E.R. Torre's Blog, page 98

After Irma

Last time I posted, on September 7th, we were waiting for Hurricane Irma.  Today, September 12th, we’re done.

The hurricane, as of September 7th, looked like it might go to our east.  However, then the models changed and, if you’ve ever had to put up with that sort of things, you’re in a constant state of panic as the predictive “cone” starts to move.

In my case, the cone shifted toward us, and for a while there it looked like we might get a direct hit.  Luckily for us, and not so luckily for others, the cone kept shifting and soon the models were predicting it would go to our west rather than east.

And that’s what it did, hitting the lower keys before moving north towards Marco Island, Naples, and, eventually, Tampa Bay and parts even further north.

Though we weren’t hit by the eye wall, Irma was a big enough beast that we were within its northeast quadrant, the second deadliest section of a hurricane, and experienced many, many, many hours of hurricane gusts, though thankfully they weren’t sustained.

Notheless, when it was done, we were out of power (still are) and found considerable tree damage around us.

But in the end and without trying to sound overly dramatic, we’re alive.  We survived.  The power will eventually come back.  The remains of the broken trees will be cleared up and the streets will be passable.  We’ll be back to where we all were before and, with any luck, Irma (and, for that matter, Harvey) will be one of those once in a lifetime hurricanes no one alive today will ever have to face again.

Waiting for Irma…

It’s hard not to be scared.  Anyone in their right mind should be.

Irma is a monster storm and she will affect us, arriving in our area in the next 48 hours or so.

The only question is just how “bad” it is remains up in the air.

To everyone around these parts, good luck and keep safe.

To those who already faced her, my greatest sympathies and hopes for the future.

Food for thought…

Over at slate.com I found this absolutely fascinating article by Rachel Withers regarding Disneyland’s Tomorrowland and how this once proud icon of future thinking has become antiquated and even sold for its nostalgia rather than forward thinking, as originally envisioned by Walt Disney.

The article’s title is brief and apropo given the subject matter:

Yesterdayland

I know I’ve presented plenty of articles and their links before, but this is one truly worth checking out.

Even if you’re like me and not a huge fan of the Disney Parks (sorry, can’t handle the crowds, heat, and the considerable expense), this article offers an intriguing look at the thinking Walt Disney had behind Tomorrowland and, eventually, EPCOT, and how those visions have changed over time and following his passing in 1966.

At the risk of giving away too much, Ms. Withers’ thesis is a fascinating one, that it is impossible to have a park focused on forward technology.  She rightly notes that the “future” is not really all that far away, and what can be viewed as futuristic when set up in year X becomes antiquated or even hopelessly wrong by year Y.

What’s even more fascinating is Ms. Withers’ analysis of the public’s changing views of the future.  There was once an undeniable optimism regarding the future and the technologies to come.  Though she doesn’t make the connection, the New York World’s Fair of 1939 and 1940 were a big influence on Walt Disney and his generation.  Within that fair, which unfortunately had to be shut down because of the coming World War, the pavilions were odes to the fantastic… to the things that were to come and would make our lives so much better.

(An aside: I was never all that close to my wife’s Grandparents.  Don’t get me wrong, they were very nice people but by the time I got to know them they were quite old and there didn’t seem to be much a youngster like me and them could relate to other than polite and often superficial conversation.  The years passed, I married their granddaughter, and they got older and older.  Soon enough they both passed away.  Years afterwards, when her family had a get together, one of her cousins played a slideshow of photographs she created involving them.  As I watched the images pass, first of them as children and then growing up and then their wedding, I was floored when the following few images showed the then youthful grandparents standing near the famous 1939/40 New York World’s Fair Trylon and Perisphere!

There were perhaps three or four photographs of them at different parts of the park, including -if memory serves- one of them next to a futuristic looking train.  Until that moment I didn’t know they had spent their honeymoon at that World’s Fair and I was crushed by the fact that I could have gotten first hand accounts of something I consider one of the more fascinating things of the early 20th Century… that’s how much I love reading about the 1039/40 Worlds’ Fair!  A lesson to the wise: Talk to people.  Have conversations.  You may be surprised by what you learn.  And certainly do so before its too late)

Getting back to the Tomorrowland article and our current view of the future, Ms. Withers -correctly, I feel- argues that today we’re far more pessimistic regarding the future and view it in terms of dystopia rather than utopia and that, to some extent, may be why there is little interest in doing a more forward thinking Tomorrowland in line with what Mr. Disney had in mind.

From her article and excuse me for giving away it’s punchline:

Tech doesn’t exactly wow us like it used to—after all, it’s now in our homes, in our cars, even in our pockets. Touristing in a technological wonderland would probably feel underwhelming, considering we’re basically already in one. And why would anyone want to immerse themselves in the future? Popular imagination holds that today’s future will be a dystopia, not a utopia. In this age of climate-change doom and job-killing automation, of “unplugging” and “logging off,” perhaps the future is no longer a place we want to go, no longer the land of exciting promise, of “hopes and dreams.” In the 1950s, the future was an inviting fantasy, something to gaze towards, to marvel at, to reach for. Now Walt’s tomorrow is here … and well, we’re drowning in it.

A grim but, sadly, sanguine argument, IMHO.

Here we go again…

At one point in time I wanted to write a novel set in Miami.  It was meant to be a first person… well… I won’t get into the plot because, frankly, there wasn’t much of one, though I was inclined to go towards it being a detective/mystery/thriller-type thing.

This was going to be the first line of the book:

I hate Miami in the summer.

Nothing earth-shattering, just a common complaint I have of being in Miami and having to live through its brutal summers.

First, you deal with the twin body slams of heat and humidity.  It is awful to go outside. It’s awful to drive in your car even with your AC on full.  Inevitably, I leave the car with my back all wet from sweat.

And then there’s hurricane season.

While people are very understandably concerned about what happened in Texas with Hurricane Harvey, we around these parts are keeping a weary eye on the next named storm, Irma, which is already very strong and projected to get far stronger.

At this moment, when you head over to the National Hurricane Center’s website, its projected path takes it right to South Florida’s footstep by very late in this coming week.

But here’s the thing: The projections beyond three days are very much up in the air, something nervous people like myself have to repeat to ourselves constantly.  After all, when watching the regular weather predictions, anything beyond two days from the current date, its been my experience, is a crap shoot (or, to put it another way, I recall many times seeing/hearing that in two/three days we would have plenty of rain and the day comes and its sunny and hot?!  Hell, there have been predictions for the next day which have proven almost comically wrong).

Anyway, so too it is with Hurricane predictions, though clearly one needs to pay far more attention to them as they represent a threat not only to property, but also to one’s life.  Nonetheless, the early models took the storm north and then east, potentially threatening the Carolinas or, best case scenario, nobody at all.

This was only two days ago.

Now, these same predictions are taking the storm, potentially, over Cuba before making a northwardly turn which will either take it straight up Florida’s center, perhaps a little to the west (hugging the coast) and maybe even a little to the east.

Here’s the latest (as of 11 AM) path estimate…

Again, that’s this moment’s view.

Only tonight will Florida fall into the far ends of the -as we sardonically call it- “cone of death”.  By then, the track might be even more southern/westernly, which seems to be the way the track has been adjusting itself over the past couple of days.

And who knows, the track might turn again, heading more north and to the east and we might well be in the target.

It’s maddening.  It’s heart-stopping.

And there’s nothing anyone living here can do about it.

I hate Miami in the summer.

Sketchin’ 23 & 24

The past few days I’ve had Batman on my mind, or should I say a couple of the people around him…

First up is Heath Ledger’s Joker from the 2008 Christopher Nolan directed film The Dark Knight, the second film of his Batman trilogy and the film many consider the best of the lot…

[image error]I thought that came out pretty good, though I impressed myself even more with my follow-up…

Back in 1997 director Joel Schumacher followed up his Batman Forever with the much lambasted Batman and Robin.  I found it so curious people essentially gave Batman Forever (featuring Val Kilmer in the Bruce Wayne/Batman role) a pass and hated, hated, hated Batman and Robin (George Clooney’s sole outing as the Dark Knight) so much.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t believe Batman and Robin is a great film by any stretch of the imagination.  But it was, IMHO, roughly on the same level of Batman Forever… a theatrical big budget version of the 1960’s campy Batman TV show.  As such, it fascinates me how much people can hate one and essentially have little to no strong opinion of the other.

Anyway, Batman and Robin featured the introduction of the character of Batgirl and they picked a mighty fine actress to play the role in Alicia Silverstone.  After wowing audiences with her sexy -and sometimes deadly!- youthful characters both in film and music videos, Batman and Robin would be perhaps her last big hurrah in terms of youthful movie roles.

In a way its too bad… I thought she made a smashing Batgirl, even if the film around her wasn’t very good.

So here’s to you.  Alicia Silverstone as Barbara Wilson (yeah, yeah, in the comics its Barbara Gordon, the daughter of Commissioner Gordon)… aka The Batgirl!

[image error]

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)… some thoughts

We’re at the (gulp) 40th Anniversary of the release of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a new, cleaned up version of the film is about to be released in honor of that anniversary to theatres.

CEOT3K was Mr. Spielberg’s follow up to the incredible hit Jaws (1975).  It was another hit movie and further cemented his reputation as a director whose works audiences were eager to see.

I haven’t seen the film in full since probably some time in the late 1970’s or very early 1980’s, but while I appreciate the way Mr. Spielberg so skillfully told his story and the hopeful tone the movie had at the end regarding our first encounter with aliens… there was always something about it that turned me off.

That something is the main character of the film, Roy Neary (, returning to Mr. Spielberg’s world after Jaws).

Neary is a character who, after chasing a UFO down a highway, finds he has some kind of strange, never quite explained psychic link to the aliens.  Following this “close encounter” with them, he becomes so focused on actually meeting them that he does increasingly strange and odd -and destructive- things around his house (I won’t go into too many spoilers for those who haven’t seen the film).  These actions draw the ire and bewilderment of his wife, who eventually cannot take his bizarre actions and grabs their three children and leaves him.

That’s right: The good guy of the movie is a man who becomes so self-involved in his mania that he allows his wife to take his three children and abandon him.

Mr. Spielberg himself, again if memory serves, stated that when he made CEOT3K, he was a young, single man without kids and that later on, after having children of his own, realized the perspective presented with regard to Neary would likely have been very different had he made the film later on versus in 1977.

But the facts are the facts and we have the Neary we’ve got and for me, his character is really hard to root for.

One can (and I did) look at Neary as a pathetic person who couldn’t accept being an adult, a Peter Pan-like figure who wanted so desperately to escape into his fantasy world of aliens while the ordinary, grinding “real world” brought him down.  But he kept fighting for that fantasy world and eventually does enough stupid shit to unload all those who keep him down, including his wife and children, so that he can (selfishly) escape to the stars.

Even though I myself was a very young man when I originally saw the film (certainly younger than Mr. Spielberg), I found his character weird and, frankly, more than a little disturbing, especially given how he loses his wife and kids.  Especially his poor kids!

Again, I haven’t seen the film in full since way back near the time it was originally released but do have it on BluRay.

Maybe seeing it again I might change my opinion of Neary and what I feel is the selfish nature of his character.

Who knows.

Free Fire (2016) a (mildly) belated review

Cult director co/writer and his co/writer (and spouse) Amy Jump are the brains behind 2016’s Free Fire, a dark comedy/action film that features a very impressive cast… and a sadly underdeveloped story.

I’m going to be blunt here: I was hoping for much more in this film than what I got.

The story goes like this: Back in 1978 (why set the film in this year?  Easy, because it was before the advent of cell phones.  If the film were set in the present and cell phones existed, this story would be done very quickly) a group of individuals get together in an abandoned factory for a gun sale.  Things go sideways quick and the various members of the cast are soon engaged in an extended gunfight which plays out for perhaps 3/4ths of the film.

I’ll get into SPOILERS in a moment but here are the things I liked about the film:

, an actor whose appearances I’ve found not all that memorable (my general experience is, and I don’t claim to have seen all his various roles, he’s been cast too many times as the big, quiet -and boring- type), is quite good as the somewhat arrogant, pot smoking intermediary who gives off vibes of being quite dangerous beneath it all.  But is he?

is an actor who can be somewhat… overwhelming… at times but here his arrogance and silliness serve him well.

, another actor with a very long list of roles, is obstensibly the hero of the piece, an IRA man who is interested in purchasing weapons and who has an eye for…

, Oscar winning actress plays a woman of mystery here, an intermediary for the IRA fellows who gets caught in the resulting crossfire.  Or does she?

These are the four roles I found most intriguing in this film but, truthfully, just about everyone is good -or, more properly, bad– in their individual roles but the biggest problem this feature has is that after everything is set up, there just isn’t all that much of a second act.  The characters attack and counterattack and after a while it feels repetitious and we’re dealing with diminishing returns.

Based on that, I can’t recommend Free Fire.  If you’re curious, here’s the movie’s trailer and, afterwards, I’m going to get into a more SPOILERY focus on one of the film’s elements leading to its conclusion…

As mentioned, we’re now going to get into…

SPOILERS!!!!

Still here?  You’ve been warned!

As a writer, I’m always interested in all things story and Free Fire was no exception.

If there was something that kept me going on with it, even after feeling the film was running out of steam, was where it was going.  The fact is that while I ultimately can’t recommend the film, I could see that the people behind it were certainly trying to do something interesting.

The film isn’t “just” a silly shoot out.  It’s an attempt at making a black comedy with the action elements.  Sadly, in the end there wasn’t enough “there” there for me to like it, but I was still intrigued as to where it was going.

Which is where, from a writer’s standpoint, the film somewhat misfired because the movie’s conclusion was set up only minutes from the movie’s actual conclusion.

Let me explain: I kinda knew the film would feature the slow deaths of the many characters within it.  I wondered who would survive to the end and, when we got to the “last three”, two of the characters got together and one of them states something to the effect of: “Let’s go, the police will be here in fifteen minutes”.

Then, the final of the three characters emerges, takes out the other two, and tries to get away with the money intended to pay for the guns.  However, as this person is heading to the exit, the lights from police cars is seen pouring from under the door of the factory.  The final survivor is caught.

Allow me to humbly point out: THIS IS STUPID.

Why, suddenly, are the police an issue… other than to provide closure to the film?

Free Fire starts with the various characters going into the abandoned factory and, because this is a gun purchase, they have to check the merchandise.  Therefore, before any monies are exchanged, the buyer gets to try out one of the weapons he’s interested in buying.

I assumed at that point in the film they chose this abandoned factory for the purchase because any gunfire -specifically the gunfire from the buyer examining the merchandise- would be muffled and therefore the police would not be called to the area.

What the movie needed was AT THIS POINT IN TIME to explain the situation with the police.

Have one of the characters say: “Look, take your shots quick.  We’re pretty muffled for sound here but you never know if someone out there might hear them and call the cops.”

THAT’S IT!

With that single line and, even more importantly, at that point in time, the film’s makers don’t have to put the awkward bit of dialogue at the tail end of the film -and moments before its actual ending- to clue us in on how the film will end.  Instead of the character suddenly pointing out the police will be there in 15 minutes, this same character would then say something to the effect of: “We really need to go.  This place muffles plenty of sound but with this much gunfire someone out there must have heard something.   It would be a miracle if the cops weren’t on their way right now.”

I know, I know.  A silly little peeve but its there, nonetheless, for me.

Now that I’ve mentioned this writerly peeve, let me give the film some love:  I really like how they subtly laid down information regarding Brie Larson’s character.  There are at least two bits of dialogue, both given by her and one of which is included in the above trailer, that hint to what she’s all about.

I enjoyed that!

Corrosive Knights, a 8/30/17 update

Before I get to the update, a story presented on theguardian.com and written by Stephanie Convery:

Terry Pratchett’s unfinished novels destroyed by a steamroller

The article’s title is self-explanatory.  The late author/humorist Terry Pratchett, who died in 2015, wanted his unfinished works steamrolled so they took what one has to assume were the hard drives of his computer and did just that.

A shame, I must say.

While much of my “bits and pieces” are pretty crappy and not worth printing, on the other hand they are bits and pieces I’ve worked on and given some of my time to.  Maybe one day people will be curious to see all my stuff and, in that case, I’m not adverse to having it available to be seen… though I doubt at this time you’ll find a large amount worthy of “discovery”.

Which is a good segue to my Corrosive Knights series and the progress I’m making on book #7, the latest in the series.

With regard to that, there’s the proverbial good news, bad news, and good news here…

I’ve mentioned before Book #7 was intended to conclude the series’ main story, though I’ve been hasty to add that there was going to be a book #8 which would present an “epilogue”.

Well, things might be changing.

Without getting into any spoilers, Book #7 was always intended to present a “two part” story which dovetails in the end before reaching the conclusion.

So, the first bit of Good News: Instead of concluding the main story with Book #7, I’m now thinking it might be better to present the two stories separately, ie have a Book #7a and a Book #7b.  Or, to be less anal about these things, have a book #7, follow it up with Book #8 -no longer the epilogue story I was planning-, and end it all with that epilogue story as Book #9.

In other words, the Corrosive Knights series, to all those fans out there of the books, may wind up being one book longer than I intended.

The Bad News is that if I go this way, it means there’s a lot of work for me to do on what might be the “new” Book #8.  It will no longer be part of a book and, being its own full novel I feel it has to be “novel length” which means it clocks in at the 100,000 word area.

Which puts me in a bit of a quandary.  The first part of the story is essentially written up (It already reached the 100,000+ range).  It needs considerable editing/cleaning, for sure, but I was holding off on doing this and instead focused on the second part of the novel’s story.

Now, if I decide to let that second part be used in its own novel, it means I could jump back to that first part of the story and finish it up and get it released relatively quickly.

However…

Here’s the thing, I’m in something of a “groove” with this second part of the story and I’m loathe to switch gears and move away from what I’m currently doing.

Let me be crystal clear here: I’m dying to get the book out but writing is a difficult thing for me.  Mostly its because I’m very, very hard on myself.  I don’t want to create something that is at best average and/or predictable.  I pride myself on releasing stories that, I hope, surprise and engage readers.

To do that, I get into this OCD-like state where I’m thinking about the work I’m currently doing during almost all my waking moments.

I know this sounds like exaggeration, but I assure you this is the case.

For me new, interesting ideas can suddenly pop up.  I could be walking the dog or driving to get some crappy fast food or sitting on the toilet or taking a shower and, just like that, it hits me.  Most other times I’m thinking about where I’m currently at and how to write the latest chapter.  Either that or rewrite it and make it as good as I can get it.

The bottom line is this:

If I have enough material to make a second novel out of that second story (something which is still not a done deal), it means the concluding two books of this series will take a little longer to be released than I was hoping.

My hope was to release this last book by late this year or early next year but, if we do have two final books, I have a lot of work to do and that will take me through the end of the year.

At least.

And then, I have to get into the rewrites/editing and that will take longer.

Which brings us to the last of the Good News: If I do decide to split this book in two and finish that second book before going into the editing of the first, the last three books of the series are going to come out really quickly.

I’ve already written out what would be the first book.  I’m currently writing that second book.  I have the first draft of the epilogue book already written.

All I may need to do once I finish that second story is edit the three last books which means they will be released pretty quickly.  Writing a book is always far harder and more time consuming than editing it.

However, all this is in flux.

Let’s see how the second half of that story goes and I’ll update you soon enough.

In the meantime, stay dry and enjoy the last of the summer.

Man, was I tired last night…

…how tired?

Not nearly as tired as the many fine people in Texas helping out all those affected by Hurricane Harvey.

Seriously, your life can be frustrating and exhausting.  You can work incredibly hard for so little pay and/or recognition.  Hell, you can spit venom at the TV at whatever latest awful thing our “President” has done…

But to then see all the misery going on in Texas thanks to Hurricane Harvey followed by images of the many, many fine folks out there helping their neighbors and strangers who are stranded or flooded out…

My heart goes out to them.

I hope that Hurricane lifts quickly and the waters recede just as quickly and we can fix what nature destroyed.

I’ve been through more Hurricanes than I care to think about, including the infamous Andrew and Katrina, the later of which thankfully hit our area when it was still a relatively small Category 1 storm.  But Katrina’s ultimate destruction sure looks a lot like what Harvey’s doing now.

So keep safe out there.

Please.

Sketchin’ 21 & 22

These two pieces were being worked on and off the past few days.  Last night I decided to finish ’em off.

First up is my take on a publicity still from the classic 1946 Alfred Hitchcock film Notorious.  The movie stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman and many consider it one of Mr. Hitchcock’s all time greatest works.

[image error]I’m not entirely satisfied with the piece, largely because I feel I didn’t get Mr. Grant’s eyes as well as I wanted to.  I’m happy about the rest of the piece and I could one day return to this and take on those eyes once again.  In the meantime, love the while pattern lines on his suit.  That part really came out wonderfully, IMHO!

Next up is the actress Sarah Douglas in one of her most memorable roles, that of the villain Ursa from Superman and Superman II…

[image error]As I mentioned before, one of the things I most like about using the iPad and Apple Pencil (no, I’m not getting any money for mentioning my tools) is that it allows me to experiment.

In the case of the Ursa picture, I quite literally did a 5 minute piece, hardly bothering with getting everything “right”, then came back to it yesterday.  Once again, I realized I needed to work on the eyes.  Eyes are usually THE thing that either makes or breaks your piece and in their original form as drawn they looked too sloppy.

So last night I erased the eyes I had and redrew them and, suddenly, the picture was something like a thousand times better.  I cleaned up a little stuff here and there and added that weird lit up/dark background and, voila, another piece.

I’m quite happy with it!