Deliverance

Dead man's hand rising, "Deliverance."

I watched "Deliverance" the other day, after not having seen that movie for a very long time, and while it's likely labeled an "Action/Thriller" movie in the pop culture, I can't help but think of it as a Southern Gothic Horror movie. It's not even the graphic man-rape in it that makes it so -- I mean, of course, that's certainly part of it -- but there's just a dread and creepiness that flows throughout it. Even the famous "Dueling Banjos" moment is fraught with an eeriness, the inbred-looking banjo boy...



And the setup of the movie -- four "city boys" plan a canoe trip that goes horribly awry. It feels very Horror to me. The dread and terror of the movie hangs heavily over it -- the unwelcoming, downright hostile Mother Nature all around them, the darkness and quiet of the woods, the unfriendly natives, the secrets and lies, the very real destruction of friendships in the face of the horror they encountered? I dunno. It feels like a Horror movie, albeit one that is marbled with Southern Gothic sensibilities, which likely are why it is better-regarded critically than more conventional Horror fare. I mean, the theme that runs through it is that Mother Nature's a bitch, and sure as hell wants to make Man her bitch -- that's what the movie's about, ultimately.

Ed, the Jon Voight character, is the protagonist -- when alpha male Lewis (Burt Reynolds) is taken out because of injury, it falls to Ed to rise to the occasion, to "play the game" as Lewis puts it. Bobby (Ned Beatty) is the smug, chubby city slicker who gets the bejeebers buggered out of him by the local, while Drew (Ronny Cox) is the affable, friendly, guitar-sporting fella who ends up dead and disfigured on the river. Each of the guys is kind of a facet of manhood -- Drew, the kind-hearted soul, is destroyed by the decision to bury the body of the dead mountain man. In a way, he's fortunate that he drowns in the river, because he surely could not have lived with the decision to bury the body. Lewis, the one who is likely most comfortable with things "going South" as they did, breaks his leg and is effectively taken out midway through. Bobby, the least prepared of them, ends up completely bitchslapped by the experience (literally). Ed, who is somewhere between Lewis and the other two -- that is, he's an experienced outdoorsman, but he's always been in Lewis's manly shadow, find himself ultimately able to kill and intent on surviving the experience at any cost (although it's clear that Bobby is traumatized by Ed's ruthless transformation as the movie evolves -- you see it in Ned Beatty's face when Ed tells them they have to come up with their fake story to try to ensure that the bodies they buried aren't found. It's like he can't even believe he's hearing this coming from Ed.



Of course, there are no supernatural elements in it, so quibblers might take issue with it being a Horror movie, but then again, people often consider "Jaws" to be a Horror movie, too, with a very real monster in the form of the massive great white shark. It's funny for me, because I don't really think of "Jaws" as a Horror movie, but I always think of "Deliverance" as one -- I think it's squarely because of the bleakness and dread inherent in the latter movie, and the very real sense that the characters in "Deliverance" will be forever haunted by what happened on that trip. There is no happy ending for those characters -- Bobby has to live with the shame and humiliation of being man-raped and having to lie his way out of his complicity with hiding three bodies (including Drew's body), Lewis appears likely to have lost a leg (putting an end to his he-man lifestyle), and Ed is haunted by nightmares and an understanding of what he's capable of. Since the movie came out in '72, I'm sure the Vietnam War hung heavy in the zeitgeist at the time, and it could perhaps be seen a kind of parable of that war, and the horrors of it. For all the horror of a shark attack, the movie itself telegraphs its dread with the John Williams score, whereas "Deliverance" delivers far more dread per square inch with simple silence and running water, with a verdant forest and feral hills. There is terror in those woods (and there's a curious moment before the rape scene, too, the night before, when the men are camping, and Lewis stalks out into the woods, saying he heard something -- that setup feels very classic Horror movie, although it's not played for that, it still communicates that: danger, lurking in the shadows).

Anyway, just musing. "Deliverance" feels more than being simply an action movie with horrific moments -- rather, it feels like a true-blue Horror movie, served up Southern-style, with all that this entails. And even when Ed, Bobby, and Lewis make it back to "civilization" (itself the soon-to-be-gone town of Aintry -- or is it Aintree? I can't remember -- this woeful, doleful little town that is going to be drowned when the dam is completed, and is being moved -- the church rolled away, the graves disinterred -- an image that is quietly horrific when seen through Ed's eyes in the wake of their own burials in the wilderness) -- anyway, even when they make it to Aintry, the Southern hospitality is underpinned with the clear dread of Bobby and Ed that the Sheriff (played, ironically enough, by James Dickey, the poet who wrote "Deliverance") doesn't believe their story, but lacks the evidence to lock the men up for murder -- he says "I'd like to see this town die a quiet death." Having delved into the literal and moral wilderness, the men find it hard to embrace civilization again (and, again, the Vietnam specter hangs heavy over this in tangible-yet-understated ways, versus, in my opinion, the ham-handed and overpraised way it looms in "The Deer Hunter" [which came out six years after this movie]). It's like they've seen the black underbelly of the world, the horror of Nature and Human Nature, and are forever marked by it. It makes the happy ending of "Jaws" (which always seems to top the mainstream "best of" Horror movie lists) seem completely panglossian by comparison. With "Deliverance," it's like the saying that when you kill someone, you kill yourself, too -- or part of yourself, anyway, dies with the person that you kill. I think part of Ed died in that river, and it's never coming back -- his nightmare (the hand rising out of the water) and him laying awake in bed beside his wife, clearly troubled, shows this, while the "happy," frenetic dueling banjo theme plays in an echoing rejoinder. Ed and Bobby and Lewis survive, but they'll never, ever be the same again.

Good Light Day

Today had wonderful light -- just beautiful light. Of course, I didn't have my camera with me, naturally! I'm having some red wine and bread at the moment. I may reheat the pasta I had the other night. This weekend'll likely have me going on a big grocery run with the boys, if I'm industrious.

Moments

Amusing moments from the morning so far:

1) Geeky little brother to his big sister: "I'm gonna tell ALL your friends about your FAAAAKE tan."

2) Right as I'm crossing the street, a woman in a Mercedes stops at the light, and the Mercedes hood ornament breaks and lands on the ground at my feet. *TING* I knelt and picked it up, walked it over to the woman, who hadn't even realized it had popped off.

Train in Vain

I love that "Atlas Shrugged" tanked in the theaters. Randroids aside (and any Randroids reading this, you know what? You're all lame -- read Nietzsche, instead; that's who Ayn Rand had a real hard-on for -- maybe read that while listening to Rush; it'll be a more rewarding experiencing than wallowing through Rand's shit-awful prose), it's just gratifying to see that even in supposedly go-go capitalist America, a turgid melodrama extolling the virtues of a moribund ideologue's fevered dreams of propertarian propriety holds scant appeal. Loving it. And that the producer blew $20 million in producing this bomb, and has already declared he's not going to produce the next parts of the trilogy -- BRAVO! The cherry on top of the sundae. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Marie-France Pisier, RIP

I found out that she drowned in her swimming pool. Such a bad, sad end for such a great beauty...

Happy Easter!

I have risen, I have risen, indeed! I hope the weather's as nice today as it was yesterday. That'd be swell! One liability with the bigger, better camera is that it requires more thought and care as to its transport. I got a little camera bag for it, but the nice thing about my older camera is it was so portable, which allowed me the opportunity for off-the-cuff, spur-of-the-moment shots. The new one requires more deliberation on my part. Ah, well. I'll get used to it. Also, its power source is AA batteries, which appear to allow for about 330 shots before the sucker runs out of juice. I'll have to dig out my rechargeable batteries, if I can still find them, and avoid wasting batteries.

You know, everybody talks about the Easter Bunny, but what about his more volatile cousin, the Ester Bunny? What about him? Hope the Ester Bunny has a good holiday, too! ; )

Hanna Solo

Saoirse Ronan as Hanna.

I saw "Hanna" today -- the trailer for it had seemed promising, but I was disappointed by it, ultimately. The fractured fairytale gloss of it fused with a kind of thriller element just didn't quite work -- the characters weren't well-developed enough for it to be character-driven, and the plot wasn't strongly drawn enough for it to be plot-driven. The action sequences weren't particularly stunning, and since everything was kept a step or two behind the curtains, there wasn't much to draw the viewer into the movie, alas. The title character looked very otherworldly, thanks to the striking young Irish actress, Saoirse Ronan, but the overall story just lacked the bones and weight to carry the premise anywhere. You've heard of damning through faint praise? Well, there's damning through faint film-making, and this had that. A lot of running, and yet going nowhere fast. Eric Bana did a credible job as her father/handler, and Cate Blanchett was steely-eyed (although she had precious little to do, really -- I'm curious why she took this gig, honestly), but there's something off about this movie -- I blame "Inception" -- I'll call it the "Inception Effect" -- faint film-making (I know a lot of people were sucked into "Inception's" seeming complexity, but it wasn't complex at all, was just crowded, and had many layers thrown into it to basically camouflage the meager fare of the plot to begin with. "Hanna" feels to me like a movie made in the spirit and/or style of "Inception," with the same meager results, only worse. The Inception Effect is like having a bunch of people crammed in a room at a party, but nobody's saying or doing anything interesting, and we're all supposed to overlook that, to be impressed by the volume of the chatter, without realizing that nobody's saying a thing worth remembering. Sorry if you liked that movie; I found it incredibly boring (except for the side plot that should have been the heart of the story, rather than the dream-caper aspect of it).

I bought a new camera, at long last -- I've had my old 6 megapixel (5x zoom) Olympus camera for many, many years now, and decided I wanted something stronger -- I got a 14 megapixel, 21x zoom Nikon DSLR camera. I'm well-pleased with it so far. I'll give the old Olympus to the boys -- B2 has already taken to playing with it, taking shots of his own. He and his brother'll be thrilled to be able to take pictures with it. I'm sure he'll have broken the camera in a week or two. Haha! I'll have to make a note of that, if/when it happens!

The weather was fabulous today -- 68 degrees and sunny. Windy, but very nice. It started out very cloudy and cool, but warmed up nicely. I went biking downtown. Really need to fix the alignment on my bike's rear tire, but have been putting that off. Now that prime riding season is beginning, I may attend to that.

Daze

I'm going to have to supplement my Great Friday with a Super Saturday and a Stellar Sunday, clearly! I'm going to get a lot of writing done this weekend. Exene has the boys, so I'm going to work on screenwriting, methinks. Try go bang some of that out. Always a challenge for me, but I've had a couple of ideas that have stubbornly banged around in my head for some time, and I want to just throw them on paper (or, well, into the computer, anyway) so they can vacate my brain. The weather appears to be very conducive for this kind of effort -- lots of rain and cold.

Woo hoo!

Rock ON!

The Pretty In Pink Blues

I'm amused by this piece about pink v. blue for kids. Shows how acceptable norms change over time. Amusing as hell that pink was THE masculine color, and blue was the dainty color, in times past.

We find the look unsettling today, yet social convention of 1884, when FDR was photographed at age 2 1/2, dictated that boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, also the time of their first haircut. Franklin’s outfit was considered gender-neutral.

Reminds me of pictures of my late 100-year-old grandpa, with his long locks and in his dress, seated next to his big brother in an old Victorian portrait.

a Ladies’ Home Journal article in June 1918 said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.

Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s, as a result of Americans’ preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti says.

Bahah! It's just amusing how such an arbitrary thing becomes written in stone like that. So many things are like this. The loss of "neutral" fashions is likely a key component, too, although who wants to look "neutral," truly?

Great Friday

Rainy Friday. Hope it's not just a Good Friday; I hope it's a Great Friday.

Honey Badgers are Sweet!

I love honey badgers! This narration of them is sweeter, still....

http://youtu.be/4r7wHMg5Yjg

Station

Apparently the International Space Station (ISS) is going to be very visible lately, is going to be the brightest object in the sky short of Venus. That's kinda nifty. I'll have to check when it'll be flying over and try to spot it with B1; he'll love that, assuming we'll even be able to see it.

The weather's been pretty dismal the past few days -- we actually had snow mixed with rain the other day, although, as ever, I roll with it.

I'm going to sling out my SF novel to another publisher, see how that goes. I need to gear up for another round of querying my books to agents and publishers; never something I particularly enjoy, but most definitely part of the dance.

Things have been pretty quiet around here lately, which is why I've been fairly blog-quiet, too, I suppose. It's the combination of lots of big, bad news in the world and relative quiet at home, I guess.

Saw "Dead Snow" the other day -- I was less than impressed by it; it wasn't scary so much as it was gruesomely amusing. The stark white Scandinavian countryside was a great backdrop for horror, and those very Nordic-looking characters in it were amusing, too, but the movie was an exercise in excessive gore (so many disembowelings -- is that a preoccupation of the director?) And, sure, all that blood works wonderfully against the white snow, but the movie was pretty empty, even as escapist fare. The opening sequence was probably the best thing about it. I didn't like the way they had the Nazi zombies kind of roar -- they sounded like orcs doing lion impressions. That was distracting and off-putting. They already look monstrous, so making them roar monstrously was too much for human-scaled monsters. One of the grossest scenes has the floozie babe putting the moves on the portly film geek in an outhouse -- a sex scene in a frickin' outhouse?? Paging Dr. Freud! It was clumsily constructed -- the floozie takes an unlikely interest in the geek, joins him while he's quite literally taking a dump in the outhouse, rides him on the commode (?!?!) and the next thing we see, the geek is returning to the cabin by himself. Now, honestly, people -- this Scandinavian Poindexter (who looked more like the kind of guy who'd be giving swirlies to nerds) gets laid by the hot girl -- he just walks away from that, turns up in the cabin to swill some more brewskies nonchalantly, leaving her back in the outhouse to get rather gruesomely killed by one of the Nazi zombies?? Terribly constructed scene, clunkily rendered (and gross -- maybe putting the moves on a guy while he's taking a dump in an outhouse is a time-honored Scandinavian courtship ritual? Shudder.) The alpha guy stumbles across a cave that appears to be a kind of lair for the zombies, and actually leaves a couple of perfectly maintained MP40 submachine guns alone, even as he discovers the severed head of his missing girlfriend. Later, he picks up a German machine gun (from somewhere) that he mounts on his "snow scooter" (aka, snowmobile), and briefly uses. But seeing the guy see those submachine guns in this cave, seeing actual horror and carnage, and the guy's military service background is referenced in his first scene -- I was thinking "Helloooo? Pick up the fucking guns, Sven; there's zombies in them thar hills." Instead, he gets to engage in some sloppy disembowelment (see?) knife fights with the zombies. Anyway, these zombies are very fixated not on eating brains, but on eating guts. They do it every time they get after somebody -- you see them gobbling guts. So, either the writer had some kind of fixation on bowels, or the director did, or they both did, because it flows through the whole movie (haha -- "flows"). There are some darkly amusing moments in the movie, here and there (I won't spoil them, if you're inclined to see this movie), and a couple of reasonable scares that are mostly a product of a spliced zombie bushwhack coupled with a BLAST of sound, but this movie didn't rise above the promise of its premise, in my view. You can tell the director is a fan of Sam Raimi -- he opts for that kind of kinetic gore approach to horror, that over the top, so bad it's good kind of aesthetic, but the characters aren't strong enough to carry the narrative.

High and Dry

American Apparel has been fairly steadily pimping its high-waisted jeans, which is irksome -- high-waisted jeans just don't look good! So much so that they have to disguise it by having their callipygian models sit, breaking up the silhouette that high-waisted jeans inflict on a woman's body...

To make these jeans work, the model had to be hot AND topless.

Poole Emptied from ANTM

Dammit! Jaclyn Poole, my favorite surviving contestant on ANTM, got axed the last episode. I hate that. She was cute as a button, had a distinctive look, and was so sweet and charming. Her high-pitched, lil' ole' Southern Belle way was so nice, relative to the emaciated neurotic harridans that tend to dominate the show. Speaking of that, Alexandria, the villain's villain for this season, continues to skate on through.

Sigh. With Jaclyn gone, I guess I'll have to root for Kasia. And then, Anybody But Alexandria.

Snow Way!

It snowed a bit last night! Lordy! I'm not surprised, truly; it's the classic Chicago Seasonal Shim-Sham -- you get a taste of unseasonable warmth, before the cold comes hammering back. May is always pretty cool in Chicago, and I imagine this May won't be much different.

I sorted out the last logistical stuff for B2, so he's squared away for school. I just need to get the paperwork filed, and he's all set.

Scre4m

I saw "Scre4m" (Scream 4) today, and enjoyed it. Funny moments in it, and it's crazy postmodern, meta to the bone. Wes Craven still has the right touch with his slasher movies, although it's surreal, given his long history with the genre, making movies that refer to that genre (and themselves refer to the referrals -- I can imagine college students getting high and writing dissertations on this movie, because you really could). I especially liked the rather juicy (and difficultly-named) Hayden Panettiere in it. She was stealing scenes left and right...

She wasn't dressed like this in the movie, alas.

41

I turn 41 tomorrow, figured I'd squeak one last post while I'm 40 years old, still. Ha! I vividly remember turning 30, being amused at being equidistant from 20 and 40. At the time, 40 seemed a world away. Now I'm about to turn 41. I've gotten a lot accomplished in the past ten years -- a couple of kids, home ownership (and sellership -- hahah), a shitload of writing, a decade of quality work for a prestigious employer -- none of that was there when I was 30.

It makes me optimistic for the rest of my 40s, coming into my prime, getting done what I need done, and doing it with style. At the same time, it's staggering how short life is. Even though 10-year-old Dave (1980), 20-year-old Dave (1990), 30-year-old Dave (2000) and 40-year-old Dave (2010) confront each other in a kind of quantum face-off, and I can distinctly remember things from those various decades, it's still amazing and humbling just how fleeting that time is.

Each moment is so precious, but as you get older, it's hard to appreciate the moments the way you do when you're younger, when everything seems new. The "been there, done that" mentality of age can erode the gloss off of living, if you're not careful. I live very much in the moment, and find peace in it. I know I brooded far more about time and age when I was about 25 than I do, now. I still find the magic in the moments, even though I may have to be a little more conscious of them than I used to be.

So, I face 41 with a surprising amount of peacefulness. Another step into my fourth decade of life.

Grant Hart, "2541"

Marathon, Man

This NPR headline cracked me up...

Marathons, Once Special, Are Now Crowded

And this SLATE article also amused me...

Living In the Midwest

Telekinesis

This band, Telekinesis (kind of amused nobody has ever named their band that by this time), is really mining the Cure's sound in this song "Please Ask for Help." Kinda funny to hear that signature sound adopted in someone else's tune, but it makes sense -- for the kids today, the Cure qualify as "classic rock." The video is mildly amusing -- packed to the gills with hipsters, and there's even a Limoncello cameo around 1:01, one of the partygoers dancing.

Later

I'm up late. Was watching some movies on DVD. I'm semi-sleepy, now, and, unfortunately, a little hungry. It's been mild enough that I've been able to keep the windows open during the night, which is nice. Not sure how long it'll last, though.

Shuttle Diplomacy

I'm getting B2 enrolled in kindergarten this week. Not that it takes a week to do so, but one kinda needs to, to ensure all the bureaucratic stuff is sorted out. My younger boy, kindergarten-bound. He's ready for it.

B1 was so miffed that Chicago didn't get one of the retired shuttles. He was particularly irked that New York got Enterprise. Never mind that it never flew in space, he wanted it! We'd already talked about the shuttles, and I figured Endeavour would go to LA, and was sure the Smithsonian would take Discovery. The other two were open questions -- I thought Houston might get one, or Canaveral. Turns out Canaveral got Atlantis, and New York got Enterprise.

So, three on the East Coast, one on the West. The rest of us flyover folks can stuff it, I guess. Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton would've been a great location for Enterprise. Chicago or Houston would've been nice, too.

Why does New York rate a shuttle, tell me? With all there is to see in New York, it hardly seems like a shuttle would be that much of a draw. Way to blow off the Midwest, NASA (or whoever made the final decision on allocating the shuttles).

B1 was grumbling about it all day. He said "New York is spoiled. They get everything they want."

I would have allocated a shuttle to each region of the nation -- Discovery for Smithsonian, Endeavour for LA, Atlantis for Houston (or Canaveral), Enterprise for Chicago (or, failing that, Dayton). It's why it's called NASA, not ECASA (East Coast Aeronautics and Space Administration).

Butter Maid

I was pleased to see Butter Maid Bakery redid their web page. That's a bakery from my hometown. They're really good. Give'em some business, if you're so inclined. They're really good. Their kolachi is fab, and their cookies are amazing. They're really a local treasure, so I'm always talking them up.

Balloon Man

Beautiful light today, and the day got milder, which was nice. A couple of amusing things happened on the way back home with the boys -- one had a tall, attractive, well-dressed woman clacking behind us in knee boots, brandishing some balloons (one was a red, white, and blue braid, the other was a pink and purple hat), and she caught up with the boys and me and said "Can I interest you guys in some balloons?" and, of course, for a moment, my city radar is in place, and I'm thinking "What's the catch?" but there was none apparent, so I said "Sure." and she gave us the balloons, and I thanked her, and then she strutted off on her merry way. The boys loved getting some free balloons out of the blue like that.

Then, a few minutes later, I stopped by a store to get some orange juice for the boys, and one of the mothers from B1's school came in with her own boys and said "You know, I see you every day, walking with your boys, wearing that scarf of yours, and you always get it to hang perfectly, and I ask myself 'How can this guy get that scarf to hang like that?' It's always just perfect." and I said "What can I say? It's a gift." and said my farewells a moment later. I hadn't seen that mom before, although I recognized her kids. What CAN I say? Scarves are a necessity in the city, during the cold months.

Chilly, of course

As predicted, it got cold again over here; or cooler, anyway. Gusty winds, too.

I know I've mentioned the "No problem" response a lot of the younglings offer as an answer to a "Thank You." Well, this morning I got a new one from a young woman who held the door for me while I trucked the boys through it. I said "Thank you" and she said "Of course!" That's a new one for me! Obviously, it was because I was seemingly encumbered getting the boys through, so she held the door to help me out, but it was still a curious response.

Summmmmmmery

Beautiful weather today -- a taste of summer (although it's just a tease. Often it gets very warm like this in Chicago [it's 82 degrees] only for it to get cold again for much of May). But it's all sunny, hot, and windy today. I took the boys out biking today, the first ride of the season. They loved it, and it was fun seeing everybody else out and about, enjoying themselves. I found $20 today, too! Gotta love that!

Coin of the Realm

Nutter Butters operate much like Scooby Snacks in my household, delivered at timely moments, when necessary. The boys both LOVE Nutter Butters...

Clementine, cont'd...

Clementine sapling is doing fine...

Testing, Testing...

This is amusingly weird, like something the Parallax Corporation would design, but is probably a digital art project of somebody's...

http://www.hypnoid.com/psytest2.html

Here's my result...

Always happy in a crowd, you love to converse, to relate, and above all to have fun. You tend to think in a more holistic manner than many others. Like a crow you are attracted to shiny objects, new ideas, playful exciting colors and the thrill of a new personal relationship. You love to talk or gossip. You are highly invested in the reality of day-to-day life. Practicality is far more important than issues of honor or allegiance. You are a creature of the here and now. You are a natural multi-tasker, often switching mid-thought from one duty to another. You have a flair for presenting your personality in your work, and are known as a great storyteller and natural actor. You are very skilled at taking in a barrage of information and distilling what is most important from it. Naturally charming, you are quick to win new friends. Over stimulation is a danger.

Spacing Out

This is pretty great...

The Sleeper Must Awaken

My brain is hard-wired to wake me up around 4:30. It kinda drives me bananas. I've never been one to sleep in (for me, "sleeping in" is perhaps sleeping in until about 8:00 -- although that's not happened since the 90s), have always been an earlybird, but still, it kinda bugs me -- I could be up really late, and my brain'll still have me up around 4:30. The ole' circadian rhythms are locked in with that. I've long since made use of that tendency by making that early morning time my prime writing time, so I've been productive in that time. I've always been like that, even as a kid -- I'd sneak downstairs and read or watch whatever was on television that early. One show I remembered was a trippy one called "Dr. Snuggles..."



I could never understand why this show was only on in the very early morning hours. My kid logic was confounded -- it was a cartoon, kids liked cartoons, it should be on during normal cartoon times. But it was only on in the early morning hours, so I'd usually watch it, while the rest of the house slept, while the whole neighborhood slept. I haven't thought about that in over 20 years, but I still remembered that theme song for it, and the style of animation.

Cutting Remarks

I'm peeved at the whole $5.8 trillion in budget cuts proposal of Paul Ryan's making (or whoever actually came up with it, likely crafted in some reactionary think tanks). While the balls of actually invoking such draconian cuts is laudable, the targets they're choosing are irritating, to put it politely. Privatizing Medicare and Medicaid while barely touching the defense budget ($78 billion skimmed from it over a 10-year period? That's ludicrous) while at the same time throwing more tax cut bones to the already-gorged rich and hyperrich? WTF? Crotch-kick the poor, the young, and the elderly for the sake of the top 1%? The truth is that an honest budgetary discussion must take place nationally, but that's the key thing: it must be an honest discussion. The defense budget has to come down, because it's massive, and the Right views it as sacrosanct. So many of the worst excesses of their "Big Government" bugaboo are buried deep within the defense budget, but it's a powerful and well-entrenched lobby, and so they go after Medicare and Medicaid, instead, because that's just poor, old, sick, and weak folks.

They say you can judge the health of a society not by how it treats its strongest citizens, but how it treats its weakest. The Ryan budget proposal is very revealing as to what the priorities of the Right are in this.

The frustrating thing is that the Democrats will likely cobble together a wussified "alternative" to the Ryan budget proposal that'll also overlook the gorilla in the room that is the Pentagon. The simple truth of it is that our defense budget is a runaway thing, operating far and away beyond anything that can possibly be construed as "national defense." Unless we're simply waving the white flag and are accommodating ourselves to a state of permanent military mobilization, keen to spend our way right over the cliff for War, Inc. We are not immune from history -- empires invariably end up doing exactly this: the homeland becomes destitute because the money is flowing outward, to the military.

There's a reason why coups occur in regimes where civil society boils away before the concentration of wealth and power -- it's because the only institution left standing by that time is the military. It becomes the only thing left, so why not take power? That's why standing armies are invariably inimical to liberty.

This reality is completely lost on the GOP, and the Democrats lack the stones to make a stand on this issue. A true budgetary compromise should take about half of our military budget (then we'll only be outspending the rest of the world combined by 8 times, instead of 16 times) and half of the entitlements spending, and reform the tax code to some kind of progressive standard.

The alternative is just a highly militarized, domestically impoverished, elite-controlled plutocracy, staggering around, with an increasingly unhealthy, ignorant, and destitute populace. Not a situation terribly conducive to democratic functioning, or economic well-being. Turning the US into a banana republic is simply not a step forward, and the Ryan proposal paves that way.

Whether the Democrats have the balls to actually offer an alternative to it is another matter. I'm not holding my breath.

Further reading...

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/86301/ryan-cbo-severe-medicare-medicaid-cuts

And a bit more that gets to the heart of what I'm grousing about, which is the mendaciously regressive tax cuts that are, at heart, the only thing near and dear to the GOP's hard heart...

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/86270/the-achilles-heel-the-path-prosperity

Sunshine

Beautiful day today, like proper Spring, instead of bogus Spring -- cool temperatures, lots of sunlight. Pretty.

6100 words.

Stormy Weathers

The big storm appeared to have moved through the city last night. I slept through most of it, only woke up briefly during one of the bouts of thunder. There's still a lot of wind blasting through the city.

4000 words.

Writing, Inc.

Haven't written in the past few days, just doing the business end of writing, which is my least-favorite part, which is why I have written tons of things and have only sold a few of them. I've accumulated lots of intellectual capital, and need to put that to work for me, get it out in the marketplace, where it'll do me some good. I'm great with people, am creative and prolific, but I'll never be a businessman. Know thyself? I do.

That's why I'm hoping to find the right agent to shepherd me through the publishing business. The writing good fiction part I have down; I just need that right agent to click with me and nail the business end of things, to find the right homes for the books I've written. I'll be happy to write the stuff, if they'll be happy to sell it for me.

The irony for me is that "salesperson" is something that is often thrown my way as something I could do -- not from anybody who knows me, but reading about my personality type, and so on. I am good at communicating enthusiasm, to be sure, but the notion of selling people on things is anathema to me. In my view, if somebody wants something, they want it; trying to talk them around to buying something makes me feel icky. I hate when I'm in a store and a salesperson hovers around, asking if I need any help, or if they try to steer me to pricier products, etc. The entire interaction unsettles me -- I feel sorry for the salesperson, trying to make their commission; I feel annoyed at them for interposing themselves in my world -- it's just not my thing.

There are plenty of people who are good at it, who excel at marketing and self-promotion, but I'm simply not one of them. Appreciate the work I do, appreciate me, or move on; I'm not going to try to sell you on my merits. I try to shelve that when I work on queries, but it's difficult. I've yet to write a truly exemplary query. I have seen plenty of bad queries, and mine are far better than those, but I don't write high-concept fiction. My fiction rewards the reader when they read it, versus being some killer concept at the front end that can wow somebody from curbside. I don't put a lot of stock in high concept, because it's a gimmick -- to me, it's like those SyFy movies-for-cable like "Megaroid Versus Land Squid" or whatever -- the kind of thing where you might go "Huh" and peek at as a guilty pleasure, but is so many intellectual empty calories. I have plenty of ideas, write stories that are packed with ideas, but they are not high-concept stories. No "Snakes On a Plane" stuff (that being an archetypal high-concept movie).

I focus on writing well, writing beautifully (even if I'm writing horrible things, I pay such attention to the language, you have no idea), having memorable, believable characters, and writing an airtight plot that is very carefully composed. There are always plenty of ideas in my stories, salted through out it. There are no land squids, however.

I don't think I could come up with a high-concept story idea if I tried. And it would feel false to me, unnatural. It would be the fictional equivalent of the salesperson hovering at your elbow, walking on the balls of their feet, grinning eagerly, trying to steer you to something you didn't want. Not my game at all.

Just the same, I've been trying to be dutiful about the business aspects of things. I can't use an "eat your broccoli" idiom for this, because I love vegetables. Except for beets. Okay, it's like eating beets for me. *shudder* But I'm doing it, because I have to.

To Hell With Poverty

Great tune by Gang of Four, and well-performed, here. Gotta love those bass grooves. Their sonic attack was always papercut-sharp, which lent a cold, crisp, taut-n-fraught trebly tone to their music that was nicely juxtaposed by the incredibly fat bass lines they would always throw in their music. And I always loved their brilliant use of feedback. Nobody's ever hit it like they did...

Rain Song

Cold rain today. Yick. I don't mind cold, I don't mind rain -- but cold rain is yicky.

Otherwise, a good day. Cleaned up around the apartment.

April is here. Oh, my! I turn 41 later this month. Wowzers. My 40th year came and went pretty quickly, have to say.

Speaking of going quickly, the boys are really growing fast. They're taller than ever.
B1 (9 years) is 4'8" and 77.0 lbs. B2 (5 years) is 3'9" 44.2 lbs. They're more prone to wrestling around the apartment, which is amusing to watch, especially lil' B2 dogpiling his big brother. I try to referee, ensure that nobody ends up hurt. B1 is very good to his little brother, who is just a little badger, truly -- charming to the end, but also feisty, a born competitor like me. B1 is very lucky he's the big brother, because B2 would've been a holy terror as a big brother -- all pranks and mischief and such -- but because B2 is the younger sibling, it kind of balances the scales a bit.