I Get a New Desk

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Hopefully life will get a little less painful after today.

At my day job where I work in a cubicle, the desks are adjustable for height. There’s a neat little button off the left edge with which you can raise the desk all the way up to a standing desk or lower it enough for a wheelchair user. For most of the time, this has been a godsend. During working hours, I had the desk at the height that was right for the dual monitors I needed to perform my processing. Then on lunch I raised the desk so that it was ergonomically better for spending an hour working on my laptop.

Then the desk broke.

At first when I lowered it, sometimes it wouldn’t stop and just lower all the way, forcing me to scramble out of its path lest my leg get squished. I could then raise it where I needed it, but eventually the motor lost its function and would only lower it, always to the bottom setting. I had to force it up and disconnect the controller. The desk is now at a height that’s right for neither work and is particularly bad for my laptop work, inducing terrible neck pain.

That’s right, it’s literally a pain in the neck.

It has been like this for months, first because the people who maintain the desks couldn’t get the parts they needed, and then because they couldn’t get what they needed to simply replace the desk. Well, today I should be in a much better situation; I am moving to a new cube.

I got to pick out the cube I wanted, making sure I am not next to any of our large windows in the office where intense sunlight could induce a migraine and still positioned well enough away from most of the rest of the floor so it will be quieter for the most part.

With me about to embark on a new novel, this comes at a perfect time.

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Movie Review: Three Strangers (1946)

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Counted among Warner Brothers’ film noir catalog, Three Strangers shares a thematic aspect with The Night Has a Thousand Eyes in that it is a noir with a strong atmosphere of the supernatural about it.

Warner Brothers Studios

A mysterious woman wordlessly lures a man to her apartment in London. Once inside another man, obviously intoxicated, rises from the sofa. The woman explains that she also invited this gentleman, again without knowing anything about him, even his name. She speedily explains that at least for the moment, they must not reveal their names or anything about themselves to each other. In her apartment she has a statue of the Chinese goddess Kwan Yin and at midnight as the new year begins, it is said that the goddess will open her eyes and grant a wish to three strangers, provided that they wish for the same thing. They agree to wish for money via a lottery ticket for the national horse race. They sign the ticket, making it a contract amongst themselves, using a blotter to obscure their names as they sign so no one sees another’s name.

They wait for midnight, gazing at the candle-lit statuette. The hour is struck, and a wind extinguishes the flame, plunging the room into darkness. By the time the candle is relit, the hour has passed. Then Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who can now safely reveal her name, insists that she saw the statuette’s eyes open, as the myth insisted. The first man, Jerome Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet) insists he saw no such thing, with the third person, Johnny West (Peter Lorre) taking no serious part in the debate if the eye opened or not. The three go their separate ways, Arbutny cynical that anything serious has transpired, West willing to believe but more interested in more drink to fuel his alcoholism, and Shackleford devout in her faith that this idol will bring about fortune for them all.

The rest of the film follows the three through their troubled lives. Arbutny has embezzled funds from a trust he manages for an eccentric widowed peer, the discovery of which will ruin him financially and reputationally. West, in a drunken stupor, was shanghaied into being a lookout for a burglary that went badly and ended with the murder of a police officer. Shackleford instigated the entire affair in hope of winning back her husband who, after unspecified marital difficulties, has taken an extended business trip to Canada. Each person’s life spirals more and more out of control. Arbutny finds no source of funds to cover his theft and his client is now suspicious. West ends up taking the fall for the murder one of his compatriots committed, and Shackleford’s husband returns, demanding a divorce so he may marry his new love. When the lottery ticket turns out to have drawn not only the name of a horse in the race but one favored to win, the film turns to its final act without ever addressing if it had been mere chance or supernatural forces at work as the characters suffer the consequences of their choices.

Three Strangers is an fascionating sort of film noir. Produced in 1946, it is early in that genre’s formation, so the dipping into the supernatural is not an attempt to revitalize a form but one that rose organically when John Huston conceived the story. It is a film I have heard of for quite some time and this week finally got around to watching. In terms of film noir, there are better movies that I will revisit much more often than this one, but it is also interesting enough to warrant watching and with a collection of characters that are entertaining with all their faults; Icy the woman who loves West despite his drinking, Gabby their accomplice in the robbery who is a brute but one with a code and the clerks working in Arbunty’s office all give the film charm and depth. . I really like how the supernatural—not only Kwan Yin but the spirits of the dead visiting their loved ones—is handled so deftly that it can be mere coincidence or actual evidence that there is much more to the world than what we can see, hear, and touch. Three Strangers is a gritty crime noir that suggests perhaps the world is not as material as it appears.

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Remaking the Exorcist

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After the box office failure of Exorcist: Believer, which Universal, who had acquired the rights from Warner Brothers had hoped to revitalize the franchise and launch a new horror trilogy, the project was taken away from its director, David Gordon Green.

A new film currently known simply as The Exorcist has been handed to the reigning prince of cinematic horror, Mike Flanagan.

While there are some Flanagan projects that I have found to be inspired and masterfully crafted, in particular Doctor Sleep a sequel to The Shining that manages to honor both the original source material and the cinematic legacy, I have serious doubts about yet another Exorcist project. The Exorcist, in my opinion, should have never had any sequels and the concept of a ‘franchise’ is utterly repellant.

 First off, a horror franchise is a deeply difficult thing. Oh, there are tons and tons of them about and every studio dreams of having a run that is like Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, or Scream, but what horror existed in those movies quickly vanished with the sequels. To me those movies ceased to horrify and only titillated with more and more elaborate methods of murders combined with advancing practical effects. I can’t remember ever being disturbed by these sequels and horror should disturb you emotionally not inspire cheers from gore as spectacle.

The second reason I am highly skeptical of an Exorcist franchise is that this story, this tale, was never constructed for that sort of open-ended treatment. The Exorcist, both novel and screenplay, was William Peter Blatty’s method of dealing with his own crisis of faith.  It was not a cash grab, but a work produced by a devoted Catholic who found his own way thorny and used fiction to explore answers to his deep theological questions. While the rest of the world considered The Exorcist a horror novel and film, Blatty and director William Friedkin, did not, treating the material as a theological mystery. With the exception of Blatty’s work with the novel Legion adapted into The Exorcist III, none of the sequels possessed the deep questioning nature of the original source material, they pursued effects and shock value, making them ultimately forgettable. yet another sequel to The Exorcist is the last thing cinema requires.

Little is actually known about Flanagan’s project and rumor has suggested that instead of a sequel he may be remaking the original film, a new adaptation of the novel.

This too would be a mistake.

Since its publication I have read the novel the Exorcist three or four times. I do not count it among my favorite books, but it is fascinating and an interesting glimpse into the time it was written. The script and motion picture are excellent adaptations, some of the best. Nearly all of the novel’s core story and more importantly questions are there, particularly with the final revisions later released. If this is a re-adaptation of the novel I fail to see what they can include that wasn’t in the original film’s take. What was left out deserved to be left out. Audiences, even in the 70s and more so today, would laugh at Father Karras’ quest to prove that it was telekinesis that moved the objects and not demonic possession. (Really, in the 70s psychic powers were all the rage in fiction and in the culture.)

The 1973 film was a miracle of adaptation, in script, in direction, and in casting. It was lightning in a bottle that I doubt even Flanagan can recreate.

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The Hardest Aspect of Writing a Novel

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Now, this is going to be different for different writers. Some will find the plotting to be the mountain that they must conquer; for others it will be the dialogue, and others constructing the actual sentences, or crafting interesting characters, even just finding the time to get the damned words down on paper or in the processor. I have often said that the hardest part of writing is butt-to-chair, fingers-to-keyboard—actually getting started with that day’s production of prose—and I stand by it. But today I want to talk about not the actual words-in-a-row challenge, but a different challenge: writing with the goal of traditional publication.

It is not the novel manuscript itself. Not to me. Outrageous Fortune clocks in at about 96,000 words, and I produced that volume in about six months. Once I hit the first 6,000 to 7,000 words, the work becomes self-generating, and I almost never had a manuscript die once that threshold was reached.

Ahh, but after that comes the really hard writing: the query letter and the synopsis.

The query letter should ideally be under 300 words; agents are busy and don’t have time for lengthy missives—rambling in your query won’t inspire confidence in your fiction. In that letter you need to give the basics of your work: genre and word count, a paragraph that conveys the story, the character, the conflict, and the theme, along with a closing that details your credits (if any) and why you’re the right person to have written this novel. Remember: you’re doing all this—displaying your voice and uniqueness as a writer—in about 300 words.

The synopsis has the benefit of needing only the story, but it’s still a maddening challenge. Now, in about 400 words, you need to tell the core story of your novel, the characters, the challenges, the themes, and exactly how it all resolves—ideally with some stylistic flourish. My novel required 96,000 words to establish who everyone is and why they act as they do. Hopefully, the characters come across to readers as believable people acting in a manner consistent with their nature. I have managed to produce a synopsis that is under 400 words and I think it’s good, but man, so much of what makes this story work is not in that bit of text.

Will it work? Only the agents can tell you—and waiting for their response is the second hardest thing about writing.

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Hoping Insomnia Will Not Disrupt My Weekend Plans Again

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Last Friday, for reasons I have yet to comprehend, a nasty bout of insomnia struck. I went to bed, lay there with my sleep apnea mask on, and waited for 45 minutes to fall asleep. This is not at all like my normal pattern as I usually am fully asleep within 5 or 10 minutes of lying down. After that three quarters of an hour I rose, switched off the CPAP machine, removed the mask, and shuffled into my living room to watch YouTube videos. This killed another hour and finally I returned to bed and this time slept, but still rising out of that slumber at my appointed time.

I spent the entire Saturday groggy and listless. My plans for the evening were to catch a late showing of No Other Way since my sweetie-wife was uninterested in the film and thus off the board for a Sunday morning matinee.  This did not come to pass as my sheer exhaustion made the idea of a late showing a burden and the prospect of driving after midnight struck me as foolish.

This weekend Send Help opens, and I really hope to see it at a late-night screening on Saturday. Here’s hoping I can sleep in a manner that I am accustomed to.

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Pluribus: Season 1 Thoughts and Theories

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I have finished all the episodes of Pluribus season one and all of the mainline companion podcast episodes and as such I am ready to expound on the series.

Apple TV

First off, I really liked it. Its premise, that a radical infection, induced by an alien signal, unifies nearly all of humanity into a single group consciousness that is compelled as a biological necessity to non-violence and an irrational reverence for life is unique and compelling. That of the dozen or so ‘survivors’, individuals who due to their genetic makeup are immune to the ‘joining’, our protagonist is a person who, at least in her former life, was quite the anti-people person and now finds herself as the agent to save humanity is also very compelling. Carol Stucka, played by Rhea Seehorn, is a different kind of hero and that is welcome. I look forward to season two and what it brings. I have no doubt that show runner and creator Vince Gilligan has an ending in mind, just as he did with Breaking Bad.

So, theories.

I think the Pluribus effect is an alien weapon system that has been targeted on Earth. The signal originated from a stellar system 640 lightyear distant, meaning even if we caught the broadcast just as it started the aliens that transmitted it did so when the Earth was in the year 1386, without the technology to receive much less interpret the alien signal and its recipe for an RNA virus. It was transmitted blindly for whoever and whenever the people of Earth became able to utilize it,

The Pluribus effect is pretty devastating, both in the short term, where nearly a billion people died from the sudden global disruption, to the long-term effects which look to be an extinction level event.

The effect renders the ‘joined’ or the ‘others’ go with whichever term your prefer, pacifistic and compliant to the transformed. They seek to satisfy every desire and whim of the people who are cut off from the group mind, even delivering weapons of mass destruction if that is what they desire. The ‘joined’ seem wholly and utterly incapable of engaging in violence even in self-defense. A planet so infected presents no threats.

The ‘joined’ are also unable, by biological compulsion, to willingly and knowingly take any action to end any life. About halfway through season one we learn that this prohibition extends to plant life as well, rendering the ‘joined’ unable to harvest anything for food. Once the planet’s population has been transformed, their food source is what was harvested and manufactured before the event and the bodily remains of those that have died.

This means extinction.

The planet, post-event, has a store of calories available for consumption and a population consuming those calories without replenishing that store. Consuming the dead only delays the inevitable mass starvation of the population but with a planet untouched and unmarred by warfare. A far better result than even with Neutron bombs if you want nice welcoming planets around but without their pesky inhabitants.

This dire situation is exacerbated by the fact that the ‘joined’ are also compelled to ‘share the gift.’ That is to construct the massive antennae and power-supply to transmit the signal onto new stellar systems dooming other civilizations to the same fate as Earth, With the fantastic resources required for such a project (neatly described in episode one before anything has really transpired), the ‘joined’ population is diverted from working on a technological solution to the caloric conundrum the event has thrust them into.

The final element that leads me to believe that this is a weapon system is the fact that Carol learned that the process of the ‘joining’ is reversible. So, if the originator or an ally of theirs became infected, it could be undone. Safety for the initiator of the infection, death for the infected, that makes for a pretty good weapon.

I will wrap up this post with what looks like an oversight and a scientific error in the series.

As I discussed above, the ‘joined’ seemingly are prohibited from taking any action that would end any life, but they are more than willing to administer antibiotics, the very word means ‘contrary to life’. Apparently, their prohibition doesn’t apply to single cell organisms. I think more likely is that the series writers simply forgot that life goes all the way down to single cells. (A very competent argument can be made it does not extend to viruses.)

The scientific error deals with a major plot element. The ‘joined’ discover that they can tailor the RNA strand to the un-joined, bringing them into the single consciousness but the process requires stem cells from the individual. Carol refuses to give them the consent to collect her stem cells and believes herself to be safe.

Stem cells are cells that can be differentiated into any kind of cell in the body, they can become nerve cells, liver cells, blood cells, from a stem cell you can produce any tissue of the host.

Okay, I can buy needing stem cells, it is a little bit of a stretch but not a terrible one. The ‘joined’ reveal to Carol that they are using her frozen eggs, human eggs not chicken, to create stem cells to bring her into the collective.

Umm, I cannot see any way for that to work.

Human egg cells do not have the entire DNA of their host. They have only half of the chromosomes which will combine with the half of chromosomes provided by the father to create the full set of a new human being. You cannot create a stem cell with only half of the chromosomes required.

But all SF shows have their errors, some more than others, and this one I can look past as I wait for season two.

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It Is Here — Now

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The Science Fiction writer William Gibson is attributed with saying “The future is here now — it’s just not evenly distributed,” referring to the fact that on this planet exist fantastic technologies nearly beyond belief and people who scrape by burning wood as their only fuel source, existing in abject poverty. Well, the same is very true for the United States of America and fascism, the fascism is here it is simply not evenly distributed.

If you are not dark-skinned with an accent, not politically active in a manner disapproved of by the regime, not currently living in a locality flooded with masked armed agents of the state, then you do not feel the presence of the fascism. It is, at best, theoretical to you and at worst invisible. The fascism poisoning our government was not theoretical to Renee Good, it was not invisible to Alex Pretti, it was not something happening elsewhere to the more than 30 persons who have died in ICE custody since this Administration took power. That is compared to the 24 persons who died in similar custody during the previous administration’s entire 4-year term of office.

In addition to these deaths, some of which in my opinion are murders, plain and simple, people have been assaulted for exercising their First Amendment rights, legal residents have been snatched off the street by masked goons with neither uniform nor identification, homes have been violently entered without judicial warrant and some of the highest officials answered these violations of people’s rights with the mocking assertion that Federal Officers engaged in their duties have ‘Absolute Immunity.’

And what of the Gadsden Flag Waving, 2nd Amendment worshiping, radical Constitutionalist who insisted electing Trump was vital to protecting our God-given rights, particularly our 1st Amendment right to free speech?

Well, they’re busy mouthing the regime’s lies, slanders, and character-assassination of the victims, or they have slithered into silence, finding other ‘outrages’ to occupy their keyboard warrior ethos. It turns out they were quite literal with the Gadsden worship, they do not want to be trod upon but ‘go ahead and stomp on those people over there, we never liked ’em.’

Repressive violent suppression of the regime’s enemies spurs no cries of ‘dictatorship!’ in the same manner as expanding healthcare. It exposes a very simple truth.

Not for all of them but for far too many racism trumps the 1st, 2nd, and 4th amendments.

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Nordic Noir Review: Freezing Embrace (Hautalehto)

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Having finished Arctic Circle and Reindeer Mafia my sweetie-wife and I turned to a series new to us on the streaming service MHz Choice, Freezing Embrace (Hautalehto in Finland).

Solar Films

Adapted from a novel by Christian Ronnbacka, Freezing Embrace follows Chief Inspecter Annti Hautalehto (Mikko Leppilampi) as he deals with a number of issues, the finalized divorce from his wife, his police chief’s potential slide into alcoholism, his best friend’s potentially unstable son joining the police force while a serial killer who targets and murders young men by drowning them in the icy river. As bodies pile up, the evidence more and more begins pointing to his best friend’s son, a skilled diver, as the murderer.

While I found Freezing Embrace less engaging than either of the other two series I mentioned at the start of the post, and despite in many ways it being a by-the-numbers drama of serving on a police force, the disrupted personal life, the troublesome superiors, the seemingly willful blindness of the national forces, the characters and performance kept the show from feeling routine. I was particularly impressed by Leppilampi in the series. He had been a supporting player in Arctic Circlewith a very different character and quickly with this series I wholly accepted Antti as a distinct person with nothing that overlapped with the character from the other show.

I did find it amusing that when the entire mystery has been resolved and everything about the murderer’s motivation laid bare that the plot for this season was, in fact, a serious, dramatic rendition of the plot of the original Friday the 13th.

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Sometimes You Miss The Obvious

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I got a little feedback on the opening chapters of my gay, 80s, cinephile, horror novel and it caused me to see something pretty important that I had missed.

The feedback thought that the opening chapter needed a little more of the world and a little more of the character’s interior life. These were both fair critiques. In all honesty, when I wrote the chapter originally, I hadn’t formed a solid conception of the character and just what was going on. After all, this was the first time I had ‘pantsed’ a novel and those elements developed later. While in editing and revision I had taken care of plot details that would pay off later, because the character was now so well defined in my mind, I failed to edit to that image. So, I began revision but not fully rewriting the first chapter, opening up the main character’s thoughts so the reader met him more fully, and adding color and detail to the San Diego of 1984 that would be accurate and informative.

The character is gay, and the mid-80s, while better than the decades before it, still presented a strong homophobic culture which I utilized to reveal character—the ‘Chick Tracts’ left at his theater and other minor elements. Thinking about the Fundamentalist mindset, growing in power at the time as the nation sprinted towards Reagan’s 49-state sweep, and how it felt to be a gay man in that time focused my search for details that both reflected the world and how the character felt about them.

And that is when I realized I had missed something BIG.

The novel covers a period of time from June 1, 1984, through mid-July of that year and somehow, I managed to forget entirely about Pride, the remembrance and celebration of gay culture commemorating the Stonewall Riot with a march and often a lot of partying. Even if nothing takes place at the march and the character is far too entangled with supernatural threats to be partying, Pride is going to be a vital part of the background for those couple of weeks of the novel.

Now I am revising the first third of the novel, adding in the details and color of Pride week and its aftermath, making the novel better.

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Classic Movie Review: Little Caesar (1931)

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Last week I watched a YouTuber movie reactor watch Soylent Green for the first time. That film was the very last movie with Edward G. Robinson a film star whose career stretched back to the very start of the sync-sound era of motion pictures. After viewing the reaction, I had a hankering to watch another film with Edward G. Robinson and instead of pulling Double Indemnity from my collection I decided to go with the movie that launched Robinson as a star Little Caesar.

Warner Bros Studios

Released in 1931, Little Caesar is most definitely a pre-code movie. We meet Caesar Enrico ‘Rico’ Bandello (Edward G. Robinson) as he and his buddy Joe (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) rob a gas station, in the process murdering the attendant. Unlike Joe, Rico has no traces of remorse as they eat supper in an isolated diner following the horrid crime. Ambitious for more than petty robberies, the murder isn’t even on his mind, Rico drags Joe to the ‘big city’ where he quickly joins a mob and begins his meteoric rise (isn’t it ironic that we use ‘meteoric rise’ when meteors are most known for falling) to the top of the city’s organized crime community followed by his equally swift downfall.

Little Caesar is part of the Blu-Ray boxed set The Ultimate Gangster Collection. With its release in 1931, this film is an example of just how quickly Hollywood adopted synchronized sound into their productions. While the quality of the sound still needed improvement, the production capability was there and aside from the occasional use of title cards as deployed in silent movies, Little Caesar looks and sounds very much like the films that would follow for the rest of the decade. As a ‘pre-code’ movie, Little Caesar is a bold tale that follows its lead character as he murders his way to fame and fortune with a downfall that was not engineered by the police forces of the ‘big city’ but rather by betrayal from a friend.

Of course, this was the movie that made a star of Edward G. Robinson, and while he did play gangsters again, most notability in Key Largo, Robinson escaped typecasting and his career stretched from the 1930s into the early 1970s. If you watch classic Looney Tunes cartoons and see Bug Bunny facing off against a gangster, that gangster is a parody of Robinson’s performance in Little Caesar, which set the template for the genre.

At an hour and seventeen minutes, Little Caesar had little time for a ‘realistic’ climb to greatness for Rico and instead swiftly moves the character along, only stopping for an occasional bit of detailed action. Aside from Rico and Joe, the characters are flat, serving more as elements of plot than living breathing people and one should not go into watching this film with modern sensibilities about writing and psychological realism, but one should watch Little Caesar.

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