Life’s Rich Pageant

Well, That’s Over

I finished the first version of this post just past Memorial Day. Why, you might ask, has it taken so long to actually publish? Well, gestures at everything around.

Once again, I want to express my admiration for folks who do this on the regular, no matter what. I, however, am of a weaker bent. If the world is on fire, I’ve a mind to say, nobody needs to hear this. And all the polishing and re-writing gets pushed away. (It also didn’t help that I was actually polishing and re-writing it and a WordPress glitch erased everything I had done soooooo)

Then again, I once did a series of social media posts… was it on Twitter? I think it was, before that went to shit… where I was whining about going to my murder mystery dinner theatre gig because I’d had a bad week, but I eventually came around to the realization that the audience was there because they needed a laugh, and I was there to provide that. That whole thread ended with “But doctor, I am Pagliacci!”. Did the show (of course. I am – or was – a professional), and actually had a blast.

Lesson learned: do the shit.

So anyway. Pagliacci reporting for duty. Now, if everyone in my life would stop getting sick and requiring my time, I might get this to be an enterprise that updates a little more frequently than every three months. *rimshot* applause

Back to the Past.

A tenterhook — *This is what one looks like, incidentally.*

Yes, I’m sure, as our country burns to the ground, that you are still on tenterhooks to hear about the continuing struggle betwixt myself and my movie collection. If you’re joining us late, I have recently moved and not all of my discs moved with me, for various reasons. DVD Profiler claimed I had somewhere around 3300 discs, but it was an unreliable narrator because I hadn’t been doing due diligence when I gave away discs and the like.

So I’ve been going through what is actually here with me in the residence, weeding out duplicates and finding out what remained behind. Some of it was expected, some heartbreaking. I once had two copies of Paranorman, now I have none. But somehow I wound up with three copies of Star Trek Beyond.

*“Hey, my nephew knows Photoshop, I bet he’d do it for cheap!”*

So now, after all this, I am currently at 1939 discs and/or sets, including a couple that DVD Profiler refuses to recognize (I acknowledge that the box art for Captain America: Brave New World is dreadfully ugly, but come ON). The first recount was like. 1954, which left me with the utterly bizarre urge to go out and buy three more, so it would total 1957, the year of my birth. That likely speaks to my quotient of what the kids refer to as “The ‘Tism”, but it got quelled when I remembered my son pined for the Doctor Who discs, which pared the number down to 1939, the year The Wizard of Oz was made. I realize that only means 18 discs for him, but I kept all the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker he hadn’t already made off with.

Now the middle of June and I have gotten it back up to 1955. Two more and I have to find another year to fixate upon.

So I am close to completing something I have desired for years: my very own movie room. I was so excited that the day I finished the re-cataloguing, I took a video, even though I wasn’t really finished:

I am a senior citizen and am allowed my eccentricities (see number of discs, above).

I will agree there is some neatening-up to be done. Those unattractive boxes set horizontally across each shelf will likely stand as a monument to my inability to pull every disc beginning with a certain letter out of multiple boxes until I have advanced to another letter further into the alphabet. Also. bookshelves have more vertical spacing than is needed for DVDs and especially blu-rays. But I had a bunch of bookshelves and those specialized media shelves are much pricier.

To continue bragging about my space (though honestly looking at these pictures from my desktop, it looks like a room hastily set up by a weirdo without the skills or resources to make it look professional) (imagine that):

You couldn’t get a good view in the video, but perched over the TV are a couple of gifts from my wife: the Horrified B-Movie Victims figures, and the Godzilla neon. The HORROR neon is a gift from our old friend Rodney, and it leads to the action figure of Vampira, which is a gift from me.

There are two of those pricy media shelves, which are for special parts of the collection. You see one under the Horror neon which holds the superhero movies (shut up, I still love them and will continue to love them) and some box sets. And, as you can see, the complete Monty Python and Emma Peel Avengers sets.

But the first media shelf I bought was specifically for the Criterion Collection (and Twin Peaks sets, which I’m going to bet join other David Lynch entries in the Collection, anyway). This was to replace an older and larger media shelf which did not survive the move, probably because I put it together twenty years ago. Hopefully, these two shelves will last another twenty years, at which point I will be dead and they will be my son’s problem.

So far, so good, just typical white man oooweee, Looka what I done! but then it starts getting weird.

I attempted to put the finishing touches on it Memorial Day weekend, which was the longest span of free time I’ve had in months. The space was practical at the time of the video, yet somehow, I’ve yet to watch a movie in its entirety. I started the new French Three Musketeers last night, and though it is undeniably a quality product, I was unable to get more than halfway.

After a moment of panic and thinking omigod I’ve forgotten how to watch movies, I settled down and have been thinking about that. I have been very busy with the move and all the bullshit that comes with it while still working 40 hours a week and caring for my wife, a brittle diabetic… so maybe it’s a bit of guilt that I’m not doing anything connected with those instead of entertaining myself.

*But then, I would also have to cut my beard.*

But now I realize that this feels like a stretch of time back five or six years ago, during the pandemic, during lockdown, and nobody had an attention span anymore. We were actively worried about survival, and what dreadful news the next day would bring. And we all remember who the President was then. And here we are again, only, I feel, in a much worse situation because it’s been proven my countrymen are venal, hateful idiots. If I’m feeling guilty about anything, it’s not donning a beret, smoking Galoises and plotting strikes against Nazi bases.

To attempt to turn myself back to the subject at hand: I got through the first Trump years with the help of Marvel movies, and I will doubtless again. Even if they outlaw them. Especially if they outlaw them.

And that’s where it’s been for a while. The world situation hasn’t gotten any better – and there’s my massive understatement for the day – my wife is currently in the hospital, and here I am with my fierce chiweenie dog and unit of a cat, waiting for news. So dammit, let’s finish this thing, shall we?

In a symptom of the Marvel backlash I had been predicting since Endgame, I read one article excoriating Captain America: Brave New World because “obviously Marvel was unprepared for Trump to be elected”. First of all, Who was? and second, How should it have reacted? These movies take years to get to the screen, but also if by some happenstance, Marvel had turned Thunderbolt Ross into a Trump analogue… yeah. I don’t think outlawing such things would be beyond the pale for him. As it is, I think a Chief Executive admitting his wrongdoing and accepting punishment for it is a perfect middle finger to Trump.

Thankfully, he now has his own little war to distract him, so my entertainment is safe until the nukes start flying. Sleep well, everybody, and I sincerely hope we all get to see Fantastic Four: First Steps.

Now press the damn Publish button, wouldya?

June 19, 2025
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant, Senile Ramblings . Tags: collections, movies, political crap . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

Anyway.

Gott damn that was a packed three months since I’ve been here last. Let’s see how much I want to clutter your life with my travails.

Longtime readers (there are a least a couple) will recall that the fallout of the COVID years finally caused me to declare bankruptcy, and for a couple of years that was the norm. The garnishing of my paycheck and my wife’s were good practice for surviving on Social Security, which I in fact will likely never get to collect because my idiot countrymen could not bring themselves to vote for a black woman. (as a digression, there is a reason that whoever or whatever is in charge of the universe did not give me super powers, the reason being the death toll would have been quite extreme)

Things changed when a local power play caused me to unwillingly change employers, and at almost the same time, my wife (who had to shut down her school for autistic children) had to quit her new job because her health would not allow it.

In brief – the bankruptcy case was dismissed, at which time we found out that the trustee had not done much at all about the mortgage on our house. All that I can say for sure was my car note got paid off, so that’s something. Foreclosure was a very real possibility. We found someone who would buy the house, getting us out of that deep hock hole, but we had to pack and leave pretty precipitously.

We had been in that house for 24 years, and if you know me at all, that means the house was stacked with stuff that had caught my fancy throughout my life. The house we were moving into (it’s a rental) was smaller, so a lot of it had to go. In a philosophical sense, a lot of it required some labor to access, moving other crap out of the way. Lightening the load was utterly necessary, and doubtless a long time coming, but it still felt wrong.

I had been told several times that I was an episode of Hoarders waiting to happen, but I replied that was nonsense. I wasn’t hoarding, I was curating.

This is where some asshole would doubtless crop up to say, “Okay, then – Pop quiz! What’s important to you?” (Super-powered me would let him live, but only after thinking about it hard) A lot of my books got the chop – my eyesight is failing, anyway, right? I tried to limit myself to three boxes of books. That of course grew to six, and yeaaaaaaaaah, I’m still not sure I held to that, either.

(One thing that surprised the living hell out of me was when I decided to keep my Cerebus phonebooks. The first four of those are first-rate satire, and even though Dave Sim deteriorated into a loon, those were a big part of my life while I was still collecting floppies.)

(Don’t come after me about problematic creators. All my Neil Gaiman stuff made the trip, as well)

(also the Harry Potter film box set, because I’ve only seen the first)

(Anyway.)

Most of my figures are gone, too (I was a big Macfarlane collector in the 90s). A box of swords I had collected over the years, most of which were costume trash, anyway. My swordfighting days are long gone.

So I concentrated on movies.

DVD Profiler says I have almost 3300 discs in my collection. That number is dubious, because I wasn’t good about keeping the database current when I did get rid of discs. I know not all of these made the trip, too, as they were in the garage, and as said before, I couldn’t get to them easily, so what was the point? It was like not owning them at all.

The advantage to the new place is my son is married and no longer living with us, so I finally got my wish: the extra bedroom is mine to line with shelves and get those movies out of boxes and more readily accessible. There is that scurrilous database, though, so I am shelving them slowly, going through the boxes and so far, isolating A through E, and I will comb through the database and finally delete everything that’s not actually here. A slow process, but ultimately worth it, I think.

There are exceptions to that process. All my Marvel movies were together, and now they’re on their own, dedicated shelf. I am missing my copy of Quantumania, which is causing one of my eyes to twitch somewhat alarmingly.

Now I am back about a week later, and the eye-twitching has settled down. I’m pretty sure I know where my copy of Quantumania is located currently, and frankly, it was just easier to buy a new copy. I am pleased to say I have carved out enough time from unpacking other stuff and having my time wasted at City meetings to actually get through the letters A and B (and the movies with numbers for titles), and while my heart isn’t totally broken, there are some missing titles that I do regret, and some whose absence mystify me. The Best Years of Our Lives? I had that in a place of honor, where did it go?

How in the living hell did I wind up with two copies of Breakfast at Tiffany’s? One I know was a gift, but the other… I mean, the fact that I wound up with three copies of The Brainiac is understandable, but Breakfast at Tiffany’s?

Okay, enough of my trials and title tribulations – this could go on forever. At this point, I have finished letters A through E, and in attempting to continue with F and G, I have found no fewer than 30 titles starting with A through E that I missed in my first sorting run. To quote the famous philosopher Charlie Brown, “Good grief!”

Now back to the cataloging.

April 19, 2025
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . Tags: life . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

Still Among the Living (so far)

Hey, how are you? Well, I hope. Looking out over the current landscape, I don’t know how, but I hope you’re okay. I’ve been meaning to get back here for some time, and given that I fully expect this administration to kill me, either directly or indirectly, I should probably do that sooner instead of later.

So when we last left our hero, he was embarking upon a new project (and therefore forgetting to schedule his last review for a partial Hubrisween, which still remains in limbo). He was enthusiastic in an almost youthful manner, and plunged ahead.

SPLAT!

Haven’t seen the results of that yet, have you? There’s a reason for that. A brick wall was hit, and it made a tremendous noise that only I heard.

I needed to learn some new stuff to keep my brain from ossifying. So I determined to finally learn the meanings of Tarot cards.

This had the advantage of playing into a lifelong fascination and riding on another longtime nebulous project, which we’ll get into in a bit.

Now, any Tarot practitioner would be able to foretell without cards the thorny path I’d set upon. First, what I was aiming to learn was what is known as the Rider-Waite deck, which to my surprise was not handed down from medieval times, but had only been created in 1909. The “Rider” in the name refers to the original publisher, the Waite to its author, Arthur E. Waite. This deck has long since entered the public domain, so screw Rider, it should be known as the Waite-Smith deck to honor the artist, Pamela Colman Smith. And even then, there’s an argument to be made for “the Smith-Waite deck”.

There’s also not just the Waite-Smith style deck, either. The older forms of the deck were more akin to a modern deck of playing cards (which, ahem, they were), with the portentous Major Arcana and fancy court cards, but most suits having mere depictions of two coins, three coins, four coins and so on, instead of the rich symbolist scenes of Pamela Smith. These are generally referred to as “Marseilles” style decks, it seems.

I covered this much better in one of the unpublished blog posts about the project, which might still see the light of day.

Ace of Swords, Waite-Smith deck

The nebulous project mentioned earlier was even more of an infrequent hobbyist pastime: I had long also been interested in the different artistic interpretations of the Waite-Smith deck imagery. That was just going to be posted to social media like Mastodon or Bluesky, each post with a random card from four different decks. The major stumbling block here for me was the prevalence of alt-text for images. Please don’t get me wrong, alt-text is a very good thing, overall; but for all the time I would spend describing the art on each card, I might as well have had the satisfaction of writing a blog post.

In the spirit of mystical adventure, I picked a card at random from the deck I’ve been carrying around for, damn, maybe 20, 30 years? It was the Ace of Swords, the beginning of a new idea! I was jazzed.

Ace of Swords, The Steampunk Tarot

Now here is where it gets complicated, as those practitioners mentioned earlier smiled. As I worked my way through the suit of Swords, I was also researching the history of Tarot and discovered more and more how it was linked – sometimes forcibly – to other mystic belief systems.

I was working with the Tarot because I had some luck in younger days using an oracle deck (another creature entirely) to guide me through some rocky times. It made me consider connections which were not obvious at first glance, and those connections helped me quite a bit. So I wanted to use the deck to once again consider possibilities I had missed, avenues not explored. A meditation aid.

What I was not expecting was an attempt to make a deck of cards a Swiss Army knife of mystical beliefs. Once I started trying to unpack the Qaballah – which I am still trying to do – things slowed down and Life with a capital L started demanding my attention.

This venture is far from over. I’ve put too much work into it to simply walk away. It will eventually see the light of day, though who knows in what form. It probably should have been a Tumblr, and it may yet be – but then I would have to learn how to make that platform do what I want, and blah blah blah. It’s likely going to have to wait until my retirement, if I live that long.

Which brings us back to that depressing opening. I had watched shockingly few movies in 2024, but towards the end of that year, a movie called Tarot crossed my path, which claims that a group of young friends “recklessly violates the sacred rule of Tarot readings”, which was something I had not run across in my research. And while watching that, I started getting the itch to return here, to my older hunting grounds, and here we are.

But this post is already long, and if it gets much longer, I will never finish it. So let’s leave that until next time. As was said in equally tendentious times, good night and good luck.

January 25, 2025
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

Life’s Rich Pageant (moan, groan)

There is so much I want and need to say and precious little time in which to do it. It’s been quite a summer, yes sir, and I would heartily endorse the idea of everything just slowing the fuck down.

Yeah, it won’t.

There is a bizarre confluence of fate at work here, as somehow it has transpired that I’m the only guy in my part of the organization. Temporary, to be sure, but I’m not comfortable with this much responsibility. I don’t like having to be this careful.

That vague enough? Good. It is late and I am a bit heightened. Next week is going to be a tad brutal, and I’m trying to get stuff done while I can.

This is starting to sound like a suicide note, so here’s some japery, courtesy of The Oatmeal:

I wrote that part four days ago. This week is, indeed, being intense in the most tedious way possible. Municipal budgets. Meetings after meetings after dear sweet god where is that asteroid? Why is it taking so long? (needless to say, I really needed the protracted LOL that Oatmeal animation supplied)

Every time I’ve thought I should sit down and write, there was something else much more important to be taken care of, and the list of movies I wanted to write about here got longer and longer and ungainlier and… whatever the longer version of ungainlier is. Ungainlier – er. Unglaublich.

I meant to be back here with you, I really did. But then, I had an idea. A terrible, grinchy idea. I have been working – on a new project, something that no one but myself would possibly want to read, and I couldn’t be happier. Well, yes I could, but for the consideration of the story being told, I am willing to exaggerate. I felt the need to do something new, and I am fulfilling that need.

I believe I’ve completed the initial research and I’m ready to get started writing (future Freex drops in, wearing science-fiction sunglasses “He’s lying!” and disappears). All I need is, yes, the time. A meeting ended early tonight, giving me a half hour to myself before bed. So here I am, babbling to you like a homesick Civil War soldier writing his wife in hopes that some day it would become the basis of an award-winning series on the devil’s lightning box.

Hm. Reading that, maybe you really shouldn’t want me coming back

And now, here I am, two days later, trying to get this screed into some sort of shape that approaches sharable.

Now, if you really want a laugh, I hope to do Hubrisween this year. If I pull any reviews off, though, they’ll be pretty first draft quality, and not my usual *cough* sterling, polished prose. You’ve been warned YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE OUT THERE!!1!

September 21, 2023
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

I Think I’m Back (God Help Me)

It’s been said that life happens while you’re making other plans. I’ve been having life happen when I was just trying to live.

Hi. I’m going to try to come back to the world of old men complaining about movies and other stuff that’s not all that connected to real life, because real life is rawther sucky right now.

I don’t know how many times I’ve started this post over the last (mumble mumble) months or has it been fucking years? Been dealing with the usual: depression and anxiety and the political situation in the States has not been helpful at all. After a whole lot of things blocking me from even thinking about writing were recently resolved, and the workload during this week has been light, well, here I am.

Not been a fantastic year for a lot of us. Here’s my personal 2022 Hellscape: (if I don’t think better of this oversharing and delete this)

2020 finally caught up with me. I lost half my income during the lockdown, and it never came back. Then there were some very bad decisions made on my part (none of which involved crypto – I’m stupid, not totally brain-dead) and I spent most of the year declaring bankruptcy. I don’t have to tell you not to do this, right? Unless it’s absolutely necessary? It’s a lot of work. That was over as of early this month, and I am now guaranteed to be a pauper for the next five years. But at least my family and I have a roof over our heads.
In the final stages of that process, I took my wife to the Emergency Room with a massive days-long headache and double vision. It turned out to be a Cranial Nerve Palsy, which tends to go away by itself, but it takes weeks, even months. We got her a batch of differently colored eyepatches in the meantime, so I am now married to either a cute pirate or Elle Driver.
Almost immediately after that, my adult son, who was dealing with severe anxiety and depression (gosh, that sounds familiar somehow), on advice of his psychiatrist, was committed to a psych hospital for 11 days. He fucking hated it, but even he has to admit that he came out much improved.
So that was my last month, how was yours?
Oh, yeah, I’m now a card-carrying Senior Citizen. Or will be once the gummint sends me my Medicare card.

This is from SHARKULA. You shall hear of it again.

Sorry for burdening you with that, but I do feel better having vented to someone besides my family. The next five years will be, um, interesting to say the least, but if nothing else I still have approximately three billion movies in my possession that I still have to watch.

Therein lies another niggling problem, also with its roots in 2020. I have some buddies I game with online every night, which is something that kept me somewhat sane and centered during COVID and Trump, and that tradition continues. Night time was, of course, my usual movie-watching time, and as my day job requires being conscious during daylight hours, my aging body has required bedtimes earlier than my usual 2AM. This has cut down my movie-watching time drastically.

Another problem that can traced to 2020 – and I’m not the only person experiencing this – was violent damage being done to my attention span. For a while I could only watch stuff an hour long or less. I finally overcame that by watching Chinese action/fantasy movies, which had nothing to with current politics or airborne virii, which helped ease me back. Caught an unfortunate taste for “Prestige TV”, which isn’t a bad problem to have, really.

I had really meant to do Hubrisween this year, but as you know, life banged at the front door. Had a good lineup, too. If I get bored tomorrow – a distinct possibility, since we’re not traveling at all – I’ll share it with you. In the meantime:

I don’t have to tell you to watch Netflix’s Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, right? That’s because my readers are smart, right? Falls beautifully into the less-than-an-hour attention span trap, and it is a genuine pleasure to see horror not only done right, but done well. I still haven’t watched the last episode, because selfishly, I don’t want it to end.
Black Adam is a totally serviceable superhero movie. Enjoyable to see Zack Snyder’s “superheroes totally kill lol” philosophy administered to a proper character, now give me back my non-murderous Superman and Batman. The plot gets super-annoying at times (The Justice Society admitting it’s “a bad plan” from the start and then doing nothing to change that plan), but it was good to see Hawkman and Dr. Fate. I definitely want to see more of Cyclone and even Atomsmasher, and c’mon, make a Superman movie where he smiles occasionally.
Everything Everywhere All at Once was just as weird and marvelous as everyone said it was, and that is all I should say, in case you haven’t seen it yet.
Is the V/H/S franchise adhering to the even-movie-great odd-movie-sucks template? Because V/H/S 99 is a terrible letdown after 94. 94‘s stories were as long as they needed to be, while 99‘s are stretched unreasonably and unpleasantly long.

There. I hope that was worth the wait. Hopefully, I’ll be back later. If you’re in the US, Happy Thanksgiving. If you’re not, have a good Thursday.

Because, honestly, who doesn’t need more SHARKULA?

November 23, 2022
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant, Movies That Do Not Suck . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 7 Comments

Well, Whaddaya Know

I was actually working on a post last Sunday, when I received a text message from my online gaming buddies that I should hop on right now. I hopped on right then. Every attempt since then has been interrupted by other texts and/or teleconferences as I work from home, so here’s some quick notes to let you know that yes, I am still alive, and I hope you are, too.

I still hope to have that post out this week. It’s slight, but I also went into the subject of God and religion – one of those subjects I try to avoid – and I have to look at it again to see if it’s worth it.
I’m an idiot, I’ll probably decide it is.
Working from home is difficult when your job entails hustling a camera around to cover events and organizations. I’m considered to be in an “essential” field- news gathering – but the arcane structure of my job entails a second, maybe even third, layer of red tape. Contradictory orders have been the flavor of the day.
It’s surprising how disruptive just not bustling about in the morning to make myself presentable enough to haul my body to the workplace without somebody yelling “My God, what is it?” has been. I looked at my pill organizer yesterday and discovered I hadn’t taken my morning meds the previous two days. Being a lot more mindful about that now.
The passing of Stuart Gordon hit me a lot harder than the passing of Terrance McNally. I am a terrible former theater person. Then, Gordon was also a major force in theater, and I had actually met him, once upon a time. Just to echo everyone else, he was as nice a fellow as you could ever hope to meet.

Time to prep for this morning’s teleconference which will likely only involve me tangentially. I’m currently working across three computer systems, and the only one that runs the Cisco Webex software well doesn’t have a webcam, which is good, since I’m starting to get really shaggy and look like a late 70s college English professor.

Which is actually a fairly good look for me.

I need some tweed, though.

March 26, 2020
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Reverse Hibernation

Oh, hi. Are you still here? Man, I would have given up on me ages ago.

We’ll play catch-up in a bit. There’s some community stuff I need to blurt:

Obviously, I’m not doing the Hubrisween roundtable this year. Chad Plambeck at Microbrewed Reviews and The Fiasco Brothers still are. You’re in good hands. Links can be found at the Hubrisween Central supersoaker page.

So. I’ve been off doing this self-care thing I’ve been hearing so much about. Turns out it’s actually pretty nice, but then that old itch starts at the back of my brain, like a rat trying to dig its way out, and suddenly here I am again, staring at a blank page. I’ve been blogging off and on since the 90s, and my God, do I respect the people who manage to turn out stuff on a regular basis for years. There are points in my (admittedly spotty) career when I just have to walk away for a while. Sometimes for years. Do other stuff.

So today we will be talking – probably to a tiresome degree – about “other stuff”. Probably no movies this time around, because I just haven’t watched that many. That’s how complete a break I made from my usual (increasingly and annoyingly regimented) routine. I point you again to the links above if you require ponderings about crap cinema. I have more if you need them.

This is how we used to have to do it. You kids have no idea.

But through all this I am still aggressively me, so we’re going to address How I Spent My Summer Vacation in a sideways manner. First, in my usual oh-look-let’s-try-this-new-thing-that’s-been-around-for-years habit, I finally made use of that Spotify account I’ve had since the dang thing was in beta. I didn’t find the UI as confusing as I did in my younger days, and after some poking around I found myself in lurv. People talk about falling into YouTube rabbit holes – that’s been me with Spotify. My musical tastes tend to the omnivorous, and there are plenty of musical rabbit holes for me to fall down. Discovered many new artists, revisited some old favorites of my youth to see if they still held up. Often they do.

Which brings me to a new version of an old pursuit: The Mixtape lives, we just now call it a Spotify Playlist.

I’m sure I’m not using the Playlist function correctly. I have every bit of 2 followers – one is an old college housemate – and I think the follow function on these are so you can keep up with new additions to the lists. I have one huge playlist – we will get to that shortly – that is constantly being added and subtracted. But the ones I work hardest on I don’t make public until I am satisfied with the flow of song to song. Like I said, mixtapes. Hitting Shuffle Play on those undoes my hard (snerk) work.

Yeah, this is me in my 20s. Recognize me now?

Once again my gloriously misspent youth trespasses on my elder years. In my 20s I played around with LSD quite a bit, and I generally ran the music for such things, solo or in groups. In my amazingly sober teenage years my friends were amazed I didn’t even smoke pot because I listened to music only potheads did, but I just really liked prog rock, and was such a science-fiction nerd that I found the gestating electronic music scene intoxicating. The closest I came was reading Carlos Casteneda, which certainly primed me for my college days, and the addition of physical intoxication in all its forms.

So I started making mixtapes for acid trips. I had a fairly impressive music library in those days, but it was nothing compared to what is available on Spotify. And I found myself engaged in that old pursuit, in my self-care time. Honestly, since I have a fairly nice sound system on my work computer, I can do research while working – just one more reason my job does not suck. If something is good enough to draw my attention from what I’m doing, it gets plugged into a temporary playlist for later appraisal.

The structure for the playlists is fairly simple – at least I think so, but this is the first time I’ve ever tried to actually write it down. I may look at the result, think it the rambling of a madman worthy of becoming President and delete the whole damn thing.

First of all, the playlist is limited to an arbitrary three hours. That is too short for an actual acid trip, which in my experience runs at least 6-10 hours followed by another 6-8 hours of what I called “thinking at right angles”. The Coming Down period is hopefully accompanied by plentiful orange juice and the music of the Grateful Dead and Free, which I found perfect for that time. Traffic is also good, but “John Barleycorn Must Die” still freaks me out.

Three hours just seems like the limit for a casual, non-altered state listen. I also check the flow at night in bed, through headphones plugged into my Chromebook. I have to go to sleep sometime. My first attempt at an acid Spotify list was the aforementioned 6 hours, and that was just ungainly. Psychedelic voyagers could, I guess, just go from playlist to playlist until the sun comes up and you start getting reacquainted with the real world, if need be. Maybe after I get three of these up and running I’ll attempt an integrated version for all your wasted needs.

Alex Gray provides us with an image for #4.

My playlist structure is as follows:

Let’s have fun, and get in a happy, jolly mood. We’re going on an adventure!
Increasingly psychedelic-tinged music as the tide of the drug begins to flow in. One of my great loves, late 60s-early 70s music is perfect for this.
Oh, hey. Something is happening. Ride with it.
HOLY SHIT I’M PEAKING. TURN ON THE BLACK LIGHT. SHOW ME ALIEN WORLDS.
Wow oh wow oh wow that was amazi-HERE WE GO AGAIN HAND ME THAT KALEIDOSCOPE (repeat as necessary)
Calm down those over-stimulated nerves with some slower, mellower, and dare I say it – beautiful music.

Obviously, I can go no further without posting the links, should you care to know what it sounds like in my head. Here they are, under the fairly innocuous title, “Headphones Strongly Recommended”:

After a certain point in my 20s, I had gotten everything I felt I could get from the psychedelic experience, and went my separate way. I’ve been asked if it was something I’d consider revisiting in the present day, and my response is: no, probably not. The most remarkable thing about acid, in my experience, was it gave you the ability to see everything as if you were seeing it for the first time, without preconceptions. That includes yourself, and that can turn into something remarkably ugly if you’re carrying any emotional baggage or trauma. I now have about 40 years of such baggage stored up, which I’ve no desire to face in a state where my coping mechanisms are diminished.

Now, as to why I got so into Spotify and created a huge frickin’ playlist that HAS to be put on Shuffle: City of Heroes is back. Goodbye, free time.

Painful as it is, I have to consider that normal people have no idea what I’m talking about, so here goes: City of Heroes was a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (henceforward MMO) that went live in 2004, in a period where there seemed to be a new one released every month, all chasing the dollars being earned by the most successful MMO of all time, World of Warcraft (equally henceforward WoW). This one, though, wasn’t about orcs and other Tolkein lifts, it was about superheroes. At the time, it was the only one about superheroes. My pal David Harlan turned me on to it, and thus began a monstrous time sink for me.

I’m not a big fan of MMOs, but City did an exceptional job of functioning without what I found to be drawbacks in other games. There was no waiting around for hours for a special hoohah to spawn for lotsa elite lootz, or even to be able to continue in the game. It was impossible to kill other player characters (people, being jerks, still found ways, and steps were taken to counter them). Every mission (or “quest” if you prefer) was in an instanced space, not the overworld map, so it ran pretty smoothly on most rigs. Combat was a fairly simple matter, and could be controlled by almost any device: keyboard and mouse, joystick, programmable gamepad. All that mattered was which of your superpowers you fired off when.

And I love flying. Flying is fun.

And you get to hang out with giant octopodes. How cool is that?

A companion game was spawned, City of Villains, where, of course, you played an up-and-coming super-villain. The two games were quite popular, though never reaching the player population of World of Warcraft. And in 2012, that all came to an end when the game closed down. I’ve heard varying stories about the whys and wherefores of that shutdown, but while it made me sad, it didn’t affect me all that much at the time. My core group had gradually drifted away to other pastimes, and though it’s possible to play solo, it’s just not as much fun. Playing with strangers did not appeal to me. So I had taken my 15 bucks a month elsewhere long before sunset came to Paragon City.

There was quite a bit of nostalgia over the years. People who loved that game really loved it, and they missed it. I confess the occasional pang or sorrow that I could not simply log on and throw fireballs at demon-worshipping street gangs in the name of justice.

Then I started hearing rumors about a rogue server that was still running City. Membership was closed, and there was a possibility of regaining your old characters from Live! Getting into it was a problematic and lengthy process, until it was revealed that the source code had been released into the wild and there were suddenly several servers openly running the game, so secrecy was no longer an option. A friend who had been working to get the old crew admitted to the closed server was finally successful, and goddammit I was in Paragon City again, and falling madly in love once more.

The reclaiming of old characters wasn’t possible anymore, but I didn’t care. It was a gas playing with the guys again. Now everything is open to all players – Heroes and Villains had separate power sets and archetypes, and now those – and all the costume pieces and other stuff formerly locked behind a paywall – are available to everyone. You don’t have to hit level 50 – once the highest possible level – to unlock the Super Special Ultimate Nitro Platinum Character Types anymore. It’s also free to play, so win-win, as we say in the trade.

I had attempted to start Discord once to participate in a No Budget Nightmares event and it mystified me (occasionally life likes to rub my nose in my increasing decrepitude). I had to demystify it so we could have a (once-again free! Yay!) alternative to our old standard, TeamSpeak. Voice communication is an absolute boon to slow typists like myself, so it became essential. In an attempt to bring the top part of this post into sync with this lower part, I should point out that in the halcyon days of the latter half of the aughts, when we were all heavily into the game, Dave and I ran a station on Live365 that purported to be a Paragon City radio station, so we could all listen to the same ass-kicking music at the same time. Dave produced some fun commercials, too. I finally ran out of money to fund that, but again, here we are, ten years later, with better tools. A truly enormous playlist on Spotify (currently 1814 songs, over 115 hours worth, quite a bit carried over from the Live365 days), and a bot to run that playlist on our Discord server. So even though the game is free, I’ve still found a way to pay 15 bucks a month just to play City of Heroes.

Look, in 1980, when I was a stoned student reading Heavy Metal and listening to Hawkwind over my headphones – had you told me then that 40 years later, I would be guiding a flying laser squid through twisting blue and purple caverns, all the while zapping evil magic users while still listening to Hawkwind over headphones… well, I’d ask you what you were on, why you weren’t sharing and where could I buy some.

Squad Goals

I’ve mentioned before that one of the few things that kept me sane during these last three years of garbage government shenanigans was Marvel movies (and thank God DC finally started making entertaining ones). Being able to briefly inhabit a world where good could overcome evil in a matter of a couple of hours – hopefully as violently as possible – got me through the darkest times. I had forgotten, though, how much physical tension could be drawn away through my guidance of an online avatar to do the same thing in a shorter time frame. There are at least two enemy factions in-game that are obvious Nazi analogs (we refer to them as “Illinois Nazis”), and it’s remarkable how easy it is to gravitate toward the missions that involve taking them down. Hard.

There. I think I’ve bored you enough. Just talking about it makes me want to go online and freeze Illinois Nazis in crushing time distortion fields. Maybe we can talk about movies next time. I did watch a few.

FUTURE FREEX BURSTS IN THE DOOR. It was revealed to me this morning that the megalomaniacs downtown have scheduled not one, but two extra City meetings next week, stealing away three evenings of what remains of my life. Y’all will be waiting for a while on that next installment, I’m afraid.

October 9, 2019
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant, Old Men Playing Videogames . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

Prufrocked Again

Whaddaya know, I finally started that project where I would actually watch good, well-regarded movies. I watched the first one, and really enjoyed it. Still thinking about it, almost two weeks later. The Law of Unintended Consequences being what it is, however, it also means that every time I’ve started another movie since. I’ve turned it off after a few minutes because it just didn’t measure up. Look at what I’ve generally been writing about in the last 1-20 years and you’ll see what a WTF moment this is. I have been infected by quality.

I am sure this will pass.

I had a dream, based on past years, of resurrecting a Letterboxd game called March Movie Madness, which was for those of us who couldn’t care less about any iteration of sportsball. It was an A-Z review challenge, one review a night, to run opposite whatever the hell March Madness entails. I like the A-Z challenges (the fact that I do Hubrisween year after year should prove that); they have a sort of scavenger hunt/game vibe that I appreciate. I did a couple of these review marathons, even in the years they didn’t return on Letterboxd. That was also back when I was limited to part-time hours at my job. I’m full-time now (sigh of relief), but that means a lot less time to watch movies, and especially to write about them. I still intend to do this Quality Thing, but it won’t be concentrated in a month (or 26 linear days). It’ll be spread out. I need to come up with a banner to make them distinct, as if the “LETTER: MOVIE TITLE BEGINNING WITH THAT LETTER” weren’t enough.

Looking back over the master list, I should probably also mention that you shouldn’t expect a train of masterpieces, either. It’s also intended make me finally see movies I have should have watched ages ago but just haven’t, for some reason or another. So The Magnificent Ambersons is on the list, but so is Rasputin the Mad Monk.

I’ve read over my older stuff here, and it seems that February is always a time for introspection and grumbling, and if I’m going to start blaming 40 hours a week for diminished writing, I should also start beating on the elephant in the room, which is my age.

Yep, the movies lied to me AGAIN.

Yeah, I’ve always complained about being older than the average bear. I was 40 years old when I wrote my first online review for The Bad Movie Report on a Fortune Cities free website. I got to bitch about my age because I found myself hanging around with people easily ten years younger, if not more, people much more savvy about the Internet than myself, sitting in my room and futzing about with Adobe Page Mill. The aftereffects of a major car wreck years previous (and some foolishly Lon Chaney-esque escapades on the stage) had me still hobbling about on a cane, sometimes wondering if I was going to wind up with a walker. Exercise has weaned me off the cane (unless I overdo it, as sometimes one must), but there is no denying that I hit the 60 year mark a couple of years ago, and I started finding out everything actual old people kept saying was true.

Next time, buy a one-story house. Fool.

I used to like to game. My reflexes have slowed to the point that I say pfui to these twitchy things that require me to do fifteen things at once, and find solace in solitaire games, and JRPGs with turn-based combat. I definitely get winded faster, and as was proven when we tried to move a futon to my son’s upstairs bedroom lst December, I ain’t as strong as I used to be. (a side query involves who the fuck makes futon frames with wrought iron? Hah?) There are times I wonder what the hell I was thinking, buying a two-story house seventeen years ago. (The answer is it was the only one we could afford that also allowed me a room for my office. My tiny, tiny office now crammed full of books and movies)(Also, I loved the neighborhood and still do)

All of this, really was expected. Everything eventually breaks down, even your body. You shrug, you carry on. But the bad thing, the really Bad Thing, is the Senior Moment.

I’ve had them. The time I sat in the car, frozen, because I forgot, for a moment, how to open a car door. The time I was driving home from the store and cursed because I had forgotten to pick something essential up, and realized two minutes later that I actually had. The time I was leaving the weekly show, dropped my suit bag in a panic because I was suddenly sure I had left the suit bag in The Room. Yes, the suit bag I just dropped. And the one my companion kept pointing to and saying “Isn’t this it?” as I tried to get back into the locked Room.

The worst part is when I can’t get the steam pressure up.

My wife – a lifelong blonde, who claims to do this all the time, all her life – will say “How funny.” It’s not funny, it’s terrifying. I’m not rich, I’m not handsome, all I’ve ever had is my mind, and if I lose my slippery grip on that, I got nothing. Add to that the fact that the thing that keeps killing men in my family is strokes, and I’ve seen the effects of that horror visited upon them – I’m definitely in the midst of an existential crisis.

Probably the best I can do is employ the methods my ancestors have used to deal with existential crises, which involve booze, loud music, and something smothered with cheese, the one concession to the 21st century being the music is Trance and I’m still watching a kaleidoscope app to put myself in an alpha state. My major fear is that I will drop dead before I get to see Avengers: Endgame, and that is at the same time pathetic and extremely hilarious. I should put it on a T-shirt.

Hope to see you next week when the Polar Vortex is back in place and the only horrors in this space are born of whatever movie I plug in tonight. If I can make it through it.

February 1, 2019
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . Tags: age . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

The King of Jazz (1930)

I always forget how hectic August becomes. Probably because I’m usually fixated on just surviving July.

Local Government: Artist’s Interpretation

As some of you know, I put a bit of bread on my table by working tech support at City government meetings, usually meaning sound, sometimes camera. August is the end of the fiscal year, so there’s a lot of budget crunching. Politicians like to be on the TeeVee, so damn near everything must be televised. Ergo, I get a lot of extra work in August. Whereas the money is extremely welcome, there is nothing that clears away the movie malaise I spoke of last time, like hearing a politician going off on the same subject a third time while the legal department tries once more to explain to them why something is being done the way it is being done.

Look, I already know I’m not going to get to watch every movie I want, or read every book, and I begin to actively resent anybody who willfully steals more of my dwindling hours on earth.

That is a major portion of the reason for my absence from this digital page; another is the approach of October, and the return of the traditional Hubrisween event. I am usually much further along on that project, and its time to buckle up, down, or under, or whatever the appropriate figure of speech might be. TL;DR: don’t expect anything on a regular basis from me until October, when you’re going to get heartily sick of me.

That being said, I actually managed to watch a movie! I did something!

Who…? What…?

Criterion recently put out a blu-ray of 1930’s The King of Jazz. Now, I’m nowhere near as knowledgeable about film as I’d like to be, so Criterion putting out a movie I’ve never heard of is not unusual. On top of that, I’m not an aficionado of jazz, but I could have sworn that the King of Jazz was somebody like Duke Ellington. But, you know, it’s Criterion, so it’s going to be worth a watch on some level.

The King of Jazz, in this case, is Paul Whiteman. As mentioned earlier, I’m not a particular fan of jazz – I find it listenable, by and large, but other musical genres are closer to my heart. So I’d never even heard of Paul Whiteman. Since my viewing, I’ve done some research. He was quite popular in the 20s and 30s, where he picked up the sobriquet, and still has some renown as a band leader and musical arranger. His was the orchestra that premiered Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, and that orchestra was the farm team for musicians like the Dorseys, Benny Goodman, and and Bix Biederbecke. The aforementioned Duke Ellington speaks well of him. Jazz, as we have come to know it today, has a lot to do with improvisation; the jazz that Whiteman is monarch of is best described as “syncopated dance music”. Perhaps literally, white man’s jazz.

Not the King of Jazz I was expecting.

Hollywood had been trying to do a Paul Whiteman movie for years, with various starts and stops. This was apparently going to be a typical romantic comedy with musical interludes, but after many delays John Murray Anderson took over and made it a revue, complete with comedy blackouts and a cartoon. It’s an early two-strip Technicolor movie, and that opening cartoon is the first in that process; it’s made by Universal’s house animator, Walter Lantz, which animation mavens will instantly deduce from Oswald the Lucky Rabbit’s cameo.

The King of Jazz cost $2 million to make – and that’s two million in 1930 dollars – and was a colossal flop. After The Jazz Singer broke movies’ silence in 1927, there was an absolute glut of musicals. By this time, ticket buyers were sick of them, and apparently they absolutely hated revues. Which is too bad, because – much as I hate musicals – I actually wound up enjoying King of Jazz. The music is quite good, but it’s the audacity of the visuals – most of them quite trippy to my jaded eyes – that take it over the top.

Wait… where’s the King?

The first big number is “My Bridal Veil”, where a young bride, on the eve of her wedding, witnesses a costume parade of brides from every period of time. This is some gothic romance woman-in-nightgown-running-from-spooky-manse-with-one-light-on-in-the-upper-story stuff, but it’s played for pure spectacle and sentiment. One reviewer has mentioned it primarily exists for the elderly people in the audience. On the cusp of elderly myself, I can safely say that what 1930 needed was either more heavy metal or more techno.

One of the prize gems in Whiteman’s crown, Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” is introduced by several men playing a giant grand piano; the lid raises, and the orchestra is lifted up from within the piano (there is a lot of that 2 million on the screen).

“Ragamuffin Romeo” is an impressive contortionist dance number with a beggar putting together a girlfriend from scraps of fabric. It impresses mainly as a tribute to dancer Marion Stattler’s acrobatic abilities and flexibility.

John Boles was Universal’s big male vocalist at the time, and he gets a couple of solos, but the singer you’re going to notice – if you didn’t notice him in the Rhapsody clip above – is in Whiteman’s vocal trio, The Rhythm Boys – a very young Bing Crosby. In fact, Crosby was going to get one of what was ultimately Boles’ solos – “The Song of the Dawn” – but der Bingle was in jail for drunk driving at the time of filming.

The big final production number is perhaps the most egregious to modern eyes – every single form of white music in the world – from Scottish bagpipes to Spanish flamenco to Russian balalaikas (and their associated dancers) are lowered smiling into an enormous boiling cauldron and out of that soup Whiteman conjures – jazz music.

I am frankly skeptical of this origin story.

(The color here is sadly inferior to the new remastered version, but what do you want from YouTube?)

It’s 1930, and though Whiteman wanted to use black musicians, this was not allowed. There is only one person of color in the entire movie, a little girl in traditional pickaninny garb who is used, not actually as a punch line, but more a punctuation mark (There is one dancer used to illustrate African rhythm who is not actually black – it’s Frenchman Jacques Cartier, wearing a black lacquer of his own invention). Whiteman though, is so affable and self-effacing throughout, it’s hard to hold this or that odd misbegotten musical ancestry number against him.

Walter Brennan, comedian.

The comedy blackouts are mercifully brief (the comic songs are longer and much worse) but the best things about them is one of the actors: If you thought he was perpetually a dried-up old coot, here’s Walter Brennan at 36 years of age:

Okay, one last clip. If “My Bridal Veil” was for the elderly, “Happy Feet” was for the kiddos, featuring the Rhythm Boys and Al “Rubber Legs” Norman:

To show how spoiled I was by Criterion’s blu-ray, I feel like I have to keep apologizing for the quality of those clips – for a movie I didn’t even know existed a month ago. Before, they would been delightful to run across, a “huh, wow” experience. Instead, I’ll just leave you with this New Zealand preview for the restoration, which gives you a far better idea of the quality of Criterion’s blu-ray.

August 14, 2018
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant, Movies That Do Not Suck . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

Remember Me?

Still here. Still alive. Paid my money to be here another year – even slapped down the extra gelt to remove the ads from the bottom of each post (you’re welcome). If that’s not a statement that I intend to be in this space for the foreseeable, I don’t know what is.

December was remarkably quiet. In the acting end of my life, it’s usually full of holiday parties. Not 2016, though. Then, surprisingly, January opened full throttle; I think we had more shows in the first two weeks of January than we had in the entire month of December. Some believe this is because people figured out the world wasn’t actually going to end (immediately) and were relaxing. They pointed to the Stock Market, among other things.

It seemed to me that this is more like the parties held the night before the final battle in Seven Samurai and Magnificent Seven, but what do I know? I’m just an American citizen of no celebrity, with no stock portfolio, and therefore no worth.

The other side of my employment situation cranked up, too: extra City Meetings, some previously scheduled, some not. This week starts my weekly stories. At some point this semester I am going to have to pretend once more that I don’t despise sports.

In all this, I actually have been working on a post, which is only two-thirds finished and about 1500 words. I hope to have that up in the next few days, but don’t lay any money on that, ‘kay? Stay tuned. Like I said, another year. Which is, oddly enough, the length of time I expect my current health insurance to exist.

Yeah, I’m just a bowl of happy candy today, ain’t I?

February 1, 2017
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 4 Comments

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