Tag: Paramount

Love Bites

Work at home Friday! My windows are covered in condensation, as we are expecting rain throughout the day–the thunderstorms are this afternoon. I have some things I need to get done today, including running to the postal service, and I would love to get the apartment finally under control (probably won’t happen) once I am finished with my work. It was a good week in the office, I must say. I slept in until about seven thirty this morning, before Sparky’s need to be fed became overpowering for him and he started hitting me in the face with one of his paws. Poor thing, he has no control over being fed so I always feel a bit guilty sleeping in.

Paul was late getting home again last night, and we watched the season premiere of South Park, and oh, how we laughed. It was one of the most brutal take-downs I’ve ever seen, and not only did 47 get burned like he was Dresden in early 1945, they also went after Paramount, CBS and 60 Minutes—and every last bit of the burns was well deserved. The fact that Paramount just paid $1.5 billion for five new seasons of the show and the streaming rights for every season is just *chef’s kiss*. (Which makes the Administration’s claim “the show has been irrelevant for over twenty years” even more butt-hurt hysterical.) I’ve not watched South Park in a very long time–not sure why or when I stopped watching, but I did–and this isn’t likely to make me want to go back and catch up on all the seasons I’ve missed, but it seems their anarchical mentality for satire has never been lost over the years?

I also kind of love that apparently the show has irritated liberals over the past decade for “punching down”, which made the Right think South Park was for them…and they just found out that it’s most definitely not. Thoughts and prayers, trash, thoughts and prayers.

No one is safe from South Park.

We’re in another heat advisory today, and things may not cool off should we actually get the rain forecast later. I am most likely going to spend as much of the weekend indoors to escape the brutality of the dog days. The new Entergy bill wasn’t as horrific as I thought it might be; it’s still ridiculously high, but not so high that paying it will be a struggle. The bill that will be due in September will be horrible, as well, but then it will start coming down for fall and winter. However did people live down here without air conditioning is a question I ask myself almost every day in the summer–but if you’ve never had it, you don’t miss it, and you adapt to the climate.

There have been a lot of celebrity deaths lately. Ozzy Osbourne, Malcolm Jamal-Warner, and Chuck Mangione all died this past week. Hulk Hogan also died, but that one didn’t hit me with a slight pang of oh that’s a shame; hearing of his death was another one of those good riddance to racist homophobic MAGA trash. I used to be a fan of Hulk Hogan, back in the days when it was the WWF and they did all those crossovers with MTV, which was a lot of fun to follow…but Hogan began wearing thin on me in the 1990s, and by the time we found out he was a bigot (and MAGA), I’d long since been done with him; that information only served to let me know I was right to think he was a garbage person. He did a lot for professional wrestling back in the day, but that didn’t mean he was good at actual wrestling. He had a large personality and knew how to work a crowd, but in the ring he didn’t really have much of a repertoire; he had very limited skills and clearly no desire to learn more…he was just a big man. (Ultimate Warrior was also a shitty wrestler with a huge body.)

Have fun in hell, Hulk.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check back in with you again tomorrow.

Such pretty eyes!

Lay Your Hands on Me

I managed to get all the errands done yesterday, and didn’t feel exhausted until I was in the process of putting away all the groceries and things. I went to both the grocery store and Costco yesterday; I was rather impressed that I wasn’t worn out much sooner. I did get the bedding laundered as well. But I didn’t get any writing done; I am going to need to do that today.

There are a lot of things I am going to need to do today. Sigh.

I’ve been invited to contribute to an anthology; and I am not certain I have anything ready to send along. I do have this one incredibly disturbing story that I would like to make even more disturbing–that’s just how I roll–and I need to get back to work on the Scotty draft. I’d like to revise Chapter 11 a bit today, get it cleaned up more so it isn’t nearly as sloppy as it currently is, and I want to get these other two stories cleaned up as well. I need to spend some more time with “Don’t Look Down” than I have been; I need to get inside the characters more, understand who they are better, and then I think the story will wind up being a lot more strong. The same goes with the Chanse story; the story is really about his relationship with his brother and that’s not strong enough in the story as it sounds right now. That is also, I think, the problem with the Scotty book. I need to spend some time today with it as well, figuring out motivations and so forth.

Ah, being a writer. Always such a challenge.

We finished watching Collateral last night, and I was rather pleased with it; it was written by David Hare, the playwright, and you could tell it was written by someone good. Carey Mulligan was terrific, and I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys complex, multi-layered crime dramas. I think tonight we may watch Justice League, to just to see if it really is as terrible as everyone seemed to think; I didn’t hate either Man of Steel or Batman vs. Superman, so I am not going into it as a hater.

I’m also still reading Tinseltown, which I am greatly enjoying. I don’t know a lot about the early days of Hollywood; the early 1920’s and late 19-teens, other than what I know from reading biographies of David O. Selznick, whose father was a producer and tried to build up a studio at the same time Adolph Zukor was building Paramount, and before the big merger that created Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). So all this is new information to me, and William J. Mann is a terrific historian and researcher. (I am more familiar with later periods of Hollywood, but hardly an expert.) I’ve always wanted to write about Hollywood’s past; I have an idea for a noir novel to be set in the late 1940’s, but my lack of familiarity with the nuts and bolts of Hollywood in that period makes it difficult–or rather, makes my already vast insecurity about writing about another period even stronger. Although I’ve already written one short story about that time–an ambiguous setting of the early 1950’s–I don’t know. Maybe I should try it as a short story first, see if I can get the sense of the period?

I don’t know.

I’m also saddened to say that I’ve now finished reading both of Lawrence Block’s art-inspired anthologies, In Sunlight or in Shadow and Alive in Shape and Color, but I’ve heard through the grapevine that he is putting together another, which is great. So, for today’s edition of the Short Story Project, I am sad to say this is the last story from a Block anthology: “A Woman in the Sun,” by Justin Scott, from In Sunlight or In Shadow.

Could she change his mind? Four steps to the open window, lean out and call, “Don’t.”

Or walk to the window and call, “Go ahead, do it.Good luck.”

Or stand here and do nothing.

He had left her his last cigarette. She had talked him into leaving the gun and he had kept his word. It was still on the night table, wrapped in one of her stockings. She had the time of the cigarette to make up her mind. More time, if she didn’t smoke it. Let it smoulder.

This is an interesting story; in that it leaves more questions unanswered than it actually answers. We never know the characters’ names, nor do we really know what has brough them to this point. All we do learn, as the story progresses, is that both are at the end of their ropes and done, basically; they are both ready to die. The only question is whether she will stop him or will she join him, and this rather uninvolved, distant approach makes the story even more poignant and sad; there’s a very strong sense of melancholy that runs throughout this story, and the reader soon realizes you don’t have to know the whys and hows and whats of their pasts–all you need to know and feel is their now.

Powerful.

I then started reading through Jim Fusilli’s Crime Plus Music, and the next story up was”Me Untamed” by David Liss.

She covered the black eye with makeup, but I could still see it was there, something alien and unaccountable. Like a vandal’s scrawl across a museum painting, the dull outline of her bruise was an outrage. Carla smiled and greeted everyone good morning, defying us to say a word, to let our eyes linger too long. It was, I supposed, how she protected herself.

Jim Baron, the senior partner in the practice, met my gaze and flicked his head toward Carla as she walked past with a stack of case folders under her arm. Carla was getting ready, as we did every Tuesday and Thursday, for surgeries–no office visits on those days, just procedures. The practice felt a bit like a gastrointestinal assembly line, and sometimes I hated how we moved patients in and out, hardly taking the time to look at them, but Jim cracked the whip. It was volume, volume, volume as far as he was concerned. We were there to heal, not to socialize, and the more healing, the better.

The point of view is that of a divorced, shy, quiet Milquetoasty doctor,  who is kind of in love with Carla, or maybe he is not. She’s married to a thug of a guy, a man’s man, who works out and so forth, the kind of man a Milquetoast would hate. And he decides to do something about Carla’s abuse…decides to make himself into the kind of man he’s always wanted to be, the kind of man that he thinks Carla would like and love. This is a terrific story, with a terrific twist at the end that lifts it up even higher in terms of craft. Well done, sir!

And now, back to the spice mines.

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