waist-deep river and up the long steepangled bank. All of them had made it except the sole calf, whose hooves scrabbled hopelessly against the crumbling rust-colored mud as it called for its mother. He knew he should leave it for the buzzards. There was no time to lose and no reason to risk seventeen head for one measly calf. If he didn’t rejoin the herd before it started north, he’d most likely never catch up. Furthermore, he’d probably break his horse’s legs or possibly his own neck playing half-ass hero. It made no sense. It made less than no sense. Halleck was still reflecting on the senseless of it when he wheeled his mare and spurred her screaming down the bank.”

Watson reveals Halleck and then, when you know him and care for him, pitches him into a battle so vivid and visceral, you can feel the pressure waves from the explosions and smell the blood and spilled guts:

“Rage detonated in Halleck’s heart, a great bomb whose shockwave carried itself on his blood into his legs and had them moving, into his hands, which brought the Tommy gun up, into his fingers so that it convulsed on the trigger and sent death spraying out ahead of him in wild, uncontrolled bursts as he ran.”

The minor characters, like the main characters in each part, come fully alive and are as intensely defined:

“Certo, a small seal sleek Puerto Rican with eyes as dark as bubbles of tar, fitted a fresh clip into his rifle.”

They all add to the humanity of the narrative, engaging the reader, making you care deeply about what happens to each of them.

Watson pulls off this feat of engagement twice more. In part two, we meet Lieutenant Breese. A city boy, quick witted, capable of humour even when immersed in horrors.

“But in the rear they’re saying the Krauts are finished, that the war’ll be over by Christmas.”

“Never believe anything that comes out of a man’s rear.”

In part three, Major Martin Zenger, aka Zengy, comes to life. Disillusioned, distraught, trying to care for his ‘children,’ to see them through safely. He dodges not only American bullets but the machinations of the ideological wing of the Nazi Party. He comes to their attention after sending in a report which suggests they should retreat, they cannot prevail. This, however, does not fit with the Fuhrer’s belief that all is required for victory is a belief in victory. It is crafted with the same empathy and attention to character detail seen in the previously two parts. Despite Zengy being German, the reader is encouraged to connect with his character as much as with the two Americans.

“The first shells were already slamming into the hillside above them, filling the air with whirling debris and shaking the ground beneath their feet. Zengy could feel the pressure wave roaring over him, staggering his legs, robbing the air from his lungs, knocking blood out of his nose like an invisible fist. But he knew that to fall meant instant death, and so he kept moving, knocked almost double, scrabbling and scrambling and half-deaf, until the noises of bombardment began to fade.”

As stated previously, Watson states this is a story about human beings, not technology, places, or dates, however his attention to detail on matters of weaponry, transport, uniform etc., build for the reader a picture of time and place which completely suspends disbelief. It transports you into the era, the minor details bringing the period to life, living the horror and futility of war through the perspectives of each of the principal characters.

*****

“Sinner's Cross” by Miles Watson receives five stars and the “Highly Recommended” award of excellence from The Historical Fiction Company.

Sinner's Cross

BOOK REVIEW: ERNST JÜNGER'S "ON PAIN"

Show me your relationship to pain and I will show you who you are!

Ernst Jünger requires two translations. One from German to English, the second from English to understandable English. I mean this literally. Jünger was without a doubt one of the most brilliant literary minds of the 20th century (which he lived through in its entirety): he was capable not only of compressing enormously complex thoughts and ideas into arresting single sentences, but occasionally of writing prose so beautiful it took on the quality of poetry. However, he was also frequently turgid, opaque, digressive and vague, so that reading his works often required great concentration and patience, not to mention a willingness to sift through those flaws to find what might be called the ores of his meaning. It is possible to read a Jünger book through without actually grasping just what the author wanted to say (ALADDIN'S PROBLEM confounds me to this day), and this explains partially why "On Pain", a 47 page essay, has 47 pages of forwards and introductions in its vanguard. It is a great and important read, but it is not an easy one.

I say "partially explains" because the other reason Jünger's essays are always prefaced with massive introductions by academics is that he is considered one of the most dangerous writers ever to pick up a pen. His reputation as "the intellectual Godfather of Fascism" demands that legions of scholars feel obligated to hurl their twopenny bits of disclaimer before he is allowed to speak. Jünger's works are presumed, by those who presume to be smarter than you, to be something unreadable unless you've been told how to feel about them beforehand. I remember reading a forward to his novel ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS which violently attacked him. because he admittedly "lacked the capacity for hatred"...by far the strangest criticism I've ever heard: It is precisely Jünger's incapacity for ordinary human emotions which allowed him to write the way he did...but I guess that's the problem. His ideas, his conclusions about existence, his particular way of viewing the world, are regarded by a great many people as simply too dangerous to be tolerated, which goes a long way to explaining why most of his works have never been translated, and why the few that have are always so unreasonably expensive or hard to obtain.

"On Pain" is a deceptive title, and here again we come to the issue of translation, which is noted by the translator himself in his forward. This is not a book about the sensation of physical pain, but rather a metaphysical analysis of the changing relationship between human beings and suffering in the broadest sense of that word. In "On Pain", Jünger, who was writing in 1934, and whose outlook was shaped by his combat experiences as a storm trooper in the First World War, posits that mankind is turning away from the values of burgeoise morality - saftey, security, ease, comfort, individualism - and becoming harder, more disciplined, and less individual. The new man defines himself via struggle, self-sacrifice, and the ability to withstand pain in all its forms, physical, emotional and otherwise. Jünger likens this evolving consciousness of man to a photographic lens, which gazes upon the most gut-wrenching horror in total objectivity, unmoved by pity or emotion of any kind. He also maintains that his mentality, the conservative mentality, is born out of an acceptance that pain is unavoidable and, in certain mediums, beneficial. Discipline, for example, is "the way man maintains contact with pain." He notes that during the "enlightened" i.e. liberal era, a "good" face was "nervous, pliant, changing, and open to the most diverse kind of influences and impulses." In '34, however (with the Nazis in power in Germany, Communists in Russia, Fasicts in Italy, etc.) the human face is undergoing a "hardening" which brings to mind soldiers of the old Prussian Army, that "stronghold of heroic virtues." What causes this physical manifestation of the inner hardening of the human soul, Jünger writes, is "the imposition of firm and impersonal rules and regulations." Humanity, he believes, has galvanized itself in imitation of the unfeeling, destructive machines he has created, and thus taken a step to become more machine than man.

At the heart of "On Pain" is Jünger's rejection of what we today would call "Western values." America is the stronghold of the pleasure-loving super-individual, who no longer feels much in the way of responsibility, and whose main purpose in life, other than experiencing pleasure, is in the acquisition of money and objects. But it is not the only country to hold these "values", and they are precisely what Jünger wanted to destroy. "On Pain" is, in essence, a gleeful ringing-in of what he thought was a new era, one which shovels dirt over the corpse of bourgeois liberalism. And indeed, as an indictment of "moderate" and "liberal" thinking it is devastating, the moreso because Jünger was not a Nazi. (Indeed, he saw with remarkable prescience that a society founded on the values of the machine could lead to ruin. "One graps how an enormous organizational capacity can exist alongside a complete blindness vis-à-vis values, belief without meaning, discipline without legitimacy.") Rather, it he is simply unwilling to accept that a fat belly, a full wallet and a silk cushion are the highest ideals of human existence. Just as IN THE STORM OF STEEL committed the ultimate academic sin in refusing to view war as an unqualified evil, finding in it "an incomparable schooling of the heart", "On Pain" compounds that sin by maintaining that the measure of a man lays in his capacity to withstand suffering.

Viewed as prophecy, "On Pain" is faulty as of now, but one can already see in certain places in the world a deep-seated rejection of "Western values" and a desire to define life in terms of the acceptance of suffering rather than in its avoidance. Terrorism is a cult of pain as Jünger defines the word, and so is Fascism, and if we see it in those terms the magnitude of the task of defeating it becomes clear: one of many reasons why "On Pain" remains relevant after almost 100 years.

MY WEIGHT LOSS JOURNEY: PART III

Addition by subtraction" is a phrase used in sports coaching and other areas of life to describe the idea that removing things can lead to improvement. In sports, it can mean that a team can improve by removing players or practices that are hindering their success, rather than adding more talent. In other areas, it can mean that removing things you don't want or need can create space for the things you do, leading to clarity, efficiency, and a renewed sense of purpose. This principle can be applied to many areas of life, including: Physical possessions, Time, Energy, and Space.

I'm not sure precisely how it happened, but at some point in the last eight years I let this blog become a little more than merely a place to shove my unsolicitied opinions about everything into the ether. It has evolved (devolved?) into a kind of annex to the private journals I have kept since 2006, a place where I can discuss aspects of my life which I feel might possibly be of use to others. If this sounds pretentious, well, it probably is: on the other hand, I am someone who is quite literally compassionate for a living. As an advocate for victims of crime, it's my job to do whatever I can, however little it may be in the moment, to help others, and while nobody is ever entirely free of selfish or otherwise unworthy motives even for their noblest actions, I refuse to diminish the actual good I do in real life because I possess, like everyone else, dark corners in my heart. So you will forgive me if I add a third chapter to this particular story, the story of how I am, at the age of 51.9 years old, reclaiming my fitness, my health, and some of the self-esteem I now realize I was missing when I let myself go.

The year was 2023, June 19 actually, and I stepped on my just-purchased electronic scale, the one I got so I could record every detail of the weight loss journey I had just decided to take. I'd recently been to the doctor, and their scale read 196 lbs, which was not terrible given my unusual muscle density, so you can imagine my shock when the verdict was...207 lbs.

I was incensed. I'd just paid hard cash for this scale and clearly the fucking thing was not working properly. I was so goddamned mad I bought an analog medical scale, calibrated precisely with a dumbbell, weighed myself, and found out was in fact...207.5 lbs.

Maybe it was that last .5, the final insult heaped upon the injury in question, but I'm damned if I didn't have a temper tantrum right out of the spoiled rich kid playbook. [Note for the literal-minded reader my people were never rich] I lost my shit. In my life I had never weighed more than 205 and even that was a freak instance brought about by heavy drinking and a careless diet. And that was twenty years ago, when I knew nothing at all about nutrition or how the body processes food. It was painful and humiliating, not the leastwise because I'm someone that prides himself on staying active and maintaining a tough discipline, and not conforming to the stereotype of the writer as a broken-down drunk whose breakfast consists of cold cheeseburgers and stale beer.

So the journey began. I enlisted a nurse who specializes in coaching weight loss to remind me of the basics and add a few pointers, and over the next half-year or so I managed to lose seventeen pounds. My goal was to hit the mid-high 180s and stay there, but I found I could not break the barrier of 190 no matter what I did. I came close more than once, sometimes to within just a few ounces, but 190 presented a barrier that just refused to yield.

Nature, nurture heaven and home
Sum of all, and by them, driven
To conquer every mountain shown
But I've never crossed the river
Braved the forests, braved the stone
Braved the icy winds and fire
Braved and beat them on my own
Yet I'm helpless by the river
Angel, angel, what have I done?
I've faced the quakes, the wind, the fire
I've conquered country, crown, and throne
Why can't I cross this river?

Whenever you're stalled before your goal, especially if the stall is a long one, you tend to lose your edge. At least I do. And over the next few months I noticed my weight creeping up slowly, very slowly, but steadily nonetheless. By June of this year, a year after I'd started almost to the day, I was 197 and a quarter. Trends are everything in life: it's not the peaks or the valleys that matter, the steps forward or sideways or even back, but the general direction in which you're headed. And the direction was wrong. So I decided to double down. Instead of throwing another tantrum, I took a deep breath and considered the words of David Goggins, who is always reminding everyone that 40% of effort will not yield 100% results. And while I don't know if I was working at 40%, I sure as hell knew it wasn't much farther than that, so it was time to up my game. I stopped cooking lavish meals for myself simply because I have learned to enjoy cooking as a kind of Zen exercise; I fed myself a lot more protein and fat and a lot less carbohydrate; and I began to add 30 - 60 minute calisthenics drills, four times a week, to my almost daily regimen of hiking for one hour regardless of the weather. And lo, the direction changed. And not merely on the scale. I found that embracing the discipline of which I so often speak in these pages (from my comfortable office chair), made me more courageous in my personal life and more aggressive in my professional one. I started pushing boundaries and doing things I had never or rarely done before, at least not consistently: I have seen some results already. Not tectonic results, but measurable ones. I asked the doctor the embarrassing questions. I told the girl I loved her. I knocked on Hollywood's door again, and I pushed the writing in every direction. On and on. In short, I started acting on my desires instead of brooding over them. Whether any will actually and ultimately be satisfied is another matter, but as the cliche goes, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

This morning, August 3, just five days short of my 52nd birthday (and how in the fuck did that happen?), I stepped on the scale and bang, there it was: 189.9. The barrier was broken. It may reassemble itself tomorrow, but that doesn't matter. Once it breaks, I know I can break it. I want to shed five more pounds and then stabilize, afterwhich I'll set a new goal: more muscle, perhaps. The point is that I didn't do what I've done in past lives, which is let discouragement trick me into quitting entirely, or perhaps even worse, accepting mediocrity as an outcome. That's growth. We can always learn to grow, at any age and any time and any place in life no matter how bleak it might appear, but we have to humble ourselves first. We have to accept that sometimes we are not enough and need assistance, whether it is moral or physical or intellectual. We have to shrug off the albatross of egotism that weighs us down. That takes emotional honesty. If you're fat, don't say you're overweight, say you're fat. Don't blame your schedule, blame yourself for not carving out the time -- admit that you're lazy and don't want to do the work. Humble yourself. The results will amaze.

Pay no mind to the battles you've won
It'll take a lot more than rage and muscle
Open your heart and hands, my son
Or you'll never make it over the river

Of course life is nothing if not tireless when it comes to throwing 100 mile curveballs directly at your head. I recently had a whole slew of blood tests at my physical and my cholesterol levels were terrible, worse than the year before and the year before that. I know why, of course. I've spent a year eating huge amounts of proteins and fats, so even as my body slimmed down and my muscles hardened up, my veins were filling with sludge. I was dismayed to say the least to see the numbers, but instead of indulging in my favorite pastime of past times, bitterness, I took a deep breath and said, "Fuck it -- you'll just have to change your diet, starting now."

And that's what I'm doing as of this morning. Just trying to adapt and overcome in the face of frequent and lively discouragements. Just trying to set aside the pride that prevents growth, and the bitterness that threatens to choke me absolutely dead when people, when life itself, lets me down. I share this not because I'm deluded or egotistical enough to think anyone cares what I weigh, but because it's a cold, cruel, capricious world out there, and it's easy to feel alone in your struggles. People in my place of work sometimes look at the totality of my life, the time in Hollywood, the time in law enforcement, the travels, the books and writing awards, the martial arts journey, and say, "What a life you've led!" They don't understand that I like most people tend to view my existence merely as a series of defeats and lost opportunities, missed marks and broken connections. I give in to despair more than anyone, and in my despair tend to isolate and thus deepen the gloom. That's why I'm here. If I can set a goal and achieve it in the face of all my weaknesses and stupidities, goddamn well anyone can do it, but goddamn well anyone can't do it alone. In other words:

Open your heart and hands, my son
And together we'll cross the river.

BOOK REVIEW: CARLY RHEILAN'S "ASYLUM"

Cabdi knew that after the world finishes there are those for whom time goes on -- beyond the moment of catastrophe, into the jagged shadowland that follows, where thin flames burn across chaos and emptiness, revealing nothing except that everything is lost. And he knew that for some there was even a time beyond that -- a time when the world reforms itself, into another thinner life, composed of fragments all wrongly put together, with moments of unexpected pleasure and satisfaction, as in a dream -- though at every step, the breaking of the world remained in the heart, like an arrowhead that can never be removed."

ASYLUM is the debut novel from Malta-born British writer Carly Rheilan, and it is quite the achievement -- a thoughtful and profound book about a stranger in a strange land. I bought it on a whim, having "encountered" Ms. Rheilan on Twitter, but didn't have any particular expectations as to its quality. I was soon drawn in, however, and -- I confess this with no shame -- finished the book with a hefty crop of goosebumps.

I should begin by saying that, for reasons you may already know if you read this blog, I am hard to move. I am not bragging when I say this, quite the opposite. Like one of the villains in this book -- an enormously memorable and terrifying villain whose internal monologue I now paraphrase: "very occasionally, [I] feel the hollow inside of myself where some faculty should be, and remember how it felt, long ago, when I was whole....perhaps it was the ability to ache that I had sacrificed." The things I have seen have cauterized me emotionally to a degree not many people can comprehend, and they should perhaps thank God, or their lucky stars, for that incomprehension. There are times when things happen, and I know I should be moved, and I want to be, and I am not, or the shallowness of the affect is soshallow that I wonder if I surrendered my membership card in the human race a few years back without realizing it (I suppose this is why Hemingway's DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON did, in fact, affect me; it spoke to what is wrong with me, held a lantern over my broken places). In any event, ASYLYM did move me. There is pathos in this novel, but no bathos; it is written with that coolness of purpose which even German literature cannot quite reach, showing the reader suffering and nobility without telling them "look at the suffering and nobility!"

ASYLUM isn't an easy book to break down for a review because there are many moving parts, and in any case I leave it to the perspective reader to discover the intricacies for themselves. Taken as a whole, this is a novel about East African refugees living under the rather Dickensian-style supervision of British social workers in the UK, which is a surprisingly fascinating subject in itself, but that is not where the drama comes in. ASYLUM is a book that, under the guise of a mystery-suspense story, probes the darkest corners of the sex trafficking trade while simultaneously offering some wonderful insights on the nature of social work, culture clashes, the subtleties of bigotry (African and European style), and the complexities of the human heart. And it does all of this without the kind of gratuitous detail that might make it distasteful or unreadable. There is a kind of deft subtlety to the prose that prevents this from happening, and it's one of the reasons I try to remind myself to read female writers more often, because sometimes even the ablest male writers sometimes lack this sensibility (I am probably one of them).

ASYLUM has a number of POV characters. The most interesting of these are Cabdi, the mutilated, socially isolated East African refugee whose arm was hacked off by Somali soldiers, and who lives mostly within his own head, experiencing Britain through the eyes of someone who may as well be from another planet, and Christmas, the Moriarty-like head of a human trafficking ring who deals exclusively in young boys, especially "disposable" African refugees. Though the two characters never meet, they are the opposing moral poles of the story, which Cabdi struggling to come to terms with his grim new reality -- one-armed, mutilated, thousands of miles from home with all of his family dead and only a feeble knowledge of English or English customs -- while the brilliant sociopath Christmas tries to manipulate all and sundry to facilitate the needs of his perverted criminal empire. Both characters are very well-written, and to some extent share the "outside" view of existence: Cabdi literally, Christmas morally. In addition, there is Helen, a well-meaning but not terribly likeable social worker who is having an affair with her boss while she juggles her many responsibilities, and Mustaf, another East African on an obsessive quest to be reunited with his adoptive sister Semira. All of this weaves together gradually into a comprehensive narrative that ends neither in Shakespearian tragedy nor the tacked-on, thumbs-up Hollywood ending so many editors demand. Like real life -- and this novel is nothing if not grittily realistic -- it is not trying to please or to injure. It simply is: a thing-in-itself.

ASYLUM is a grim story but there is also humor in it. Rheilan has some tart things to say about bigotry, about the well-meaning yet cruel system by which refugees are housed and supervised, and most especially about Britain and its culture as seen through the eyes of an African refugee (he describes Santa Claus as a "red demon" and Halloween as "a festival of skeleton gods"). In terms of social commentary she wields a long whip: unlike most white writers she is fearless in discussing slavery in contemporary Africa, as well as the caste systems and ancient ethnic and racial-religious hatreds that pervade the region, and transfer to some extent to British soil. The novel is in a sense an attack, and a principled one, on all the systems and forms wherever they may be found, and whether good-natured or evil, which cause human beings to be moved around like herd animals or even worse, like commodities, and provide justifications to treat others cruelly or indifferently. As a former parole officer and correctional specialist, who works now as an advocate for victims of crime, I can relate to this -- boy, can I relate to this.

Before I part I should like to share one of the many passages from this novel which moved me deeply:

"Perhaps all bereavement is a mourning for dreams. What has really happened can never be undone. The dead never leave us. What torments us is the loss of things that never were -- the years of life unlived, the things not said or done, what might have been, what wasn't, what couldn't be."

Like this passage, ASYLUM is not easily forgotten. I highly recommend it.

AS I PLEASE XXVI: LIFE LESSONS EDITION

Next time ain't always gonna happen.

A few short weeks ago -- weeks that feel, now that I consider them, like months in terms of both pain and personal growth -- I decided that it was time to level up. In every aspect of life, I wanted to find myself one full rung higher on the ladder, whether it was fitness, my writing career, my day job, my personal relationships, all of it. If you read this blog, you probably know that part of the motivation came from tragedy, actually multiple tragedies, which intersected with my life (I won't say "happened to me," because they happened to others, souls I cared about). The root causes, however, are less important than the effect, which has me working every day, to some degree or other, toward all my various goals. I now work out twice a day four times a week (and work out once a day, every other day), restrict my calories, eat better foods, no longer drink alcohol at home, and have cut way back on television and non-writing computer time, so I can devote more to writing, editing, submitting and so on. I have stopped wasting energy trying to appear "all right" for the benefit of others when I am far from it, and am more vocal -- or confrontational, when I deem it necessary -- than I used to be. In short, I embraced a much tougher self-discipline than I had previously imposed upon myself, and while it is not as much fun as, say, drinking a 12-pack of beer while playing video games, it is producing a definite effect.

Now, at the core of all discipline lies pain. Discipline, it has been written, is the way civilized man maintains contact with that pain and keeps himself hard for life's challenges. Probe deeper, however, and you will find that beneath the pain is fear. When we pass the half-century mark, it is high time we also quit kidding ourselves about a great many things, foremost among them is that we have unlimited time to do all the things we were planning to do "someday." For as that catchy motorcycle ad once read:

MONDAY. TUESDAY. WEDNESDAY. THURSDAY. FRIDAY. SATURDAY. SUNDAY. THERE IS NO "SOMEDAY."

In order to make this more than a passing fad in my life, it was necessary for me to sit down and do some really painful, actually almost excruciating, self-analysis. You will note that all really deep looks within ourselves are painful, unsettling and sometimes deeply humiliating -- which is why, of course, most of us don't perform them, or at least don't do so very often, and also why most of us change very little over the courses of our adult lives unless acted upon by an outside force. We get along, as David Goggins said, on forty percent effort, and usually convince ourselves that the forty is really seventy, or eighty, or even one hundred percent. When I looked at myself objectively, I found it was necessary to begin the almost inconcievably intimidating and laborious process of rewiring my brain, my heart, my entire being, so as to operate differently. This was not to be a software update, but rather a hardware overhaul, and would take years to achieve the desired results. So I combed through all the profound thoughts I've had, epiphanies I've experienced, and inspirational words I have heard, and came up with some rules for living. And yes, I've done this before, and yes, I've done it in this very blog, and yes, I stand by what I said before, too, but that was, in essence, blue belt level thinking, and now we are at the brown belt level, or at least trying to attain same, and that means making changes when changes are necessary. So every day, I read these thoughts aloud, and really try to consider what they mean in the moment I'm living them, and how they can be applied:

* Anxiety is energy. It will only hurt you if you don't use it...but it will definitely hurt you if you don't use it.

* Jealousy is desire.It's a signpost that directs you to what you want. Now go get it.

* Success has a moral element. All real triumph is indivisible from some element of nobility. If there is no nobility there is no victory. You just got away with it, that's all.

* Resentment is a great teacher. Its lesson is either "man up and move on" or to identify the bully in your life in deal with him...even if the bully is you (especially if it's you).

* Average men get average results. The outcome is a reflection of the effort. If you put in the work, that will show; if you didn't, that will show, too.

* Whatever you are ain't good enough. You can always be better, and the moment you stop trying is the moment you start dying. It is said that perfect is the enemy of the good, but it is equally true that the fact perfection is unattainable is no reason not to look for it: the very act makes you better.

* Emotions are not problems to be solved. They are teachers to be respected. Learn from them. This is an especially difficult lesson for men.

* You can' get skinny by hating being fat. It's good to recognize a bad situation, but just being angry won't change a damned thing. Too many of us get stuck in anger and never move.

* You will never outperform your belief systems. If you think you're a loser, you are. If you think you're a winner, then you already know where the prize is, you just haven't collected it yet. This sounds like New Age rubbish but it is actually the mentality of ever winner who ever lived.

* You have a role in your own suffering. This moment is the end product of ten million decisions big and small you've made in your life. It's easy to blame God, school, your parents, your -ex, you junior high school bully or "society" for all your woes. And they may in fact be responsible. But they aren't entirely responsible. The common factor you have with every failure in your life is you. Take responsibility, look for the patterns, change your ways.

* The mountain is not your adversary. It lifts you up. It assists you into the sky. There are a lot of theories on the value of discipline, hard work and suffering, but they tend to ignore the fact that some suffering in life is only suffering if you regard it as such. I used to look at certain things in an adversarial way; now I try to see them as trying to ease my difficulties. The mountain wants you at its peak.

* The universe doesn't hear “please don't,” only what follows it. Replace “I want” with “I am,” and "I want" with "I will." You may not succeed but if you fail it won't be for lack of trying.

*Don't seek happiness in the same place you lost it. Vices are not painkillers. They are the producers of pain.

*You must sacrifice the worst of you to become the best you can be, and only you know to what degree you're in love with the worst of you. What is it you hate most about yourself as a human being? Now ask yourself truly: do you want to give it up? The answer will surprise you and probably upset you, but in the answer, hard as it may be, you find the starting point to becoming a better person.

* If you viewed yourself as kindly as you view those you love, you would love yourself, too. Like most people, I am my own cruelest critic. I negate my accomplishments. I devalue my abilities. I look at compliments with suspicion, or even worse, cynicism, and often attack my own motives even after carrying out good works. I do few or none of these things with the people closest to me in life -- but who is closer to me than myself?

I realize a lot of this sounds like fortune-cookie wisdom of the sort Mr. Miyagi might utter in one of the more inferior Karate Kid sequels, and there may be people who are insulted that I even try giving life lessons because who the hell am I? But it is working for me, demonstratably working, and I feel as if I'd be cheating my own growth somehow if I didn't at least try to share it, Daniel-san.

WOKEISM VS. ART: AN ESSAY

Art is the daughter of freedom. – Friedrich Schiller

I really don’t like writing that passes as entertainment when it’s really propaganda. I want to hear a human story. – Alan Alda

A hundred years ago there was a titanic worldwide struggle between art and ideology. In both totalitarian and democratic nations, creative forms were subjected to ideological litmus tests. The works of Shakespeare, the short stories of Jack London, the art of Picasso and Dali, the films of D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin, the music of Mendelsohn and Irving Berlin, the poetry of Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden, the novels of Remarque, the philosophy of Tessanow, Nietsche, Kant and Hegel – all were viewed from the perspective of whether they were hostile to, or in accordance with, the principles of fascism, communism, or capitalist democracy. By which lens they were examined, of course, depended on who was examining them, and what they were allowed to enjoy or expected to hate was a natural outgrowth of which side of the fence they stood on.

It is unsurprising that totalitarian states would take an interest in art, because it is in the nature of totalitarians to wish to control everything, and art is by its very nature an expression of freedom, the fearless sharing of one's inner being with the outer world, which is the one thing a totalitarian can never allow of the ordinary citizen he means to control. However, and as I stated above, it would be a mistake to say that America, Britain, France and so on were immune from this sort of thinking. Those in power in capitalist democracies were hardly less assidious in trying to find messages in movies, radio programs, musicals, etc. which they deemed “patriotic” or “subversive” depending on their content, and either lauding or damning them accordingly. Long before McCarthyism, everything from comic books to moving pictures to music and Broadway plays were scrutinized not only for obscenity, indecency and violence, but for political messages which threatened this or that tenet of Western democracy or of the often constrictive societal fabric which held that democracy together. In America – for example – it was not permissible for films to overtly attack segregation, or employ certain minorities in roles other than that of slave, servant, waiter, or comic footman, or to present women in a way which actively attacked assumptions about their place in society. Sex was never or only very gently touched upon, nor mental health, nor poverty in any way which might find blame within the system itself rather than the individual. In short, it was an age when all creative arts were under attack – in dictatorships openly, in democracies by virtue of boycotts, blue laws, censorship, social pressure and other more nuanced but fairly effective means.

George Orwell, writing at the time, noted with alarm that one of the curious effects of totalitarianism specifically, and ideology (and even religion) generally, was that it had a destructive effect on literature and creative thought. Artists, whether they use a pen, a chisel, a brush, a baton or a camera, represent a serious threat to those in power. With their art they can attack, sometimes boldly, sometimes subtly, policies and personages they dislike. A totalitarian government cannot tolerate criticism any more than it can tolerate freedom of expression, and so must suppress artists by sanctioning only narrow, state-approved forms of art and abolishing everything else. It is unnecessary for me to explain what “being abolished” meant under Hitler or Stalin, except to note the chilling effect the “abolitions” of various comedians, singers, painters, directors, playwrights, and so on would have on those practicing art as a career, or considering it. But as Orwell noted, the overall effect was to either drive those with creative talents away from art entirely, or otherwise to turn them into hacks or, to use his phrase, “literary prostitutes” of the stripe of Alexi Tolstoy: individuals who cut, sand, and polish their “art” to fit the demands and whims of the regime. A few decades of totalitarian rule were probably sufficient, he believed, to suffocate the existence of art in a nation-state as we understand it: but it would not, he stressed, mean that songs, paintings, films, radio programs, music, and even comedy routines would cease to exist. They would simply become state-approved products produced by said trusted hacks or committees, and prove either harmless to the regime or exist solely to sing its praises. Art would be reduced, not merely to the level of entertainment, but to mere propaganda.

In contrast, a capitalist, ostensibly democratic government cannot use such drastic methods to crush artistic opposition, but it is well within its ability to use the churches, police and courts to make art difficult to disseminate to the masses, especially when it questions the social order. There are many examples of artists crushed by the power of the state because their comedy, art, cinema or what have you violated ideas of propriety or was considered radical or revolutionary. As I noted above, art requires imagination, but it also requires a certain fearlessness, the sort of moral courage which is required to tell truths as one personally sees them regardless of consequence. Imagination and moral courage are not qualities encouraged by governments, political parties and religious leaders as a general rule wherever they may exist: authority prefers docility, apathy, conformity and obedience from the masses. Anyone who believes otherwise is at best naive.

Now, this war between authority and art is a permanent one, and like all permanent wars, it undergoes periods of both dormancy and frenzy. No government, no matter how liberal or conservative in its outlook, is immune from this conflict: the idea that only the “right” burns books is as stupid as trying to find some moral difference between the Communist gulag and the Nazi concentration camp. In every nation there is a “right” and a “left” of some kind, and both do everything within their power to suppress opposing ideas, especially as they manifest in popular culture. All art is propaganda, and if we accept that as an axiom, it follows that the powers that be are right to look at art from the “opposing side” as nothing less than enemy weaponry. And since it is natural to wish destruction on the weapons of your opponent, we have the interminable “cultire wars” which rage in every nation but most especially, of late, within the United States. Pop culture, viewed through an ideological or even a religious lens, is nothing more than a means by which one influences hearts and minds to one's own specific world view. What we call “conservatives” in America have traditionally fought to suppress anything in this arena which challenges what they call “family” or “traditional” values – meaning, of course, their own personal values. What we refer to as liberals, on the other hand, are equally if not more intolerant of anything which runs contrary to their own value system, though as a rule they attack using different means. Conservatives tend to use the power of government, while liberals favor popular culture, and with very good reason, for right-wingers in any country often exhibit a startling lack of creative imagination. (One should definitely listen to Jordan Peterson on the subject of why, viewed scientifically.) There are of course right-wing playwrights, directors, poets, novelists, comedians, etc., but they are often either appallingly bad at their respective arts, or come at their art from a more religious than a political angle – C.S. Lewis, for example, or Orson Scott Card. Speaking anecdotally, after spending four years at a conservative Catholic graduate school for writing and twelve and a half in Hollywood, I would say that in America anyway, the “the liberal” outnumbers “the conservative” in creative endeavours by a ratio of at least 3:1 or even 4:1, and that those on the left tend to produce better art than those on the right. I personally attribute this mainly to a difference in outlook. Art is often rooted in discontent, and tends to question the existing structure of society and the way we look at reality: it is especially fond of slaughtering sacred cows, those political, religious, aesthetic, and societal assumptions we hold most dear. Perhaps by accident, these are also liberal-progressive traits. On the other hand, conservatism is rooted in caution, a desire for order, a reverence for the past, and an intense dislike for change. Such roots definitely support traditions, but they do not encourage innovation or rebellion.

There is no doubt that during modern right-wing administrations there have been attempts, sometimes fairly well-coordinated, to propigate a value system on popular culture and art which corresponds to the conservative or Republican worldview. No one could seriously argue that Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, or Donald Trump were sympathetic to (modern) Hollywood's value system, or encouraged schools to examine, via literature, ideas anithetical to “traditional values.” But speaking from a place of objectivity, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in the last half-century, it is not from the right but from the left that the most serious challenges to artistic freedom have been mounted. Indeed, since the early 1990s, there have been two significant campaigns by the left to influence not only popular culture in its artistic guise, but the general fabric of society through art: in other words, to completely weaponize it. The first of these was “political correctness,” a movement designed to attack freedom of speech under the guise of civility and compassion. The second, more recent and more focused, with its motives more openly on the table, is “Wokeism.”

Wokeism is defined as “being alert to racism and societal hypocrisy,” and on that basis, one would think everyone would want to be “woke.” Like most words minted nowadays, however, “woke” has come to mean something entirely different in practical context. “Woke” in connotes the advancement of a specific political agenda through artistic means, most commonly films and television. Wokeism, in relation to art, has certain core themes which reveal themselves by repetition. These themes can be divided into the positive and the negative, i.e., that which wokeism stands for, and that which it stands against.

Wokeism stands for female empowerment. It differs, however, from the female empowerment espoused by a pre-woke feminist show like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in that it stands against male empowerment -- especially "straight white male" empowerment. In other words, it views power among characters as a zero sum game: empowering a female character necessitates weakening the male characters, again, especially if they are "straight white males." This hostility is definite, and it is deliberate. In a woke film, the white male is either a villain, a victim, a foil, or a clown. There are no other categories. What's more, women in woke films and TV shows are generally Mary Sues all the way around. They have few if any recognizable flaws or weaknesses, and already seem to know everything and need not be educated or mentored. The hero's journey for a woke Mary Sue is not a journey at all: from Captain Marvel to Rey Skywalker to the live-action Mulan, what we see is not the evolution of a character but a series of usually successful actions performed by that character. They really don't learn, or change, or grow, and if they are taught anything at all it will never be by a man. (This dynamic can be applied to all characters of color and all LGBTQ characters as well, though there is a complex hierarchy of gender, sexuality and race here that can be somewhat comical in its effect.)

Wokeism stands for SJW messaging. In "The Last Jedi" the God-awful character of Rose Tico exists to facilitate the political education of Finn, and never mind that Finn is literally a victim of human trafficking impressed from childhood into an army he hates. Rose treats him as if he spent his whole life in silk pajamas, eating strawberries off gold plate, and for some reason, he takes it without complaint or demur. Presumably she is free to do this because in the wokeist hierarchy (see previous remark) a female is always going to outrank a male on the moral scale, even when the male is "of color." This character, if you want to debase the word by calling her that, is not a character at all: she is walking lecture on social justice, delivered with intolerable smugness and arrogance.

More than that, however, wokeism has sought to change the very nature of art by eliminating those artists who do not agree with or propound woke ideology – deplatforming or “cancellation.” Wokeism is therefore not only advocating a political view, it is actively seeking to destroy those who hold opposing views, by preventing their art from coming into existence, or, if it already exists, by destroying it, or perhaps even more nefariously, by remaking it in “woke” form. A common exclamation of Wokeists when approaching the reboots or remakes of films or television shows is "we are going to fix it." In practical terms this means recasting the story to be more diverse and inclusive, shifting away from the use of straight white males (except as villains), and loading the dialog with wokeist messaging. A list of pre-existing intellectual properties and franchises which have been subjected to this mutilating and emasculating process would include Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Witcher, Willow, Cowboy Bebop, Ghostbusters, Scooby Doo, and Doctor Who, though this list is by no means inclusive. There are truly Orwellian echoes in altering a story so that its orginal themes and meanings are brought forcibly into line with the prevailing wisdom, because in this way the message of a story can be changed into the exact opposite of what was originally intended by its author, while retaining its label and, therefore, some aspect of its credibility.

One of the more terrifying aspects of Wokeism from an artist's point of view is the speed with which it has infected and perverted storytelling. Just a very few years ago it was still possible for television and movie scripts to reflect the creative vision of their author and nothing else: whether they ever got produced was another matter, but the scripts themselves, the stories the writer wanted to tell, remained pure products of imagination. Sometimes, of course, budget restraints or commercial considerations would color the writer's execution of his or her vision, but the basic story itself was a product of the fearlessness which exists when a writer is free within their head. This is no longer the case. Every movie, every television show, every “event series,” graphic novel, comedy special and cartoon, must now run through a dual filter of both diversity-inclusiveness and wokeism, rather like meat through a sausage grinder, the result being that the final product not only bears little relation to the original vision of its creator, but now has a strong resemblance to every other sausage emerging from the grinder. This product is not merely mediocrity, but genericism: all of these end products taste the same, no matter how different their packaging might be. And this raises the question as to whether any kind of artistic greatness is possible when art must be filtered, homogenized, pasturized, packaged, and rendered “safe” before the public can even lay eyes on it.

As a writer, I have had a number of encounters with Wokeism. I have been told that a WW2 novel I wrote must be subjected to a "sensitivity read" because the Holocaust-themed subject matter might upset some readers (word to the wise: Holocaust stories are supposed to be upsetting.) I have been warned, when writing historical pieces which involve bigots, not to use racial and ethnic slurs -- as if it were possible to convey an accurate picture of racism without doing this. I have been instructed, when writing nonfiction scripts set in the antebellum era, to leave out figures who fell into the "white savior" category, as if American slaves freed themselves. What's more, I have attended meetings in which "diversity and inclusion" czars from studios or networks would look at a proposed series or film, and say, "Is this role open to ethnicity?" This was code for, "There are too many white people in the script." This last statement is not necessarily objectionable if the logic of the story demands otherwise: nobody would claim that a TV show set in 1930s Harlem with an all-white cast would make any sense. But left out of the question is the fact that whether we want them to be or not, our race, ethnicity, and sexuality have the deepest influences on who we are as human beings. It is not possible to change these dynamics in a character without fundamentally changing the nature of the character and their entire backstory. And thus the process of forcing the writer to alter his vision for the story begins, with the endgame often being that the tale he intended to tell is lost in all the reshuffling.

Now, in regards to these last points, one could point out that Hollywood has whitewashed everything for generations and that the present push for greater representation merely represents a spirited attempt to belatedly balance the scale. This is objectively true, and I would push it even further and say that characters and storylines geared for an LGBTQ etc. audience are just as long overdue. Hollywood long ignored, stereotyped or marginalized anyone who didn't fit their idea of what an American was supposed to be, and it has much in the way of atonement yet to perform. People who are angry about this are either bigots themselves or simplty reactionaries who long for a whitewashed past, where the woman was in the kitchen, the gay was in the closet and the black was in the back of the bus. As the cliche goes, it's a big tent: there is no reason, not even a justification, for anyone to be excluded. My issue is not with greater diversity in casting or storytelling: it is with the the one-size-fits all approach, the forcible ramming of ideas and quotas into the afformentioned sausage grinder. It is with poorly written hack propaganda masquerading as entertainment and, even more grotesquely, as art. It is with the idea that story, character, dialog, and craft are far less important than checking diversity boxes on a hiring form. Is it really necessary or logical to cast a black actor to play a Norse god, an East Indian as a Knight of the Round Table, or a woman of color as Anne Boleyn, especially when the people forcing such absurdities upon us are the same ones who use phrases like "culture vulture" and "cultural appropriaton?" There is a time and a place for everything, and artists should be allowed to choose that time and that place and not have their ideas defaced so executives can virtue signal on Twitter, to people - if they are people, and not bots -- who do not even watch the material in question anyway. The first commandment of anyone endeavouring to tell a story is that the story be good. And it is not possible to tell a good story if one must jump through political, sexual, and racial hoops before the project has even begun. Art requires intellectual and emotional freedom, not a checklist drawn up by idealogues and censors.

Speaking for myself as a writer, I know that when I sit down to begin a story, my only objective is to tell it well. I may have a point I am trying to make about life, or human nature, or anything you care to name, but ultimately my goal is to engross, to immerse, to entertain. In the whole of my life and career, nearly all of my literary failures -- stories I consider weak, obvious, poorly executed, or just plain lousy -- failed because I was preaching to the audience. Because I did not trust them to think for themselves or draw their own conclusions. Because I created archetypes rather than characters that I could use as loudspeakers or punching bags depending on my state of mind.

Consider the words of Hemingway:

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. ...For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature.

If one looks at the characters in films and television shows which can be objectively described as "woke" in theme, we see that they are indeed caricatures. They lack any depth or dimension; they do not live but merely preach. This is because the writers are doing precisely what Hemingway described: placing his or her own "intellectual musings" into the mouths of characters who feel and sound fake because they are fake. They are like the Inner Party members in Orwell's "1984" who are little more than tape recorders attached to loudspeakers, endlessly preaching "truths" which often palpably lies. And the strange thing about such characters is that anyone who is not under the spell of the ideology they are spewing instinctively grasps their two-dimensionality and rejects them out of hand. And there is something else to consider as well: a character will never be more intelligent than the writer who created them. The greater the intelligence of the writer, the greater the potentiality of the character. But wokeism being an ideology, and indeed an ideology whose ultimate demand is that "you ignore the evidence of your senses and say that two plus two equals five," it ultimately must cripple the intellect of anyone who embraces it. There can be no other outcome, because ideology by its nature rejects the existence of objective reality and fact if those realities or facts clash with party dogma. The party says collectivized farms work better than private ones, and millions starve in consequence...and still the party maintains that collective farming is more fruitful, and shoots anyone who argues otherwise. This is ideology in its most extreme but also its inevitable form. All ideology is a road and all roads have destinations and the ultimate destination of any ideology is that "the party is always right." This is what differentiates ideology from politics or philosophy. Ideology is a religion, and like all religions it claims not only the power of moral sanction but infallibility. And it rules by fear. This fear can be produced by the imposition of a physical terror, as in totalitarian dictatorships, or it can be imposed by spiritual terror, as in most religions, or it can be imposed by societal and economic consequence, as in democratic societies; but it must be imposed for the structure to hold together.

As a novelist, my best work always -- always places character and story well ahead of any underlying message. Such messages can exist -- it is folly to pretend that a person's politics and prejudices don't or should not enter into their writing -- but they must not exist as a substitute for storytelling. We are writing fiction, not political tracts. But to make art rather than propaganda, it's necessary that I be entirely free of dogma and cant, political correctness and wokeism. I must stick to philosophy and avoid ideology like the plague. And above all, I must be unafraid. The story must be all, and to be all it must be true.

This brings us to a crucial point, which is that the creation of objectively good stories is no longer the goal of Hollywood. Indeed, it is not even a priority. By placing the political cart before the artistic horse, Hollywood has effectively wrecked storytelling as an art. Their objective is to "awaken" the audience, not to entertain them. Thus art has been sacrificed to propaganda, which explains the appalling fall-off in the quality of most films and television shows nowadays. Anyone who has suffered through some of the franchises I mentioned previously, the ones which have been "fixed," can testify to this. Where are the classic lines of dialog, the blistering performances, the brilliant plot twists? Why does everything feel so flat, forced, stale, derivitive and unimaginative? Why is it so easy to forget the "content" pouring out of studios nowadays a few hours after one bears witness to it? In large part this has to do with the fact that progressives, unlike liberals or center-leftists, seem to have no imagination at all. They are even worse at storytelling than the most hidebound, dull-witted conservative, because they themselves are so blinded by the need to preach, to lecture, to inject, to infect their audience with their worldview that they cannot see that what they are producing is shit. Their own ideology will not permit them to. The power to not draw conclusions from specific evidence is one of the most astounding aspects of wokeism. Again and again we see these reworked I.P. projects fail, and again and again we see the same mental rigidity from the people who created them. And rather than reconsidering their approach, they adopt the double-down strategy, which this only serves as further proof of their incapacity to reason, for as Satayana noted, fanaticism is the process of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim -- and these are fanatics. They have even taken up the dubious and disturbing tactic of actively attacking their own audience as racist, homophobic, ableist, etc., whenever their propaganda is rejected at the box office. In reality the logic of their position demands this otherwise bizarre response: since they are the sole repositors of merit, fault must by necessity lie elsewhere.

Like political correctness, Wokeism is difficult to combat head-on, because anyone who objects to it is immediately labeled a bigot, racist, misogynist, homophone, reactionary, or sell-out. When I originally voiced my thoughts on "The Last Jedi," I hesitated to criticize Kelly Marie Tran, even though she is easily one of the worst actresses I have ever seen on the big screen, because defenders of the film deemed all criticism of her performance either racist or misogynist or both. Indeed, while writing this essay I found myself occasionally wondering if I ought to say that I found Moses Ingram's character of Reva in "Obi Wan Kenobi" a sham, lest it be used against me out of context at some future time. And this sort of anxious second-guessing is not a side-effect of Wokeism: it is the intent. Wokeism is not, as it claims to be, an awareness of racism and societial hypocrisy: it is a preconcieved attempt to hijack art in the name of ideology, and to make sure nothing gets produced which takes on differing views. Probably the most common sentiment expressed by people when discussing everything from "All in the Family" to "The Office" is, “They could never make this today.” And sadly, this is true. The atmosphere of intellectual and creative freedom which is necessary to create a character like Archie Bunker or Michael Scott is gone: it has been deliberately banished from writers' rooms everywhere. Even a mere womanizer of the Hawkeye Pierce type on "M*A*S*H" would be almost unthinkable today. Likewise, if Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy were greenlighted now, it would have been vandalized in precisely the same manner that Bezos' "Rings of Power" is vandalizing Tolkien's legacy as I sit here and write these words.

But what is more sad is that people accept this fact as just that, a fact, unchangeable, rather than an odious temporary condition, like a rash, which ought be treated with all the medicine at our disposal. No one, or almost no one, prefers art which has to run through ideological filters to that which comes directly from the artist's creative mainspring, yet we all accept, explicitly, that the age in which artists were free to make great art is now over. And the reason for this, as I mentioned above, is fear. Political correctness and wokeism represent diabolical genius because they contain within themselves all the self-professed moral high ground. If you are against political correctness, you are for “hatespeech.” If you are against wokeism, you are “slept” – a bigot, a reactionary, a cultural ignoramus. Proponents of both offer no third alternative: either you're with us or against us, on the right side of history or simply evil and stupid. And of course no one wants to be called a racist or a misogynist or “phobic.” So the big public, the broad masses, tacitly accept that while they may wish television, film and comedy were not emasculated by ideology, they keep these wishes largely to themselves, and rather than openly attacking wokeist trash, simply don't watch it. Wokeist movies and TV series have bombed or sputtered out of existence one after the other after the other because audiences rejected the injection of wokeist ideology and forced diversity into storytelling. They reject it not because they are necessarily in disagreement with it politically, but because while political agendas can certainly be part of art, they cannot substitute for storytelling. The Nazis learned this the hard way at the beginning of their rule in Germany, when they made a series of films about their struggle for power. The majority of these were box-office duds. Germans, even ones sympathetic to the Nazis, had almost zero interest in seeing Nazism infiltrate cinema. What they wanted, when they sat down in the theater, was to be entertained, not brainwashed, and the Nazis quickly realized this and, for the rest of their tenure, produced films which, while untheatening to the regime and its ideology, were almost completely free of political content. As vicious and dogmatic as they could be, they quickly came to understood that only good storytelling sold, and good storytelling required a very light political touch. "There must be opinion," propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in a memorandum in 1935. "But opinion does not mean tedium." And here we come back to the crux of the problem.

When one looks at classic television shows of yesteryear, one sees very clearly that left-wing political thought drove the writers almost from beginning to end, yet none of these series suffers in the least from this fact. This is because the writers had the right end of the telescope. They understood that regardless of the messages they were trying to send through their scripts, characterization, dialog and story had to be first-rate and internal logic had to hold, and the opposing view had to have a reasonably fair hearing. The political messaging was secondary to the integrity of the story and the characters moving through it, because a good yarn is a good yarn regardless of its ideology or whether it has any ideology at all. Wokeism up-ends this model and makes narrative agency – plot and character – almost irrelevant. What matters is the message, or as it is sometimes referred to online, THE MESSAGE. And the frightening thing about THE MESSAGE is that it seems to become louder and more strident the more Wokeism fails at the box office. It's as if the arbiters of culture believe that if they simply take over all forms of entertainment and keep spewing out the same content in slightly different packages, audiences will lower their standards and regard thinly-disguised propaganda films as art. And the really terrifying thing about this is that they might succeed. The ability to discriminate between filet mignon and a cold McDonald's hamburger becomes much more difficult of filet mignon no longer exists.

One of the things I loved so much about the original versions of Star Wars, Star Trek and Doctor Who was that they each possessed a clear-cut philosophy which appealed to the decency that exists somewhere in every human being. They stood for the little man against the big man, for the slave against the oppressor, for peace against war, for tolerance and understanding against aggression, and for moral courage -- standing up for what they felt was right -- at all times. The heroes of these series could appeal equally to people of any race, religion or political belief, because the virtues they possessed were timeless and transcended borders and differences of race, ethnicity, sex and national origin. Being largely free of politics per se, they could create terrific drama, because their writers were free to test the viewers' assumptions (whatever they might be) and sometimes present problems which had no clear-cut solution. They could raise moral questions which had no definite answer. They could even imply that both sides could be wrong in a conflict. In short, they could provoke discussion and dialog as well as entertain. And they could do this without being identifiably in sympathy with any wing of political thought. They were truly "inclusive" before that word took on a somewhat more sinister meaning.

Alas, this sort of storytelling is rapidly becoming extinct, because philosophy, which "refers to looking at life in a pragmatic manner and attempting to understand why life is as it is and the principles governing behind it," has been replaced by ideology, "a set of beliefs, doctrines that back a certain social institution or a particular organization." And as various totalitarians have discovered, while it is possible to muzzle artists and to pervert their work into mere propaganda or polemic, it is quite impossible to make anything of truly artistic value after subjecting it to a process of ideological scrutiny. When Jeff Bezos released his "woke" trailer for "The Rings of Power," outraged Tolkien fans trolled the bejeezus out of it, with many writing in the comments section to the effect that in Tolkien's vast and complex universe, it was established from the very beginning that evil could not create anything, it could merely distort and pervert that which already existed. And this is in fact what is happening now. Wokeists, in their clumsy attempts to "fix it," have in fact "broken it." They have managed to hijack and ruin every major and many minor intellectual property they could get their hands on, and seem perfectly content to keep their vandalization campaign going until there is nothing left for them to despoil. But any of these casualties could be endured if only we knew that this was merely a phase, a sort of temporary cultural insanity, like McCarthyism. Unfortunately, "go woke, go broke," while largely correct as an assessment, does not seem to have dissuaded the proponents of wokeism from their objective of telling us what to think, and how to think it.

BOOK REVIEW: "GOETHE: CONVERSATIONS AND ENCOUNTERS"

If I love you, what business is it of yours?

This forgotten little book, edited by David Luke and Robert Pick, is a gem in the almost literal sense -- being both valuable and having many facets. In the former sense, it is a great introduction to one of the greatest writer-artist-philosopher-thinkers of European history; in the latter, it is a treasure-trove of insight and quotation. You may think it a bit scholarly-sounding (or just plain boring) by way of title, but you'd be wrong. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was eminent polymath, one of the great thinker-creators of all history, and a true savant, standing somewhere beyond genius in the power of his thinking and creativity: he was also a very colorful and deeply flawed man who becomes all the more interesting for his vanities and caprices, laid bare here in this editorially-assembled collection of firsthand encounters with the man as recorded by various friends, admirers, relations, rivals, acquaintances, colleagues, and enemies. Presented in chronological format, they trace Goethe from his preciocious childhood in which he embodied the German concept of the Wunderkind, all the way to his deathbed.

To understand the range of Goethe's interests, it's worth noting that one of his least-known efforts is still held in awe 214 years after it was published: THEORY OF COLORS (1810) "disputed the Newtonian view of the subject and formulated a psychological and philosophical account of the way we actually experience color as a phenomenon." [1] Werner Heisenberg later commented, "Goethe’s colour theory has in many ways borne fruit in art, physiology and aesthetics," while noting that Sir Isaac Newton's work was the more influential, being more scientific in nature. This is undoubtedly true, but rather misses the point that even when acting as a scientist, Goethe's view of life was not really scientific, but consisted of brilliant "intuitive schema" which spoke more to those very arenas of which Heisenberg referred -- art, physiology, aesthetics. Goethe's was not only a brilliant but a profoundly restless and unconventional mind, and a man who seems to have deeply influenced many other great men of his era: "His poems were set to music by many composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler." [3]

The author of FAUST was born in 1749 and lived until 1832, and in that time numbered among friends and acquaintances such people as Mozart and Napoleon, Mendelssohn, Schopenhauer and Schiller, not to mention innumerable politicians, artists, poets, and noblemen from all over Europe, including Talleyrand and Lord Byron. Holding court at his estate in Weimar, he frequently regaled visitors with his thoughts on every aspect of life, and it is these conversations which make up the book -- a selection of Goethe's views on everything from art and politics to music and science; religion, immortality, writing, poetry, science, the creative process, critical acclaim...you name it. And this is what makes the book valuable, for Goethe, while eccentric and often moody, was an immensely wise and quotable man with a lot of insight. I marked down literally dozens of quotations which I found inspiring, arresting, or simply too provocative to forget:


"When a writer can find no more suitable development for his theme, he kills his hero."

"Each man should sacrifice himself to his own conviction."

"Maximum possibilities are realized if the impossible is demanded."

"A monk is a refugee from life; a man buried alive."

"The essential thing is to love truth and to be receptive when one finds it."

"At least there is some character in hatred."

Somme of the anecdotes are just amazing -- the time, for example, when a young Felix Mendelssohn was at his house, and Goethe handed him some sheet music to play for the guests...music which turned out to be hand-written original drafts by Mozart and Beethoven. Goethe pointed out that Beethoven's "looked as if they'd been written with a broom dipped in ink" while Mozart's were picture-perfect, lacking even a single correction, as if dictated directly by God. That would make a great scene in a movie (provided Milos Forman directed it, of course). The point is that in an age very heavy on technology and very light on wisdom, GOETHE: CONVERSATIONS AND ENCOUNTERS is wisdom-heavy...without being a heavy read. I must emphasize this because you couldn't be blamed if you felt your eyeballs hardening just reading the title. I assure you, like most oral histories it moves very swiftly, interweaving somber and in some cases tragic moments with extremely funny, deeply thought-provoking conversations about every aspect of life. Goethe could be a wonderful and considerate man, or an arrogant, cold-hearted jerk, and seems to have been both refreshed and exhausted by the regard in which he was held. Some of this comes off in the different ways he handled, or was handled, by those who met him.

In closing I should admit I knew almost nothing about Goethe when I decided, based on a glimpse of what was inside, that I would read through it, and while this selection of conversations and encounters is by no means a biography, and only touches glancingly on most of his diplomatic career, published works and scientific studies, it is a very excellent portrait of the man himself and his mental processes...a man who was one of the towering artistic and intellectual figures of the 19th century, but almost unknown in America except by a handful of scholars.

SECOND THOUGHTS ON 70s DISASTER MOVIES

Disaster movies do us the psychological service of forcing a quick march through the worst that could happen. At the end we see that you win a few, you lose a few, some cars are up in trees, and only the most attractive of the young people have survived.

I recently completed a highly enjoyable marathon of 70s-era disaster movies. For those of you who weren't around for Hollywood's "disaster craze," let me tell you, it was something. For years, audiences drank thirstily, almost insatiably, from a well of spectacular, cinematic destruction. In modern times the closest analogs would be the vampire or zombie crazes of the last twenty-five years. Like all crazes, it eventually burned out, but while the mayhem was in swing it was highly entertaining.

Disaster movies were what Charlton Heston, who starred in a number of them, referred to as "stories of an event." What he meant was that the script's did not allow for a great deal of character development, but rather thrust swiftly-developed (or totally undeveloped) characters into extraordinary situations, and drew its entertainment value from watching how they coped with the catastrophe. Suspense was maintained by killing enough of them that there was always doubt as to who would live to the final credits: enertainment was provided by watching things crash, explode, burn or otherwise meet doom in spectacular fashion.

A simple search for films of this type from that era yielded about 30 results, of which I myself would eliminate a small number for being dystopian or post-apocalyptic in character, such as DAMNATION ALLEY and Heston's OMEGA MAN. I would also a trim a few which are plainly horror movies though they certainly present themselves as disasters: DAWN OF THE DEAD, for example. And of course there were a few I did not see or want to because of appallingly bad film quality or reviews (or both). I was left with fourteen films, three of which I managed to catch in the theater (at a triple feature at the Aero in Santa Monica).

The China Syndrome - One of the better actual movies on this list, and only marginally a disaster movie in the sense that it threatens catastrophe without bringing it, TCS is a virulently anti-nuclear story with a good script and fine actors delivering very good performances. Jack Lemmon plays a high-strung worker at a California nuclear plant so obsessed with what he believes are sloppy safety procedures that he ends up holding the reactor hostage.

Gray Lady Down - The aformentioned Chuck Heston stars in this gruesome flick about a nuclear submarine, the Gray Lady, which is accidentally rammed by a freighter and promptly sinks to the bottom of the ocean, necessitating a daring undersea rescue by an experimental craft skippered by David Carradine. As a kid I was traumatized by some of the drowning scenes, which are graphically depicted. While hardly the greatest movie ever made, it's pretty suspenseful and heavy with acting talent.

Kingdom of the Spiders - While KINGDOM is really a monster movie, it's sufficiently massive in scale to qualify as a disaster film. William Shatner is a rugged rural vet brought in to investigate some mysterious animal deaths, only to discover they were caused by a mutated strain of poisonous desert tarantula which is fast spreading toward the nearby town. I got a big kick out of this movie, which develops some very likeable characters and puts them through absolute hell. The ending is a real shocker.

The Towering Inferno - This is probably the acme of diaster movies, a "cast of thousands" epic which sees Paul Newman as the harassed architecht of a mega-skyscraper on the West Coast who discovers, too late, that wicked Richard Chamberlain has cut so many corners the building is nothing but a vast deathtrap. And indeed, when the inevitable fire breaks out, it slaughters so many famous actors you'll quickly remember that these folk really do love a good death scene. This is a tremendously fun movie, which features everyone from from Steve McQueen to O.J. Simpson.

The Swarm - Many consider this movie to be one of the worst of all time. This is nonsense. THE SWARM is indeed utter rubbish, but it is also a great deal of fun. The moronic premise is that a swarm of African killer bees terrorize America, causing far more destruction than you would believe possible, including a nuclear explosion. Michael Caine leads a star-laden cast in this piece of laughable nonsense, which kills most of the characters with an abandon bordering on homicidal mania. You'll never look at bees the same way again.

Two Minute Warning - Charlton Heston is once again at the helm in this surprisingly excellent thriller about a mysterious gunman who sets up shop at a pro football game in Los Angeles, and the cops (Heston and John Cassavettes) who try and stop him before he can initiate a massacre. What distinguishes this film aside from its excellent cast, which includes Jack Klugman playing a desperate bookie with a bad combover, is that the cops know exactly where the gunman is but can't quite get to him, and have to make a series of tough moral decisions while the clueless characters in the crowd go about their soon-to-be-disrupted business.

Juggernaut - This forgotten gem is a first-rate British thriller with an excellent cast, including Richard Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Omar Sharif, Ian Holm, Freddie Jones, Julian Glover, Jack Watson, Ian Holm, and Simon McCorkindale, most of whom were at the near-beginnings of their careers. It's about a disgruntled bomb expert code named Juggernaut who remote-hijacks a cruise ship plying the stormy North Atlantic, and the bomb disposal expert flown in to try and his plan. Harris plays this disposal expert as a cocky, know-it-all bastard with nerves of steel who comes to the horrible conclusion, midway through the movie, that the hijacker knows more about blowing up bombs he does about defusing them, and begins to fall apart at the seams. The suspense is murderous and the performances superb and often touching, especially Roy Kinnear as the ship's social director, who tries to keep morale up on the possibly doomed ship by any means necessary. And the "which wire do I clip?" scene at the end is a masterpiece.

The Cassandra Crossing - This movie has one hell of an opening, and if it had maintained that breakneck pace it might have been a damn good film. Alas, THE CASSANDRA CROSSING, though full of talent (as all of these movies are), is a weird, rambling, periodically boring tale about a European passenger train which picks up a terrorist infected by a virulent form of man-made plague. The government decides the train ought to be shunted over the nearest cliff rather than risk a pandemic, placing Richard Harris, Sophia Loren, a young Martin Sheen and the ubiquitous O.J. Simpson in very grave peril. I rather enjoyed Bert Lancaster's performance as the weary American general who struggles with the morality of sacrificing the few to save the many, but this film sorely needed a better editor. Way too much of nothing happens for way too long, and by the time something does, it's hard to care.

The Poseidon Adventure - This movie is a nasty piece of work, and all the more pleasurable because of it. All disaster flicks roll the dice by trying to introduce a large number of characters in the shortest possible time, and then hoping we care if any of them survive. THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE gets around this by smartly employing actors like Gene Hackman, who could play a week-old tomato and still be riveting. The Poseidon is a cruise ship traveling the Mediterranean which is capsized by a rogue wave on New Year's Eve: the few survivors, led by Hackman, are trapped on the sinking, upside-down vessel and must try to reverse-engineer an escape through fire, water, and their own fear. A punishing film, but a good one.

Earthquake - Chuck Heston once again takes the lead in this highly fractured, silly, but rather enjoyable exercise in massive destruction, which was largely shot in my old backyard of Burbank-Toloca Lake, and depicts Los Angeles getting positively assholed by The Big One, a superquake that first levels, and then floods, much of the city. Victoria Principal, pre-DALLAS fame, struts around in superhuman gorgeousness, while Marjoe Gortner chills as a psycho whose National Guard duties give him ample means to get even with some neighborhood bullies. Heston must ultimately decide between saving his alcoholic shrew wife played by Ava Gardner, or the young babe Geneviève Bujold, who wants to run away with him. One thing I'll give this messy movie is the relentless way it pummels the characters with fresh disasters.

Airport - Mocked mercilessly by satirical takes like AIRPLANE, AIRPORT was also reviled by its star, Burt Lancaster, who hated it so much he trashed it at every opportunity for the rest of his life...though I'm pretty sure he cashed his paycheck. But this is a quite enjoyable and effective thriller with more than a cup of soap opera thrown in for good measure. The plot, such as it is, revolves around a mad bomber who hijacks an airliner which is already headed for trouble due to a massive snowstorm sweeping over the Midwest. One reviewer described it as "a blizzard, a bomb, and a stowaway" and that's accurate enough, but it's still great fun.

Airport '75 - A surprisingly enjoyable sequel to the original 1970 flick, "'75" features -- you guessed it -- Chuck Heston, as a hotshot pilot who has a hell of a problem on his hands. See, an airliner chock full of innocent people has been rammed by private plane in midair, killing the airliner's pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer, but not downing the plane. From his office down below, Heston must find a way to get the airliner out of the clouds and safely on the tarmac without a crew, and without much of an instrument panel, and with a liner full of panicked passengers. It's a helluva problem, and some very ingenuous means are used to solve it.

Airport '77 - You'd think the second sequel to a movie hated by its own star would be absolutely terrible, but marshaling a lot of talent, including Jack Lemmon and Jimmy Stewart, actually gets this sucker off the ground...and into the ocean! Yep, the latest disaster to strike a flying machine is that it crashes at sea and sinks to the bottom, while somehow retaining (mostly) watertight integrity, oxygen, and electricity. A rescue operation is naturally initiated, but this being a disaster movie a lot of people are going to die anyway, except George Kennedy, of course, who is in all the AIRPORT films and always comes out unharmed.

Concorde: Airport '79 -- This lengthy final installment was a crass attempt to kick a few last coins out of the exhausted pinata that was the disaster genre, and the AIRPORT franchise generally, which by this time was a pastiche of itself. I remember watching it on TV with my older brother when it aired, and we had great fun mocking the dumb plot, trash effects and campy writing, so I guess we enjoyed ourselves after all. The main appeal was crusty old George Kennedy, who seems to have showed up mainly because he wanted 100% attendance in the franchise. Or possibly to pay a gambling debt. According to Wikipedia: "It is also listed in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson's book The Official Razzie Movie Guide as one of The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made." It's about a crooked arms dealer's attempts to blast the Concorde jet from the sky to rid himself of one of its passengers, a bit of overkill if ever there was. This oaf expends so much money and effort trying to annihilate the feckless news reporter that he begins to resemble Wylie E. Coyote, but fuck it, nobody watches the fourth movie in a disaster franchise for the plot.

Meteor - "It's five miles wide and it's coming this way!" If ever a tag line invited ridicule, this was it. The worst film on this list by some distance, far worse than THE SWARM or CONCORDE could ever hope to be, is METEOR, a cinematic atrocity that should be erased from human memory. The movie's unfortunate star, Sean Connery, later apologized for its existence by noting that, "The film's success depended very heavily on its special effects. When I saw the final cut I was appalled. Shit flying around instead of meteors." Shit is right. METEOR is about a gigantic space rock which threatens to destroy the Earth, but unfortunately does not, at least not before it stupefies its audience via two hours of pointless dialog (in several languages, no less), time-consuming sub-plots that go nowhere, fake-looking disaster scenes randomly distributed throughout the movie, and some of the worst acting by the best actors you'll ever see: Martin Landau's performance is so bad I burst out laughing. But there is nothing funny about this miserable chunk of space shit. The last half an hour actually features the entire cast slogging through mud, and that is exactly what watching this movie is like. Fuck this film. Seriously, fuck it.

So much for the movies themselves, most of which I found quite engaging, if often somewhat mindless and certainly very repetitious in construction and theme. Now comes the important question, one which should concern any reader or teller of tales: what is the appeal of the disaster story? They lack well-drawn characters, employ a fractured narrative, and the antagonist is often a literal force of nature rather than a person: even when the adversary is human, he tends to be a mere catalyst for events. So again I ask: what's the appeal?

In his rambling but brilliant book DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King analyzed not only what he felt made horror work as a genre of fiction and film, but also why people enjoyed being scared. In his now-famous essay which has retroactively been dubbed "Keep the Gators Fed," he explained the need many feed to toss red meat to the beasts within themselves, a thesis I fully support; in a different part of the book, however, he tackled THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, a film he described as an economic horror movie, in which the supernatural elements pale, in King's mind, to the financial disaster the accursed house presents its crumbling hero and his family. The audience is presented with a slow-motion act of destruction, and cannot look away, in large part because the movie articulates, in a stylized way, their own fears about economic ruin. Well, in a disaster film we get plenty of destruction and ruin, and very little slow motion. Indeed, there is a sacrificial quality to these stories: the setting is always presented as either beautiful, idyllic, luxurious or high-tech; something safe, something which stands for human aesthetics or genius; and then it is thoroughly and cruelly sacrificed, like a gorgeous virgin to dark, bloodthirsty gods. We satisfy the beasts within by feeding them freezers full of red meat: toppling buildings, crashing aeroplanes, derailing trains, out of control fires, raging whirlwinds, towering waves, massive asteroid impacts, swarms of killer insects. At the same time we offer them the classic car-wreck-as-entertainment, the spectacle provided by someone else's misfortune. The homey small town, the famous big city, the cozy mountain resort or plush luxury liner, all familiar to the audience and all regarded as more or less safe, are suddenly visited by Biblical plague. We know many of the people involved are going to die, but not all of them, and that at the end, while the physical destruction may be complete, the message will be the same in every film: humanity survives.

The disaster craze more-or-less ended with the seventies themselves. Oh, disaster movies were still made here and there, but the public's appetite for them had finally been satiated: a new obsession was required and, I suppose, found. It was not until computer generated animation became a workable prospect in the early-mid 90s that we began to see a modest renewal of interest in the genre with movies like TWISTER (one could certainly argue that JURASSIC PARK and its sequels fall into this category). And this is the way of Hollywood, and literary, crazes. The public is insatiable until it isn't. That however in unimportant. What interests me is the Why of things, and what our passion for tales like this says about the human race is intensely interesting, if at times quite depressing, but I have come to understand it. We live in a civilized society. Climate changes and proximity to geological fault lines notwithstanding, the ordinary Westerner, whether he is a German or a Spaniard, a Canadian or a New Zealander, lives a life of ease and comfort. Even the dirt-poor, and even the homeless, live comparably better in some ways than most of our ancient ancestors -- or even many of our grandparents five generations back. Nor do most of us interact with nature or wildness in any fashion which is not at least partially controlled and therefore safe. In short, the very things we were designed to do by virtue of evolution and genetics -- to live in the raw, at the mercy of the elements, constantly on the move, constantly fleeing danger or facing it head-on -- are the things we seldom or never actually experience in our lives. Our ancestors were weaned on cataclysms: floods, fires, famines, droughts, plagues, wars. We were weaned on sugar, saturated fats and air conditioning. And let's face it, sometimes even the most optimistic of us, even the happiest-go-lucky sumbitch out there, the human champagne type who sees the glass as entirely full even when the glass is laying shattered upon the ground, will be stuck in shit-impacted gridlock on the 405 freeway on a hot, hazy, ozone-stinking morning, look at the shimmer of downtown through the haze, listen to the doom report on the radio, think about all the bills they have to pay and how little they enjoy their job, and say, "What a fucking mess we've made of this world." And because this is so, because so many of us are merely viewed as consumers, as drones, as soulless digits whose purpose is to pay taxes for 50 years and then die quietly out of sight when our time comes, it's natural for us to long for our civilization, so-called, to be blown to bits. Just smashed all to fiery fragments. A clean sweep to free us from the rat race, the 9 - 5, the boss, the taxman, the doomscroll. In fact, if one looks at the literature of the last century and beyond, it is easy enough to see how this feeling has obtained as long as people have been bound by the accident of birth to spend their lives in coal mines, factories, hardscrabble farms, and lonely dead-end jobs without prospect of excitement or release. How many men have willingly marched off to war, have risked crippling injury, mutilation, and death, simply to get the hell away from the endless, soul-starving drudgery of "civilization?" Some maintain that war itself is a sort of fever-reaction to civilization itself, that war releases the frantic energies trapped by a safe if grinding, dull, and adventure-free existence which is at odds with our wild and violent nature. I certainly believe this at least to an extent, and I believe that things like horror and disaster stories not only trigger our seldom-invoked but hardwired fight-or-flight responses, they also appeal to our sense of morbid curiosity. One slows down passing the car wreck to see the spectacle, but also to experience a feeling of relief that "at least it wasn't me." Not a very noble thing, but mankind was not meant to be inherently noble. He was meant to survive, and disaster movies are ultimately about survival. They allow us a cathartic but vicarious release of that self-same energy that finds very little other release in our neatly-kept, 21st century lives. Because, after all, we really don't want our civilization to die. We're far too addicted to its comforts. But we dislike it enough to want to see it burned in effigy, and disaster movies provide this precise service...without depriving us of our air conditioning.