Tag: Three Mile Island

I Want Your Love

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.

  1. Sorry-not sorry for not putting up a spoiler warning for a forty-six year old movie. ↩︎

With Your Love

Here we go again, on the rollercoaster that is my usual work week! Good morning, Monday, how the hell are you?

I am still rather sleepy this morning; more of a tired eyes thing than anything else, really. I got new contact lenses (a trial pair) from my optometrist on Thursday; yesterday was my first time trying them out in real life, as it were (I wore them home from Metairie on Thursday, taking them out as soon as I got home). The new lenses didn’t really seem to fit in my right eye; that lens felt off the whole time Thursday, and again when I put them in yesterday. But within minutes my right eye adjusted and they became comfortable; the progressive lenses actually began to work as well, which they hadn’t any time I had tried previously with another set of lenses. I wound up wearing them for almost seven hours yesterday, which was kind of lovely. Today and tomorrow, however, are too long of work days to try them out again; I’ll hold off until Wednesday before trying them again. But it’s nice to have contact lenses again; I’ve not really worn contacts since discovering, five or six years ago, that I need progressive lenses (what used to be called bifocals).

This weekend, on June 1, I started posting on social media about queer crime books in order to celebrate Pride Month (last year I simply posted a queer book cover every day for Pride; this year I am specifically focusing on queer crime novels). I want to be absolutely clear that, in case there’s any confusion, I am posting queer crime books that were influences on me; or influential at some point in my lengthy (!) career. At the end of the month I will post the entire list here for more easy access to anyone looking to look at queer crime novels, or looking for such a list–I may not be an expert on queer fiction, or even on queer crime fiction, but I do have my list and I do know the books I read and enjoyed that made me think and develop my own queer crime novels.

And if I can bring attention to a queer crime writer who has somehow fallen off the radar, so much the better.

Yesterday we went to brunch at our friend Pat’s lovely deluxe apartment in the sky; she really has the most spectacular views of the Mississippi River at what’s called the Riverbend (from her dining room) and the rest of the city (from the terrace outside her living room). Her apartment is filled with natural light, gorgeous built in bookshelves filled with wonderful books, and amazing art everywhere. It’s kind of a dream apartment for me–one I’d never be able to afford in a million years–but every time I set foot in her apartment I do spend a moment or two fantasizing about living there (just as I always fantasized about living in her partner Michael’s former home in Hammond). It was, as always, a lovely afternoon, and enormously relaxing. I wasn’t able to do anything when I got home around six because I was so relaxed; instead, I started watching Chernobyl on HBO, which is incredibly sad and disturbing. I remember when Chernobyl happened in real life, just as I remember the Three Mile Island scare in the late 1970’s. It’s interesting that since those two scares that nuclear power plants are pretty much not talked about or thought much about anymore, when back in the day they were quite controversial (I’ve mentioned Scotty’s parents protesting nuclear power plants in the earlier books in the series) but that controversy doesn’t seem to exist as much anymore, as though activists have maybe given up on their dangers…or it’s not glamorous enough to be considered newsworthy anymore. I do recall after the natural disaster in Japan several years ago (earthquake/tsunami) there were concerns about a Japanese nuclear power plant…but those concerns also evaporated once the news cycle moved on from the Japanese disaster.

One thing that was interesting about visiting Pat’s apartment was her view of the river, mainly from the dining room windows–which was my first experience this year actually looking at how the river is in its flood stage. The river has apparently been in flood stage longer than it has any time since the Great Flood of 1927, which changed everything as far as governmental policies and procedures for fighting floods; this was the natural disaster that created the Southeast Louisiana Flood Project, building levees and dams all along the river and its tributaries. For only the third time in history all the spillways north of New Orleans are being opened–and the tributaries are all still flooding and continuing to rise. The river itself it almost to the top of the levees in Baton Rouge, and apparently a levee on the Mississippi breached further north yesterday or this morning; I saw the report on social media earlier this morning but didn’t read it; I think it was in Illinois, maybe?

Anyway, the river is really high and this reminds me that the river being high was a plot point in Bourbon Street Blues, all those years ago, and it also reminds me of how vulnerable the city is for this year’s hurricane season–if the river is already almost to the tops of the levees, a storm surge coming up the river would overtop them quite easily; which begs the question, would the levees be blown below the city to save it? Any time there’s potential flooding of New Orleans there’s always the belief that levees are blown to save the city; people believe the levee failure during Katrina was planned, to save the French Quarter and white Uptown; people still believe the levees were blown below the city for Betsy in 1965.

And now, back to the spice mines.

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