Tag: Obsession

Where Life Begins

Sunday morning in the Lost Apartment and so far, so good. I got up to feed Sparky and went back to bed for another few hours and was even reluctant to finally get up when I did at last. But my coffee is good, my coffee cake was even better, and I do feel good this morning. I did nothing of consequence yesterday, other than having some things delivered and picking up a little bit. I didn’t engage my mind much with anything–didn’t read, didn’t write much, didn’t do anything but let myself have a recharging day, and it seems to have worked. I actually wrote some stories in my head while I was sleeping, or in that half-sleep thing, which is incredibly cool. I need to be more productive today–at least a little bit. I did page through Valley of the Dolls and Peyton Place, reading random sections while thinking about the books themselves and their writers.

Hopefully, when I get around to writing those essays, they will be good.

I also spent time reconnecting to Dolly tributes and video compilations. I’m very glad they are renaming the Nashville airport for her. What a legacy to leave behind, right? So many incredible stories of kindness and charity and compassion, and none of it performative–as most of it was done quietly and without fuss. She loved the queer community when it was dangerous for someone with her fan base, her long time driver/assistant was a trans man, and she loved and embraced drag queens.

From now on, all I am going to say to people that hate drag queens is “Oh, wild, so you hated Dolly Parton? What a weird thing to admit.”

It’s kind of wild, but I had thought about writing a Scotty book about the murder of a Milo-type a while ago but chose a different story at the time; I don’t remember which it was; but it was after he did the whole “child rape can be consensual and good” thing–but I am sure a strike against it was how deeply unpleasant he is and how much I would hate learning more so I could credibly create a character from that foundation. Now, I am thinking about it again for this Scotty I am building, and it could easily be shoe-horned in. Hmmm, this could really be fun.

The goings-on over at HWA are troubling, to say the least. Much as I love horror, I’ve tended to keep that community at arms’ length…well, because there is always a lot of drama going on in that community. I’ve personally never had a problem with HWA; all of my dealings with them have been incredibly pleasant, and I even put on an event for them. I’ve seen a lot of drama over the years on social media and, choose to stay out of it. I’ll see posts here and there, but don’t look into it very deeply with a not my circus not my monkeys mentality. I’ve served on boards and even run them in a leadership position. I’ve spent more time in my life at board meetings than I would have liked or preferred, retrospectively. I don’t criticize organizations publicly, or their boards, for that matter. Even when I disagree with a policy or a statement or anything for that matter, I try to keep my mouth shut because the work is hard and any system (waves around at the world in general) can be hijacked and suffer institutional damage at the hands of a bad actor, or good intentions not landing right with the community. Unless I am going to get involved to clean up the mess, I am not going to criticize. I am not saying others can’t, of course–I wouldn’t know any of this if people didn’t debate these issues publicly, for example, and some of these controversies are general enough to be of interest and concern to all authors (AI issues, for example). I only speak for myself, I want to make that abundantly clear; I don’t even claim to speak for authors that I am friends with and talk to regularly. I think it’s a shame, though, but there seem to be a lot of factions and not a little bit of hypocrisy in the horror writing community. It’s a shame, because it’s a marvelous genre and there are any number of talented and lovely writers within it. I don’t like watching train wrecks, but always seem to get sucked into watching them–which is something I need to work on.

Speaking of horror, we watched Obsession last night, which was very unsettling and very well done. It wasn’t terrifying or jump scary; it was just very disturbing and creepy but impossible to look away from. It’s another variation on the be careful what you wish for trope, but the acting is phenomenal and it’s brutal and horrific–but I also can’t help thinking, it would be nice to see this from the woman’s perspective. Imagine the horror of being obsessively in love with someone while knowing you really aren’t but you can’t control yourself. Now that would be terrifying.

And now, I am going to get something more solid to eat than a slice of coffee cake, another cup of coffee, and then I am heading into the spice mines. Have a marvelous day, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back tomorrow morning.

Screenshot

Promise to Try

It’s my birthday, and I made the enormous mistake of giving Sparky a new catnip toy this morning and now he’s high as a kite and zooming around the apartment, with the occasional launch of a crazed kitty at me in full play-attack mode. Needless to say, I’m regretting giving him that toy!

And just like that, I qualify for senior discounts. Funny, I don’t feel any older this morning. I’ve never been a big birthday person, for any number of reasons (primarily because outside of my parents, no one else ever cared much about it, which I will unpack at some point in the newsletter), and the older I get the less fuss I want made of it. I really prefer to just spend the day hanging out at home with Sparky and Paul, very low-key. I’ll watch some shit on television, and do some reading; maybe even take some notes on something, anything, that I am working on currently. But no pressure at all, and that’s the lovely thing. A day of ignoring the world and everything else going on and just having some peaceful, relaxing down time. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? It does, indeed. The house is messy, so I may slowly and gradually do things, too, but the primary goal for the day is to stay off-line as much as possible and just have a lovely quiet day at home.

Sparky also let me sleep late this morning, for which I am grateful, and even slept in the bed with me after checking on me at the usual time I get up. The no-alarm confused him, I think–hey you’re supposed to get up to the loud noise–which is why he curled up in the crook of my legs and went to sleep.Yesterday was fine. It was a relatively easy and mellow day at the office, and I ran some errands when I got off work. Paul got home while I was catching up on the news, and we watched another episode of Furious, which took another turn last night I wasn’t expecting. We’re caught up now, and have to wait for the next episodes to air, so we can catch up on The Shards and Reacher in the meantime. There’s also a couple of movies streaming that I want to see–Obsession and The Devil Wears Prada 2. And the final season of Outer Banks dropping today on Netflix like another birthday present for me. I also want to read more today, and finish the birthday newsletter I started…but there’s no rush. It’s about getting older and not being ashamed or afraid of the word old. I wouldn’t, for example, want to be younger now than I am, and frankly, now that my health is pretty far along on its way to 100%, I actually feel pretty good most of the time other than the occasional ache or pain; and you know, I was often sore when I was younger because I worked out.

And yes, we are definitely seeing the new Spider-Man tomorrow.

I also got caught up on the new season of Real Housewives Ultimate Girls’ Trip, and I have to say I really am enjoying seeing the other women bonding over not liking Vicki. Them’s my girls!

So, I am going to get another cup of coffee and have some breakfast. There’s a load of laundry I want to do, and the dishes need to be done, and some minor straightening up I also need to get done and handled, and get cleaned up as well. Sparky has calmed down now enough for me to safely navigate the apartment without getting attacked, so it’s also safe out there.

Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I will see you tomorrow morning!

A very young Michael Biehn posing as St. Sebastian

Down Under

Remember him?

I’ll never forget him.

The marketing for Calvin Klein fashions and products has always been provocative, proving once again the old adage that sex sells. But on the men’s side, the company’s push to remove men’s underwear from the old, badly fitted, and horribly uncomfortable/unattractive underwear that always looked terrible after a few washes. If you see pictures of men in underwear in the 60s and 70s, it’s always high-waisted and baggy and not flattering in any way. Marooned in Kansas for the latter part of the 70s, I was very unaware of changing trends in men’s underwear, other than ads in magazines. Jim Palmer was one of the first celebrities to do an underwear ad; he was hairy and slim, pretty good shape but not exactly something to write home about. But it was a start, and when Calvin Klein decided to enter the market of men’s underwear, I’m sure people thought the company was crazy: why would anyone spend that much money for a single pair of underwear, when you could get several packs of three for that same price? But CK was onto something–sexy underwear that fit well, lasted a long time, and looked good was an untapped market, and of course the gays were all about fashion underwear.

And they used beautiful men with lean, ripped physiques to make their point for them. Surprise! It worked.

And Calvin kept selling us sex, and we couldn’t get enough of it. Obsession for Men became a must-have cologne, and they continued producing new scents that were popular and had enormously sexy ads. Other fashion companies began emulating the CK model (imitation is flattery and all that); designer underwear for men, colognes, after shaves, and on and on. And what was also happening were two things: the gay aesthetic for what is attractive in a man began to dominate the culture, and straight men began, oddly enough, to start dressing better, caring about their hair and shaving more, and their bodies…the rise of the ‘metrosexual.’ So say goodbye once and for all to those beefy, bulky, barrel-chested men with their high-waisted pants…

And then came the Marky Mark ad.

The great irony of homophobe and racial hate criminal Mark Wahlberg becoming a sex symbol for gay men will never stop making me laugh.

I mean, he was cute, the body was to die for, and the killer smile? And he’d already become known for dropping his pants and “performing” his music in his underwear. The Calvin Klein gig was probably a mistake for him, but he wound up with a successful film career and even was nominated for an Oscar. Goes to show, Hollywood doesn’t really care about a problematic history if you can sell tickets for them. I always had a soft spot for him, despite everything though–that first crush from seeing the video for “Good Vibrations” has never really gone away, despite knowing full well about the problematic past.

My first pair of Calvin Klein underwear changed my opinion about underwear forever. My mother always told me that the things you never skimp on–even if you have to save up money for it–are underwear, socks, and sheets. Everything else, you can buy discounted, on sale, or from bargain bins, but as long as you bought quality for those three things, they made up for everything else. Once I opened that gorgeous black and white box, and slipped them on…I was sold. I was never buying cheap underwear ever again, even if it meant having to save up money for a while to invest in the good pairs. To this day, I still wear Calvin Klein as my preference; I discovered Under Armor around 2004, but eventually went back to Calvins. I bought cheap underwear at Wal-mart after Katrina to get by until I got back to New Orleans…and regretted it. I hated the cheap socks and underwear, how they felt, how the elastic in the waistband loosened with every wear, how the material began to wear within a few weeks.

Calvin Klein introduced us to the term “underwear model” as a body type, too. Underwear model didn’t used to even be a thing; you’d only see underwear models in catalogues. Calvin Klein’s artistic spreads, with incredibly bodied models shot by the best photographers, certainly had a huge impact on culture–and certainly played a part in what I call the “gaying” of culture; in which men became sex objects in the way women always had been before.

And Mark Wahlberg’s natural progression from ‘rap’ musician who dropped his pants all the time to underwear model also changed the perception of celebrity models; if Calvin Klein wanted you for a photo spread, that meant you were fucking gorgeous–and they started including actors, dancers, and athletes to their rosters.

Number One tennis player in the world Carlos Alcaraz

I can think of several celebrities I’d like to see model for Calvin Klein–figure skater Guillaume Cizeron, several rugby players, Joe Burrow, Malik Nabers–but they also do a pretty good job of finding models.

My favorite cologne from Calvin Klein was Eternity, but it wasn’t my favorite–I liked Fahrenheit and Cool Water the best, but I stopped wearing cologne after we moved to New Orleans. In this climate, for most of the year there’s really no point in wearing it anyway.