Tag: Wonder Woman 1984

Christmases When You Were Mine

And while technically Christmas season doesn’t really end until Twelfth Night (aka the twelfth day of Christmas), for most everyone it’s ended; the shredded wrapping paper trashed, ribbons and bows perhaps stashed aside for another use; boxes either broken down and recycled, or saved for use for the next time Christmas rolls around. Taking down decorations is something everyone seems to have their own traditions for; Paul and I left ours up our first year in New Orleans until the following July. I spent yesterday morning filing and organizing–discovering all kinds of treasures and ideas I’d allowed to fall by the wayside; a few months ago I counted how many short stories I had in progress and the truth is, I’d vastly undercounted, as I found ever so much more on hand yesterday morning. I found other research (some of it necessary, some of it interesting) that will come in enormously handy in the future. Perhaps people are correct when they talk about me being prolific; discovery of these stories and research certainly gives proof to that. (I must say, it was delightful to find myself looking at the files for “The Blues Before Dawn” and “One Night at Brandy’s Lounge” and “Waking the Saints” and “Malevolence” and “Getting Rid of Roger”–stories with great openings and potential that I had set aside and forgotten about as my nimble mind continued to leap around like a child’s that is in desperate need of Adderall. I also discovered folders for book ideas like Kansas Lonesome and Where the Boys Die and The Kissing Bridge…and that’s not even scratching the surface of the research that I found.)

I also discovered folders for Scotty books to come–Congo Square Conga and River Parish Rhumba and Hollywood South Hustle…and that’s on top of the three in the front of my mind, French Quarter Flambeaux and Lake Shore Limbo and Redneck Riviera Rhumba (oops, looks like I’ve got two rhumbas, and that just won’t do, will it?). I also found an idea for a Colin book that is completely different than the one i’ve been thinking about over the last year or so, and several other ideas. My word, I really need to harness my creativity, don’t I, and I really do need to go through the files every quarter or so, just so I can remember some of these fairly decent-and workable, usable–ideas.

So, we watched Wonder Woman 1984, and no, it wasn’t as good or as enjoyable as the original. I did think, a few times, “this would look amazing on a big screen”, but about twenty minutes or so into the film, I told myself, stop expecting it to make sense and just enjoy it without thinking, which is what they apparently want all of us to do, and so by shutting off my mind, I was able to enjoy it maybe a bit more than other people did. Was there problems with it? Absolutely: “of course i can fly a 1984 era fighter jet! So what if all my experience is with circa-1917 era prop planes?” And since when has a 1984 era fighter jet had the fuel capacity to fly to Cairo and back from Washington–and didn’t they steal the plane? And flying the jet through the fireworks? I actually said out loud, “is it safe to fly a jet through things that are exploding? And wouldn’t the jet have fucked up the fireworks?” Visually, that scene was quite beautiful–one of those “on a big screen” things–but…and while I also get the desire to have Chris Pine/Steve Trevor return, the way they did it made little to no sense, and I may have literally rolled my eyes when I realized what the central plot was going to be: an ancient stone that grants wishes? Really? I mean…if they were looking for a plot to symbolize that this was a super-hero movie from the 1980’s, putting the entire world in jeopardy is the kind of thing they used to do in those rare super-hero movies from the time–I’m looking at the Christopher Reeve Superman movies–but other than that, there really was very little that made this a “1984” movie–music, costumes, etc. It was a mess of a movie–I got bored from time to time–but it was a mildly entertaining diversion….afterward, inspired by seeing Lynda Carter, we watched the original pilot for her Wonder Woman series from the 1970’s, which completely leaned into the idea that it was a comic book television show, and went the old Batman route. I was also rather surprised to see what a star-studded cast they came up with for the pilot as well–Red Buttons, Carl Reiner, Stella Stevens, and Cloris Leachman, among others–and they even went with little caption boxes, like the comic books had–“Secret Nazi base”, “top secret US base”, etc. Never once in this movie is there a moment like the No Man’s Land scene in the original, which literally brought up goosebumps and tears to my eyes when I was sitting in the theater watching….it’s like they forgot all the things that made the first film so special and that the audience connected to, and kept the stuff people had problems with and then amplified them. About the most 1984 thing about the movie was the threat of nuclear annihilation–something that was very much on our minds back in the 1980’s, not to mention the Cold War, which was only glancingly mentioned and probably should have been the driving force of the movie. The heart of the first movie was the clearly delineated line between the evil of the Germans and the “goodness” of the Allies; the key to this movie–and had it actually been made in 1984–the villains should have been Soviets. By skating around the what was truly the most important ideological divide in the world at the time the film was set, they undermined the film itself.

After the Wonder Woman double feature, we watched Let Them All Talk, the Netflix movie starring Meryl Streep as an author and Dianne Weist and Candace Bergen as her two best friends from college, reuniting on an Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2 so the Streep character can accept a distinguished literary award in England. While it had some very interesting things to say about writers and writing, it never really took off because the cast really never did anything more than sit around and talk about things, and there were no real emotional pay-offs. How can you have these three powerhouse actresses in the same film and then give them so very little to work with? They were all fine, but maybe a little flat–which has a lot to do with the direction and the script.

Needless to say, I did no writing over the last two days, and of course now realize I have fucked up completely the working time-line I had created in my head to see me through to the end of the book. Today I have to run errands, and I should go to the gym, but I also need to focus and get back to writing the book. In fact, probably once I’m finished here, I will take the laptop with me to my easy chair, grab my lap desk, and then start revising away. I’ve been waking up early these last couple of days, and while I am most pleased with the organizing and filing I managed to get done yesterday–all those stories in progress I’d forgotten, all those ideas moldering in the back of my mind–I do regret the laziness of not writing anything yesterday. But by the time I was finished with everything it was already mid-afternoon, and there really wasn’t much choice at that time. That also needed to be done, so I shouldn’t regret the loss of writing time, but I also am not going to be berating myself over.

I also forgot the Saints played yesterday, just assuming the game would be Sunday. Oops.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines while leaving you with one last, past the actual day Christmas hunk. Have a lovely 26th, everyone.

Christmas Tree Farm

And now it’s Christmas. I woke up this chilly morning to a barrage of well wishes in my inbox; thanks, companies who have my email address; I appreciate your concerns about my holiday and how it is going to go. It’s cold this morning, but the sky is blue and the sun is shining and there are no clouds to be seen anywhere in the sky; it was also cold yesterday but much more dreary outside. This morning appears to be one of those mornings where it feels colder inside than it does outside.

I was a slug yesterday, admittedly so. I just didn’t have the energy or the inspiration or the drive to do a whole lot of anything all day–i feared this would be the case, and was proven, rather early on, to be correct. I spent the morning finishing reading The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson, and yes, this was magnificent research for Chlorine, but at the same time is was a fascinating journey into what it was like to be gay in the entertainment industry in the post-war period, and needless to say, it was a fascinating read. And while it was completely impossible to feel deep sympathy for Henry Willson–he did terrible things, and used his power to force beautiful young men with Hollywood aspirations and dreams into having sex with him, among many other terrible things; and although it was also the era when beautiful young women also had to have sex with producers, directors and studio executives to get ahead, that doesn’t lessen, or in any way mitigate, what he was doing to those young men. Willson was gay but was also homophobic, and serves as an interesting case study into the mentality that drives and draws gay men into sociopolitical conservatism–and the cognitive dissonance that must exist in order to embrace a self-loathing world view. Willson was a friend of Roy Cohn, probably the most horrible gay man to ever exist in this country, but that friendship really came as no surprise. Reading the book was a fascinating, if horrifying, reminder that it wasn’t all that long ago that the closet was the only option and going to a club or being involved with another man or even going to a private party, was putting everything in your life–career, family, whatever–in jeopardy.

And needless to say, I have a lot of great ideas now to work into Chlorine; I’d say this book was probably the single most important resource I’ve come across in my research for the book–more so than even Tab Hunter’s memoir or the biographies of Rock Hudson and Montgomery Clift; yesterday afternoon as I digested what I’d read, plot twists and story kept coming to me–scenes, character development–and I am, as always, looking forward to that day in the now not so distant future when I’ll be able to write this book…although I am also thinking reading a biography of Anthony Perkins also might not be such a bad idea.

We finished watching Tiny Pretty Things yesterday, and I have to say it was quite delightful fun–but the dialogue! OMG, the dialogue was sometimes so jarringly bad it took me right out of the show. I don’t blame the cast at all–some of the dialogue was so fucking bad not even Streep or Lange or DeNiro or Pacino could have made it work–but everything else about the show was marvelous. It was well plotted and planned very well; apparently there are two novels set in that ballet school, and the first season ended with an amazing cliff-hanger as well to set up the second season, even if the crime from the first was still unresolved–at least, thus far. I’ve always thought ballet was the perfect setting for noir–the sacrifices it requires, the commitment necessary, and the willingness and desire to push your body through incredible pain to achieve great beauty…it’s amazing to me. Do I wish I had some ballet training? Kind of, although I don’t think as a child I would have had the drive to push myself through the pain…but you also never know. I’ve always been able to commit fully to things I’m interested in or enjoy; the question would be whether or not I would have enjoyed it enough to commit to it. Hard to say, really.

I do know if and when I start writing about ballet, I’ll need to immerse myself in it. I do think the young men who commit so fully to dance–particular in our culture and society, which still sees such things as “unmanly” and “gay”–are fascinating, and most books about ballet–shows, etc–inevitably default to the female point of view and perspective; no one has, to the best of my knowledge, ever really delved into the world of ballet from that masculine perspective.

We also watched the second episode of The Stand, which isn’t really generating a lot of buzz as it airs; which is kind of curious to me. Someone mentioned it on Twitter last night, something along the lines of “How bad must this version of The Stand be if there’s no on-line discussion of how hot Alexander Skarsgard is in it?” I hadn’t really thought about it–I’m kind of enjoying the non-linear story-telling technique they are using, even if it does kind of lesson the impact of the apocalyptic end of the world from the flu story King told in the first part of the book–which is one of my favorite parts of the book, honestly. (I do love the book, even if it’s been years since I reread it–it used to be one of my comfort reads) There were some responses to the tweet about how bad the show is, and I don’t know that I would go that far–I’m enjoying it thus far, even if the non-linear story-telling is kind of jarring–but the lack of conversation about the show is pretty telling, I guess.

I didn’t do any physical writing or editing yesterday, but I did spend some time thinking about it, and i hadn’t planned on doing any writing or anything today, either, what with it being holidays and all (remember, I suspected this would happen yesterday morning), but that’s okay, really–not going to beat myself up over it too terribly; it is what it is–and today I will most likely try to get some of this mess cleaned up; my office area is a disgrace as always, and I have paper and folders and books stacked everywhere. And we are definitely watching Wonder Woman 1984 today.

And that, Constant Reader, is as good a segue as any into my return to the spice mines. Have a lovely holiday, everyone/

Last Christmas

And it is Christmas Eve for those who celebrate–and even for those actually don’t, really; it’s rather inescapable in the United States. I generally don’t make a big deal out of Christmas anymore. Decorating is out because the decorations aren’t safe from Scooter, who is sweet but dumb enough to chew through an electrical wire for lights and will try to climb/pull down/destroy the tree. We don’t buy gifts for each other anymore because neither of us is wanting or in need of anything that is an affordable gift, and we generally just buy what we want or need whenever we can. So, for us, it’s more of a “don’t have to go to work” thing, and we generally just lay around and relax on Christmas, and this year’s plan includes watching Wonder Woman 1984 on HBO MAX.

I went to the gym yesterday evening, and I have to say, while I always have to make myself go and even after I am there, I still have to make myself resist the urge the lighten the weights so it’s not so hard, and not to skip machines and exercises…it always feels amazing after I get home and get cleaned up. I also noticed yesterday that my moobs are turning back into pecs. The veins in my arms are becoming more visible–if not prominent quite yet–and I noticed that my backside is getting firmer. (I notice this primarily when I sit down on the wooden floor of the aerobics room to stretch…it’s not as comfortable as it used to be, when everything was squishier.) I don’t really have a set goal at the moment for my working out or the development of my body; right now, I am still primarily focused on getting to the gym three times a week and pushing through the exercising…but it is always lovely to notice progress. Once the routine is more secured and there’s less concern for me about skipping, maybe then I’ll figure out a physical goal, but for now, I am enjoying the feeling of exercise and it’s effects on my body. I’ve always had a contentious relationship with my body, to be honest, and I am actually kind of enjoying getting reacquainted with my muscles and my body and reevaluating it. I don’t know that I’ve actually achieved any wisdom in my sixty years on this planet, but I feel like I am not nearly as hyper-critical of my body as I was when I was younger. I think in February is when I am going to change my workouts to body parts rather than the full body workout I’ve been doing.

Last night we started watching Tiny Pretty Things, the ballet school series on Netflix–I’ve always been fascinated by ballet, and have always wanted to write a gay noir set in a ballet company–and while it gives in to tropes from time to time–the villainess among the students is a bitchy blonde girl from a wealthy family, for one–and of course, the ‘girl from nowhere’ who comes to the school as a student with a stunning amount of raw talent that shakes up the power dynamics of the school; periodically I would say, “this is Showgirls only in ballet”. There’s a gay kid, who is having sex with his ostensibly straight male roommate; there’s a kid whose father died in the Middle East (whether Iraq or Afghanistan isn’t made clear) who of course has to share a room with the French kid who’s also a Muslim; Lauren Holly chews every piece of scenery she gets near as Monique DuBois, who runs the school (it also took me a while to realize it was her, because she doesn’t look much like she used to; I’d see her full face and think yes that’s her and then they would show her in profile and I wouldn’t be so sure anymore); and of course there’s all the competition and backstabbing one would expect from a ballet school/company. Most of the cast came from the world of ballet–there’s really no way to fake the bodies or the dancing–and it’s always a joy to watch them rehearse, practice, warm up, and actually dance. There’s also a central mystery; the prima ballerina at the school is in a coma, having fallen off the roof–or was she pushed? Nova Ren Suma’s The Walls Around Us is an excellent novel about the cutthroat world of a ballet school–it was an Edgar finalist the year I was a judge for young adult crime novels, and I’ve never forgotten it. I’ve been wanting to write a ballet noir since the early 1990’s, and Megan Abbott’s next novel The Turnout, is a ballet noir I cannot wait to get my hands on. I still might write one–while Megan’s book will probably be the definitive ballet novel, mine would be about a gay dancer (of course), so I think I could get away with writing about the same subject.

So many things to write, so little time.

I’d actually planned on sleeping in this morning, but I woke up just before seven and went ahead and got up. I figured I could drink some coffee while cleaning and organizing my office space, and then later, when my mind is more awake and focused and clear, I’ll dive into Bury Me in Shadows. I’d like to get through this last chapters–I still have to write one more chapter, the end–so I can get to work on my story for the MWA anthology deadline. I’m also going to try to finish reading The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson, and I also have a couple of secret projects I need to start thinking about. I also have an advance copy of the new Alison Gaylin novel, The Collective, that I cannot wait to start reading.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Christmas Eve, Constant Reader!

Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree

And suddenly, it’s Christmas Eve Eve Eve. Huzzah? Huzzah.

Yesterday was quite a day. A roller-coaster, as it were; up and down and then loop-de-loop and up and down again. It wore me the fuck out, let me tell you–it was deeply unpleasant at times, and then at others, it was quite marvelous. But the ultimate end of the day was overwhelmingly positive, and that’s always a good thing. The low light of the day was thinking I’d lost the revision of Chapter 18 I did over the weekend–I thought I’d renamed the file (I include the date finished in the file name) and it was nowhere to be found. At one point I was close to tears, thinking about the work I was going to have to completely redo and I almost had one of those patented writer emotional breakdowns we all experience periodically. They are always unpleasant–make no mistake about that–but they are also incredibly cathartic. Deadlines are incredibly stressful, after all, and sometimes that emotional release–like a steam valve that lets off pressure periodically–and weirdly enough, it actually calms me down and centers me.

I have never claimed to be emotionally stable.

I went to the gym after work yesterday, which was nice–I didn’t even have to make myself go, which was even nicer–and then I came home, emotionally and physically exhausted. Paul was working and since I had to go to bed early, we didn’t watch the season finale of The Hardy Boys; hopefully that will be tonight. Instead, I sat in my easy chair and read some more of The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson, and I have to say, it’s so well written and involving you can’t help but get absorbed into the tale. We’ve now reached the 1950’s, McCarthyism, and the red/lavender scares of the 1950’s (I did not know that pinko, which was used against suspected Communist sympathizers, originated as now just a Communist slur, but a gay Communist slur; it makes sense, of course….and now I want to write a book called Pinko). I really do want to write my four book historical noir series–not just because the stories themselves are so appealing, but because it will force me to do research into gay history of the twentieth century, and I will learn ever so much more about what it was like to be gay before, during, and after Stonewall in the US.

Paul and I have decided we will spend Christmas watching movies–naturally, Wonder Woman 1984 on HBO MAX is the main feature of the day we are looking forward to seeing–and that will be kind of nice. After my half-day tomorrow I am on vacation until New Year’s Eve, and even then I am working that day at home–more of the Cynical 70’s Film Festival, no doubt–so after I come home from work tomorrow (and must go to the gym as well) I don’t have to go back to the office until January 4th, which is a lovely break and should be enough time for me to have a few goof off days (like Christmas) and writing days and cleaning days as well. I may spend Christmas Eve doing just that–moving the rugs, moving the tables and bookcases and so forth–and getting a nice deep clean on the Lost Apartment. There’s also going to be a Costco day in there somewhere as well–Paul has really fallen in love with Costco, and I’ve sort of created a monster in taking him there; but he also pays for everything when we go, so definitely MY KIND OF MONSTER–and I am thinking I may make a Genius Bar appointment so I can figure out what the hell is the problem with this fucking Air and its storage issues….or I may see if I can do it on-line with an Apple tech first.

I mean, why leave the house and go to Metairie if I don’t have to?

I may even see if I can get the old desktop to work again. We shall see how that goes; I think there are things I can delete off its hard drive to free up space. I really hate working on the Air, to be honest, and am seriously thinking I need to get another desktop computer…obviously, I am very reluctant to spend the money on another Mac if it’s going to be rendered completely useless by a future OS update. But a new computer is another tax write-off, and that’s nothing to be sneezed at, I suppose.

And the Dark Lord continues to come around. Paul says he has started hanging out with Tiger next door, but when he hears us coming he comes springing down the sidewalk and bounces behind us all the way to the door. He will only eat from one spot–I’ve tried a dish, I’ve put the food in other places, but no, if it’s not in front of the bottom step he won’t notice or touch it. He also scampers away whenever I try to get close–right under the house, which is rather conveniently close for an easy escape–but Paul said he let Paul touch him and pet his head yesterday, so there’s progress. Paul is the Cat Whisperer….if anyone can get the Dark Lord to bond, it’s Paul.

And on that note it is back to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely Christmas Eve Eve Eve, everyone, and I’ll check in with you all again tomorrow morning.