DOOOOOOOOOM! Part 2

When I got up this morning, Rita was pointed at Galveston. Now, at nearly noon, it’s pointed at Beaumont. Well, both of those were actually pretty good news for me, since they both put my forty acres and a mule on the “clean” side of the storm, and if it continues its current drift, impact will be minimal around here. Sadly, this is, of course, at the expense of others. Equally, of course, these damned things are unpredictable, and it could conceivably hit the coast, yell “PSYCHE!” and turn toward me. Specifically, me. Cuz that’s the way my luck seems to run.

Nonetheless, seeing endless video footage of cars inching (if moving at all) on local highways just seems to support my decision to stay put. My neighbor across the street, who’s lived there for thirty years, cut out this morning, and told us his son left at 9PM last night to travel a couple of hundred miles inland. Twelve hours later, he still had not arrived.

I may be without power this weekend (if a sparrow farts in my neighborhood, power goes out) – and during my last encounter with a hurricane hit, Alicia, power was out for over a week – but I can imagine the sinking feeling of those people stuck in that gridlock – the sure, helpless feeling that they are going to be riding out a hurricane in their car. The horror of that gas tank slowly being drained.

It’s like the opening twenty minutes of The Day After out there.

Speaking of TV sci-fi, let’s go over this quickly:

Lost continues to be the show that surprises me over and over again. one of the few times each week I can say “Well… I didn’t see that coming.”

Threshold premiered last Friday on CBS, and holds the most promise for me, with some solid concepts (three-dimensional distortions of four-dimensional objects is one of my favorites) and more than a little mystery about exactly what is going on. If there is a flaw, it’s that our cast of main characters seems a little too willfully eccentric. But I will be tuning in again.

Surface had the standard hour debut instead of the doubled-up two-hour slot Threshold enjoyed, so it hasn’t laid all its cards on the table. Its main problem, as pointed out by the Time magazine critic, is the fact that it’s strip-mining Spielberg movies for its characters and set-ups. Kid hiding an extraterrestial in his home? Check. Working class guy who has extraordinary experience but no one will believe him? Check. Annoying moppet? Check. Something scary in the water? Check. Disturbingly, our government-sponsored bad guys are either expressly foreign or just look foreign, so a lot of bet-hedging is going on here. I’ll watch another episode just to see where they’re going with this, but they’re on probation.

Invasion had a tougher row to hoe for me, since it opens in a bloody hurricane and frankly, right now, I’m hurricaned out. But I knew that going in (and they even announced it before running the first episode), still… Damn it, I want to like this show, I’ve liked Shaun Cassidy’s other shows, and this one is equally well-done…

But I’ve seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I’ve seen it done three separate ways. I don’t need to see it again. I likely won’t be following this one.

It’s the cost-effective “the aliens are us” approach that has likely ensured these shows’ production and will equally likely kill them for me (Surface’s preview seemed to indicate it might be headed that way). Threshold is handling it a little more expansively than Invasion, but so far none of them is compelling me to tune in again and again every week for the foreseeable future.

Now, back to preparations. Stay safe, everyone.

September 22, 2005
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant, The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 4 Comments

DOOOOOOOOOOM!

You know, I would love to continue talking about some stuff I read over the summer, or share my thoughts on the current crop of science fiction shows on the fall TV lineup (or as I like to refer to them, the Children of Lost), but right now I’m making hurricane preparations.

This means things like trimming back the trees that might threaten the house and securing things in the yard that could turn into projectiles. Taking that carefully nurtured pile of gallon jugs and filling them with water. Finding out where my son has hidden all the flashlights. Those are the things you expect. What’s taking up a lot of my time is answering the phone and explaining to well-meaning friends that no, I am likely not running away.

In the aftermath of Katrina, a lot of people are a whole lot more scared of hurricanes than they were before, and that’s likely a good thing. However. Every local newscast I turn on might as well have a background graphic behind the immaculately coiffed newscaster reading WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE…stay tuned.

So I’m spending a lot of time explaining no, I am nowhere near an evacuation zone, no, the area I live in is not low-lying, no, I do not understand that merely being in the path of a hurricane is surely a death sentence. DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

And yes, I am sick and tired of being told how terrified I am supposed to be every waking second of my life. It is not my first hurricane. I have been through this before.

On the other hand, if you don’t hear from me again, please feel to smugly think, I told ya so.

September 21, 2005
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

Summer Vacation I

The Fantastic Four and I go back a long way. If you go back to the first comic book I ever owned… well, it would be Tales of the Texas Rangers, but somewhere in there, in and among a literal (and ironic) ton of Herbie would be issue #1 of Fantastic Four, likely because it had a monnnnnnnnster on the cover.

So I grew up with the FF, almost literally. They’ve been friends for a long, long time. I even bought the recent box set of the 90’s animated series, even though I hated it (and find I still do, grrrr), mainly in hopes that its success would lead to the release of the Iron Man and Silver Surfer series, for which I must sdmit there is the proverbial Fat Chance. And if you think you see where this is heading, no, I didn’t bother with the movie this last summer. The reason can be summed up in two words: Doctor. Doom.

Victor von Doom is my favorite comic character of all time, bar none. grandiloquent and egotistical, he was also a bad guy who was capable of remarkable nobility. Extremely misguided nobility, to be sure, but… I can’t quite see Lex Luthor executing his right hand man, saving the life of his worst enemy and declaring the day a draw simply to save the great art treasures of Europe.

This was the magic of Doom: He would never, ever be turned to the light side of the force, but he could do astounding things. He was the guy for which the phrase “If only he could use his talents for good, instead of evil” was invented.

So for me, Doom has been an integral part of the Fantastic Four, the fifth member, as it were. No Doom, no FF for me. I was seduced into buying periodical comics for a brief time around Fantastic Four #500 to check the revamped Doom, and I hated it. So it was the changes to my beloved dictator that killed the movie for me.

Now, I can take the name change from von Doom to van Damme. That’s okay, if a little grating. Placing him so he would be in the accident that gave the FF their powers was compressing things a little too far, and then changing him so he was an electricity-wielding bad guy just got to be too much. I wanted my scarred, bitter supergenius in gray armor and green tunic, dammit.

Which is why I am astounded that I love the Ultimate Fantastic Four so much.

I’ve largely steered clear of Marvel’s Ultimate line, still smarting from that revisionist-but-not-really “Heroes Reborn” nonsense. The line’s version of Avengers, The Ultimates was highly recommended to me, however, and I found that very satisfying. As a long time Iron Man fan, I especially loved this new version of the character, with a hundred man support staff needed to maintain the armor and a Tony Stark suffering from an inoperable brain tumor. The Ultimate line seems to be benefiting from a lack of 40 years worth of recursive historical baggage, while at the same time paying homage to that history.

Ultimate FF‘s changes seem logical: the Baxter Building now houses a think tank of young geniuses under the charge of Dr. Storm, the father of Sue and Johnny. Reed Richards is now of high school age, which I think pitches the age demographic a bit too young, but what do I know. The fact that they’ve given Reed that haircut with the close-cropped sides to echo his earlier white sidewalls is amusing to me, at least.

Richards was trying to perfect a mode of teleportation using an entropic, collapsing parallel universe called “The N-Zone” (instantly recognizable as the Negative Zone), and one of his experiments goes horribly wrong, causing the cosmic accident that changes the four into their more familiar personas. The accident is caused by one of Richards’ peers, an egotistical young genius named Victor van Damme, who recodes the computers running the experiment, because to his mind, there is no way that dolt Richards could have gotten the coding right. Van Damme is also changed by the accident, and hurtled back to Europe, to boot.

This, dammit, is DOOM!Now, this is everything about the movie I hated: van Damme changed by more than his hatred, and given super powers, too. The difference here is the execution, and I place that firmly at the feet of a writer who I come to worship more and more: Warren Ellis.

Yes, I admit, it was that name that convinced me to buy the trades of Ultimate FF, and what a sound investment that proved. Not only has he done Doom right, his revisionist take on the character even provides a logical substitute for Latveria and an army of robots. The fact that the followup story arc sends the four into the N-Zone in a retrofitted space shuttle to face off with a new and frightening Annihilus is another layer of a very rich cake.

The revamping of the villains is exceptional, and it’s refreshing that Ellis hasn’t changed much about the family dynamics of the FF, except to make Richards an uber-nerd; Ellis’ dialogue is, as ever, crisp and entertaining. He’s a crackerjack science-fiction writer, and the fact that he’s actually attempting to make sense of the FF’s powers in realistic terms is proving at least as fascinating as the incorporation of Marvel standards into this new universe.

Ellis is also handling Ultimate Galactus, which I’m watching with interest; the first trade provides a new, horrifying origin for the Vision, but I felt a little shortchanged, as by and large this part of the story arc repeats the setup for my favorite story in Ellis’ much-missed Global Frequency series. But if we start kvetching about writers stealing from themselves, we’re gonna be here all day, and I have laundry to do.

So. Ultimate Fantastic Four. Enthusiastic thumbs up. Fantastic Four movie? Waiting for the DVD. And then, I’ll probably rent it.

September 8, 2005
Categories: Hey Kids! Comics! . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

Holding Patterns

The Blocked Project seems to be in semi-permanent hiatus, awaiting the convocation of experts who will hold forth on what will surely be the Magic Formula for the script’s success. That hasn’t alleviated the overall depression and deep funk the failure has engendered. I’ve been burying myself in non-writing activities, trying to spark something somewhere; reading, performing, helping out at the church, playing City of Heroes.

After such a gap in enterprises like this blog, I generally log back on with a jocular “lot of water under the bridge, huh?”, but given the events of the last couple of weeks, that would be in spectacularly bad taste. I would feel guilty even referring to the influx of evacuees into Houston from New Orleans as being a “flood”, you know? Seeing the devastation of the Big Easy referred to in the Chronicle as being of “biblical proportions” also seems suspect to me, for reasons I cannot quite comprehend.

And comprehension is a problem, no matter how many distressing images one sees on TV or how many angry messages one reads on the Net. We are told on the one hand this is happening, then told no, this is not happening… but one thing that is becoming clear: generalities often become that because they contain truth, and the generality that such events bring out the best and the worst in people is so obvious that I am ashamed to bring it up.

Mere miles from me is the now-overcrowded Astrodome, where health scares have apparently prompted FEMA to step in, rumor has it. Go a few more miles and you’re at the relatively new Convention Center, slightly less crowded and apparently more accomodating (they had a little more time to prepare). As more than one newscaster has put it, Texans have opened their hearts (as one Chronicle blogger has groused, “Houstonians opened their hearts! Houstonians!” – and I’m concerned about being petty!) – and this good.

But I am in a funk, so the Cynic is ascendent in my worldview, and he is quite vocal in his musings about how long the charitable outpouring will last. History tells us that once the initial rush is over, charity will taper off, and though I read today that residents of Jefferson Parish are being allowed back in for “brief inspections” of what used to be their homes, this crisis is going to be months in the clearing. Months. At least. How long before the bonhommie sours into resentment? Though there’s another voice inside my head that hopes for the best, that voice is becoming increasingly desperate, and the Cynic’s voice is the one that seems to ring truest.

Of course, the cynic is being egged on by the fact that yours truly is once again looking for employment, and tens of thousands of jobless people just arrived in this town. There is another voice, different from the cynic and the optimist, which approaches that observation with a resounding, My God, but you’re an asshole for thinking like that.

Unfortunately, that voice also rings very true.

Next time, let’s talk about something more pleasant. I have been reading some good stuff. Let’s talk about that, hm?

Stay healthy,
Freeman

September 5, 2005
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 6 Comments

The Block

Okay, let’s try some analysis.

The line I’ve been staring at for so long is “I’m not going to school today.” From this line there are two paths obvious to me; one is preachy and boring, and will wind up in the same dustbin of ridicule as Reefer Madness. The other leads to the Columbine Massacre, which would be a sensational, disturbing conclusion no matter how it was handled. Impactful, as we used to say in the marketing world, and it would never, ever fly. More appropriately, it would never make it past the written page.

There is another path, to be sure, the path that eludes me, the path that the script will eventually take. The path that is interesting and entertaining, at least to the people holding that paycheck. The fact that these nebulous qualities are about as concrete as any indication to the direction or even content of the script by these Powers That Be doesn’t help. Add gun-shyness into the mix.

Here is likely the worst part of the equation: anything else I write at this point is at the cost of time spent on the script that is giving me problems now; any time devoted to anything else, the Calvinist angel on one shoulder proclaims, is delaying payday, and that’s bad, it’s so very bad.

Yes, to be frank, I don’t give a rat’s ass about this project outside the money. If I can get to the point where there is anything of me in the writing, that will change, but right now, that magical property of involvement is locked up in a very real and very impenetrable fortress. And writing anything else feels like stealing from myself.

That’s some catch, that Catch 22. And the proper response, as you know, is “It’s the best one we got.”

August 11, 2005
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 9 Comments

Alright, Alright.

You don’t really want to know where I’ve been for the past month, do you?

Well, maybe one or two of you do.

By and large, I have been here, sitting on my ass, staring at one line written on a blank page. For weeks. There is a term for this: Writer’s Block.

This has been tremendously humbling, and above all, depressing. After nearly a year of churning out stuff on demand for the Video Game Project, to suddenly be faced with my own inadequacy has been brutal, to say the least. Not even my usual solution, to watch episodes of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes, has worked to soothe the hurt.

It’s like this: I was asked to write a touring show by a local theater, a show about a pernicious social ill (somewhere in there, I seem to have moved from writing about knife-weilding zombies to being the Social Ills Writer. Don’t ask me how that happened). “So,” I asked. “What shape do you see this show taking?” “oh, we don’t know,” was the reply. “We’re sure you’ll come up with something. We just want it to be entertaining, and interesting.”

I wrestled with that a long time. Finally handed in the first ten pages of a script that made a social ill entertaining and interesting. The response, almost predictably, was, “This wasn’t what we had in mind at all.”

The things that leap to mind are many, including the obvious If you knew what you wanted, why didn’t you tell me? I then attempted to fulfill their needs, and have found myself staring at that one line for hours on end, as I realize over and over again that one of the major reasons I don’t own a gun is because I lack the strength to resist the urge to blow my own brains out.

There has been a slight alleviation in this gloom, as it has been decided that I will meet with a Panel of Concerned Experts, which means I will once more be writing by committee, but at least I will by God leave that first meeting with an actual idea of what is needed.

That job at Fry’s is looking better and better every day.

And that, gloomy and demeaning as it is, is where I’ve been. Except for one bright weekend, where I got to hang with my b-movie brethern. Ken has written about it far more eloquently than I could at this point, so I’ll just direct you there.

Oh, and I pulled my head out enough to review the movie Constantine. I think the movie deserves more than the few lines I scrawled about it, but hey: I got something written. Two somethings, now.

August 10, 2005
Categories: Senile Ramblings . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 14 Comments

Digital Sweatshops Again

Wage Slaves is an expose from 1UP.com that almost reads like an article from The Onion, but is all too true.

July 6, 2005
Categories: Old Men Playing Videogames . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

Too Damn Hot to Blog

I remember once being told that air conditioning can only hope to lower the temperature inside a structure by twenty degrees. In my very dim home office (my Bat Cave, if you will) I manage to cheat that down to thirty, by dint of insulation, ceiling fan, and simply not moving. The point is, with temps topping 100 degrees – and that’s without the heat index, which adds our sizable humidity into the formula – I’m still wondering why I live here.

Oh, that’s right. I can’t afford to move.

Ah, well. Life can’t be too easy, or we’d have nothing to talk about.

Visited my parents over the weekend; it had been a couple of months since they’d gotten to spoil their grandson or grandpug. This was the cue for my wife and mother to head out and shop the resale stores. After thirty-some-odd years of living in an almost exclusively male household, my mother is very happy to have another woman around.

For my part, I eventually sneaked out to the local Half-Price Books – I’ve managed to empty the local stores of any interesting material – and spent way too damn much money. Picked up some more Preston & Child blockbusters, mainly to convince myself that good gravy, I could write this. A few comic trade paperbacks. And – the topper, a thick art book entitled Men’s Adventure Magazines.

Written in three different languages – English, French and German – by contributors like Max Allen Collins, the book traces the history of men’s magazines of the 40s through the late 60s. A combination of pulp, graphic exposes (with often bloody photos unprintable in the major media) and skin, these magazines were a pervasive presence through my youth. Titles like Stag, Men, Men’s Adventure, Cavalier… I don’t think Manly Man was a title, but it should have been.

These magazines featured hyperbolic, often salacious painted covers, which were almost always so overwrought as to be humorous. These form the bulk of the book, and the major reason I bought it. I’m sure we all remember studying about the part of World War II when scantily clad French hookers machine-gunned an entire Nazi platoon. Surely, that is in there, somewhere.

It’s too much of a good thing, and I find myself drinking it in by portions. My favorite part of the book thus far – and it is arranged by themes – is “Animal Attacks”. I had no idea that the phrase “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” originated on the cover of a man’s magazine – but there it is, with the cover art to match. Add to the mix of b-movie horrors detailed within this chapter attacks by vicious swarms of flying squirrels and spider monkeys. I had no idea snapping turtles traveled in herds.

And that’s before we even get to the subjects of female pirates and SS sex slaves.

How did these become such a big part of my youth? Besides the obvious, the copies owned by my father and grandfather, never very well hidden at all?

Simply, these mags were on display in stores, right next to Ladies’ Home Journal and Life. Newstands didn’t make much of an effort to conceal them, and as they often wound up next to Famous Monsters or Vampirella, I always found these magazines in my searches. Did these magazines, heavy on the violence and bondage imagery, at all affect my development into what I am today?

Jeez, it’s too hot for weighty ruminations like that, too. I’ll just close by mentioning that the magazine slang for these items was the “sweats”, which seems wholly appropriate, both in subject matter and the time of year in which I’m reading about them. Time to get that scanner talking to the new computer, I’m thinkin’.

“Mad Monkeys Manned the Lifeboats!”

(That image courtesy Men’s Adventure Magazines)

July 6, 2005
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 7 Comments

Jeepers

In the midst of all the drama and schadenfreude, I forgot to mention that I managed to pen reviews for Alone in the Dark and H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.

Then again, given the quality of these flicks, that may not be such a surprising thing.

June 27, 2005
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 4 Comments

Unholy Glee

There has been much drama around here of late, though on such a rarefied, general level that it hardly seems worthy of inclusion here. Still, I haven’t done anything here in a longish time, so I should likely bore you with details, anyway.

I believe we’ve already gone over the storms of the last few weeks – after the last dramatic outage I spoke of (Iron Giant vs the Power Station, indeed, thanoseid) there was another outage, this time during the day. Lightning strike on a pole, apparently. Unconnected with that was a major freaking outage that put much of the area northeast of Houston in darkness for the entire night, and that was due to an entire dynamo going down.

That’s not what I’m here to preach about today, brothers, oh no. A little over a week ago, we returned from dinner to find a fire truck parked in front of our neighbor’s house. My wife, Lisa, being the demure, quiet type, immediately leaped out of the car and bellowed to a nearby fireman, “What happened?” Turns out there was quite a gas leak from the neighbor’s meter – the hiss was audible, nearly sixty feet away, and the fire fighter opined that since the repair crew had not yet shown up, it might be, um, wise for my family and myself to make ourselves scarce for the next hour or so. Just to be safe.

Safe is a good thing, so we gathered up our other neighbor, crazy Ronnie, and got back into the car. Where to go for an hour? Lisa went to her defaults, declaring that we should go to Garden Ridge Pottery, so she and Ronnie could ooh and aah over cheap, mass-produced folk art for an hour – especially since there was a Best Buy next door, so my son and I wouldn’t be too bored. I said that could work, since I haven’t been to Best Buy since a Fry’s Electronics – or as I refer to it, “The Man Mall” – opened much closer (and with a far better DVD selection) than Best Buy.

Well, Ronnie had never been to the Man Mall, and the kid was now chanting “Man Mall! Man Mall!” so we went there instead.

Now, much has been written, and in a far more scholarly manner, about the difference between men and women shopping. The hunter vs the gatherer mentality. Suffice to say that even confronted by the incredible bounty of the Man Mall, I was hard pressed to find enough to ooh and aah over for an hour. When I finally caught up with the women folk in the CD section after 55 minutes, and asked “Are you ready?” I was greeted with a disgruntled “We’ve been ready.”

I’m sorry. I will pay for this for the next… oh, however many years I have left… but I immediately flashed on every time I’ve sat, useless and morose, on one of those uncomfortable laundromat chairs that stores like T.J. Maxx and Marshall’s have at the front, for useless and morose husbands. The trip to Walmart for wood screws and twine that turned into a two hour search for bathing suits. The many times my wife has brandished the tenth grotesque wood and paint creation at me, brightly asking, “Isn’t this cute?”

And I replied, in my best Abe Simpson, “Welcome to my world.”

As I said, I’ll pay for that for years.

It was worth it.

June 27, 2005
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

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