I Don’t Often Get To Use the “Senile Ramblings” Tag

There is a moment in the life of any pet owner – forgive me, “animal companion” or whatever is popular and correct these days – when you realize your furry friend is not going to be with you much longer. This is not my first time to this dance. And yes, every time we lose one of our furry friends, I am emotionally devastated and swear off ownership forever and that lasts a few months.

Mavis the Pug Dog has been with us for a decade now. I look at photos of her from her first days with us,when we had first adopted her, and her mask and ears are dark black. They are now almost totally gray. She snuffles and snorts and hobbles through the house. Her skin allergies are worse than ever. She smells bad. She still loves sitting in my lap while I watch movies, hoping I will scratch her butt. I usually do.

Thinking about it, of course, makes me sad. Then I also watch her shuffling and grunting, and think, “Poor old thing.” Then I also wonder if the students at the community college where I work see me shuffling around and grunting, and if they think “Poor old thing.”

Unlikely. If I’m lucky.

I’m probably not that lucky.

It’s interesting: I’ve spent so much of my life writing and acting, and a key element of those two disciplines is observation. The changes in my body over the past decade, as youthful injuries starting taking their tolls, have been… interesting, I suppose. Whenever I meet up with old classmates, I am endlessly fascinated by what age has wrought, what it has changed, and also what it has not. The person inside remains basically unchanged. It’s the spacesuit that’s wearing out.

…Well, this got rather dark rather fast; all from that “poor old thing” anecdote that I thought was fairly amusing. I’m stopping short of saying stuff like “I know I don’t have all that much time left, and seeing where this country is goin’, I don’t much care, by jing!” and shaking my cane at all you young hooligans.

So I’ll shift gears and mention that Barnes and Noble is currently having their – annual? I just know it’s happened before, old age and memory, you know – 50% off Criterion DVD sale. I limited myself to two – which would net me free shipping – and therefore picked up the recently-released Kiss Me Deadly and a disc I had lusted after for most of that aforementioned decade: Gimme Shelter. I’m listening to its commentary track as I write this, directors Albert Maysles, Charlotte Zwenn, and utility player Stanley Goldstein. That could be the reason for the cloud hanging over this entry. Gimme Shelter, though it didn’t intend to, documents the death of the 60s. They pretty much shambled around until around ’72 or ’73, but the fact Altamont didn’t play out like Woodstock was the rifle crack from the grassy knoll that put paid to a lot of idealism.

But imagine how much darker this would all be if I were listening to Kiss Me Deadly.

Ha, Maysles just mentioned that some people would say the 60s didn’t really end until the early 70s. I am vindicated.

Okay, movie’s over now. I suppose also seeing the Stones so freaking young didn’t help much, either. As either Goldstein or Maysles pointed out during the movie, you look at all those people in the audience and realize they’re 30 years older now – 40, actually, the disc came out in 2000 – and wonder.

Remind me to watch some uplifting movie this weekend. Lie to me, Hollywood. I’ll love you for it.

July 22, 2011
Categories: Senile Ramblings . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Solutions In Search of Problems

My brain’s been increasingly muddled of late, so this is probably going to be even less focused than usual. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, as I just checked my biorhythms and my intellectual curve is plummeting down toward the bottom of the graph. Yeah, I check my biorhythms.  Not religiously, but they do seem accurate when I do.

Through a series of happenstances, unrelated events, smoke and mirrors – you know, the usual – I have become the go-to guy for the audio at city meetings. I know my way around a sound board well enough, and apparently I work cheaply enough, so I am currently up to my waist in city-level bureaucracy and politics. Which is not where I thought I would spending my adult life.

There is an astounding amount of sturm und drang even at that level, and not where you’d think. The drama and conflict is all over at the School Board meetings, maaaaan. Problems addressed at the City Council often seem to go the route of beating the dead horse until it is liquefied and poured into bottles; the best example of this occurred a couple of nights ago, when, and the tail end of the City Engineer’s presentation, an old subject was brought up by a council member.

Can you see me waving?

This likely sticks with me because it is centered where I work: at a suburban branch of Houston Community College. I work in a nice building that houses the math and science departments. It has a large parking lot behind it for the students, a smaller lot in front for faculty and staff. Some student eschew the lot in back to park on the city street that runs alongside the complex to the west – it puts them a little closer to the building. Not significantly closer, just a little closer.

There have apparently been complaints about this from local businesses. This is kind of odd, as the city streets are generally wide enough to accommodate this sort of thing. I go down this road every day on my way to work; yes, there are cars down each side of the road, but there is still room for two lanes of traffic. Unlike in my neighborhood, which has rampant street parking, and if two cars are going opposite directions, one has to pull over and let the other pass. That isn’t the case on the street in question.

Then, I guess I’m not driving a big UPS truck or other similar large vehicle. I do see the local police out there occasionally, because some of the students are stupid enough to park in front of fire hydrants.

But the resurrection of this complaint prompted a half-hour digression while various solutions to this problem were brought up and most were shot down by the City Attorney, whom I am beginning to recognize as a bastion of sanity. There was a phrase I heard during an NPR story, “This is a solution in search of a problem,” and that covers the discussion in spades.

Eh. Then again, what do I care? I get paid by the hour.

The Solution In Search Of A Problem came from an NPR story on the recent Supreme Court decision to reject a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors. This decision has prompted a out-gushing of oh-the-horror this-is-the-end-of-civilization dogs-and-cats-living-together hysteria I am used to seeing from right-wing outlets but this time it was coming from liberals and even people whose opinions I normally respect. Besides the whole Freedom of Speech thing, the law should have been stuck down because it was a totally unnecessary piece of legislation. There is already a rating system for games, and retailers follow it. I have stood by and watched a Blockbuster clerk tell a clueless parent what the M rating meant on a Grand Theft Auto game, much to the chagrin of the disappointed child next to him.

This was an easy target, low-hanging fruit for a legislature to point to and say, Look, I’m protecting your children. Now shut up for a while. Rejection of the law does not mean that it is okay to sell or rent these games to minors; it means that there is already a regulatory system in place for that and it was not needful for the government to invest time and money in enforcing it.

That is likely the most conservative thing I am going to say all month.

I would, however, like to know how many people who are squealing about the law’s rejection are also loudly complaining that the gummint needs to stay the hell out of other things.

I got on Google+, and I am pleased to report that it is nice and quiet there. Then, I’ve put about seven people in circles. I like the ability to decide who I want to see posts from, and who will see my posts. The fact that I could put some of my Facebook friends into a “Right-wing Bigot” circle and allow them to blither freely into the aether without adding to my migraine is priceless. And the fact that I would wind up in a “Liberal Idiot” circle would be quite alright, as I would never know.

Whoops, make that eight people. Keith Allison of Teleport City just made the scene.

I actually wrote a review and made a post at Attack of the 50 Foot DVD this last weekend. Trying to make it at least a twice-monthly thing, my newfound fame as an audio operator allowing. Need to find the time this weekend to finally watch 13 Assassins.

In closing: an interesting experiment is unfolding across Twitter and Facebook – Karen Barley is an attempt to tell a horror story across social media. Her Tweets are collected at this website, which also has links to the Twitter and Facebook accounts. Interesting stuff, occasionally hitting the right low-budget creepy note.

July 15, 2011
Categories: Senile Ramblings . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

The Crap of July

Well, the 4th of July Parade (held on the 3rd of July) was, as predicted, a dreadful ordeal. Setting up cameras in the heat, moving the camera back into the shade so the electronics wouldn’t cook, walking back and forth from the cameras to the air-conditioned control center. At one point when I checked, the heat index was 111 degrees. The nice thing about control being air-conditioned was having that place to retreat. The bad thing about it was it necessitated running a lot of cable. Cable we did not possess or even own, as it turned out. Could have been prevented by moving control out to the heat with the rest of us, but that wasn’t going to happen. By the time the Parade actually began, we had six out of seven cameras online, which was a minor fucking miracle. The Parade itself was rather underwhelming, but the fact that we managed to pull our part off carries with it a certain feeling of accomplishment.

I wasn’t needed for the actual 4th of July broadcast, which was very good, since when I got up Monday morning I couldn’t put any weight on my bum leg. So I spent most of the day with my leg up, searching out episodes of Mythbusters I had not yet seen on Netflix Instant. For America.

I knew it was going to be like that. I knew there was a fairly good chance that the 3rd would be the day that either crippled me permanently or outright killed me. (As I write this, it is the 6th. I was able to come to work without the cane, and I am not dead. I attribute this to my willingness to sit down as much as possible and let the enthusiastic younger employees do all the work) Therefore, I bullied all my compatriots into a Crapfest on July 2nd. I had no shows that weekend, a financial problem but not an emotional one, as I’m also pretty sure I might have murdered or at least maimed a few drunken audience members.

This still almost did not happen; Dave called about 2pm to inform us that he had a clogged drain problem affecting his whole house. A Crapfest canceled by plumbing problems? My irony gland was throbbing. A quick visit by a plumber, though, and we were underway only an hour later than planned.

While we got settled down, food was set up and cooked, I trotted out my three disc This Is Tom Jones set, which was not crap by any means. Tom Jones is a hell of an entertainer and these selections from his 1969-1971 ABC variety series… well, here is a taste:

That is a bare minute and a half out of a set that lasts some fifteen minutes at least. The very first show has The Moody Blues, Mary Hopkins (“Those Were The Days”), Richard Pryor and Peter Sellers. One episode. We went on to episodes featuring The Who, and, as seen above, that luminous appearance by Little Richard. The eps always end with Jones in a concert setting, sweating and singing his heart out.

Well, it’s kind of hard to force yourself to sit through crap after that, so rather than ease us in, I went for the throw-the-patient-into-some-cold-water treatment, and an episode of Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos, of which there appears to be only five episodes anyway. Enough to run each afternoon for a week, and sell some action figures.

There is a real desire evident to make this the Chuck Norris equivalent of GI Joe; Chuck and his troops have far-ranging authority in his fight against an organization of super terrorists. There is a lot here to work with, and some day I should do a full review.

Food still not ready? Time for some Birdman!

Birdman is one of the lesser Hanna-Barbera superheroes, frankly (I still have no idea who this BIRMAD might be…). He got a complete season DVD set due to the Adult Swim Harvey Birdman Attorney At Law series, and since The Other Dave was a big fan, I brought it. We watched two Birdman stories and one of The Galaxy Trio shorts, and I remember nothing about them. Except Birdman constantly shouting “BIRRRRRRRRRRDMAN!” because he was very conscious of his branding.

Thank God, the fajitas are finally cooked, and now it is time for a movie. Dave was foiled when he discovered that Netflix had removed his choice, Jaws The Revenge, and instead trotted out Jack The Giant Killer. The musical version.

Jack was a fairly infamous attempt to imitate the success of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, right down to hiring its two leads, Kerwin Matthews and Torin Thatcher, and its director, Nathan Juran. Columbia threatened a lawsuit, and in an attempt to recoup their investment somehow, the producers had to change Jack into something 7th Voyage was not: a musical. But not by bringing back the actors and shooting additional footage, noooooo. There was already a leprechaun in a bottle (an ‘imp”, if you believe the script), who spoke in verse; that’s a natural for some music. But the rest…

It is best to simply let this version speak for itself, as it were. Jack is trying to sneak into the evil sorcerer’s castle to rescue the princess:

If anything, we thought this version of Jack needed even more musical numbers. It was very, very bizarre, easily the high point of the evening. Having created and uploaded that clip, I am becoming obsessed with the idea that seems to be Thurl Ravenscroft providing the basso side of that duet.

By now, Rick was positively vibrating to complete the Ginger Trilogy by watching Girls Are For Loving. I have a longer review of it here, but suffice to say: It ain’t no Abductors.

There is a lot more money invested in Girls, and perversely, the movie suffers for it. There is a general bid for respectability; Don Schain (or, as I prefer to think of him, Mr. Cheri Caffaro) really wants to do a Dr. No-style movie, but doesn’t have the chops. The sleazery is there, though not enough to salvage the flick for Ginger fans. Ginger is sluttier than ever – no, that’s not fair. Caffaro is playing a Liberated Woman, 1973-style, and that means being bewilderingly frank about engaging in the carnal act. Yeah, I still miss the 70s. You youngsters missed out on all the good stuff.

As alluded to earlier, Girls is not a very good movie. Not that this is a requirement for Crapfest, but it is largely bad by dint of being boring, which is bad for a Crapfest. Cheri sings in this one – she’s undercover as a lounge act – and sure enough, just as someone says, “I liked her better when she was taking off her clothes,” she switches to a strip-tease number. There is a Ginger movie struggling to get out, but it’s lost in an ill-defined plot by the anti-Ginger to get rich. Even the nudity seems to be somewhat toned down. This must have really frustrated the grindhouse patrons familiar with the Ginger brand.

Finished up with Five Fingers of Death, which Rick and I both claimed we had watched before, but Dave claimed we had not. Not that it matters – it’s a good flick, and I needed some winding down time to sober up for the drive home. Paul and the Other Dave had already wussed out. Wusses.

So I faced the grueling Next Day with something approaching some peace in my heart and a song on my lips. “A spectacle! A spectacle!”

 

July 6, 2011
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

Horrid Junes and True Legends

Life’s Rich Pageant has been rather more pageant-ly of late. Enough so that I became certain the month of June was cursed. Not Total Catastrophe-style cursed, but certainly here-let-me-fuck-with-you-some-more cursed.

We’ve already covered the Wife’s annual visit to the hospital. Four days after her return, the house’s AC cratered. At first it seemed to be an electrical problem. I found out my wife had continued to pay out money to a Home Warranty outfit that I considered to be on the level of a pyramid scheme, but she’d paid the money, so let’s use them. Received an e-mail detailing the contractor’s contact info, and was assured they would call me for an appointment in 24 hours. When they didn’t, I called them – it was now Friday afternoon. Was given an appointment the following Monday, because, sorry, they’re not open on weekends.

This seemed appropriate.

This seemed appropriate.

This was – naturally – during a period of 100 degrees + days in H-town. We elected to stay in a hotel for the weekend. Come Monday, the electrician came and told us that yeah, he would have assumed it was an electrical problem too, but it was actually something with the unit itself, and he would put in the call to the AC tech. When the 24 hour period had passed – once again – I call the AC guy myself, and was told the earliest he could get there was Thursday. By this time, we were staying with a neighbor.

He came, and it turned out to be something which – if I only knew a tiny bit more about AC technology, I could have remedied myself. But when he found out how long we had been without AC, he was shocked and refused to charge us anything. So guess whose business card is up on my refrigerator now?

The shows on the weekends have been the usual parades of petty annoyances. I hate drunks, I hate performing for drunks, and I hate performing for people who consider me the cheap version of 3D TV. Why the hell you shell out that much money to have a conversation is beyond me. The absolute nadir came when I found out a table full of drunks – who, of course, knew they were improving the show with their shouted bon mots – when I found out one of the drunkest and loudest was a pregnant woman. Pregnant, and rapidly approaching what my pal Dave refers to as “puke-ass drunk”. It is one of the few instances in my life where I found the phrase “Jesus wept” to be appropriate.

This week, there are no shows, which is good on every level but the financial. This Sunday is the 4th of July parade (held on the 3rd, yeah, I know), which is going to involve me hauling my porcine semi-crippled butt out to the parade site at Noon and spending the next seven hours, in the sun, setting up for a live broadcast of the blessed event. This will be the first time for a new “improved” parade route, and the scuttlebutt is there are markedly fewer participant registered for this year – but that only affects the actual run time, not the set-up time. I’m looking forward to at least a nine-hour day. Likely more.

So I guess it was important that I write this today in case I don’t survive.

An old friend who works at one of the bigger cinemas in Houston told me that Ip Man 2 actually played there for a week with absolutely no advertising or promotion of any kind, though he – Bruce Lee fanatic that he is – would have watched it had he known the subject matter. I find that sad, even if I do think the first Ip Man was better. But this also started nagging me on another matter. Ever since the trailer for Yuen Woo Ping’s movie True Legend showed up on the Apple movie trailers site, I had been looking forward to it:

…and I was beginning to fear that it had suffered the same fate.  So I rushed over to Amazon, found the DVD and ordered it. I received it at the very beginning of the AC debacle, and was surprised to learn that it was a Region 3 disc. That really shouldn’t have surprised me, since I didn’t recall any announcement of an R1 release, but there you have it. While sequestered at the hotel and the neighbors house, I was cut off from my region-free players.

So finally I did get to see it and… what a disappointment.

The narrative is pretty scattered, and really feels like three different movies. The first is the truly impressive opening, as our protagonist rescues a prince from barbarians. Huge fight scenes with lots of guys.

Then our hero retires from military life to concentrate on his wu shu. His adopted brother shows up to clean up some family business – Hero’s father killed brother’s parents for being evil practitioners of the Five Venom Fist, then Hero married the sister. Brother had mastered the Five Venom Fist, and sewn “dark gold armor” into his skin to make himself invulnerable. Hero is defeated, goes into hiding, and is taught superior fighting skills by “The God of Wu Shu”, who turns out to be a figment of his imagination.

All that is the major portion of the movie, and that sounds like a typical kung fu plot. But it comes to a tragic end with about 25 minutes left to go… and then we enter the third movie.

You see, True Legend is supposedly the story of Beggar So, the guy who originated the Drunken Fist style of fighting. Where this ends up is So, now an alcoholic wreck dragging his son around China, is taught the drunken style by yet another figment of his imagination, just before he finds himself involved in a deadly competition with foreign fighters, more by accident than anything else.

But this is where I enter “Oh come on” territory. No, not when the God of Wu Shu is shown running over the tops of tall grass, holding a drunken monk at arm’s length like a cackling Olympic torch. That I willingly accept. It’s the big fight-for-our-honor-against-foreign-devils conclusion.

It seems that the last four major Chinese martial arts films that I have seen – Jet Li’s Fearless, Ip Man, Ip Man 2 and now True Legend – end with this conceit, and frankly I was kinda tired of it by the end of Ip Man 2. I’m beginning to wonder if this  is now a mandated part of Mainland China cinema. At least this one has multiple wrestlers, and the ring is surrounded by a pit filled with hungry tigers. Ha! Take that, Donnie Yen, you wuss!

As I said, disappointed. There are many parts of the movie that are great, but the overall structure is too disjointed in an effort to be epic. Michelle Yeoh is criminally wasted in a small role. Interesting to see David Carradine in a career-lapping role yelling “Kill that Chinaman!”. Jay Chou as the God of Wu Shu is outstanding; he is likely the only reason I will ever watch the Green Hornet movie.

June 30, 2011
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Three Day Weekends Bah Phooey

Yeah, so much for trying to at least blog once a week, eh? Last week was especially contrary to that little initiative.

Let us start off the week with two School Board meetings, on Monday and Tuesday evening. These were promised to be short; but then, upon entering the building Monday, the first thing asked was, “Are you available Thursday evening?” Monday was welcoming the new Superintendent, and that was short. Tuesday was installing two newly re-elected trustees, and the election of a new President and Vice President. This was also supposed to be short, but an acrimonious closed session put it into overtime. Sadly, all the drama was after the closed session, during which the station went to a live broadcast of the Economic Development Committee, which was nowhere near as dramatic.

All, well, we broadcast the recorded meetings until there’s a new one, so the reading of prepared statements and openly aired bitterness still got its screen time.

Wednesday was my single night off, then, and even then, that was spoken for; the graduation for my wife’s school was that Saturday. My wife, for those who don’t know, runs a school for children with reading difficulties. It runs from K-12 and every one, at least one student graduates and goes ont o college, which is pretty amazing considering most of these kids were ready to drop out due to frustration. You can’t say the public schools have failed them out of malice or anything, it’s just that they do not have the resources to handle these students in the way they need to be taught. So that’s my wife’s job.

A standard feature of each of these graduation ceremonies has been a slide of the graduate, photos taken from baby pics through elementary up to the present, all accompanied by music. Usually “Let Them Be Little” by Billy Dean. What this means is every year my wife sidling up to me asking me to pleeeeeeeeeeease do the slide show (or, more accurately to “help her do the slide show” which translates to “pleeeeeeeeeeease do the slide show”), which means every year I ask her to find somebody else to do it and that somebody then flakes out and I wind up learning how to use Power Point yet again.

By Wednesday, I had finally gotten all the photos I was promised and had given up on the CD being found and actually fucking buying “Let Them Be Little” from Amazon MP3, which is going to screw up my recommendations for months. Oh, but wait, when I got my new computer, I declined to give Microsoft any more money and went with Open Office for all my office-type needs. Well, Open Office does also have a Power Point-type program called Impress that takes a little getting used to; I couldn’t figure out how to just have a solid black background, which I prefer for this sort of thing, but it did have a very nice blue notebook background that was appropriate. After a few hours, I had the photos all timed out properly, and exported it to a Power Point format. Yay, that’s done.

Except the next day I took it to work on a flash drive and tried it out, and… saw the first slide, heard no music, and then… nothing. This was the definition of Not Good.

Well, no, actually the definition of Not Good was the text I received from my wife an hour into the day, asking me to pick her up and take her to the Emergency Room.

My wife is a brittle diabetic, prone to wild fluctuations in her blood sugars. Well, that’s what she’s defined as now, before she was just a diabetic. She had been minding herself, doing everything she should have, but the swings were getting more extreme. When she got up, her fasting sugars were 58. When she called me at 10am, they were over 500.

So it was time for what is starting to look like an annual event: put Lisa in the hospital and try to stabilize her sugars. Ha ha, good luck with that.

So not only did I have a joint School Board/City Council meeting that night, but I was also trying to communicate to her staff (which had been reluctant to do anything for the graduation but were now in charge of it) where things were and how they needed to be done, deal with a wife who was freaking out because she wasn’t going to be there for her babies, and figure out how to fix the slide show.

I felt really, really bad about not being in the hospital with her, but there was stuff that needed to be done, and I wasn’t contributing anything other than holding down a chair. As I set up the mikes for the meeting that night, I kept reminding myself that she was with people who had the training and tools to help her, and I didn’t have either.

That meeting actually only ran ten minutes over, and I got home by 10pm, trying to fix the slide show and finally get to bed. Turns out you can’t have an MP3 sound file when you save an Impress slide show into Power Point format – it has to be a WAV file. So a quick conversion later, I finally have sound again. But now the timing is off. DAMN. After a couple of tweaks – and having to listen to that damned song over and over again, I finally get it to an acceptable level of sync. Not as perfect as it was before, but acceptable.

Friday morning – drop off the kid for his last day of school (yes, he’s dyslexic and goes to Mom’s school), along with a present for a departing teacher and a flash drive with the slide show on it. Go back in 20 minutes because they need Lisa’s keys. Go back in two more hours because it’s a short, and find out two guys from Church have come and troubleshot the whole projector/slideshow/ music thing. Bless you guys. Drop by the hospital,find out that my wife is now radioactive. They gave her a stress test, and shot her up with radioactive tracers. Then I go to get some rest because I have a show that night.

The graduation goes off with the usual number of hitches, not the least of which is the graduate’s mother arriving 45 minutes late. After prying my son from the post-graduation buffet (deviled ham sammiches, yummmmmm), it’s back to the hospital. Not much in way of news. Back home, sleep. Do the show Saturday.

On Sunday, they decide to send her home, as she could have irregular sugars at home just as well as at the hospital. Her heart, thyroid, gall bladder, all were in good shape. She has ulcers from taking so much ibuprofen for joint pain and leg/foot cramps, and two of her medications have an ingredient that retards her body’s ability to absorb potassium, hence the cramps. Life style changes have been called for, and a new goal: keeping the sugars to around 200.

So after waiting in her room for an hour and a half for a wheelchair to take her down (and Mary, her favorite nurse, finally grabbing a wheelchair and pushing her down to the lobby herself), I then spend another hour waiting on prescriptions. Monday I spend a couple of hours at a supermarket weaving in and around people piling their carts with bratwursts and steaks for the Memorial Day cookout that they somehow hadn’t gotten the meat for, yet.

So three day weekend, bah, phooey. There was no such thing.

And just to twist the knife: no, we still have no insurance. And generic Prevacid? $100 a bottle. As the song says, “It’s sick, the price of medicine.”

This week: nothing. No meetings, no punishing deadlines. Hell, I don’t even have shows this weekend. I have resorted to pinching myself just to make sure I’m still alive. There is a constant, nagging sensation that I’ve forgotten something, but two different calendars tell me otherwise.

June 1, 2011
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Ow Ow Ow Ow Ow

AHHHAHHHHHG let’s not have another weekend like that, okay? Maybe even extend it to another week.

I feel like I was either apologizing or paying for or something my weekend with my lovely wife, as I hit the ground running – okay, in my case, hobbling – and had little time to catch my breath. My normal work hours, sure, but then I was covering for sick co-workers in the evening Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, working the live remotes for the School Board, Planning and Zoning Commission, and City Council. None of these are what you would call back-breaking. In fact, if I had to do extra work, this as just about ideal for my busted body. Outside of set-up, it’s all sitting at a mixing board and making sure a) people who are speaking get heard – not always easy, as “speak into the microphone” might as well be uttered in High Enochian to some people – and b) make sure that when the chamber erupts into spontaneous laughter, you do not blow out the equipment or the speakers of people at home.

I am assured that people actually do watch these things at home.

I had been asked to run similar duties at a Board of Directors meeting here at the college on Thursday. There would have been quite a bit more set-up involved in that. Luckily, our engineer was willing to help me out with that (as if I hadn’t been doing it, he would have been stuck with the whole shebang) and got tot he site only to discover someone else was doing the audio deed; those details had been e-mailed or voice-mailed tot he guy who was sick, so nobody had gotten the message.

That was, however, the best thing that could have happened, far as I was concerned. I’d had more than my quota of bureaucracy in action that week.

Thursday was the first evening off in a while; that had me looking over my shoulder, wondering if I was going to be called in to run audio for the Dog Catcher’s Union or something. Then, of course, the show on Friday and Saturday, and yes, funny that you should ask, I was filling in for an absent actor, and his character gets to stand and walk around for about an hour and 15 minutes. I was moving very, very slowly by the time these shows were over.

In case you're wondering what to get me for my birthday

Naturally, I had a shoot Sunday morning. At the San Jacinto Monument. Meaning a lot of walking was in order. That was the 21st Annual Monumental Bug Bash, which sounds like Cricket Stomping Day, but is actually a gathering of fans of the Volkswagen. Again, I’m not a motorhead by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the Bug, and it is a very fortunate thing that I don’t have a lot of money, because I have no idea how I would have gotten those cars home, anyway.

The gimping around is bad enough; when you have a 45-minute drive home, that gives those ailing knees an ideal opportunity to lock up. When I finally got home, my cane seemed woefully inadequate to the task; I really wished I had a walker. Maybe with a little horn to honk at young hooligans who get in the way.

This week seems blessedly clear. There is a showing tomorrow of a anti-drunk driving film I did some camera work on, and that’s it until the weekend’s shows. An actual chance to heal? But then what will I bitch about?

May 16, 2011
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Talking Myself Into Writing

So, right on time, I turned in the final pieces of my contract writing. I picked up my paycheck. A few days later, I looked over the rewrites editorial had done. They weren’t bad,  but I did wonder about the necessity of some, especially those that muddled the voices of the characters. Eh. It was work for hire. I did my,work, they liked what they got (and, I’m not too humble to admit, were impressed by the quality of what they got), I got my money, it’s out of my hands.

No, what is amazing me is the fact that I’m still busy. Thus far, this has been the busiest year I’ve had in quite some time, the old saying about “feast or famine” made concrete. I managed to get my foot tangled in some stage equipment a couple of weeks back and screwed the knee back up again, so I suppose some of the hectic nature of my schedule is due to the fact that I can’t be hectic myself. If a fire breaks out or zombies attack, I’m a goner.

But let’s see; the final weekly newscast of the semester was last week, and I had to scramble to find my last story. I like to cover things like local food banks or similar charities for that last slot, because it will run all month, until we switch over to our Summer travel magazine format on June 1. But for some reason I was anathema to the two local food banks we had done stories on before – I couldn’t get anyone to return my calls. Then I noticed the Fort Bend Boys Choir is entering its 30th year, I knew the artistic director, and there you have it. That was kind of nerve-wracking, but it got done.

Then that weekend was my 16th wedding anniversary, and my wife and I had decided that dammit, we are doing something this year, so we dumped the Teenage Moose off at the neighbors and headed to Galveston for a couple of days. Stayed at Grace Manor, a lovely bed-and-breakfast, and basically enjoyed being in each others’ company for two days without anyone else intruding.

I was probably the spoilsport for the trip, as I had to stop often and partake of the plentiful benches on the Strand while Lisa shopped. The 1900-style architecture is lovely, but damn, did they ever believe in stairs. The two flights of stairs in Grace Manor were murderous enough, but they at least had the promise of a bed at the top. (Also, I could admire the woodwork as I grumbled my painful way up) The shops on the Strand, located conveniently close to the dock for the Carnival Cruise ship? I didn’t need to go up ten steps for the privilege of looking at more tourist stuff. I do, however, regret not giving in to my baser desires and buying that gorgeous statue of Ganesh I found in one shop.

Now back to reality, and the second School Board meeting in two weeks (with two more in a couple of weeks in the offing). My boss, who normally does the audio for the Planning and Zoning Commission meetings, is sick today and I might wind up doing that tonight. So I’m just as busy as I was, the events are just not so closely scheduled as they once were. They’re down to One Extraordinary Evemt a day, instead of two or more.

One of the things that nagged at me while doing the contract writing was that I really wanted to be writing for myself. I haven’t added all the sections up, but I turned out probably between 60,000 to 80,000 words, which is sufficient for a novel, I’m told. Hell, this blog entry is about to pass 700 words. Though they couldn’t be defined as mine, I still got attached to a couple of the characters. I dredged up some painful stuff so I could put some truth about painful stuff on the page. Overall, it wasn’t as hard switching from a script format to a prose format as I’d feared, though I still rank my dialogue higher than I would my descriptive passages.

So, you might ask, besides the fact that your normal writing times are being taken up with running audio for the live broadcast of governmental sausage-making, what’s stopping you from getting back on the novel-writing horse? How far had you gotten the last time you tried this? Maybe 25,000 words, before you put it aside, feeling it was too close to a commercial franchise which had, at that time, not yet been run into the ground?

Therein lies the eternal rub. There is a NaNiWriMo book near my bed, called No Plot? No Problem!, which mocks me openly. I should try reading it again, perhaps. There are germs of stories I’ve been working on, off and on, for months and years. Time was, I wouldn’t sit down at a typewriter (which ought to tell you when that “tine was”) until I had the plot pretty much planned out, or at least the major setpieces.

Then, something odd happened. I wrote two scripts where I took advantage of only things that were easily to hand. This was, I suppose, exploitation scriptwriting at its finest, as I leveraged props and effects into the script. Video company I worked for had a junker they were going to retire? Fine, I have a car to trash. Somebody knows a local artist who specializes in transgressory sculptures featuring gruesome body parts? Good, we have a psycho’s hideout. We still have those ninja outfits we bought for that training film? Great! Those yellow contact lenses we bought for Forever Evil? I have a use for them.

I didn’t have much of a plot when I started writing those two scripts, but they were fun to write, and, honestly, they are some of the best things I have written. I have to find a way to apply that feeling. that let’s-put-on-a-show moxie, to the written word. Without the need for props and junker cars to drive the narrative.

At this point, I have written 1000 words for a blog entry. As my friend Roger keeps pointing out, do that 59 more times, and you’ve got a novel.

May 10, 2011
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant, Mindless Blather . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Interruptions to Overwork

I approach the end of my writing contract, and it is a conflicted feeling. On the one hand, I will have some free time again. On the other hand, I will have some free time again. I think you see where the conflict lies.

Oh, wait, perhaps you don’t. One of those was free time with money coming in and the other was without. There, that should clear things up.

In the usual storm of regular work and picking up the extra duties of the co-worker who had to go on medical leave – extra duties that multiplied as the School Board meetings he worked similarly multiplied due to the ongoing budget crunch and the Superintendent having the audacity to resign just because he got a higher-paying gig at another district – (pause for breath) and the show every weekend and blah blah blah jeez

All of this culminated in last week, when my wife was out of town and I found myself booked solid Wednesday through Saturday. Sunday I took a day off simply because I had to – I was exhausted, frazzled and half-crippled. This week is a short week, with Good Friday providing a day off – just the daytime hours, the night still belongs to Mystery Cafe – and I had to edit together two stories. That’s done, and now I can get ahead on the two stories I need to do for next week, or plan out what is becoming a troublesome section of the contract writing, or I can just sit here and blither into this oft-neglected blog.

The stuff to fill my suddenly free time has been piling up. Books and movies taunt me from their resting places. I got over 100 pages of Richard Kadrey’s Kill the Dead read during a closed session of the School Board, and that is about it for my non-comics reading this year. (Yet another reason I love comics – the episodic nature of the stories lend themselves to bursts of reading)

Speaking of bursts of reading, there’s the Twitter, and thank God there has been very little of it devoted to outstanding buys I must have lately. It’s thanks to Twitter that I own things I could not otherwise afford, like the slipcased deluxe Don Martin and Gahan Wilson collections, or that wonderful Criterion box set of BBS movies – all gotten for half-price and far below. Thanks, Twitter friends, for tipping me off to those.

There are a couple of other times that Twitter has surprised me, which probably says more about how I use and view it as opposed to how it actually works. I mean, there are people and news sources I follow; I occasionally reply to some of the people, and they reply in turn. Or they don’t, and I’m never sure if they even see my replies – but such has always been the nature of electronic communications betwixt fans and the people they follow, right? Anyway, it’s always seemed like  a fairly closed system to me.

Then comes a Tweet from a fellow I do not follow, nor, I think does he follow me – answering a question I had asked by omission, when I referred to a recurring character in Korean movie posters as “That Guy”. He helpfully provided me with the true identity of That Guy – The Red Falcon. Perhaps he saw it on my Tumblr site, I don’t know.

Then there was an acrimonious exchange I started having with a guy who took exception to my buying DVDs from Warner Archive. I, myself, love the Warner Archive for delivering up discs of movies that wouldn’t have gotten a release otherwise. Pretty, lovely discs, often re-mastered. Allowed me to finally stop trying to subject myself to that ninth-generation VHS dub of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark I bought on the ‘Net years ago. Gorgeous, ephemeral stuff like jazz shorts from the 30 and 40s, Robert Benchley shorts, those bizarre Dogville fillers. Hanna-Barbera cartoons… for God’s sake, these people are putting out box sets of The Herculoids and Frankenstein Jr. this year. They are, therefore, saints in my book.

Then, a goodly number of saints are also martyr, so of course – because it is the Internet – Warner Archive has their detractors. People that grouse that the discs are over-priced, that they have no extras, that they’re just DVD-Rs, or as Kevin Church so eloquently boils it down, ” Waaah waaah waaah.” WAC discs generally weigh in at $19.95, and I know from experience that I am going to hand a bootlegger at a con – or over the Net – a 20 for a much sketchier version of the same thing. Hell, I paid that much for friggin’ VHS tapes of stuff I wanted to watch back in the day.

The detractors who are also economic wizards state that the discs should “only be $10”. I’d love for these people to be in charge of the pricing on my groceries and utilities also. It could be pointed out to them that if they only wait for WAC’s sales – which I do – the discs average out to $10 a pop. There’s sales tax, but generally there’s also a deal on shipping for larger shipments.

So it’s unusual, again, that a guy I don’t know starts berating me on Twitter for patronizing WAC, citing the above reasons, and he starts hammering on their recent release of a letterboxed, remastered Green Slime, wondering why I spent that money when I could have bought a “perfectly good” pan-and-scan version from a certain vendor for fifteen bucks. I looked at my gorgeous letter-boxed version and considered the “perfectly good” pan-and-scan version, and decided to use the “block” function for the first time in my Twitter life. If you’re willing to buy stuff for me, you get to say where the money goes. Otherwise, shut the fuck up.

The latest version of this was triggered by my offhand statement to a couple of my Twitter friends that the much-vaunted Free Market had apparently weighed in on the movie version of Atlas Shrugged: #14 at the box office, $1.5 million take. Someone hopped in to defend it, pointing out that Rand hated commercialism, and the movie has an 85 at Rotten Tomatoes.

Have I blocked him, also? No, everything he said was true. It has an 85% Audience reaction on RT, but a 7% on the critic side, which impresses me as system-gaming, in much the same way L. Ron Hubbard became a Best-selling Author: lots of Scientologists buying multiple copies. But it must be admitted that 1.5 million dollar take was achieved at less than 300 screens, so that’s not too shabby a showing. Be interesting to see how it does the second week.

Like I said, everything he said was true. It didn’t change my mind about Rand at all, but it was true.

April 20, 2011
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Spring Break Leads to Crap

Yeah, I had another one of those weeks, where I had to schedule breathes in advance. The week before Spring Break, when everyone and everything at my Day Job was trying to get everything nailed down before they left for a week. At the final total, three remote shoots, two live remotes, two shows and one story conference. Followed by a week in which I only had one live remote and two story conferences, and time to actually do something, which of course meant I didn’t do very much. I did spend a lot of time on research for the writing contract, though, and now know more about tongue biopsies than I ever wanted to know.

The end of my Spring Break week, though, yielded another Crapfest, though not as well-attended as the others. It was only myself, Host Dave, Rick and Alan, who had a fortuitous weekend off from his rehearsal schedule. There had been a general muttering about the Crapfests straying from their original intended purpose, which was watching as many trashy R-rated movies with exposed breasts as possible, so this night’s schedule was dubbed Sleaze-O-Rama, and as this seemed to lead to a reduced audience, I can only assume we are returning to G-rated fare for the remainder of the year.

While waiting for the others to arrive – I had casually ignored Dave’s sudden plea to move the beginning up an hour – I convinced him to put on Dark and Stormy Night, which is Larry (Lost Skeleton of Cadavra) Blamire’s tribute/pastiche of black-and-white Old Dark House Movies. I love it, and I knew Dave was one of the few people conversant enough with the tropes of that genre to also appreciate it.

Rick arrived at the halfway mark and enjoyed it too, so there. We have now penciled in Lost Skeleton for a future Crapfest. Alan arrived, and we could finally cook the carnitas, eat, and begin the proceedings. And, at long last, I would watch Scorchy.

Scorchy is Connie Stevens’ exploitation movie. There may be more, but the lady’s filmography is so full of TV movies and episodes that it tends to stand out as the only one.

Scorchy led to a lot of head-scratching, not the least of which is because nobody ever refers to Stevens’ character as “Scorchy”. She’s Jackie Parker, a police detective who’s been working undercover to bust a heroin ring. This means posing as a jet-setter type on the taxpayer’s dime – for a year and a half – while ingratiating herself to the wife of the head of the ring, played by Cesare DeNova.

The second instance of head-scratching comes at the expense of the poster above, which, surprise surprise, lies. Ms. Stevens only makes love once, and doesn’t make with the killin’ until the end of the picture, which certainly doesn’t fit into one evening.

Scorchy is basically an over-long episode of Police Woman with occasional – pretty darn occasional – nudity. Ms. Stevens allows us to observe her (admittedly nice) ta-tas three times, and one peripheral character gets an expanded role in the final drug deal, just so she can change clothes and provide us with the required full-frontal nudity.

So Scorchy is not an ideal drive-in movie experience. We were also confused by the soundtrack, which is an electronic-percussion heavy monster more fitting in a 1980s movie, not a 1976 offering like Scorchy. Dave did some research and found it was, indeed, a re-scored version – though no reason was given. (why would anyone fight over the rights to the score of a movie like Scorchy?)  There’s also a bizarre bit of re-editing at the end where (SPOILER ALERT) DeNova outfoxes our heroine,  and shoots her in the uterus with her own gun (I’m not kidding, the placement of that squib is very specific). He then tries to get away, but Stevens gets out her second hidden pistol and shoots him dead. Then there is a freeze-frame of the bloodied Stevens. It’s a very kung-fu way to end a movie, and according to Dave, in the original version (ANOTHER SPOILER ALERT) she flat out dies.

Still, we allowed as how this was a fair entre into the world of sleaze, if a bit… lacking. So when Rick “I Love White Slavery” began demanding The Abductors as the next flick, there was little dissension.

The Abductors is a Ginger movie, which means it can be counted on to put the “sleaze” into Sleaze-O-Rama. In the epic inaugural Crapfest in Dave’s new home, we had watched the first movie, Ginger. Although, if you only watch one Ginger movie, it should be The Abductors, because star Cheri Caffaro is a lot more comfortable in her role, and there is a little more money in the budget, though not enough to really blunt the sleazery.

The link above will take you to my old review of the flick, but to make it brief: Ginger is a bored jet-setter who likes to style herself as “the female James Bond”.  Some insidious organization is kidnapping beauty queens and cheerleaders and selling them to rich white dudes as “mistresses in bondage”. Ginger and a young protegé will, of course, offer themselves up as bait and wind up tied up and in various states of undress. Of course, Ginger, the older, wilier Ginger will employ the powers of Applied Sluttiness to get out of her predicament (as Dave observed, “We really are that stupid, aren’t we?”), while the protegé proves that all you have to do to get a woman to talk is not to torture her, but get her hot and bothered.

Dave also earns extra sleaze points for knowing that the main henchman also appeared in Young Lady Chatterly.

Rick is now a confirmed Cheri Caffaro fanatic, which means a screening of the final Ginger movie, Girls Are For Loving, is in the future. To further your fledgling love for the lady, here is the musical number from The Abductors:

After that, Alan set up his Rock Band equipment, and we played that on into the night. I know bupkiss about playing musical instruments, so I can manage a decent success rate on a bass guitar set at Easy, but that’s the extent of my skill at the game. Still, some fun was had, even if we had said farewell to boobies for the evening.

March 24, 2011
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Name-Checking Some Fantasy Greats

Neil Gaiman. He figures into this, eventually.

Been a while. Been busy. You know the drill by now.

My writing contract work  proceeds apace, and pretty much on schedule. The sad part being, we are now approaching the part of the schedule where I should start work on Part Three, and there is no plan for Part Three. This is, apparently, where the Creative Department comes in, which becomes a bit irksome when I’m writing educational fiction for a field with which I have very little parlance. I suppose when our hero starts fending off zombies with a chainsaw, I’ll be informed I am in the wrong.

One bright spot, if it can be called such, is that freed from a page count for the next week or so, I actually have what I’ve been craving for a while: free time. This started yesterday evening, and I’m embarrassed to say I have no idea what to do with it. Or, rather, I have too many ideas. So instead I just read, and went to bed at, for me, an early hour. I was dead tired. Rough couple of weeks. Car troubles, deaths in the family, you know: all the stuff that makes life so thrilling.

Actually getting a decent amount of sleep is an extraordinary circumstance for me, so I can count last night extraordinary. It was filled with hideous nightmares – my subconscious needed to take out a lot of trash, apparently – but surprisingly consistent nightmares. I did awake at approximately 3:30AM, as usual, for a nocturnal visit to the bathroom, but went back to sleep and back to the same nightmare. Since I’ve been reflecting that it’s time to return to fiction writing for myself, I’m going to take this as my brain serving up the raw fuel for what I need to write. We’ll see.

(Homer Simpson Gurgling Noise)

I cannot, in good conscience, blame my reading material for the nightmares. A lesser person might, as I have been consuming Gahan Wilson: 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons, a typically gorgeous Fantagraphics piece of publishing pulchritude, a three-volume slipcased monster. It is one of those editions I looked at, then looked at the $125 price tag, sighed, and put on the “After Winning The Lottery” list.

I had not, however, counted on Twitter, or the irrepressible and fantastic Neil Gaiman. One night last week, Gaiman tweeted that Amazon had the aforementioned huge tome for sale at $29. I squashed several photons that got in my way as I clicked the link, and my poor UPS driver grunted the hefty package to my door two days later. Say what you will about Neil Gaiman (I tend to prefer his earlier work, but he is never less than entertaining), I officially pronounce a gesund on him, may his tribe proper and increase. He is the gift that keeps on giving.

Because I looooooves me some Gahan Wilson.

If you’re one of the three people reading this blog, you know Gahan Wilson. If not: his heavily cross-hatched cartoons epitomize bizarre, black humor. Or to put it another way, he’s the one who’s not Charles Addams. In Hugh Hefner’s intro to the first volume, he talks about looking for a Charles Addams-type for his fledgling Playboy (Addams being under exclusive contract to The New Yorker), and finding Wilson in Colliers. Thus begins the legend.

Okay, I looked at my father’s Playboys quite a bit when I was a kid. I don’t remember the nekkid women doing that much for me at that early age (that would come later), but I really loved the cartoons, especially Wilson’s. I have a few of Wilson’s smaller collections, but revisiting these in volume one, from 1957-1968 (that’s from memory, I may be correcting this later) was like talking all evening to an old friend I hadn’t seen in ages. Cartoons I had forgotten and suddenly recalled in a splash of memory.

The best part is, I have two more volumes to go through, which promise equal joy. The only bad part is, now I’m hungry for the collection of Nuts from National Lampoon, and that’s not coming out until July. But I do note that there is a hardcover edition of the Classic Illustrated Poe he did the art for, and The Devil’s Dictionary. Both of which I own in their “floppy” incarnations, and both buried in a longbox somewhere. Hm….

February 25, 2011
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

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