My biggest complaint about the job of writing is that you can’t walk away from it. I can’t, anyway. Most jobs aren’t like that. You go to the office, or the factory, or the strip club, wherever you work, and you do your job for the allotted amount of time, and then you go home. You leave the job and go do something else. I’ve never been able to do that. I’m probably better at it than I used to be — I should be, I’ve been at this for about thirty years — but I still haven’t mastered the ability to stop writing, walk away from the desk, and go do something else. I mean, I do that, but I’m unable to completely leave the work behind. It’s still going on in my head.
Right now, I’m working on an extremely difficult project that’s driving me crazy. I’m behind, the deadline’s approaching, and I can’t help feeling that I’d be able to handle it a lot better if, for just a little while, I could STOP THINKING ABOUT IT! But that’s not how writing works.
Once I get a project going, it’s stuck in my head. I may walk away from the desk, but the characters are still right where they always are, in my head, doing the things I’ve made them do. They’re solving problems, or creating problems, or they’re stuck in a problematic loop that, for whatever reason, I can’t solve.
Right now, I’ve got about a dozen characters running around in my head trying to survive a hurricane, a deadly virus, and each other, and they don’t take breaks. They can’t! They’re dealing with the horrible situations I’ve put them into, some of which I’m not sure how to get them out of, and wherever I go, whatever I’m trying to do, they’re in my head trying to survive, or kill somebody, or kill each other, and THEY WON’T SHUT UP! How the hell am I supposed to sleep with all of that crap going on?
The result is that I’m often distracted, preoccupied, unaware of my surroundings. I might be sitting in the living room staring at the TV, but that doesn’t mean I’m watching or listening to it. I might wander through the house slowly late at night as if I don’t know where I am. I do, but it might not seem that way. I might be in the middle of a conversation with someone when the people in my head have a breakthrough and solve a problem, or discover a new layer to the story, which means I'm not longer in the conversation.
If you live with a working writer, you know what I mean. You’ve seen it first hand. You’re probably nodding your head as you read this.
This is one of the reasons people think writers are weird. It’s not that we are necessarily weird — yeah, okay, I admit, most of us are in one way or another — but what we do is weird. I suppose that in order to want to do what we do, you have to be a little weird in the first place, because so much of it is sitting in a room alone and writing. But even when we leave that room, we’re still writing, whether we want to or not, which is a part of this job that makes us weirder than we were before we started doing it.
Are you a writer who has this problem? If so, how do you handle it? Do you live with a writer who has this problem? If so, does it make you crazy or are you used to it by now? Share your solutions and funny stories in the comments below.
I haven’t blogged in a while because I’m working on a new book with a looming deadline and it has consumed most of my life lately. I’ll be able to discuss the project in detail soon. When I’m involved in a book, especially one that has a quick deadline, I tend to become somewhat useless. My brain never stops working on it, so no matter what I’m doing, there’s always a lot of distracting activity going on in my head. Sometimes I’m surprised other people can’t hear it. I have a tendency to utter baffling non sequiturs or spontaneously retreat into my head in the middle of a conversation, and I spend more time than usual asking myself why the hell I came into the kitchen, or the living room, or the hall closet. Does that ever happen to you? You get up, walk into the kitchen with a specific purpose in mind, but by the time you get there, the purpose has drifted away like a puff of smoke over St. Peter's Basilica and you’re left standing there wondering what the hell it was. This happens to me with more frequency the older I get, but when I’m deep in a book, its frequency becomes a nuisance.
I’ve also been keeping weirder hours than usual. I’ve always been a night person, but lately, I’m still in the office at four and five in the morning. Normally, I prefer to be asleep by then, but when things are rolling at the keyboard, I don’t want to stop. Having to set the clocks ahead an hour did not help this situation. I found myself still up and wide awake when Dawn left for work at a little after seven on Monday morning, watching old second-season Twilight Zone episodes and waiting for my brain to quiet down enough to sleep. The cats loved it, though. I’m usually asleep when Dawn leaves for work, which means there’s no one around to show them obeisance until I get up, and there’s nothing for them to do but nap or lick themselves. When Dawn left on Monday, I planted myself on the couch for more Rod Serling weirdness and was suddenly surrounded by a needy, purring cloud of pleasantly surprised cats. In spite of my preoccupation with the current project, I’ve been doing some other things lately. ...
I just finished reading Carl Hiaasen’s Star Island from 2010. If you’ve never read Hiaasen, I urge you to do so. The Los Angeles Times called him “an Old Testament moralist disguised as a comedian” because in his frantic and absurd Florida-based novels, cold, hard justice is unfailingly doled out to those who deserve it. But unlike the Old Testament, that justice comes in hilarious and sometimes delightfully gruesome forms and it always makes sense. His prose remains tight and punchy as he piles on layer upon layer of crazy characters and increasingly complex and berserk plot developments, so no matter how close the whole thing might seem to spinning completely out of control, Hiaasen is always solidly in charge. He’s a writer who regularly makes me burst into laughter that sometimes goes on a little longer than it should. In Star Island, for example, he writes that a character who’s just been zapped with an electric cattle prod “made a sound like a chicken going under the wheels of a truck.” Cracked me up. This is his best novel in some years and I strongly recommend it.
We have so many books in our house that deciding what to read next can be stroke-inducing. It’s like choosing a movie on Netflix streaming or off the shelf in our movie room. I probably could watch several movies in the time that I’ve spent trying to decide what to watch on Netflix, or standing in our movie room staring at the thousands of movies on the shelves. Sometimes I look at the pile of books I intend to read and wish there were some way I could read them all at once. No matter how long I live, I know that, at the end of my life, one of my biggest regrets will be not having time to read all the books I wanted to read.
I’ve been fascinated lately by the story of H. H. Holmes, a serial killer who used the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago as his hunting grounds. Dawn is currently reading The Devil in White City by Erik Larson, and I’ve recently watched a couple of documentaries on the subject. I vaguely remembered that Robert Bloch had written a novel based on the story of Holmes, but I couldn’t remember the title. I launched an expedition to see if we had the book somewhere in the house. Sure enough, I found it. The edition of American Gothic that I have was published in 1975 by Fawcett with one of those standard gothic woman-in-peril paperback covers that were so prevalent back then. I think I read the book ages ago when I was a kid, possibly before I was old enough to appreciate it, but I'm not sure, so that’s what I’m reading right now. I’ve only finished the first chapter so far, but once again, I am blown away by Bloch’s deft economy with words and his ability to evoke so much imagery with so little description.
Not since Boston Legal have I been as addicted to a TV show as I am to the Netflix original series House of Cards. This show is delicious, like some dark, rich dessert you know you shouldn’t eat but can’t resist. I was hooked immediately, in part by Kevin Spacey’s juicy performance as Congressman Francis Underwood. Spacey is always fun to watch, but here, he so clearly relishes his role that he’s even more riveting than usual. Underwood knows everybody’s secrets and where all the bodies are buried and he uses that knowledge to get what he wants, whatever that might be at the moment. He and his wife Claire, played by Robin Wright, are a couple of web-weaving spiders who are prepared to do whatever (and whomever) is necessary to achieve their goals. Underwood sometimes breaks TV's "fourth wall" by addressing us directly to let us in on his schemes and fill us in on how things really work in the halls of power. This device makes all the devious plotting even more fun.
I’m no Washington insider, of course, but from what I do know (combined with all the things I’ve always suspected), House of Cards feels like one of the more brutally accurate depictions of our government. Remember Aaron Sorkin’s turn-of-the-century White House soap The West Wing? It was a great show, but if it were put in a cage with House of Cards, it wouldn’t last two minutes. And there’d be a lot of blood. The West Wing was about morality, about doing the right thing. In House of Cards, corruption is the default position and it’s a given that just about everyone is on the take in one way or another.
A remake of a 1990 BBC miniseries based on the novel by Michael Dobbs, the show has some talented writers, like Rick Cleveland, whose credits include The West Wing, Six Feet Under, and Mad Men, and directors like David Fincher, Joel Schumacher, and Carl Franklin. My only complaint is the overuse of the phrase “the American people” — it’s used once in the first season. I firmly believe that phrase is never used in Washington, D.C., unless cameras are rolling, because what goes on there seems to have little or nothing to do with “the American people” and everything to do with the accumulation of power and the covering of asses. Netflix made all 13 episodes of the first season available for streaming on February 1 so you don’t have to wait a week for the next episode, and it’s such an addictive show that it’s extremely tempting to watch all 13 episodes back to back.
House of Cards is brilliantly entertaining, but it also made me angry. It should make everyone angry. Because in the United States, you and I are the government, we determine who takes office, and this is what we’ve allowed our government to become. We point our fingers and complain about all the other politicians, but for some reason, we all want our favorite politicians from our political party to remain in office because, for whatever reason, we think he or she isn’t like all the others and only the other political party is a problem. We really need to wake the hell up.
When I came into the office today and turned on the TV, there was nothing on but the goddamned papal conclave. It was everywhere. And it was being covered in a way that strongly suggested I should not only be interested but sitting on the edge of my seat biting my fingernails. I didn't even know who was competing, and I hadn't even watched the auditions — I haven't watched that show since they fired Paula Abdul. On the screen, a vast ocean of people had gathered to see who would be the next CEO of the world’s largest organization of child rapists and their protectors. By the time I joined the festivities, white smoke had already puffed out of the chimney, so a pope had been chosen and everyone was waiting for him to be introduced. I flipped around the channels looking for the coverage that was being hosted by Joan Rivers — I knew it had to be out there somewhere, because that was the kind of coverage this event was getting, like the biggest show business event since the O.J. trial, and I wanted to hear Joan had to say about what the new pope was wearing.
Given everything we now know about the Catholic church, it seemed to me that all those people gathered outside St. Peter’s Basilica should be angrily dismantling the place. But instead, they all cheered when it was announced that the new pope would be some old fart from Argentina. Afterward, everywhere I turned I found only post-game shows with everyone analyzing the whole thing. So I turned off the TV.
If you’re wondering why there is still smoke coming out of that chimney, it’s because Cardinal Snoop Dogg is visiting from the states.
Dawn and I rarely go the movies these days, and once a movie I want to see becomes available at home, it usually takes me a while to get to it, so I’m typically way behind when it comes to current movies. I only recently watched The Artist, which won the Best Picture Oscar more than a year ago. I’ll probably see the new winner, Argo, sometime next year.
I recently watched Drive, mostly because I was eager to see Albert Brooks’s Oscar-nominated performance as a villain. Brooks is a comedy genius who’s been making me laugh since I was a kid. He’s also a great director who started out making short films for Saturday Night Live in the 1970s. He’s written, directed, and starred in some of the funniest movies out there, like Real Life, Modern Romance, and Lost in America. I had to see what kind of villain he would play. I was blown away — not only by Brooks’s portrayal of a ruthless businessman, but by the whole movie.
It felt like I was watching a movie made in the 1970s or early 1980s. It quietly took its time setting up its story and introducing its characters, and then it kicked my teeth down my throat. I'd barely noticed Ryan Gosling until I saw this movie. He has some Steve McQueen in him, with a James Caan vibe, but they make up a style that’s all his own in Drive, where he plays a guy who says very little, but means what he says. It’s a very violent movie, but it’s the right kind of violence. It takes its violence seriously. It made me squirm and grunt and even look away briefly. Director Nicolas Winding Refn doesn’t wallow in the violence because he doesn’t seem to enjoy it, but he doesn’t shrink away from it, either. And it features another fine performance by Bryan Cranston. I’ve been a fan of his work since the daytime soap opera Loving, which I watched faithfully for a full year after seeing the pilot in 1983.
Drive is a hard-edged action thriller that has some real humanity. Sure, there are great car chases and plenty of violent action, but it is, first and foremost, a movie about people, which makes us care about the car chases and action because we’re emotionally invested.
I have not seen any of Refn’s other work yet, but he’s a director I will watch from now on. I’m especially excited about the fact that he’s remaking Logan’s Run. I’m hoping he will remain true to the novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. The 1976 movie starring Michael York was a lot more bright and light-hearted than the dark, disturbing novel, which has a much better movie in it. I'm hoping Refn will make that movie.
What kind of writer would I be if I got through a pointless, rambling blog post like this without plugging my work? A whole bunch of my novels are now available as audiobooks! Meds, Live Girls, Night Life, Ravenous, Bestial, Trade Secrets, Pieces of Hate, Scissors, The Loveliest Dead, The Girl in the Basement, and Murder was My Alibi are all available now, with Dark Channel coming on March 29. You can find them all right here. For regular updates like this, keep checking my website, RayGartonOnline.com.
In the new Fox horror series The Following, Joe Carroll, played by James Purefoy, is both a serial killer and a novelist, two things that have been romanticized and mythologized all out of proportion. (A perfect example of the mythologized writer is Carroll’s idol, Edgar Allan Poe.) Carroll is the villain of the series, and the reason people will keep coming back. Kevin Bacon’s damaged FBI agent Ryan Hardy and all the other characters are really just window dressing. Let’s be honest — this might as well be called The Joe Carroll Show.
Carroll is a serial killer with groupies. Maybe it would be more accurate to call them disciples because they carry out his orders while he plots and schemes in prison. While the first episode of The Following was not ideal viewing for dog lovers (if you saw it, you know what I mean), it’s off to a good start. It’s well written, has a fine cast, and overall, it’s a beautiful production. It occurred to me while I watched the show, sitting stiffly on my couch during a tense moment, that serial killers are the new vampires.
Not too long ago, the vampire was a scary predator. That was before, as Craig Ferguson puts it, they got sensitive and started sparkling and expressing themselves through their rippling abs. The vampire is now Fabio — a figure of airbrushed romance and teen angst. He’s dark, but in much the same way those teenagers who hang out at Hot Topic are dark — and if you’re fond of the vampire of old, just as annoying. In fiction, it’s hard to successfully dress up the vampire as a scary predator anymore, and the same thing is rapidly happening to the werewolf. If you do, you’ll inevitably hear from some upset female readers who will proclaim, “Your vampires (or werewolves) are scary! I don’t like that!”
The position the vampire once held in the horror genre is now held by the serial killer. He is the new boogeyman in horror. But it’s the position that’s new, not the serial killer. He’s been around in horror movies and fiction for decades. Serial killer movies have been popular for a long time. One swept the Oscars more than twenty years ago. Now there are even serial killer comedies. But now he’s come into our homes. First there was Dexter, which has been running since 2006, now The Following, and coming soon are primetime series about Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates. When there are enough serial killer shows on TV for people to have a favorite TV serial killer, you know the serial killer has gone fully mainstream. I’m waiting for a serial killer sitcom. (In fact, I have a pretty good idea for one — if you have any pull in the TV biz, message me.) We Americans love our serial killers. And we should — we’ve produced some of the very best. Along with porn and guns, serial killers are one of the few things we still make, and make well.
The vampire of old could manipulate people with hypnosis and/or telepathy. He could turn into a bat, or a wolf, or a creeping mist, and he had superhuman strength. He was, of course, a dead man resurrected. Undead. He drank his victims’ blood to survive, it sustained him. Traditionally, his only weaknesses were sunlight, garlic, and the trappings of Christianity, but those came and went depending on the movie or novel. The vampire usually looked like a human being, but he was a monster with supernatural powers. There was an air of romance about him, but it was dwarfed by his menace.
But he is no more. Not really. He used to make women scream, but ever since Anne Rice started writing vampire novels, he’s had to turn swooning women away due to his own exhaustion and bloat, and because, even when you live forever, there just isn't enough time in a day. In other words, he has a new career, his dance card is full and he doesn't have time to be scary anymore.
The serial killer is a human being, a mortal who can be killed. He has no supernatural powers. But ... he might as well. Just as the vampire must drink blood, the mythological serial killer must kill. It is his outlet, his meditation, his happy place, and it sustains him. He is brilliant, a seductive genius whose razor-sharp powers of perception keep him one step ahead of everyone else. Chances are, if you analyze any fictional serial killer story, you’ll probably conclude that he does have supernatural powers, which would be a requirement to do the things most fictional serial killers do. But we don’t think about that much as viewers or readers because we’ve come to expect it. That’s what fictional serial killers are, that’s what they do.
Real serial killers are different animals altogether. They are deeply dysfunctional people who always have in their background some combination of abuse — physical, sexual, psychological, or all three — personality disorders, and mental illness, a deadly brew that leaves him with deadly, bloody desires and no conscience. The one who came closest to being a seductive genius was Ted Bundy, and he was just a bright, handsome guy who also happened to be a monster. He fooled a lot of people for a while, but he wasn’t manipulating them like chess pieces on a board. But that’s neither here nor there. We’re not talking about real serial killers. We’re talking about the boogeyman.
Some people don’t think serial killer stories qualify as horror because of the absence of the supernatural. I disagree for the reasons above. We have imbued the fictional serial killer with ersatz supernatural powers because the real serial killer scares the hot, steaming shit out of us precisely because he is not supernatural. He’s just one of us. It’s never possible to recognize him for what he is, we only learn about it later, after it’s too late for his victims. Sometimes he’s an odd, quiet loner and sometimes he’s active in local politics and entertains local children by playing a clown. And sometimes he’s a mass killer who walks into a mall or school and opens fire. He is impossible to spot or predict. Because he’s one of us.
The vampire grew out of ignorance and superstition. There was a time when people were sometimes buried a little too early, and if they managed to get out of the grave, they probably didn’t look so good. Imagine happening to see someone crawl out of a grave and stagger away looking dirty and sinister. It’s the kind of thing that would stick with you, the kind of thing you’d tell others. There was never a real vampire, of course, but there was a time when the fear of vampires was very real.
The fictional serial killer is scary, but he’s scary in the way a movie or novel or TV show is scary — he’s safe. We’ve made him that way. We’ve distanced him from ourselves, made him different. He’s a seductive genius who reads people like cereal boxes and basks in his own evil. We can enjoy the gruesome chills of a Hannibal Lecter movie because he is clearly what we want him to be — not us.
The real serial killer is not different from us. He is us. He is somebody’s son, somebody’s friend, maybe somebody’s brother, maybe even somebody’s spouse. Yes, he’s a monster, but he’s a monster who’s also one of us.
We had to turn the serial killer into a supernatural boogeyman. The reality is just too horrifying.
25th Anniversary
2012 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Live Girls. It was my fourth book, and I’ve written a lot more since, but it’s still the most well known of all my work. I’m often asked if, after all the work I've done in the years since, it’s irritating that my fourth book is still getting so much attention. Absolutely not!
In fact, I’m pretty astonished and quite thrilled that a book I began writing 26 years ago on a spare typewriter in the offices of Pinnacle Books right after an inspiring visit to a Times Square peep show is still being read and enjoyed. If you’d told me back then that the book would still be selling in 2012, I wouldn’t have believed you. And if you’d told me that all these years later, I’d be working on another book set in the Live Girls universe and featuring some of the same characters from that book, I wouldn’t have believed you.
No matter how many books I write, knowing that people are still enjoying this one could never be irritating. So happy anniversary, sexy New York vampires!
Overkill
When I was a boy, my mother took me into a new book store in town owned by a friend of hers, a woman named Jean with whom Mom had worked as a nurse. (I didn’t know it at the time, but she was also the cousin of the father of the woman I would later marry.) Jean said to me, “I have something for you.” She took a book off the shelf and handed it to me, saying, “You can have this one.” She added with a chuckle, “But then you’ll have to come back and buy the trilogy.” She gave me The Hobbit. I burned through it quickly and loved every second of it. I was not as fond of the trilogy. While The Hobbit is a light, quick tale of adventure, a children’s book, the trilogy is a much more dense epic fantasy that takes itself far more seriously. I read it and enjoyed it, I just didn’t enjoy it as much as The Hobbit. While everyone else was waiting for movie adaptations of the trilogy, I was waiting for a movie adaptation of The Hobbit.
Be careful what you wish for.
Making a trilogy of movies based on the Lord of the Rings trilogy makes perfect sense, of course. Making a trilogy of three-hour movies out of The Hobbit makes sense only if all you care about is the buttloads of money you can wring out of it. A trilogy will give us plenty of time to get intimately familiar with every detail of the hobbits’ lives, right down to their personal possessions, each of which will be marketed as collectibles. The Hobbit toothbrush! Hobbit kitchen sponges! I’m kind of surprised there isn’t a trilogy of movie novelizations, as well. Some people have told me the first movie is good. That’s not the point. Saying the first of three three-hour-long movies of The Hobbit is good is like filling a stadium with hot oil to deep fry a turkey and then saying, “But the turkey is delicious!”
Peter Jackson is a wonderful director and I’ve enjoyed his work in the past, but I’ll sit this one out, thanks.
Shadowland
I’m rereading Peter Straub’s Shadowland right now. I first read the book when it was published in 1980. I was in high school at the time, a Seventh-day Adventist boarding academy, so I had to hide the book. It was contraband. It disrupted my life because I didn’t want to put it down. When I picked it up again recently, I expected to be disappointed. So often the books we read in our youth don’t hold up in our adulthood.
This one is better now than it was back then. I’m not sure why — maybe simply because I’m older and more mature and no longer a teenager — but I’m appreciating the book a lot more this time, seeing more in it than I did before. If you’ve never read it, I strongly recommend it. I recommend anything by Straub, but this one really stands out and has never gotten the recognition it deserves.
WTF TV?
For the past couple of months, we’ve been getting IFC (Independent Film Channel) for free. We have one of those cheap, crappy packages that doesn’t include IFC, and I’ve missed it. I tuned in after not having access to it for almost two years to find a marathon of Star Trek movies. Wait ... Star Trek movies? Are they independent films? I think not. Neither were any of the movies I've been seeing on IFC, which includes a Christmas time marathon of Jason movies.
What the hell is going on with TV?
Remember when the History Channel featured programming about history? Those days are gone. Now it offers Ax Men, American Pickers, Pawn Stars, and just in case you can’t get enough of that last one, Cajun Pawn Stars. Once in a great while, it will air something about history, but only if it has Nazis in it. The History Channel just loves its Nazis. And aliens.
Remember the Sci-Fi Channel? They had to change it to “SyFy” because its original sci-fi programming became so polluted with wrestling and pranks and “reality” shows in which bullshit artists run around in the dark hunting for ghosts.
The Food Network used to feature cooking shows. Now it’s nothing but overproduced, repetitious cooking competitions to see just how whiny and nasty and unpleasant people can get over a goddamned cupcake contest.
TLC used to be The Learning Channel. It was founded as the Appalachian Community Service Network by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare and NASA as an educational channel that was distributed for free by NASA satellite. It was privatized in 1980 and became The Learning Channel, or TLC. Its programming was made up of documentary content about everything from nature and science to cooking, from current events to history, and it did a better job of it than its rival, The Discovery Channel. By 1991, the Financial News Network (FNN) and Infotechnology Inc. owned 51% of TLC, but FNN went into bankruptcy that year (there are several jokes there, but I’ll let you come up with them yourself). The Discovery Channel bought up the TLC shares held by FNN and Infotech, and that’s when the channel’s crapward spiral began. Now it has come to provide what people used to have to go to the circus to see — little people, fat people, polygamists, a two-headed woman, preacher’s wives, brides from hell, virgins, hoarders, people who can’t seem to stop having babies, and, of course, Honey Boo Boo. (Let that be a lesson to us — when something, anything, is privatized, its original goals and intent immediately take a backseat to profit at any cost.) Now TLC stands for TLC and nothing more. Move along, nothing to learn here.
The Discovery Channel is no better. Gone are the nature documentaries and shows about science and medicine. Now we’ve got Amish Mafia, Texas Car Wars, American Guns, Outlaw Empires, booze, bikers, fishermen, ghosthunters, competing gold miners, ancient aliens, conspiracy theories, and a guy who drinks his own urine while pretending to be stranded in the wilderness with a full crew and provisions.
Now IFC no longer focuses on independent movies. IFC could accurately be called the Portlandia Channel. Along with that show, it features something called Whisker Wars (I don't want to know, really, so please don't fill me in), reruns of Malcolm in the Middle and endless airings of Trapped in the Closet, along with lots of movies that couldn’t be further away from “independent.”
I don’t know what bothers me more — what I just described above or the fact that nobody really seems to notice or mind. This has made channel-surfing a kind of self-inflicted punishment, and it’s why I watch very little broadcast television these days.
Back in the 1980s, American television audiences loved watching the rich wallow in their wealth and flaunt their immorality. Millions faithfully followed the exploits of the Ewings and the Carringtons and lapped up all those big, beautiful homes, fully stocked limos and globe-hopping lifestyles. Shows like Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous took up a lot of network airtime. Now we watch shows about people who have jobs. Any jobs, it doesn’t matter. Truckers, bakers, fishermen, chefs, as long as they’re employed. Employment is the new porn.
Stop Apologizing!
Jon Stewart is still publicly apologizing for his performance in The Faculty, the 1998 movie directed by Robert Rodriguez. Am I the only person in the world who liked that movie? Most people seem to laugh or roll their eyes when it comes up in conversation. I thought it had a nice ‘50s monster movie vibe. You know what I mean — the kind of movie that has a silly premise, but makes it work and manages to suck you in no matter how silly you thought it sounded at first. For example, the idea of giant ants invading Los Angeles might make you chuckle, but Them! is a pretty damned good movie that makes you believe those ants. That’s what The Faculty was for me. It has some laughs and some solid chills, and a great cast of character actors like Piper Laurie, Christopher McDonald, Daniel von Bargen, Bebe Neuwirth — and yes, Jon Stewart, who plays Professor Edward Furlong. The Faculty is a rarity these days, in any genre, in that it entertains without making the assumption that its audience has sustained some kind of brain damage.
And yet, Jon Stewart is still apologizing for it! I don’t know why, because I thought he was pretty good. And no one should apologize for the movie, which is a fine piece of work. If Stewart wants to apologize for something, he can start with that Adam Sandler movie Big Daddy. Where’s my apology for that piece of shit, huh? I’ll never get that hour and a half back.
American Horror Story
I battle with insomnia, and Netflix streaming is the insomniac’s best friend. American Horror Story, on the other hand, is not. I’ve been watching the first season of this series, which airs on FX (yet another channel our crappy satellite package doesn’t include), and I can’t remember the last time I was this impressed with made-for-TV horror. The horror genre hasn’t always worked well on broadcast TV in the past because broadcast TV has tended to be family friendly, which has resulted in a lot of watered-down horror. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. This is a disturbing series that tells a different story each season. I’m almost finished with the first season and I love the way it has managed to tell a haunted house story that feels fresh and unpredictable.
The writing is outstanding and does a good job of messing with our heads. It’s not the show to watch if your goal is getting to sleep, though. It’s frightening and upsetting, and so far, there has been one moment when I slapped a hand over my eyes because I didn’t want to see something. The glimpse I got has stayed with me.
I'm not prepared to commit to this, but Jessica Lange may be scarier than Glenn Close. I haven't decided yet.
American Horror Story reminds me of the made-for-TV movies that aired on the networks from 1969 to 1975. Most were in the horror genre, but even those that weren’t told dark and unsettling stories in dark and unsettling ways, and they usually had downer endings. They had low budgets and added to the atmosphere and tension with unique, creepy music and bizarre camera work. I’m seeing some of those same techniques in American Horror Story, and I like it. I’m also enjoying the use of familiar music from horror movies. If I’d heard about that before seeing the show — that it used music from other genre sources — I probably would have said, “That’s just lazy.” But I have to admit, it’s done selectively and with excellent judgment, and it works.
Among the names in the opening credits is Jennifer Salt. I first noticed her in one of those creepy TV movies I referred to earlier, Gargoyles from 1972. She popped up in a lot of TV shows and movies and was always a welcome presence. I especially enjoyed her work in the sitcom Soap and the creepy-as-hell Brian de Palma movie Sisters. Her father, Hugo Salt, blacklisted in 1950, wrote movies like Day of the Locusts and Serpico, and won Oscars for Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home. After walking away from acting, Jennifer took her father’s path and started writing for television in 1998. She began to produce as well during her years on Nip/Tuck, and now she’s doing both on what is maybe the best horror TV series I’ve ever seen. It’s been an interesting career to watch.
So Long, 2012!
For most of the people I know, 2012 has been a lousy year. It sure has sucked cosmic ass for Dawn and me. But things seem to be turning around. Dawn finally got a good job after two years of being unemployed, and I have a new publisher, so things are looking up.
I want to thank my readers, who’ve kept buying my books while patiently waiting for a new one (it’s coming!). Also, thanks to the people on Facebook and Twitter who put up with my bizarre sense of humor between bouts of self-promotion. I hope 2013 is a better year for all of us.
I’m a veteran of a number of apocalypses. They come, they go.
I was raised in a religious cult that emerged from William Miller’s failed prediction that Jesus would return on October 22, 1844. He made other predictions about the second coming, too, and they didn’t happen, either.
As I was growing up, those around me had occasional outbursts of breathless certainty that we were on the very threshhold of The End. “This is it!” they would say. “Get right with god because the end is here!”
Jimmy Carter was the antichrist. Ronald Reagan was the antichrist. George H. W. Bush was the antichrist. Bill Clinton was the antichrist. George W. Bush was the antichrist. Barack Obama is the antichrist. And whoever wins the next presidential election will be identified by some group — probably several — as the antichrist.
Remember Y2K? My old friend Scott loaded up on survivalist supplies back then so he’d have plenty to eat after all the computers went down and took civilization with them, and he was huddled in his little house in St. Helena with his gigantic safe bursting with guns and ammo, waiting for The End. He doesn’t talk to me anymore, but he’s probably huddled in the same house right now, with the same gigantic safe bursting with even more guns and ammo, waiting for ... whatever.
Some people have managed to enhance their panic by connecting the most recent Batman movie and the last few mass shootings with what is now known as the “Mayan apocalypse.” Some people are waiting for the phantom planet Nibiru to slam into the earth, others are waiting for massive solar flares to fry us all to a crisp, or for an alignment of the planets to turn the earth upside-down, and still others are waiting for the U.N. troops to storm the United States and take away all our guns and throw us into concentration camps under the direction of Barack Obama, the current antichrist.
You know what I’m doing? I’m waiting for everybody to STOP TALKING ABOUT THIS SHIT! I’ve had my fill of end times and apocalypses, of antichrists and dire warnings and doomsday predictions. Don’t we have enough real problems without having to worry about the end of the world, for crying out loud? I mean, it wouldn’t be so bad if there really were a planet on a collision course with earth, or if we had reason to believe the sun was going to barbecue us all in an apocalyptic burst. In that case, I could understand it. But that’s not the case. Instead, everybody’s quaking in their boots because of a bad interpretation of a goddamned ancient calendar!
What is it about us human beings that keeps us from enjoying our lives? What is it that makes so many of us insist on looking ahead to some moment of doom based on ... well, on nothing! What’s so wrong with just relaxing and enjoying each other in the time we have? That’s what I’d like to do, but it’s kind of hard when everybody's always going bugfuck crazy over another goddamned apocalypse!
KNOCK IT OFF, PEOPLE!
NASA has been bending over backwards to reassure people that the planet Nibiru does not exist, that the Mayan calendar in no way predicts The End, that the sun is fine, that the zombies aren’t about to rise from the earth in search of brains. In a video on the NASA website, David Morrison, a senior scientist and astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center, says:
“NASA has received thousands of emails and calls from members of the public who are concerned, especially young people. So it seems only right that NASA scientists should help dispel these rumors of doomsday.”
I used to be one of those young people who lived in fear of the end of the world and I know what it’s like. I’m glad NASA is stepping up to try and clear away the smoke. But for a lot of people, it just won’t work, because so many of us seem to be convinced that something’s coming to wipe us out.
NASA has also provided a few examples of other notable predictions made by the Mayans that did not come true:
OTHER BAD PREDICTIONS MADE BY THE MAYANS:
Donald Trump will be worshiped as a god.
The 1983 NBC series MANIMAL will be a cultural sensation.
Regis Philbin will be far too annoying to be successful in show business.
America will spend decades under the rule of the Kennedy dynasty.
Nostradamus will be an obnoxious quatrain-spouting douche destined for obscurity.
There’s no way Barack Obama will get a second term.
Elizabeth Taylor will be revered for her beauty and marital fidelity.
In the future, domesticated cats will be reviled for centuries.
Anal sex will never catch on.
December 21, 2012, will be no different than the date of any other predicted apocalypse. By that, I mean that it will come and go like any other day. It may be eventful, it may be a slow news day, but it will not be the last day. And on December 22, those who were waiting for the apocalypse will begin, once again, to annoy the fuck out of those of us who weren’t by searching for some other hook on which to hang their fear and paranoia.
Relax.
There have been many charming movies featuring Santa Claus. Fortunately, all of them have been Christmas movies. It just wouldn’t work if Santa showed up in a movie about Valentine’s Day or Easter — although in a perfect world, Mel Gibson would have cast him as the guy who whipped Jesus to a bloody pulp in his gay BDSM Easter porn flick, The Passion of the Christ. Sure, there have been a few horror movies featuring someone posing as Santa Claus that would make appropriate Halloween viewing, but they’re not specifically Halloween movies. Santa mostly confines himself to secular Christmas movies featuring music written by Jewish people.
One of my favorite Santa Claus movies is Miracle on 34th Street from 1947. It’s the first live-action movie I remember seeing in which Santa was depicted as a real person. Edmund Gwenn, who was such a charming Kris Kringle, had a big influence on my idea of Santa as a small child.
We have the movie on DVD, but I haven’t watched it yet this year. A couple of days ago, I was happy to discover that it was playing on AMC. When I turned it on, I got a queasy feeling. Something was wrong. Everything was a sickening shade of pink, as if the movie had been shot through a thin filter of Pepto Bismol. Then I became aware of the problem: it was the colorized version.
I had almost forgotten about colorization. At least, I hadn’t thought about it in many years. The period of years during which I did not think about the colorization of black-and-white movies was a peaceful one. Because I did not think about the colorization of black-and-white movies.
When Ted Turner, owner of the MGM film library, announced back in the 1980s that he was going to colorize Citizen Kane, a genuine effort should have been made to have him committed. He later said it was a joke and he’d had no intention of colorizing the classic, and even though he never did, I didn't believe him at the time. But he colorized other classics. Movies shot in black and white were not meant to be shown in color. Otherwise, they would have been shot in color. Because Turner was incapable of grasping that nugget of logic, movie buffs had a great deal of hostility toward him back then. But the fad didn’t last long and, mercifully, it all faded away.
Before I turned on AMC the other day, decades had passed since I’d last thought about or seen a colorized movie. I don’t know if Ted Turner had anything to do with colorizing Miracle on 34th Street, but I blamed him, anyway. All that Ted Turner hostility came rushing back. I felt myself tensing up, clenching my teeth, wishing that all kinds of creatively horrible things would happen to Turner. (For those not familiar with it, this is very similar to the hostility felt by many fans toward Joel Schumacher for putting nipples on Batman’s suit — something else I haven’t thought about in a long time, so now I’ve just pissed myself off again, dammit.) Then I remembered that he’d been married to Jane Fonda for ten years and figured the poor son of a bitch has probably suffered enough.
John Favreau’s Elf is a more recent example of Santa being depicted as a real person, portrayed in this case by Lou Grant. Um, I’m sorry, I meant Edward Asner. But Santa is overshadowed by Buddy the elf, played by Will Ferrell. Your enjoyment of Elf will depend a great deal on your enjoyment of Will Ferrell. I know many people who think he's about as funny as a pilonidal cyst. He makes me laugh when he’s in the right role, and I think the role of Buddy fits him perfectly. My problem with the movie is another actor in the cast. Elf is a light holiday comedy, but casting James Caan as Buddy’s father transformed it into a light holiday comedy that could, at any moment, explode with brutal violence and bloodshed. Or, at the very least, a bunch of F-bombs.
This isn’t the only light comedy James Caan has been in, either, which is bizarre when you think about it. Ever see a 1982 romantic comedy called Kiss Me Goodbye? Sally Field plays Kay, a widow who’s about to marry Rupert, played by Jeff Bridges. So far, so good, right? The ghost of Kay’s dead husband, a light-hearted song-and-dance man named Jolly, comes back to prevent the marriage. James Caan plays Jolly. Did you get that? James Caan plays a dancer named Jolly — and that name is not meant to be ironic. He tap dances. No, really, I’m not kidding. Holy crap, that movie was exhausting! I kept waiting for Caan to drop the ruse and knock Sally Field’s teeth down her throat.
I once dated a woman who claimed to have lived with James Caan, and she said every time they had sex, when he came he would spit in her face. I later learned she was a pathological liar and that nothing she’d told me was true, but the point is that I believed it at the time. Because it was James Caan. He’s a scary guy. He is not light comedy material. And yet he starred in Neil Simon's Chapter Two.
But unlike Kiss Me Goodbye, I’ve seen Elf several times now, and I no longer flinch when it looks like Caan might be making a move to beat the shit out of Buddy. It’s a funny, amiable holiday movie.
I don’t mean to be a Grinch, but I have a problem with Santa movies — specifically those movies in which everyone learns that Santa really exists and really has a toy factory run by elves at the North Pole. These movies share a flaw that, as far as I know, has never been addressed. It doesn’t seem to bother people, and I imagine most haven’t even noticed it. But as a writer, I am annoyed by stories that contain a logical flaw and then try to ignore it by never mentioning it and just hoping nobody will notice. Elf is a perfect example.
Walter (Caan) and Emily (Mary Steenburgen) have a son named Michael (Daniel Tay) of about ten or eleven years of age. When Walter and Emily meet Buddy, Walter’s biological son, at first they think he’s a little goofy in the head because he insists he’s an elf from the North Pole. Later, when they learn he’s telling the truth, they also learn that he works in Santa’s workshop making toys to be delivered by Santa to all the children of the world at Christmas.
Why don’t Walter and Emily already know Santa exists? If he delivers toys to all the children of the world every Christmas, there should be something under the tree for Michael that was not put there by Walter and Emily. I think it would be pretty hard to miss an extra gift under the tree, especially if it was the toy Michael had been requesting from Santa. It seems like there would have to be some communication between Santa and parents. You wouldn't want to give your child the same toy Santa had brought, would you? Now that would be awkward. I would think that discovering that Santa is real — especially for parents — would create more questions than it answered.
I don’t know how the other Santa movie fathers would react to learning that Santa is real, but I can easily imagine how James Caan would react.
“What the hell is this? You’re real? I mean, you gotta toy factory up at the North Pole, the sleigh and the reindeer, the whole show, and you’re tellin’ me you deliver toys to all the children of the world at Christmas? Then where the fuck you been, huh? Huh? Where the fuck you been? What about all those Christmas Eves I spent tryin’ to figure out how to assemble the kid's fuckin’ toys until five in the morning? Huh? What was that? And then you get the credit for it? After I do all the work?”
Caan rushes the fat man, pulls out his piece, levels it with Santa’s forehead and says slowly, “I am the last guy in the world ... that you wanna fuck with. You ain’t been deliverin’ toys. Whatta you up to, huh? You runnin’ drugs? Weapons? Doin’ some human trafficking? ‘Cause I’ll tell ya what you’re not doin’. You’re not deliverin’ any fuckin’ toys!”
That’s how I imagine it, anyway.
If I were a parent and learned that Santa was real, I would be tempted to sue the lazy bastard. At the very least, I would ask, “Then what the hell have I been doing the last few years?” But that never happens in the movies. The parents always shed their skepticism and embrace the fact that this fat guy has been flying all over the world delivering toys, but for some reason, not to their house. And nobody says, "Oh, god, what else were my parents telling me the truth about?"
When you think about the relatively small period of time during which children believe in Santa Claus, it’s pretty amazing how much time, effort and money our culture puts into convincing them of his existence. Movies, TV shows, books, advertisements — they all conspire to maintain for children the belief that Santa Claus is a real, magical guy who has flying reindeer, and those childre will, very soon, figure out, or be told, the truth. It’s a short period of time, but it’s an important process, because in this way, we soften their brains for religion and politics.
Do you have a favorite movie Santa? Was there a movie Santa who didn’t work for you? One who frightened you? Let's talk Santa in the comments.
Earlier this week, a story first reported a little over a decade ago resurfaced. It seems that in the 1950s, during the Cold war, the U.S. considered detonating a nuclear bomb on the moon as an intimidating display of power to the Soviet Union. According to the man in charge of “Project A119,” physicist Leonard Reiffel, the project was scrapped for fear of endangering the people of earth and contaminating the moon with radioactivity.
"Thankfully, the thinking changed,” Reiffel said in a 2000 interview. “I am horrified that such a gesture to sway public opinion was ever considered."
Does that make sense to you? I mean, going to all the trouble of firing a nuclear bomb at the moon to spook the Soviets?
Look what we can do, ya damned commies! We can blow up the fuckin’ moon! So you’d better behave.
Maybe it’s just me, but that doesn’t compute. It sounds more like a cover story. But what could that story be covering up? What other reason could there possibly be for nuking the moon?
During WWII, the Nazis had a space program under the direction of General Hans Kammler. He and his team were working on flying saucers with which Hitler planned to bomb London and New York. They also wanted to conquer orbital space long before anyone else even had the chance to think about it. The program was quite successful. There are many eyewitness accounts of the Nazi flying saucers that bore the iron cross. When the war turned out differently than the Hitler had hoped, they used that space program to flee to the moon, where a base had been under construction since as early as 1942.
A lunar Nazi base is a much better reason to nuke the moon than the one we’ve been given, don’t you think? It certainly makes more sense. I mean, if there are Nazis on the moon, then of course you’re going to fire a nuclear bomb at it! Especially when you consider the fact that they’ve been monitoring us with their flying saucers all these many decades, waiting for the right moment to strike again. All those alien encounters you’ve heard about that involve anal probes? Probably Nazis.
The only problem, of course, is that I don’t believe any of this stuff.
I just read a book called Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. It’s about how the human mind works and suggests ways we can get it under control — because we don't control it as much as we think. Wilson stirred Timothy Leary, G.I. Gurdjieff, Alfred Korzybski, Aleister Crowley, and the disciplines of Yoga together in a big pot and came up with this book. It’s fascinating, funny, even enlightening, and each chapter ends with some exercises for the reader to do that will illustrate that chapter’s point and make it stick.
In the book, Wilson spends a lot of time discussing our “reality tunnels,” a term coined by Timothy Leary. A reality tunnel is how a person sees the world through the filters of his senses, personal experiences, conditioning and prior beliefs, and other non-objective factors. We all have them, like it or not, and in Prometheus Rising, Wilson tries to make the reader aware of them and show how they can be changed.
Right now, we’re living in a time of colliding reality tunnels. There was a time when a person probably would spend his whole life in the same community, where everyone had reality tunnels that ranged from very similar to virtually identical. But the world has gotten a lot smaller, information travels a lot faster, and so do we. Conflicting reality tunnels are crashing into each other all over the place. When we encounter a conflicting reality tunnel, we’re often quick to conclude that the other person is just plain wrong or maybe even crazy. We reach these conclusions without giving any thought to the fact that the other person’s reality tunnel probably makes them see us the same way. And that person is probably no more aware of his reality tunnel than we are of ours. Wilson encourages us to approach these conflicts with understanding and openness rather than simply dismissing the other person as a nutjob.
We could use a lot more of that in the United States these days. That’s why I read the book.
Some of the exercises encourage the reader to enter someone else’s reality tunnel, to believe the things that someone else believes for a little while, things that conflict with the reader’s reality tunnel. I did some of those exercises. One of the more extreme things I tried to believe for a little while was that there are Nazis on the moon. It was triggered by the story of our plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon.
I’m a fan of conspiracy theories, and one of the goofiest is that the Nazis established a base on the dark side of the moon during WWII. Yes, there are people who believe this. Google it. Search YouTube. You’ll see what I mean. There’s even a movie about it, a comedy called Iron Sky. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m looking forward to it.
I took a shot at believing in the moon Nazis. I tried. I want to be more understanding of other ways of thinking, I really do, but ... I’m sorry. After a few minutes of that, I concluded that I was nuttier than a Christmas cheese log and went back to my old reality tunnel. If you believe there are Nazis on the moon, your biggest problem is not Nazis.
I can, however, recommend Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising. And while we’re on the subject of Wilson and conspiracy theories, I also recommend the Illuminatus! trilogy written by Wilson and Robert Shea. In fact, I think it’s probably a good idea to read anything by Wilson, who will stretch your brain in the funniest and most entertaining ways.
