Homogeneous

While lacking the money and inclination it would take to get into hard drugs, I have heard things. Something I've read about is that dealers will entice a prospective customer with the best product, that which will give you the purest effect, and this will be below their usual cost as well. Of course once said customer is hooked, they will be expected to pay full price, and for less distinguished product as well. At this point they're considered to have no choice.

For a while it's seemed to me that the internet has been pulling the same game on, well, all of us. Where there used to be a fascinating variety of features and voices, now you have a mindnumbing monotony that can't even hold your interest long enough to repel it. An especially sad decline can be seen in the area of fansites, where loving online shrines have been replaced by dull official sites and social media accounts. And while this is partly due to the migration of internet usage to phones with smaller screens, there's also a question of plain indifference.

And 20-25 years ago, when print media started to go into an obvious decline, we were told that it didn't matter, that the web would not only pick up the slack but bring more variety and beauty to the media. It sounded too good to be true, and as things have panned out, it wasn't.

Tromatic upbringing

Am now currently reading and enjoying Make Your Own Damn Movie!, a nonfiction book by Lloyd Kaufman. Am I planning on making a movie myself? No, not necessarily. On the other hand, being able to write one and get it made is the kind of goal that could spur me on to other things I want to do. And thus far there has been some useful advice, especially about finding financing.

In the early chapters there are quite a few swipes at Harvey Weinstein. Apparently back in 2003 when the book was written, Weinstein was the rival that Kaufman could never catch up with. With Weinstein's troubles now I'd bet that Kaufman is quite a bit less envious. After all, no one's ever accused him of raping anyone...EXCEPT YOUR MIND!

Whatever

If you have any interest in writing, you probably know that there is plenty of advice out there to be had: lots of classes, how-to books, specialty magazines. For me only a small percentage of these are of any use at all to a creative individual, and after a certain point they become actively harmful. The problem is that the authors pass along things that have worked for them in terms of output and sales. These methods may or may not have helped them do their best work as well. In either case, the problem is that it's not a replicable skill where the same things will work for everyone. The consumers of these lessons fall under the category of "everyone" so they wish that this were not so.

Perhaps the prime example is the emphasis on creating conflict in your fiction. A story isn't a story, they say, unless two or more people are at odds, or one character has a goal and a problem in achieving it. Perhaps. But telling a writer that they need conflict is like telling someone they need to breathe. If you produce 1,000 words on any topic, some kind of conflict will be present. And in writing conflict, as in breathing, if you concentrate on achieving it you're going to run into more problems than if you just don't think about it.

In witch we...

Are Alfred Hitchcock episodes starring James Franciscus about to become the focus of this blog? Sad to say, I don't think there are enough of them to keep the concept going. Still, it's a nice thought.

"Summer Shade" is one of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes that came after Rod Serling made a splash with The Twilight Zone, and it's not shy about swimming in the same pool. A married couple (Franciscus and Julie Adams) drive around Salem, Massachusetts, looking for a home where they can raise their daughter (Susan Gordon). Just as they're ready to give up, they find a quaint house that the owner (Charity Grace) is putting up for sale. The daughter is happy there, but the parents are concerned that she's spending too much time with her imaginary friend, a friend whom she seems to have made up after reading an ancient tome on Puritan New England.

Going further into spoiler territory would do nothing to elucidate what makes this story work. It's just too weird, and that's what makes it work, partly. The setting is Salem, and while the Witch Trials took place in what is now known as Danvers, most fiction has always found that irrelevant. In this case the city of Salem is presented, albeit tacitly, as a tourist trap where the reputation of black magic is as vital to it as the beaches are to Atlantic City. Real estate signs show witches on brooms, and the woman selling the house wears a witch hat, which the protagonists don't even think anything of.

Everyone commits to the weirdness, and I would make an educated guess that this starts with Nora H. Caplan, who wrote the original short story. The weirdness isn't random. It points in a certain direction. And it defines everything, even the details that seem mundane. That's what it means to have a vision.

Glad rags

Burlington Coat Factory is open again. After an extended period in which clothing stores around here had to close, this is a good thing. The thing is, speaking as an adult male shopper, their selection has been nonexistent since reopening. The socks and underwear sections have been bare, heh-heh. And I've looked to buy a couple of new short-sleeved shirts, but there's nothing in Large. Medium would have worked for me in high school, but not now, and for Extra Large I'd have to gain 60 pounds. So someone must be buying up all the clothes that would fit me and smoking them.

This is the year that isn't

From a story attempting to add a little perspective to the current crisis, the number of Americans who consider themselves "very happy" appears to be at an all time low, at least while these things have been measured. How much of that is down to their extremely constricted social lives? Quite a bit, I would guess.

I'm fairly lucky. As a natural introvert, I need to be in contact with other folks some of the time, but not all or even most. I have family and friends that I've been able to keep in touch with some way or another, and that includes at least a couple of friends I've met with in person all the way through. On walks outside I catch sight of people and sometimes exchange greetings. Today I dined in at a breakfast place I like a lot which just recently reopened.

The only thing that really bothers me is that we're still hearing the rhetoric of "can't do this, can't do that, everyone will die." The evidence that COVID-19 was an unprecedented plague was always thin on the ground, and at this point the idea is completely in tatters, yet some people want their deadly pandemic and will have it. Even there, it's not so much the people lying that depress me as those who've fallen for it. Or just haven't thought about it, somehow.

The joke's on you

So as to this story...You can see the skit above, unless YouTube removes it, which who knows? I think it's pretty funny. The cop played by Keegan-Michael Key has a lot to do with that, doing a...you know, it's not even a slow burn, just total bafflement with what this guy's deal is.

In a year where nuance seems to have crawled off to join the pile of corpses, it's not too surprising that Netflix has pulled it from their service. What is surprising, and kind of encouraging, is that Cross and Odenkirk have managed not to grovel. They actually expect their audience to show some understanding of where they're coming from. This is more sensible, if less fashionable, than claiming they were ignorant of the existence of racism when they wrote a comedy skit about racism.

Atsa real good

Yeah, another video post. Sue me.

I heard this scene on a radio station a little earlier tonight and had to dig up where it was from. Animal Crackers, an early one.

You have to hand it to Chico. It's hard enough to keep up with Groucho, one of the funniest men to have ever walked the earth. But Chico actually gets a chuckle out of Margaret Dumont. Italians tended to like his portrayal as well. He sort of codified the bad Italian accent.

What of the Carpenter? What of the Eggmen?

Interesting that the walrus is shown to be having such trouble getting back into the water. And keep in mind that this is a healthy specimen, the leader of the pack. So is this just an awkward evolutionary landing for the species? Are they destined to ultimately take to the seas full time? Or does the land hold something for them that will keep them coming back?

Time will tell, whether or not we're around to hear it.

Heroic vices?

Can vices be heroic? It's something I've been thinking about.

I don't want to denigrate idealism, youthful or otherwise. It has its place, certainly. But the things that make up your best self: altruism, integrity, honesty. It often seems like all these things can be bullied out of you under the right circumstances. Bullied out, or twisted so hard that you think your practicing them when really you're just filling out someone else's agenda.

The vices, things like cynicism, laziness, and gluttony, they're old reliables. And they can throw a monkey wrench into the plans of people who might be doing harm in the long run.

So I don't want to make rash decisions about which traits are heroic and which aren't. I can only say that it's a good thing they're all on the table.

Screw your courage to the sticking place

Robert Sikoryak is a name I've only started to hear and thus appreciate in the past few years. He's a brilliant magpie, able to retell just about any story with new details that stand its idea in itself.

So what would the "Scottish play" look like if it were a comics feature set at a sleepy Southern California condo? Now we have an inkling.

Start reading the want ads

Today I went to an ATM to withdraw some cash. I had my card out anyway. But there was a lady in the bank lobby telling me that the ATM wasn't working. But also that I couldn't go into the bank. Because right now you can't get into any bank lobby without an appointment. No exceptions apparently.

Banks could ask why stores of comparable size can have, say, fifteen customers inside and they're apparently capped at zero. They could also petition to get the ban lifted now that infection rates are shown to be dropping, which was true basically at the time the law(?) went into effect. There are lots of potential reasons why they haven't objected, but the simplest and therefore the most probable according to Occam's razor is that they don't object because they have no objections. They've decided that the day-to-day business of their average customer isn't worth the time of their tellers, now or later.

I hope I'm wrong, because if I'm right a lot of people are going to be displaced. There's only so many people they need for loan interviews.

Factory recall

I read somewhere that one of the falling-outs Lou Reed and John Cale had over the course of their lives―and there were a number―was caused by Cale doing the theme music for I Shot Andy Warhol. Which I guess had to do with the whole idea of a film about Valerie Solanas. Does it glorify her? I don't think Cale was out of line, though. If her life could serve as a cautionary tale for someone, I think that's worthwhile.

Have to give Reed the last word, though, just because I love the song he wrote for Warhol after the shooting.

Sister act

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often that that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amarita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

After wrapping up the Elmore Leonard caper Swag, I decided to reread Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. As I think the passage above demonstrates, Jackson had a way with opening paragraphs. The Haunting of Hill House had a choice opener as well. Yes, I had to think about the "two middle fingers" bit, because I always count the hand as having five fingers, and with odd numbers you just have one middle. Some people don't count the thumb, though. Merricat Blackwood isn't like me, of course. I like dogs. Books about people unlike you, those about whom you don't even initially know how to feel, are vital. The test, the necessity, is that they be well-drawn.

In the key of sea

The sea organ, "played" by the tides, is an interesting concept. It's in the general Aeolian harp category, where sound is produced by the forces of nature. Certainly a feat, if lacking the personal touch of musicians who have to pick up their instrument.

There are sea organs in a few places worldwide, including Blackpool in Northern England and San Francisco. This one is in Zadar, on the Croatian coast. Don't know if it's loud enough to keep people staying on the beach awake at night.