Saturday morning with an LSU game on pretty early, at eleven this morning; I’ll still be drinking coffee at that hour. I slept well last night, which felt good–I love the night when the bed has freshly laundered linens and blankets–and Sparky even let me sleep in a little bit. My coffee is tasty this morning as I wake up and prepare for a day in which I probably won’t do much of anything other than read, watch football, and make notes in my journal. I feel a big tired this morning still, but it’s the final stage of the fatigue dying away. I may do some chores and picking up around here during the games, but I am sure by tonight’s Alabama-Tennessee rivalry game I’ll probably be quite sick of watching football games. Miami lost last night, so the rankings are going to be shaken up again, as they will be after all today’s games.
After finishing day job duties yesterday and running my errands, I settled into my easy chair and rewatched Scream, the original, and was reminded again of just how clever this movie is and why I love it so much. I took five pages of notes! The panel on crossing the line between horror and mystery also resonated and has stayed in my head… and I also remembered some things since, like authors we didn’t mention. I also very proudly finished and posted my newsletter on Clown in a Cornfield 2: Frendo Lives, which was a rave, and also has me in mind of slasher stories….the one on Scream is going to be a pretty good one, methinks. We shall see, I suppose.
After Scream, we settled in to watch our shows for the evening, before retiring to bed pretty early. I also picked up my copies of the third Frendo book, Clown in a Cornfield 3: The Church of Frendo, which sound delicious and a continuation of the exploration of trauma the characters have faced–as well as remembering the rules: in a trilogy, no one is safe in the third chapter–and the latest Donna Andrews. (I am four books behind on her series now.) I really do want to write a slasher novel, and have several ideas for one (my favorite potential title is Where the Boys Die); but I have numerous things I want to write before I turn my fevered brain in that direction. I’m going to work on something for the rest of the month (mostly short stories and a novella) before diving headfirst into Chorine for November. Ideally, I want to have the first draft finished by the end of the month so I can work on something else for December.
I am also planning on revisiting A Nightmare on Elm Street before spooky season ends. And today I am going to dive headfirst into Holokua Road by Elizabeth Hand while I am watching the games, if not starting it before the LSU game starts. I don’t know how LSU will do today against Vanderbilt; they’re pretty good this year, despite their sloppy loss to Alabama in Tuscaloosa. It’s not like LSU has been setting the world on fire this season anyway. So, that game could very easily ruin the energy of the entire day if I am not careful. I also have some short stories to read–I have several horror anthologies and author collections–while I continue to celebrate Halloween Horror Month until the very end.
And on that note, I am heading back into the spice mines for the day. I do have some chores to do this morning as well as some cleaning, filing and organizing. Have a great day, everyone, and I’ll be back tomorrow, bright and early and feeling rested, I hope.
Thursday and my last day in the office for this week, and I actually worked in the clinic every day this week, including today! Look at me going hard, right?
Speaking of which, I’ve learned so many new things about the Right since last week’s murder on campus that I really did not need to know. I had a vague idea of what a groyper was; I also knew it involved that stupid frog image. I did know what an incel was, too, but I had no fucking idea how far out there it got, and while I could have easily gone for the rest of my life happily not being aware of any of this shit, well, now I know. I don’t think it has made me any smarter or more knowledgeable. The “transmaxxing”1 stuff? Holy fuck-balls, Batman! I think I’m just going to file all of this knowledge I gained without my complete consent under “Things I Will NEVER Understand” in my memory file cabinet. Hopefully this will be one of those things I forget.
But it never works quite like that, does it?|
And to think, I went down that wormhole thinking it might make an interesting background for some fiction. Yeah, no fucking thanks.
I’m tired this morning–and while mentally I am fine, physically I feel some fatigue. I was pretty worn out when I got home from work yesterday, read more of the manuscript (lord, the revisions are going to be a bitch and a half), and hung out with the Cuddle-bug kitty before watching the season premiere of The Morning Show, which opens in the summer of 2024, pre-Olympics…a period that will be interesting to revisit. It also set me to thinking about 2024 in a reflective, detached way; certainly there has been some distance (it does seem like another lifetime ago, doesn’t it?) and remembering again why I hate George Clooney with an undying, white-hot passion that will never cool. Remember that asshole and his op-ed in the New York Times last summer? And as authoritarian censorship starts to take hold in the country–thanks again, George! How is this regime working out for you in your Italian country estate? Oh, yes, that’s right– you’re rich enough that nothing really changes for you and you never have consequences, shithead. I also have noted that he’s been silent about politics and the state of the world ever since then. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Always remember his tax bracket is the one doing the best under this regime.2
There seems to be a plethora of things for us to watch over the course of the weekend; it’s always lovely when a show we enjoy returns.
I generally am not one to get emotional over the death of a celebrity, and at most, I feel a pang of oh that’s a shame. Robert Redford’s death announcement was one of those; he lived a very long life, kept his private life very private, and had some views I agreed with. I also enjoyed his film work, and always thought he was underrated because he made it look easy and he was stunningly beautiful; it is very rare when someone is that good-looking to be taken seriously as an actor. Maybe I’ll rewatch The Sting tomorrow while doing quality assurance. I saw that in the theater back when it was in release, and really enjoyed it. I did see some Redford films during my Cynical 70’s Film Festival during the pandemic (Three Days of the Condor, The Candidate, and All the President’s Men), and became even more impressed with his ability to command the screen and deliver a layered performance that was believable. (I also love The Way We Were, despite some of my misgivings about the plot and story and characters; maybe someday I’ll do a longer essay about The Way We Were.)
There will never be another Robert Redford, for sure.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I will be back tomorrow morning!
Screenshot
Please–take my word for it and do not look this up, tempting as it may be. ↩︎
Same with Susan Sarandon, may she rot in hell for eternity. ↩︎
Iris Saturday! And it looks like a beautiful day out there outside my windows. I also don’t feel sick this morning, which is also wonderful. After working yesterday I felt very sick and very tired, so I just decided to shut my brain off and just mindlessly drift through news clips on Youtube, as well as whatever my brain decided for me to look for (the temple destruction scene at the end of Samson and Delilah, for one example) as I finished laundering the sheets and went to bed. I slept great last night, too, and feel pretty good this morning. That’s awesome because it is, after all, IRIS SATURDAY! I probably won’t stay out for Tucks after Iris, but I am not missing my ladies! I also feel like I can get some things done around here today, too. I’ve been slacking on the house (and on, well, everything) for a while now–being sick didn’t help matters much–and so I should be getting it all under control today. I want to get some reading done, catch some beads, do some cleaning and some writing, while I’m at it.
I also watched a couple of 1970s movies last night while Paul worked (I got tired of the news; I can only watch American elected officials embarrass the country in front of the world so many times. What a fucking disgrace) and watched a Gene Hackman hard-boiled private eye movie (Night Moves) and a classic I’ve never seen (that no one ever talks about anymore either–The China Syndrome) and I enjoyed both. There’s really something different about the movies of the late 1960s and 1970s, a kind of gritty realism that showed the world as it was–dirty, graffitied, muted colors–that went away with movies in the 1980s, where everything was prettied up for the movies and departed from realism. It put me in mind of my Cynical 70s Film Festival that I did during the shutdown, and how so many movies were about paranoia and not trusting the government; which, after Vietnam, civil rights, and Watergate was very much a leftist thing. (Weird how that’s shifted–it’s the right that doesn’t trust the government anymore; that would be an interesting study, wouldn’t it? How that changed and shifted over the years? Another thing I hate about the right is that they’ve made the left defend the government rather than critiquing it.) Night Moves was okay–the mystery itself wasn’t terribly interesting but the thing that was interesting was Gene Hackman’s performance. The film was an excellent character study, even though we never really learned much about him. My primary takeaway from the film was that Gene Hackman would have made a great Travis McGee. Talk about missed opportunities. (Although it would also be a great role for Alan Ritchson…)
The China Syndrome was born out of the 1970’s paranoia about using nuclear reactors to create energy. After all the lies before, during and after Vietnam–not to mention Watergate–people weren’t really into trusting government reassurances, and weird things were happening with the nuclear power plants anyway (Karen Silkwood’s story would also be filmed, Silkwood, which was another one of those “paranoia/can’t trust the government or corporations” movies); they were building one fairly close to where we lived in Kansas–Wolf Creek, I think was the name–and there were protests about it (Kansas folks just saw as it as a place to work and no more thought into it than that) and I also remember in the classifieds in the Emporia Gazette some group always ran a little ad that said “NEVER FORGET KAREN SILKWOOD” so I already knew that story before the movie was made. Michael Douglas produced the movie, and of course Jane Fonda was in it–they were both very anti-nuclear energy; so of course it was seen as a “Hollywood liberals trying to scare people” film. But shortly after it was released, Three Mile Island (our almost Chernobyl) happened–and the movie became a huge hit. The movie ended positively–the news about the accidents at the plant in question gets out finally at the end1–which goes to show how hopeful these kinds of movies sometimes ended; when we all know the reporter and her cameraman, as well as the nuclear engineer played by Jack Lemmon, would have all either disappeared or been found dead under mysterious circumstances.
I really should watch an old movie when I’m too tired to write or read, rather than doomscrolling news clips on Youtube.
I’ve also been terribly remiss on my newsletter; I’ve started several that are in progress that I really should finish and share with the world–and should send out one before it’s time to do my review of The Bell in the Fog (Lev AC Rosen). I am trying not to overdo it–I mean, I pretty much write this every day so I don’t need to be sending out newsletters more than once a week; there’s only so much Greg people can take, after all. And I also expect you all to read my books and short stories, too. What can I say? I really enjoy writing.
And on that note, I am going to get cleaned up and get to work around here. Have a lovely Iris Saturday, Constant Reader, and who knows? I may be back later.
Sorry-not sorry for not putting up a spoiler warning for a forty-six year old movie. ↩︎
Well, Christmas itself has passed and now we are in the slide to New Year’s and Twelfth Night…which means it’ll be Carnival season again soon. I don’t think I’m ready for Carnival this coming year, but is anyone, ever? I am back up before dawn to go into the office today; I don’t think we’re going to be very busy in the clinic today–I checked the schedule and we will definitely be busy on January 2–because we’re in that weird in-between-holidays time. I hope everyone’s Christmas was pleasant; mine was. I slept in yesterday and did nothing around the house other than some of the dishes. It also rained, and we drove out to Elmwood via Airline Highway, which was fun. Airline isn’t a highway I use very often (like the Earhardt), and it’s actually a great back way to Jefferson Parish and that part of the metropolitan area. I don’t know that part of town very well, so it’s always interesting to go out there. (Elmwood is out by the Huey P. Long bridge across the river.) We did see Babygirl (more on that later), and gorged on popcorn and soda. It was kind of nice just kicking back and not stressing about getting work done or cleaning the house (although I probably should stress myself out about the housework more often, or at least more regularly); I think from now on I am going to treat myself to a literal day off/holiday whenever one rolls around again. I’m also in that contemplative state that usually comes around between Christmas and New Year’s. What kind of year was it, did I have, and what do I want to accomplish in the coming year? That’s the thing about a year’s turning, you can’t help but get dragged into a contemplative reflective state whether you want to or not. I think it was a good year for me for the most part personally; it was mostly a recovery year for the horror that was 2023, to be honest. Ordinarily I would be thinking I am an utter failure for not accomplishing much of anything in a year–but I am being kinder to myself. The change in medications really kicked in this year (it began in December 2023), and there are still things I can get anxious about, but there’s not a physical reaction to anxiety and stress anymore and I really appreciate that more than anything else with the medication change; it was always the physical reaction (increased heart rate, nausea, sweating, trembling) which was the worst for me, which was why public speaking was always torture for me. (The reading the other night was a piece of cake, which was a lovely experience.)
I keep thinking today is Monday, which is more than a little annoying, honestly. My week is very screwed up. But it’s okay. I have to run errands after work tonight–grocery store and mail service–and I don’t have to come in tomorrow; I was going to cover for someone if they needed me to, but it turns out they don’t so I can work remotely.
I did not get to watch my two favorite Christmas movies this year (Auntie Mame and The Lion in Winter) because I would have had to pay to stream them; I do find it very interesting that films of a certain age aren’t streaming free anywhere. Why are old movies pay-to-play but many newer releases–even brand spanking new ones–are free to stream in numerous places? I guess I will never understand the economics of show business. We tried watching a gay horror movie last night (Ganymede, it’s terrible; we were an hour in and I wasn’t sure if the movie was pro-gay or anti-gay, and when you’re still not sure when there’s only a half an hour left? No need for us to watch that final half hour. The writing was bad, the acting overwrought, and I wasn’t really quite sure of the point of the film….so we gave up on it.
Babygirl was interesting, and made me quite uncomfortable more than a few times. Nicole Kidman is fantastic in it, but…this is one of those movies that I don’t think I can completely appreciate because I’m not a woman, if that makes any sense? Kidman plays an incredibly bright, driven and successful CEO of a major corporation…but is sexually dissatisfied in her marriage and her perfect appearing life. She literally has it all, but something is still missing in her life, and her desire to maintain her outward perfection while dealing with a weird sense of longing for something missing is portrayed quite compellingly. She feels drawn to an intern at the company, and he is drawn to her as well; that is never truly explored (what does he want?) but the movie is hers, and we see everything from her point of view. So, is she an untrustworthy narrator? We’re only seeing how she continues with her facade of perfection even in light of her torrid affair, that’s fulfilling some need in her–to be controlled, to be trained, and the sex and loss of control is exactly what she is needing, even though she is risking everything–career, marriage, family, wealth–here. Like I said, it was interesting; the story is the character study and evaluation of her life and her present. Is the ending happy? I’m not entirely sure, but in the final scene, and her delivery of the last line? That’s the character we’re never really shown, and that final scene is so brilliant that it changes the entire film from what you think you were watching.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Boxing Day, or day after Christmas if you’re not in a commonwealth of the Empire.
Sunday morning, and all is well in the Lost Apartment.
I woke up early this morning and, remembering, thought it might have been a dream, but no, a quick glance at the Internet told me it really did happen–Alabama did lose to Vanderbilt yesterday, 40-35. Hell, Arkansas came back to upset Tennessee last night while we were were watching ‘salem’s Lot (more on that later). What in the world was going on in college football yesterday? Admittedly, insane days like yesterday (Washington even went to Michigan and won. What the holy hell is going on this year?) are what make college football so fun to watch and experience as a fan; and I think 2024 might just be one of those insane “reset” seasons where everything goes out the window. Vanderbilt beating Alabama1 just two weeks after losing to Georgia State–another Vandy embarrassment–and now the concept of hope has shown up for the hapless Commodores; if they can beat an Alabama team, on any given Saturday, the ‘dores could beat anyone. Absolutely wild. I was watching a different game–I don’t even remember which this morning–when I saw that the score was 13-7 in the second quarter, Vandy leading, and I thought, what the hell and switched over to that game, and both Paul and I watched in stunned bemusement, riveted until the clock ticked to zero and the Vandy fans rushed the field, tore down the goalposts, and carried them three miles to throw them into the Cumberland River. I can only imagine what it was like to be a Vandy fan watching all of this yesterday.2 I do pity the new Alabama coach; he’s got a hell of a week to get through before next weekend’s South Carolina game (LSU comes back from the bye week to play Mississippi next week at home; the Rebs trounced South Carolina yesterday), but still have to play Tennessee, LSU and Oklahoma. They can still make the play-offs if they run the table, but I am beginning to wonder about that. Missouri was also beaten badly by Texas A&M yesterday, so now Texas is the only unbeaten SEC team still standing and there’s no telling who might run the table, who is good and who isn’t, and so forth. It’s kind of exciting, actually. CHAOS.
I did sleep late yesterday, got up and ran all over town and even went out to Metairie for my eye appointment (which has to be rescheduled; it was an on-line booking error), but was thoroughly exhausted when I got home from everything. I immediately started cleaning while the A&M game was on–no need to watch that thrashing, so it was mostly background noise. I did manage to get all the dishes done, and launder the bed linens, and pick up around here. The Lost Apartment looks better this morning, but I also need to finish assembling my desk chair, do some more cleaning up around here (the floors, the floors!) and hopefully do some reading and writing today as well. The Saints play tomorrow night (Taylor Swift has been rumored to be attending; so I imagine all day tomorrow local networks will have someone stationed at the airport to see if her plane lands), and the weather has been lovely since that sopping wet mess of a Friday we had here. I am glad to be up early this morning–clearly I needed to sleep in yesterday, and I was still easily exhausted, so I know I am still not at 100% yet…patience, Gregalicious, patience. You’re older and it takes longer to bounce back than it used to, and you’ve never had a major surgery before; it hasn’t even been a full year yet since the surgery.
I do have one errand to run today, and I should get it done this morning.
So, we decided to watch ‘salem’s Lot instead of watching the Tennessee game (which we should have watched, apparently; I never tire of watching Tennessee lose), and going into it, I knew that most of the King fans amongst my horror writer/reader social media friends didn’t care for it. As I watched the movie–which is a fairly competent vampire horror movie–I immediately saw what the problem with this film adaptation was going to be, and even understood why even the cheesy two-part television version with David Soul failed. I have always thought of ‘salem’s Lot as “Peyton Place with vampires, and that strength of the novel–the townspeople themselves, their relationships with each other and all the long-simmering feuds and gossips and pettiness–was the primary strength of the novel, as is its pacing: it begins as a slow building burn, and the momentum just keeps building. Everyone knows the story is about vampires now; it’s even a bit of an homage, in its own way, to Dracula–there’s even a scene in the book where Matt Burke reminds Ben of Van Helsing–but when I first read the paperback from Signet back in the fall of 1976 in Kansas, I had no idea what it was about. I just knew it was scary, it was about evil in a small town, and the writer was the guy who wrote Carrie, which I had read in one sitting a year earlier. So, I was enjoying how the town is originally shown, a small town that’s like every other small town, that idyllic vision of America that the right keeps forcing on us all–small town America is the real America as this Norman Rockwell painting/Mayberry like life, and it’s anything but that. (Small town America is the real America, but not in the way they mean–small towns are composites of the society as a whole, with percentage wise just as much crime, adultery, incest and passive-aggression as the rest of the country, no matter how much better they believe they are than urban dwellers.) That slow build, as we settle into Jerusalem’s Lot as a town like any other, with likable people and unlikable people whose dirty secrets King allows us to see; in the first half of the book it’s almost like reading Peyton Place; Jerusalems Lot even has the Marsten House as Peyton Place had Samuel’s castle (which was also the name of Allison’s novel in the book). Something dark is going on in the town, and just getting started, which we get glimpses of from time to time–a dog killed and left on the cemetery fence spikes; the disappearance of Ralphie Glick and his brother’s strange sickness and death…but it isn’t until Danny Glick shows up at Mark Petrie’s window do we know that it’s actually vampires, and then the entire book flips and no longer lazily meanders along on its assigned path; it then becomes a thriller that moves with the speed of a locomotive.
This pacing is what most readers like me (and I suspect a lot of others) loved the most about the book; I always loved the town-stuff as much as the vampires, honestly, but that kind of pacing is impossible in a film or a two-part television movie–you can’t have the first half be meandering and slowly moving along the path of the story, folks who have no idea what’s happening in their town and still aren’t entirely sure as the depopulation moves faster and faster, because you risk losing your audience. This was the problem with the David Soul version–the pacing was the same throughout, which isn’t the way the story reads. In this film version they chose to abandon everything from the story that isn’t about vampires, and to just make a standard horror film about vampires. On that level, the movie works. It’s a standard vampire movie that moves very quickly, just as the second half of the book does, but by cutting out all the stuff that made us care about the characters, we aren’t as vested, and when they die, we don’t really feel it much or care–every death in the book was a fucking tragedy, and so the movie is actually kind of soulless. We aren’t given enough character development to care when characters die. I think the only true way to film ‘salem’s Lot successfully, it needs to be a six or eight episode series to be done truly properly. There was hardly anything about the Marsten House in the movie, and that’s a significant change from the book. It’s just there, and we have no idea what kind of research Ben is doing for his novel or why he even came back. The loss of all the supporting characters that really made the book so strong can be felt deeply in the film. It’s just a competent vampire movie, but it isn’t ‘salem’s Lot, but I did like the big scene at the drive-in movie theater.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. I want to get a lot done today, and here’s hoping that shall come to pass.
No one ever worries about losing to Vanderbilt; it’s usually seen as a bye for most teams because Vanderbilt has always been terrible in football; they’ve never won the conference in all the years of belonging, haven’t beaten Alabama since 1984, and are always cellar-dwellers in the SEC (one of my favorite things to remind people is that Senator Tatertown the moron lost to Vanderbilt as a football coach; now Kalen DeBoer will also have that distinction. What a wake-up call for Tuscaloosa, and how wild that it happened one week after Alabama beat Georgia, handing them their first regular season loss in 42 games. I mean, good for Vanderbilt, but whoa, what the hell, Bama? ↩︎
Vanderbilt always has more visiting fans in their stadium than their own fans; at one point I was in the kitchen washing dishes and would hear the crowd cheer, so would come take a look–they were Alabama cheers, and they were louder than the smaller contingent of Vandy fans there. ↩︎
I don’t really remember why Paul and I didn’t watch Looking when it originally aired. But now that we finally have, I am even more disappointed in ourselves for not.
I think there was a lot of backlash to the show when it originally aired, if I am remembering correctly, but I don’t remember what the backlash was about. The cast was diverse, even if two of the three main leads were white. I am often critical of queer media–while I recognize the importance of both Will & Grace and Queer as Folk, I also can see how and why both were problematic and flawed–and sometimes it’s justified, sometimes it’s just something that rankles with me. I fully recognize that I do not contain multitudes nor am I the gatekeeper on the queer experience; I do not speak with any authority for the queer community, nor do I think I would ever want to.
But Looking was satisfying in a way that neither Queer as Folk (with its sophomoric storylines and so obviously faked sex) and Will and Grace (with it’s neutered attractive gay male lead who was also a lawyer; yeah, he’d have dating trouble for sure, let alone could get laid every time he turned around) were for me. With Queer, I never got the sense that any of the characters were real or anything more than a two-dimensional representation who each would go on a polemic per episode about gay life, homophobia, etc.- (Brian is the Fonzie of the show–everyone wants him, he’s effortlessly cool and hot and rich and he can have anyone anytime he wants…perhaps with the snap of a finger…)–and the castration of Will Truman was horrific, particularly given how he regularly slut-shamed Jack, who at least was more realistic despite being a cartoon.
The characters in Looking seemed absolutely real to me; they had layers and depths and complicated emotions. The three gay friends at the core of the show–late thirties Dom, with his aspirations of opening a restaurant; 29 year old Patrick, a video games designer whose completely bought into the “someday my prince will come” Disneyfication of love and romance, yet behaves as the antithesis of that; and Agustín, a hedonistic and selfish artist’s assistant–were perhaps archetypes, but they also seemed like human beings. Dom lives with his best friend, a nurse named Doris (Lauren Weedman) whom he dated in high school before he came out and they’ve remained Will-and-Grace like ever since…but a Will-and-Grace who seemed real; Doris never interfered with his sex life, for one, and he’s kind of a Peter Pan-like character. He gets fulfillment emotionally from Doris so he doesn’t need a relationship, yet over the course of the series, he pushes Doris towards her love interest and decides to stand on his own and make his dreams come true. Patrick falls for Ricky, and their relationship gets off to a bad start and ends badly; Patrick is self-destructive in his relationships in a way that also felt very real. He then becomes the “other woman” in his next relationship, with HIS BOSS Kevin (played by Russell Tovey) and of course, that’s doomed almost from the start (you just know Patrick is going to mess that up too) while Agustín also blows up his own life and long-term relationship with Frankie, and hits rock bottom. He finds his own love and redemption in a bear he meets at a weekend at the Russian River, and they have to negotiate their way through their own hang-ups and character growth to finally let their guard down enough to build a life together.
This characters are messy, frustrating, and sometimes you just want to shake them–like they are real people.
And that’s what I loved about the show–these were people I knew, people I’ve known, people I will know.
And there’s also a pleasant guest appearance or two by Julia Duffy as Patrick’s mother, and she steals every scene she’s in.
Very well written, with a high level of quality in the production values as well, the acting is top notch, and I’m sorry it only got two seasons and a movie to tie it all up–which it did incredibly well.
Queer and Loathing in America 