In the early ’80s…I was much too young…to really feel in my gut what it meant to remember [being in love] across a gulf of decades. –
“So Long Ago, So Clear”
Trying to use [social media] without muting is like trying to have a garden without weeding. – “Maytweets”
Journalism that doesn’t at least occasionally offend the government isn’t real journalism. – “Yes, They’re Still Tweets”
My emotions are often insidious, slippery things, which is why I often used to refer to the “snakes in my head”.
– “Thirty Years Gone“
A few years ago, in “The Sparkle of a Star“, I wrote: “When I last watched [Bewitched], in my late teens or very early twenties, I naturally identified most with Samantha. But on this rewatch, I found myself identifying with her mother, Endora…” But Bewitched isn’t the only show about witches I’ve loved, and Endora not the only no-longer-young woman character I find myself increasingly identifying with as I myself progress into cronehood. Obviously, this isn’t surprising, but I do find it amusing.
I ran into another example of it recently when I decided to revisit Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Witch series. My own period of reading YA fiction was short, and largely confined to when I was 8 to 9; by 10 I was mostly reading light adult fantasy and sci-fi, mixed with some of the juveniles written by more typically adult authors like Robert Heinlein (Red Planet, Podkayne of Mars, etc) or those borrowed from the library by my younger siblings whose covers caught my eye (which is how I discovered one of my favorite books, Magic in the Alley by Mary Calhoun. And by 12 there weren’t many even in that category. So though I was of the right age to read Witch’s Sister when it was published in 1975, it never popped up in the Scholastic Books flyer we got at school, nor did I spot it in the library back then. In fact, I only discovered it in a rather roundabout manner, through my habit of scanning the new TV Guide magazine each week in search of anything I might enjoy (since in the days before home video, that was the only way to discover treasures). One week, in the spring of 1980 IIRC, I noticed a listing in the Saturday morning show Big Blue Marble (which I didn’t watch even before I gave up on Saturday morning fare) for a 6-part TV movie called Witch’s Sister. Naturally the title caught my attention, so I watched it and was immediately hooked; besides being an interesting story, I identified with both 10-year-old Lynn Morley (because I had a hyperactive imagination at her age also) and her 16-year-old sister Judith (because I was Goth before there was such a thing, and like her enjoyed spooking my younger siblings).
It only aired once or twice (I only saw it once) and I despaired of ever seeing it again, but during a short period when I had free premium cable in 1988 it turned up on Showtime as a unified TV movie. I of course taped it, and on a rewatch during my time as a librarian I noticed in the credits that it was based on a book; we had it in the library so I read and enjoyed it and its two sequels, which had been published in 1977 and 1978. Sometime later I transferred the movie to DVD and discovered several more sequels (published in the early ’90s) and bought them on Amazon, but never got around to reading them until recently. The reason was simple: after starting this blog in 2010 I had very little time for pleasure reading, and that only changed a year ago with Grace’s death. So for the past year, I’ve been scanning my shelves for books I own but had not yet read, and a couple of weeks ago realized I had never read those later books in the series. Since it had been over 30 years since I read the first three I started with them, and discovered to my amusement that while I still remembered feeling like Lynn as a tween and Judith as a teen, I now found myself more than a little sympathetic with Mrs. Tuggle, the elderly Englishwoman who was Lynn’s nemesis in the books! Though in the later books she was definitely a wicked witch, in the first (and IMHO the best) of the series that was portrayed with far less certainty (and in the movie which inspired my love for the stories, she was almost certainly not a real witch). So as I read, I started thinking about how I’d feel if a couple of nosy 10-year-old girls started making strange accusations, sneaking into my house to steal my things, and terrorizing my cat. And now I’m a bit wary of watching Bell, Book and Candle again.
Paradoxically, the anti-sex mob are those most obsessed by sex; they see it even where normal people do not. – “Obsession and Bedevilment”
Modern people are deeply in denial about how common sex work has been throughout human history. – “The Invention of Incels”
Though cops are still conducting their entrapment schemes and pretending they’re something more than an excuse for moral degenerates to rape and rob women and ruin men’s lives, the public has largely lost interest in the “sex trafficking” hysteria which drove them, and they’re limping along on a mixture of inertia, sadism, and the federal government’s profligate spending until such time as the sociopaths in office can think of a way to interject more mindless carceral violence into their war on the internet. – “Newsworthy”
It’s one of the ironclad rules of media journalism that all “100 best” lists are bad. – “By Non-fans, For Non-fans“
Somehow the body became secreted. – boss hog Kevin Catalina
I’ve been re-watching The Avengers lately, and while perusing a venerable fan site for the show I came across a reference to this video, which I’d never seen before. The show went to color in its fifth season, and this “mini-episode” was made as a color test; it was broadcast in abridged form on US TV as an ad for the new season, and provides a nice little taste of the show’s style. The links above it were provided by Missy Mariposa, Mike Masnick, Scott Hechinger, Jesse Walker, T. Greg Doucette, and IncarcerNation (x2), in that order.
I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one. Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful. But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer. So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets. Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements. Thanks so much!
My tastes in TV shows often run to the eccentric, so I’m never especially surprised when I can’t find shows I enjoyed on DVD. Sometimes the shows were never popular enough, and often they were cancelled after one season; a lot of the time I seem to be the only person who even remembers them. One such program was The Steven Banks Show, produced for New Orleans’ public TV station, WYES, in 1994 by ex-NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff after he semi-retired to the Crescent City; I actually caught it on the Baton Rouge PBS affiliate, WLPB, because it aired at 10:00 PM on Saturday night, just before Doctor Who. At the end of every episode was an address to order a copy of the soundtrack album, and given that I thought Banks’ brilliant comedic songs were the best part of the show, I of course ordered it (and still play it every so often). That single viewing over 30 years ago, just before the beginning of my “year of disaster”, was the only time I ever saw the show; even after the debut of YouTube I could never find any trace of it other than the Showtime special which was essentially its pilot, and an upload of the soundtrack album. Then last month, I discovered someone had uploaded all 13 episodes; I immediately contacted the same generous gent who sent me the two missing seasons of The Muppet Show last year, and he found even better copies somewhere online. So now I’m watching them again; I only wish I could’ve shared them with Grace, because I think she’d have enjoyed all the musical humor very much. Anyhow, here’s the series on YouTube; I hope y’all enjoy it as much as I do.
It’s one of the ironclad rules of media journalism that all “100 best” lists are bad. Certainly, some are worse than others; some are merely skewed, while others cause the knowledgeable reader to wish they could reach through the screen or page to repeatedly slap the compilers while shouting “WHAT! THE! HELL! WERE! YOU! THINKING?!?!!” Nearly all of them are biased toward the last 40 years prior to their compilation (for obvious reasons) and most of them seem to be compiled by committees which include at least one, and sometimes as many as a majority, of individuals who absolutely should not have been included due to such factors as A) conformism; B) contrarianism; C) inexperience; D) ignorance; E) lack of taste; F) stupidity; G) crippling bias; or H) any 2-6 of the preceding. Today’s example of the genre is Variety‘s new list of the “100 Best Horror Movies of All Time“, whose chief flaw is summed up by the title of this column: it seems to have been composed by a group composed of 1 serious horror fan, 1 casual fan, 2 fans of adjacent genres, 3 non-fans, and 1 person who does not actually like horror movies, for the consumption of Variety readers who are not actually horror fans per se. Now, before any of y’all accuse me of bias, let me get this out of the way: de gustibus non est disputandum. There can be considerable disagreement between aficionados of any genre about which examples are best, much less the specific order they should be arranged in. I’ve already written about my own favorites, and about my philosophy of the genre, the most important principle of which is that slashers are not horror:
Slashers are actually more closely related to porn than horror; both genres grew out of the exploitation films of the 1950s, which featured both gratuitous sex and gratuitous violence. Those in turn were essentially cinematic Grand Guignol, whereas true horror began as filmed “ghost stories”; the former are theatrical, while the latter are literary. Expressed another way, slasher films are designed to shock the body via intense imagery, whereas horror intends to shock the mind via terrifying ideas.
So right off the bat, the Variety list fails by putting a slasher in the top slot; the top ten are further puffed out with a satirical black comedy, a couple of suspense thrillers, and a literary exploitation flick. And the rest of the 100 are similarly heterogeneous; there are lots of horror and slasher movies in the list, but also lots of suspense, psychological drama, tense sci-fi, monster movies, dark satire, black comedy, and other types of flicks which may indeed be entertaining and exciting and even thrilling, but are not horror. 34% are from the past 40 years (not bad as “top 100” lists go), but 14% are from the 21st century (not exactly a notable period in genre history). So, go take a look at it if you feel so inclined; you may find a few things there you’ll want to see, even if they aren’t “the 100 best horror movies” as advertised. And try not to get too annoyed if they ranked your favorites much too low.
I’ve loved The Muppet Show since it first premiered in 1976, so when it became available on DVD in the Oughts, I bought each season as it came out. Then when season 4 was announced I put it on my Amazon wishlist and waited. And waited. And waited. And surprise surprise, it never came out, probably because Disney now owns the show, and they have a long history of simply stopping series in the middle if they don’t feel like they made enough money on the previous seasons. It’s absolutely true that shows which predate the home video revolution of the mid-’80s are often delayed due to having to re-negotiate the music rights, but that delay is rarely more than a few years. And once “streaming” became a thing, I knew I could kiss any chance of an official release of the 4th and 5th seasons goodbye. I’ve periodically tried to find bootleg sets online because I’ve had excellent luck with bootlegs of other hard-to-find shows, but nope; it seemed I was destined to never see them again. Then one of my generous gentlemen (who happens to be an IT guy) sent me the video in Sunday’s Links column, and in the process of thanking him I told him of my love for the show, and asked that if he ever saw the bootlegs available he would grab them for me. He responded by asking me to take a picture of the back of my DVD player, and a couple of weeks later what should arrive in my mailbox but the last two seasons on DVD! He had located them online, stored them in MP4 format, and saved them to DVDs for me! The picture was to be sure my machine could play the MP4s, and it can! So now I’m rather childishly excited about watching them, and as soon as Grace and I finish the dinnertime series we’re currently watching we’re going to start the Muppets from season 1. And I wanted to let my gent know how very happy I am about that.
When I tell people, “never call the cops for any reason whatsoever”, many of them fail to realize that calling 911 = calling the cops. You cannot call 911 and tell them you want an EMT or ambulance or whatever and not cops; regardless of what you say, they will send cops first. Some places only send cops, and any actual assistance will only be sent if the cops ask for it. These systems treat cops like Spam in the famous Monty Python sketch: a form of pork that you get with every order whether you like it or not. Naturally, the 911 programs most people supported (because they were effectively sold to voters) did not use the slogan, “Cops instead of actual help, regardless of your problem!” But that’s what they actually are, and in most places the only alternative to risking deranged thugs bursting into your home and assaulting, possibly even murdering, you and your loved ones is to handle the situation yourself, because if you try to call the hospital they’ll either redirect you to 911 or call themselves, thus launching the violent thugs. I have no solution for this; it’s one of numerous bad situations our society has marched lemming-like into by indulging its own childish trust in sociopaths who promise to take care of everything for you so you don’t have to worry about it, all for the low, low price of power over you.
As regular readers know, we don’t watch regular TV or “streaming”; when we want a TV series we buy it on DVD and then watch it at our leisure. Typically, we watch an hour at dinner and then a couple before bedtime while the edibles kick in, and when we’re done with one series we move on to another. And though we didn’t really plan it that way, lately we’ve been watching a lot of shows from the Kennedy era and immediately after. The pattern was ushered in by Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1965), but since then we’ve watched Thriller (1960-1962), The Flintstones (1960-1966), and The Outer Limits (1963-1965). I’m not old enough to remember any of these series from their initial runs, but I discovered and enjoyed all of them in syndication, then obtained the discs later; I think most of my favorite shows were discovered that way, years after their first broadcast, and a lot of them are from the ’60s and early ’70s. But watching a number of shows from the early ’60s relatively close together has had a kind of synergistic effect, and I’ve found myself going through a phase of nostalgia for the period – its music, its movies, its cars, its fads, and other assorted bits and pieces of that odd little interlude, no longer the ’50s but not yet what we think of as the ’60s. It won’t last long; in just a few days we’ll be moving on to more modern shows waiting in the wings. But in the meantime, I’m rather enjoying feeling nostalgic for a time just before I was born, which I know only through the medium of recorded entertainment.
This is one of the images of my childhood. The can looks as it has for well over half a century; the only thing different is the red circle with “NO PRESERVATIVES” written inside (and probably the metric equivalent of the volume). The product has been made in Abbeville, Louisiana since 1910, and growing up it was a staple in my house; we used to make peanut butter and syrup sandwiches as some people make peanut butter & honey, and it was also used on pancakes & lost bread (AKA French toast). When I was very young, my dad would cut off the ends of his bread to make po-boys to bring to work for lunch, then he would make a hole in the end and pour some Steen’s into it as a breakfast treat for me. He also taught me that a sandwich using ordinary sliced bread with Steen’s and cheddar cheese was a delicious snack; don’t knock it ’til you try it, because I’ve had more than one friend go “eeeeeeeew!” until they take a bite and then become converts (don’t use so much syrup it makes the bread soggy; a light coating will do). But when I started stripping I made a number of sacrifices to keep my weight down and my tummy flat, and cheese & syrup sandwiches were one of them; then when I moved to Oklahoma it wasn’t even available. But a couple of years ago it somehow came up in conversation with Chekhov, and he found a can in some grocery store around here; it has been in my cupboard for a while, repeatedly calling to me until I finally succumbed to its siren song and made myself a cheese & syrup sandwich for my evening tea one night last week. The flavor was just as I remember, and I may even enjoy it on my waffles next time I make them (which should be Friday). And you can bet that even if I have to have it shipped from Louisiana, it’s going to return to its long-ago status as a staple in my larder.
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In the early ’80s…I was much too young…to really feel in my gut what it meant to remember [being in love] across a gulf of decades. –
