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Diary #683

Posted in Biography, Diary, Favorites, tagged , on July 31, 2023| 1 Comment »

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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The Eye of Childhood

Posted in Biography, Favorites, tagged , , , on June 19, 2023| Leave a Comment »

One of the things Grace and I have always enjoyed is watching TV shows, usually science fiction or fantasy, together.  And over the past three years we’ve established a pattern: about ten PM we each prepare a snack – I a cup of tea and a little dessert, and she a bowl of soup – and take some edibles to relax, and then we watch a couple of episodes of whatever show we’re doing at the moment.  Over the past few years we’ve watched or re-watched Doctor Who, Farscape, Deep Space Nine, Space: 1999, Blake’s 7, Babylon 5, Mission: Impossible, The Wild, Wild West, Enterprise, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Star Trek, and currently The Six Million Dollar Man, plus a number of shorter series we knocked out in a week or less.  Some of these I first saw as an adult, but others (like our current show) I haven’t seen since they first aired when I was much younger, and those are the ones I’m finding most interesting.  It’s hardly incisive criticism or inspired analysis to point out that children see and enjoy different things in a movie or show than adults do, or that young adults and older adults may enjoy different things about the same show.  But what’s fascinating is that ofttimes it’s almost like watching a different show.  Even as a young lass I enjoyed watching good characters, though obviously I lacked an adult’s ability to appreciate the nuances of character development and interaction, and of course a lot of the subtler jokes and dialogue flew right over my head.  But for the most part, it was the ideas in these shows which ignited my imagination.  Even when I watch shows I haven’t seen in the neighborhood of half a century, I still clearly recall some plot points, characters, terminology, and even exact lines or phrases.  Yet there are other bits I don’t remember at all despite their really grabbing my attention in our current viewing.  Sometimes that means rolling my eyes at things I thought were really cool when I was ten, but sometimes it means gaining a new, adult appreciation of a childhood favorite.

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Throwback Thursdays

Posted in Favorites, Miscellaneous, tagged , on June 15, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Since we’re coming closer to wrapping up my annex project, it seems likely that before too long before I won’t have enough going on to ensure a weekly column on the topic; I’ll need to start throwing other things into the Friday space a couple of times a week, and eventually I’ll be completely finished and any updates will probably just appear in the diary columns.  That leaves room for a new weekly feature, because my days of being able to come up with a whole new essay several times a week are gone, and I think it unlikely they will ever return because one can only burn a candle at both ends for so long before there’s nothing left.  That doesn’t mean I plan to start leaving unsightly gaps in my perfect record, however.  As of July 10th, I will have been making a new post every single day for 13 years; that’s 4748 posts altogether, most of which the majority of y’all have never read.  Now, I’ve often said that the one moral concept from my Catholic upbringing which has remained steadfastly lodged in my head is that waste is a sin, and there’s a lot of good material there going unread; I sometimes even impress myself when I encounter some old witticism from Days of Yore.  So starting four weeks from today, on July 13th, the first Thursday of my 14th year of blogging, I’m going to start a new feature in which I peruse old columns from past years and share interesting quotes, links, pictures, etc.  As of right now I’m unsure of which years I’ll be looking at, how much I’ll quote from each, what the layout will look like, etc, but experience tells me that I’ll probably tweak it here and there for a few years until I get it the way I want it.  I already do something similar with my weekly links column and the monthly archive columns, but those are pretty dense for the sake of completeness; this will not attempt to be complete, but will instead be a kind of “best of” to introduce new readers to notable posts and remind old readers of ones they liked.  And with any luck it will free up enough time for me to start putting together a few books I promised myself I’d try to finish this year.

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The Buffyverse, Part Three

Posted in Favorites, Miscellaneous, tagged , , on June 8, 2023| Leave a Comment »

The three things I find most appealing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel all fit into characteristics of the way my brain works.  I’ve mentioned before that for me, human interaction is the most satisfying part of my journey through life, so it should be no surprise that I quickly lose interest in shows without the kind of interesting, well-developed fictional characters the Buffyverse has in abundance.  Last week, I thoroughly explained why strong, consistent world-building is important to me, and of course Buffy has that as well.  The third thing I value in shows is cleverness and ability to surprise, and guess what?  Buffy has that, too.

See, it’s like this: my brain moves extremely fast, so if the plot of a show is at all predictable, I will see any twists coming long, long before the big reveal.  And because I have an excellent memory, I immediately recognize derivative story elements and tired tropes practically as soon as they appear.  Now, it’s OK if I figure out the twists halfway through, or if it only happens on occasion.  But if I can predict the ending nearly every time, five or ten minutes after the opening credits, I’m probably going to get bored with it.  But with Buffy, it was exactly the opposite; the show kept me guessing the majority of the time, despite the fact that it usually “played fair” rather than pulling some sort of unprecedented necrobabble out of a hat to hand-wave the writers out of some dungeon they’ve written themselves into, as so many dark fantasy shows are wont to do.  But that’s not the half of it; the Buffy writers were not only willing to turn tropes inside-out and upside-down, but also to shamelessly steal them from other genres or defenestrate conventions.  Vampires could be boring, airheaded, or lovesick; demons could be easygoing nerds or flamboyant lounge singers; an evil wizard could be a corny square; villains could be likable and goodies despicable.  One episode was a bona fide musical (the result of a powerful demon’s influence), but rather than just being a throwaway bit of fun it actually contained serious character development and important foreshadowing.  And in more than one season, the finale resulted in more destruction than is even the norm in the superhero genre.

And then there’s the wit.  The dialogue in most episodes doesn’t merely sparkle, it snaps, crackles, and pops.  There is often humor in even the darkest, most serious episodes, and ofttimes that humor is of Saharan dryness and Hitchcockian blackness; at other times it was practically farce, and yet it all fit together smoothly and comfortably to create a consistent and recognizable style which, though less striking in Angel, suffuses both shows.  I found myself laughing out loud on a regular basis, and there aren’t even many comedy series that can dependably evoke that from me.

All in all, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a rare gem, and Angel a worthy spinoff which, while it doesn’t match its parent series, certainly doesn’t disgrace it.  I highly recommend these shows not just to those who think a horror comedy superhero soap opera sounds right up their alley, but also for anyone who enjoys tight, clever writing, compelling characters, and series which aren’t so impressed with themselves that they forget the point of television shows is, first and foremost, to entertain.

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So Long Ago, So Clear

Posted in Biography, Favorites, Music, Obituary, tagged , , on May 23, 2022| Leave a Comment »

My favorite musician of all time, Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou (best known by his stage name, Vangelis), died last Tuesday in Paris at the age of 79.  And because he was the creator of a large fraction of the soundtrack of my life, I find myself very affected by his passing, more so than by any of the other relatively-recent deaths of musicians whose work I admired.  I wrote a Twitter thread featuring many videos, with a few facts and a bit of criticism, but here I’d rather share more personal thoughts about my relationship with his music.

Like many Americans, I was first introduced to his work by Carl Sagan, who used the third movement of Vangelis’ Heaven and Hell (1975) as the theme to his amazing and groundbreaking TV series, Cosmos.  And while I found the music lovely and moving, it was the music used in this sequence, demonstrating the evolutionary history of humans, that really took hold of my brain:

In those pre-internet days, there wasn’t any simple way to find the name of a piece of music used in a show if it wasn’t listed in the credits, and it wasn’t.  Fortunately, someone thought of writing in to TV Focus, the weekly TV magazine of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, to ask about the main theme, and somebody over there was able to name Vangelis as its composer.  Armed with that knowldge, I begged my cousin Jeff to take me to New Orleans’ best music store, Leisure Landing, where I found the Cosmos soundtrack and a number of other Vangelis albums.  Fortunately, part of the piece I was looking for was on the soundtrack album, along with its name, “Alpha”, and the name of the album on which it appeared, Albedo 0.39.  And it wasn’t long before I made another trip to Leisure Landing to buy it.  China soon followed, then Heaven and Hell, then Spiral; I played them all frequently, and copied them to cassette tapes for playing in the car (as we used to do in those long-ago and far-off days, dear reader).  They were among my favorite albums for playing while dallying with lovers, and to this day I cannot hear the titular song, which appears on Heaven and Hell, without thinking of lying in the afterglow with my first adult inamorata on lazy Friday afternoons in the early ’80s in my apartment near UNO.

Of course, I was much too young then to really feel in my gut what it meant to remember such things across a gulf of decades; even Vangelis himself was only 32 when it was recorded, and singer Jon Anderson two years younger still.  But in the many intervening years my brain has caught up with my very old soul, and the departure of my lifelong musical friend has left me feeling very old indeed.

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Links #588

Posted in Current Events, Favorites, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , on October 10, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I’ll fuck you up, son.  –  John Jackson.

On Friday Liz Brown tweeted that someone had sent her the lyrics to this song with “Elvis” replaced with “sex trafficking”, but she appeared to be unfamiliar with the original song so naturally I shared the video, and it got so many likes and retweets I figured I should share it here as well.  The links above it were provided by Boatfloating, Dan Savage, Scott Hechinger, Radley Balko, Cop Crisis, and Dave Krueger, in that order.

From the Archives

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The October Country

Posted in Biography, Favorites, tagged , , on October 4, 2021| 3 Comments »

October Country, that country where it is always turning late in the year.  That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…  –  Ray Bradbury

My 2011 essay “Moondance” was mostly an examination of the psychological and philosophical consequences of modern people’s disconnection with nature, but it also included the following:

October usually enjoys a particular sort of cool weather, a crisp breeziness quite unlike that one might experience on an early spring day or a comparatively warm winter one; this is October Weather, my name for that special atmospheric condition I associate with turning leaves and the imminent arrival of my birthday. In New Orleans I was often cheated of it…but when [it] did arrive I was filled with a sort of wild, witchy joy; I wanted to stay out late, to suck the fragrant air into my lungs and fly through the night under the harvest moon with my hair streaming behind me. As a young teen I often sneaked out in the middle of the night to enjoy such weather, and after I arrived at UNO I would wander about the campus on such evenings or ride my bicycle to midnight movies…And though as I age my reaction to October Weather isn’t nearly as strong as it was in my teens and twenties, on clear, cool October nights I still feel the urge to go out and dance in the dry leaves under the moon.

I’m now a decade further from those days than I was when I penned those lines, and my days of dancing under the moon are long gone; each October takes me still further, and now my reaction to October weather is less euphoria and more blessed relief from the discomfort and anxiety produced by the excessive light and heat of summer.  October is more than just my native month; it is my native country, and the time in which I have always been most at peace and (paradoxically for a time associated with haunts, dying vegetation and the dying year) felt most alive.  I’ve always had a taste for the weird and macabre, for spooky tales and shadow-shows, for rain and dry leaves and pumpkins, for black cats and the imagery of wild woods, sunless seas, and catacombs; I was “Goth” long before either the term or the subculture existed.  So it should be no surprise to anyone that I gravitated first toward a profession associated with musty books, and later toward one associated with the night, nor that as I aged I moved my habitation westward (the direction historically associated with death) to finally settle in the region of this continent with the least sunlight and the most rain.  These days, I mostly celebrate this Month of Months with the watching of horror movies, culminating in my birthday; if you’d like to help me celebrate by sending a token of your esteem, I’d very much welcome that.  And as you’ve probably already guessed, many of the selections are very much in keeping with the season.

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Representation

Posted in Biography, Favorites, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , on July 26, 2021| 5 Comments »

A lot gets said these days about “representation” in popular media, by which people mean that it’s a good thing for children or adolescents to see people like themselves among their heroes in TV or movies.  Usually, this is used to mean obvious characteristics like gender, skin color, or disability, and sometimes less-obvious traits like queerness.  But for me, none of those traits meant anything if the characters displaying them were law-obeying, apartment-dwelling, boring-job-having authoritarian squares of the type television has always been infested with, and whose lives mine was never, ever going to resemble even if the character could’ve been my doppelganger in every superficial “representative” way.  By 1980 I couldn’t find a single network TV program which interested me in any way, and even before that the characters who interested me most were always outsiders, weirdos, and outlaws such as vigilantes, monster-hunters, and fugitives, or else characters who had figured out how to fit in while still doing things in their own idiosyncratic fashion.  Anyone more perceptive than I was at the time could probably have figured out that I was going to end up living outside of the law and at odds with the Establishment, so it’s no surprise that one of my favorite shows since my mid-teens has followed the adventures of an eccentric, anti-authoritarian outlaw who stole a spacetime ship from his people and proceeded to wander about the universe, following his conscience rather than some set of arbitrary rules, and teaming up with a long succession of other misfits to ruin the schemes of tyrants, bureaucrats, psychopaths and other violent busybodies while freely associating with weirdos and freethinkers who rarely get along with their local “authorities”.  Yes, representation is important, and never more so than when the type being represented is those who refuse to allow themselves to be sorted into herds and driven to build up power for those who would rule others.

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In the Abstract

Posted in Favorites, Philosophy, tagged , , , on April 23, 2021| 1 Comment »

The other day I saw a tweet in which someone expressed incredulity that others might not like something he likes.  Now, beyond this statement I’m not going to comment on the obvious silliness of the idea that everyone should like the same things, because I think normal people who aren’t cases of arrested development learn that sometime around the age of four or five.  Nor am I going to mention what specific thing he was tweeting about, because it really isn’t important to the point I want to make.  And that point is, there are lots of reasons a person might desire something in the abstract, yet never partake of it in reality.  No substance, object, activity, or other thing a person might like exists as a Platonic ideal; regardless of what pleasure or benefit someone might derive from a thing, there are always costs, drawbacks, side effects, complications or other negatives which tend to counteract the benefits.  And so every responsible adult decision to indulge in a pleasure requires consideration of the give and take:  Can I afford this?  Can I handle the negative health effects?  Do I have time today?  Will it somehow harm those I care about?  Obviously, immature, irresponsible, or foolish people often skip this consideration, with predictable consequences; so do those suffering addiction or mental health issues around the desired thing.  And puritans (or, again, people suffering from certain psychological or emotional disorders) often do exactly the opposite by denying themselves a pleasure whose negative effects are trifling, imaginary, or both.  But well-balanced individuals may very well refuse themselves things they would very much like to enjoy because in their judgment, the negative factors outweigh the positive.  I can’t help looking at the wide variety of delicious candies on display every time I go shopping, but I never buy them because I want to maintain my figure; I don’t drink nearly as much liquor as I’d like for exactly the same reason.  At this exact moment I’d prefer to be stoned, but I’m delaying that gratification so as to finish this essay; there are other drugs I haven’t partaken of for a while because I prefer to enjoy them with companions who have been isolating for the past year due to their own health concerns.  Pretty girls are nice to look at, but experience has taught me that doing more than looking is always more trouble than it’s worth, and as I wrote in “Out of the Dark“,

…there are some things I’ve found very hot my entire life yet have never acted on, and probably never will.  And there are other things I’ve tried, enjoyed and still find hot as hell, but will probably never act on again because they either come with too much baggage or it’s much too difficult to find the right person or persons to do them with.

And this, I think, is the main reason the tweet I spoke of at the beginning annoyed me so much:  if someone doesn’t share your likes it may simply be a matter of different strokes, or it may be that they do share them, but are less fortunate than you in being able to afford their economic, social, practical, or emotional costs.

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Who Knows?

Posted in Biography, Favorites, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , on March 19, 2021| 4 Comments »

The venerable British science-fantasy series Doctor Who has been one of my favorites since it first appeared on our local PBS station (WYES in New Orleans) in the summer of 1981; like many Americans of my generation, the first episodes I saw were those starring Tom Baker as The Doctor, which originally ran from 1974-81.  But as most of you probably know now, he was only one of many actors to play the part, because when a Time Lord (that’s the alien race to which the Doctor belongs) dies, he regenerates into a new form, with a new face and a new personality.  When WYES realized how much pledge money the series brought in, the station naturally did its best to acquire as many seasons as possible; at one point they were playing the Fourth Doctor episodes (starring Baker) on Saturday night, the Third Doctor episodes (1970-74, starring Jon Pertwee) on Friday night, and the then-new Fifth Doctor episodes (1982-84, starring Peter Davison) on Sunday morning.  Eventually they even got ahold of as many of the 1960s episodes featuring the first two doctors as were then available; it was then I discovered that many of these early shows were missing, casualties of lean times at the BBC which caused many of them to be taped over because videotape was expensive and newer shows had to be recorded on them.  In the decades since, some of the missing episodes have been discovered in various places; others have been reconstructed with animation or stills from the original soundtracks (which all managed to survive).  What that means is, with some effort and ingenuity it’s now possible to watch the entire show from 1963 to the present, and last month Grace and I decided to do just that.  Lorelei Rivers is a Who superfan, and graciously allowed me to borrow her complete classic collection; we’ve already watched the first two seasons and soon we’ll move on to the Second Doctor, the one I’ve seen the least of.  Back in the ’80s, I loved watching the series with people who were dear to me, and prior to the pandemic Lorelei and I regularly enjoyed our Who nights; it’s great fun to see them again now with Grace.  And I’ve even started a running Twitter thread on my impressions of the old shows, which despite being less sophisticated than their modern counterparts are still a helluva lot of fun.

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