Do I offend?

Was the DC Comics thing a bridge too far?

Probably haven’t complained about A.I. enough.

WELL, ROLL UP THEM SLEEVES, PARDNER, CUZ…

… well, I don’t actually have much new to say about it.

Except that it delights me to watch A.I. haters growl and snarl, and A.I. apologists do their darnedest to convince people it’s the best hotness.

The former, because their venom tends to be really funny (usually on purpose), the latter, because they unfailingly invoke horseless carriages and luddites to scare people into gulping down the thick A.I. hog.1

Chuck Wendig had a funny takedown of an A.I. defender getting unleashed in the HWA2 newsletter. For one.

But the big deal around these parts is the whole A.I. “detection” thing, and suddenly, people far and wide are being accused of using A.I. for their writing. Authors are losing six- and seven-figure book deals because of it.

Several of them.

And of course, because it’s A.I. doing the detecting, there’s no way to know for sure if it’s correct.3

The antis are highly amused to provoke the A.I., deliberately writing stuff that gets “100% human” tags, then changing a single word in their compositions to try and get the “100% A.I.” tag to prove the whole thing is a farce.

The latest in a long line of stuff A.I. is useless at, spotting its own fingerprints.

Goody.

I’ve written ad nauseam that I think generative A.I. will one day create a masterpiece, whether on purpose, or accident, with help (more likely) or without. It feels inevitable to me.

J. Michael Straczynski, a writer of some reputation, argues that A.I. will never do any such thing, never rise above the mediocre.

He might be right.

For one thing, he points out, we haven’t seen it yet, the “masterpiece” produced by A.I., and we should have by now, given the mass numbers things are being generated in. Or at least a hint of it.

The apologists would probably say that’s because no human-aided A.I. thing has yet been allowed to become a masterpiece, that these hybrid products are being socially cut off at the knees before anyone can judge for themselves.

Maybe.

Maybe one day, these abortions will be dragged out of the rotpiles, and put on pedestals by more open-minded future folk.

One person’s trash is another’s treasure, the Mona Lisa was forgotten until it got stolen, Salieri was more popular than Mozart, etc. etc.

Except even proponents seem cautious to declare any of these A.I. works a “masterpiece.” Cuz they know they could get laughed outta the building if they back a loser.

Darren Aronofsky’s A.I. American Revolution show came and went, didn’t make a dent. Most people don’t know it exists. The highest-clicked episode has 250K views as of this writing.

There’s videos of peoples getting whacked in the nuts that get four times that.

Despite Elon claiming there will be an A.I.-generated Odyssey by the end of the year to rival Nolan’s, even the deepest A.I. lover doesn’t buy that.

(I notice he hasn’t made the same claim about Spider-Man, which would probably be way easier to accomplish. Almost like there was a racial motivation for his nonsense.

I said it.)

Nevertheless, unless A.I. gets better at recognizing its own work, it feels to me like somebody’s gonna get away with it someday, and make an amazing work, that’ll be loved and acclaimed, and won’t get revealed until much later.4

(I mean, chances are good it might’ve already happened, and we’re just waiting for the big reveal.)

And hey, by that point, having to work hard enough to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes for an extended period, maybe that’ll constitute enough blood, sweat and tears for everyone to say, “FINE. It’s great. Yay. Good for you.”

But most people don’t use A.I. to create art, they do it to try and make a buck. And if they can’t get it pretty quick, they move to the next quick-buck thing, angry that the A.I. thing didn’t make them rich and instantly acclaimed as artists.

That part I agree with Straczynski on. Lots of people seem to think they should get to be called “artists,” even with A.I. doing almost all the work, and are furious that they aren’t.

I don’t know. I’m not full-on anti-A.I. I’ve played with generative A.I. a few times, so I can’t claim virgin status.

(In fairness, I didn’t know I was going to hell for doing so before I did it.)

I don’t write with it, because I don’t feel like it. I don’t claim superiority on this. I just want my shit to be my shit. In that arena, A.I. can suck it. I can make up my own wiener metaphors.

I also forget most of the time to add “-ai” in my web searches, so I get A.I. results.

Incorrect about half the time, btw. Not helpful.

I also use A.I. in my video editing work for production companies, some because it’s already embedded in the software and I don’t even know it’s there, or stuff that I have to let A.I. do or I don’t get paid, like generate transcripts.

(No, I’m not going to spend an unpaid six hours transcribing this shit myself. If that makes me a betrayer of mankind, guess it is what it is.)

I haven’t tried any of the software that “edits” for you, so I have no idea how well that shit works. Figure it’ll be replacing me soon enough, so I’ll get my chance.

I also laugh at some of the dumb A.I. songs that pop up on social feeds. I admit it. I feel guilty, but God help me, “I Glued My Balls to My Butthole Again” is funny.

I’ve gotten some weird heat on both sides, people angry with me for not offering up my sweet alabaster asshole to be used and abused by A.I., got others mad at me because six years ago, I used one of those photo apps to make funny versions of my own face, and dared use them on this site early on.

Again, before I knew I was offending God.

Can’t win for losing, ‘twould seem.

But I’ve never claimed it was my own work. Or that it made me an artist.5

I’m not convinced that using A.I. to “help” somebody write their novel, or paint their painting, or whatever, makes an artist. At least, not yet.

Hey, I’m having a hard enough time reconciling the fact that Robert Towne had a writing partner/ghostwriter his whole career, and let the world think it was all his solo work. And Edward Taylor was a living, breathing human.

When all other arguments fail, A.I. proponents usually get to, “But if the end product is amazing, WHO CARES how it was made?”

At the moment, the answer seems to be, lots of people. Not even necessarily me.

I suppose if we had tons of amazing end product fashioned by A.I., this would be more of a debate. But so far, it’s mostly a “what if?”

“Marvel Comics Presents… WHAT IF… Something A.I. Made Was Amazing?”

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But of course, I’m not going to jump right into that, I’m going to test your patience with backstory.

Many know, but in case you don’t: DC comics, waaaay back in the 30s & 40s, created the original versions of their characters. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, the Flash, et al.

In the 60s, they sorta “rebooted,” by introducing new versions of some of those characters. New Green Lantern, new Green Arrow, new Atom, new Flash, and many more.

(The big three were more or less untouched, character-wise: Supes, Bats and WW were much the same as they’d always been. Batman got a yellow circle around his torso bat icon, but that was pretty much that.)

The new versions took over. And that was fine for twenty years.

Then things got a little confusing, having 50-odd years of stories and weirdo continuity, so DC produced Crisis on Infinite Earths.

In Crisis, DC culled down their inventory. Inspired by Marvel’s tighter continuity, the powers that be decided that DC needed to be more… user-friendly? Hip?

Profitable?

Whatever the case, DC made some pretty bold choices, essentially rebooting the entire universe.

(They didn’t do it all at once, like they probably should have, and the way they did it was messy and really only caused more problems, but that’s another story.)

One big choice they made was killing off many, many characters, including a pretty prominent pair… Supergirl and the “new” Flash.

The Flash, in the character of Barry Allen (who I, as a kid, initially misread as “Barry ALIEN,” which seemed a weird but cool name, and now I can’t think of anything but), was one’a them prototypical superheroes, white, blond, blue eyes, good teeth…

…and essentially… not very interesting.

Sure, it was fun to read about a guy who was basically invincible, but Barry Allen was kind of a cypher. He wanted to help people, he was an “aw, shucks,” kinda hero, just like Superman, and a thousand others.

Well, we already had Superman, we didn’t need another overpowered boy scout.

Fer giggles, they killed off Barry Allen, so his sidekick, Wally West, the similarly-powered hero named “Kid Flash,” stepped into the big man’s running shoes, becoming The Flash.

And something interesting emerged.

Whereas Barry Allen basically just did his best and was sorta automatically a hero, Wally West had the crushing anxiety of having to live up to Barry’s example. Everything he did, he wondered, “What would Barry do?” Putting him on a pedestal, making a saint out of him.

It made Wally much more interesting.

It didn’t hurt that Wally was already a more rounded character, thanks to his time in Marv Wolfman and George Perez’s “New Teen Titans.” He was younger, so he made more mistakes than Barry. He was a womanizer, was kind of a screw-up, and was somewhat selfish.

As a teenager/young adult would realistically be.

All of that was great fodder for a guy trying to be something better.

So when he took over as Flash, he was constantly comparing himself to “Uncle Barry.”

“Uncle Barry” was a saint.

“Uncle Barry” never did anything wrong.

It was an impossible image to live up to. And most of his initial years as the Flash were spent trying to live up to an image he could, ultimately, never live up to.

It was a smart bit of character development.

Eventually, over the course of years, he proved his worth to himself, becoming the Flash, not just the kid who took over for him.

Wally was allowed, in other words, to have a character arc.

(And, not for nothing, it’s been said many times before - Barry Allen was waaaay more interesting a character in death than he ever was in life.)

Similar story with Green Lantern. At some point, the “original” GL, Hal Jordon, was wiped off the board, and replaced by the younger Kyle Rayner. Hal was a 60s hero, a test pilot, a Jack Kennedy, “nothing to fear” type.

Basically perfect, as the Boomers saw themselves.

Kyle was a sensitive artist and a slacker, who had more faults than seemed appropriate for a hero.

Rayner got a character arc, too - not only did he have to fill the shoes of an established hero, he didn’t necessarily want to be a hero, only doing it out of a sense of responsibility.

And, as he tried, he got slowly better at the gig. And had more fun with it. To enjoy being a hero.

For a minute in the 90s, many of the established heroes were replaced with alternates. Batman, Green Arrow, Wonder Woman, all got newer, or different, models.

And for heroes like Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter, while they stayed the originals, they got more character development and room to change and grow. Kids today see the Jason Momoa version of Aquaman as the definitive version, but twas not always so, for those of us who remember him as wearing an orange shirt and riding a giant seahorse.

Plus, Momoa never had a hook instead of a hand. That shit was gnarly.

Even Superman got changed around, first with a gotdamn mullet, and when that wasn’t enough, transformed into “Superman Blue,” a creature of pure energy.

(They weren’t all great ideas.)

But ultimately, the heroes of the 60s had been replaced by the heroes of the 90s.

Look at Grant Morrison’s “JLA” comics. Most of the heroes are replacements, and he does a great job of playing off them as the new kids. It was a delight to read and anticipate the future.

And then, for no reason I can ascertain except nostalgia, in short order, DC methodically replaced all the new kids with the old, 60s heroes.

Barry Allen came back to life, so did Hal Jordon and Oliver Queen. Their kiddie versions hung around, but now are once again outshone by the 60s versions.

(Much like the Boomers shoved Gen Xers aside to stay in power.)

Batman, eh, it made sense, his replacement was just to show that only Bruce Wayne has the right temperament for psychotic vigilantism.

Superman, he needs to be the OG version. He’s an icon, the red and blue and the cape, and revamping him usually means removing what makes him iconic.

But everybody else, they shoulda left alone.

Let them be the new stars. Let the dead stay dead.

It wasn’t like the movies wouldn’t eventually tell their stories. Not like you wouldn’t get the “Absolute” reboots and every other thing, so those old characters would have a spot to shine again.

What DC had, was a chance to replace, and thus build, the myths. And by showing that the myths could be replaced, as they’d been in the 60s, showed that the stories could have beginnings, middles, and endings.

What it ended up showing… I don’t know. That nostalgia trumps innovation? That we can’t let old moneymakers go?

All it really did in the DC universe was show that nothing progresses, that we were perpetually stuck in the 60s-80s.

Much like the real world, I suppose.

Also, that death doesn’t really mean much.

Which ain’t that much of a story.

STORIES…

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I presume it’s a small operation, so it didn’t shock me when I ordered a couple hard copies of the ish I’m in, and discovered that it was a print-on-demand scenario.

I hadn’t seen it done like this before, but it makes perfect sense, media made-to-order, rather than a bunch made all at oncest. A smart addition to the modern publishing ecosystem.

I was just glad to see my work in actual print at all.

And on my life went.

Then, recently, I ordered Nineteen Seventy-Four: the Red Riding Quartet, Book One, originally published in 2009. I assumed that I was getting a physical book that had, probably, been either kept in storage since the original print run, or was a more recent reprint.

But when it arrived, it had the telltale signs of publishing-on-demand.

Have to admit, this confused me a little.

Black Lizard is a known brand, owned by Knopf, who has access to traditional publishing.

But this book was obviously done a little cheaper. The pages were copied and printed, that slight smeary look to the words. The covers thinner, less durable.

Not terrible. But a notable step down in quality.

I ordered some James Crumley books, also from Black Lizard, and sure enough, POD.

(Funny to me that my own work, I accepted it gratefully, but the older guys, I’m torqued about it.)

Is this the future now? That “first editions” are a relic?

On the one hand, it reads the same. It’s a book, right? Pages that turn. The experience is identical.

But it bothers me.

Not like, ruins my day.

But y’know that feeling you get when you realize something’s been lost, something most people won’t miss, but for some reason you do?

Like that.

And trust me, I know how it sounds. I was the guy that snorted loud when people talked about not wanting to read digital books, because they liked the feel of the paper or the smell or whatever.

Embrace the future, right?

Ironic, that as time passes, I find I prefer reading prose books in their physical form. (I still like comic books on digital devices. Go figure.)

There’s obvious reasons it’s better than the alternative. Out-of-print will be less of a thing, books more readily available, no matter how old or niche.

For new authors, this evens the playing field even more. If all books are print-on-demand, your book is as legit as anyone’s. You and John Grisham are doing the same thing.

(Slightly different payoffs, probably.)

I mean, in all likelihood, POD is the way you’ll be (hopefully) one day holding a physical book with my name on it.

But part of it is the cheapness. Since I paid retail price for the Crumley books, I guess I expect the “full” product, not a cheaper knockoff.

I just hate feeling like the old guy who won’t adapt.

STORIES…

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I can’t even recall how many hip-hop songs I’ve heard that horse in, but it was a 90s rap staple.

I only recently went deep-diving to find out where the sound came from, and got an education not only on the original track to feature it (by Mel & Tim, who I don’t think I’d ever heard of before, but I got a kick out of discovering):

… but as to how the rest of Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Brain” came together:

DJ Muggs, creator of “Insane,” has disputed that it’s a sample, saying he created it with (depending on which interview you believe) a horn or a blues guitar run through an amp, and the fact that it sounds so similar is a massive coincidence.

Uh-huh.

I actually don’t care if they stole it, created it theyselves, whatevs. I know I’m a’supposed to care, as a creator myself, but far as I’m concerned, that couple seconds has long passed the statute of limitations, and now belongs to the whole world. Like “Funky Drummer,” or “Amen, Brother.”

It’s such an odd sound for a rap song.

Muggs had used a similar sound producing House of Pain’s “Jump Around” the previous year, that screeching sound every few seconds:

…which in turn was a different sample from a saxophone:

… and I guess Muggs wanted the same, but different, for his own group.

So we get 90s tracks packed tight with screechy saxes and horsies.

I got set down this path because my beloved daughter loves to listen to Chappell Roan on the way to school…

… every day…

… and that first song on her CD, “Femininomenon,” while it doesn’t use the horse or the sax screech, is layered with a lot of other 80s/90s sonic references that got me thinking on it.

(One being a chainsaw or other revving noise, which Eminem loved to use in his songs around then.)

It even has a cowbell. Or something like it.

It was the cowbell got me thinking about layered sounds in songs. Like the cowbell in “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” and the Eminem chainsaws, which then mentally led me to the horse.

BTW, “Femininomenon,” when it hits the techno part, if you strip out Chappell’s voice, sounds like a Depeche Mode song. Least, it does to me. Everything old is new again…

STORIES…

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For me, born in the 70s, WWII seemed a million years away, not the brisk thirty or so.

So I didn’t really understand my father’s obsession with the affair.

He was a history buff, particularly focused on the world after WWII, the Cold War, and the strained relations between the U.S. and Russia. He was a Russophile, he and mum having visited Russia before I was born.

(Apparently, in mom’s telling, they were at a train station somewhere in Russia, and somebody handed Pops some “literature,” in the form of pamphlets. She didn’t go into detail, but from what I gathered, the pamphlets were subversive, and probably illegal. She thought he should throw them away before they got on the train, but he was fascinated with them, and said he wanted to preserve them.

Til they were on the train, and gentlemen with submachineguns started poking through passengers’ pockets and luggage, looking for contraband.

My father excused himself, and went to the bathroom, where the pamphlets mysteriously vanished.)

Dad joined the Navy Reserves out of high school, to get money, to get away from Minnesota, and to get an education. But he never thought he was the interesting part of the story.

He had odd ideas of what made his stories interesting.

I tried many times, as Dad got older and his memory started waning, to get him to tell me about those early years.

He’d respond with a story, say, about how he was living in a rooming house and had to sneak past his landlord every day to get to his room.

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh, because I always wore my Navy uniform and I spoke Russian, so he thought I was a spy. But, listen, I have to tell you about the curtains in this rooming house…”

And I was like, “Dad! Tell the story about him thinking you’re a spy!”

He’d brush it off and say, “Oh, hell, that’s not interesting.”

And then go on to detail the stupid curtains.

My father, ladies and gentlemen.

But anyhow, I never knew the Russian spy in the Naval outfit, I knew the man who would often pull down those Time-Life books about WWII, and study them.

I never understood the fascination. He’d lived through the war, hadn’t he? Didn’t he get enough information at the time? Or the three decades after?

Apparently not.

Those books were a staple of our living room my entire growing up. Well, those and his almost-complete collection of National Geographic.

(Now that I think on it, the fact that I became a collector of any stripe was inevitable. My dad collected history, my mom fancy dining ware, among other things.)

I tried to look at those books a few times, out of pure curiosity. I never got very far. I was young, my knowledge of WWII pretty facile, so details like that were lost on me.

But those books were incredibly useful to me as a kid. I used to draw on copy paper my father brought home (read: stole) from the school he taught at, and when I needed a hard surface to draw on, those books were mighty handy. Nice, firm hardbacks, of a bigger size than the 8.5 x 11 copy paper, so I wouldn’t have to shift the paper around to draw a complete picture.

I don’t remember if those books went out the door when we moved him to California to care for him, or before.

Now, I wish I had them.

Not necessarily to obsess over and study. That was Dad’s thing, I’m far less into global history than he was.

But as time goes on, and I learn more about how other cultures learn about world events from their point of view, and how our own history is slowly being drowned in a bathtub by rich politicians who only care about shifting the nation’s wealth into their pockets, I wish I had a record of history as we knew it in the 70s.

Not because it’s necessarily correct, though I trust the Time-Life people were at least somewhat objective.

But because those sorts of records will become increasingly valuable. With AI and the internet starting to eviscerate history, so that objective facts become harder to track down and verify, it’d be nice to have something to be able to at least refer to, to ground ourselves.

Or, barring actual facts, to have a record of where we saw ourselves at a time when the American persona was at its most self-confident.

Again, maybe not a wholly accurate portrait, but one we can build from, as “facts” get turned into mush.

STORIES…

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Walter Hill is one of those directors that by the time I recognized his name and his work, he’d already sorta shifted out of favor with Hollywood.

Famously made his bones writing for directors like Peckinpah, later writing and producing the first Alien flick, so he came in blazing hot. His (debatably1) best works as a writer/director, 48 Hrs, The Driver, The Warriors, came in the front quarter of his directing career, his latter works don’t get nearly as much attention.

Most screenwriters know his writing style, or at least the style he demonstrated in his “Alien” rewrite.

Described as “spare” and “hiaku-like,” he conveys much with few words.

Like a more practical Cormac McCarthy.

His directing style is often equally practical - the frame might be packed full of colorful gang members in clown costumes, but the actual shot choices, the setups, the rhythms, they’re usually more classically done than to show off.

(Compared to say, Michael Bay or Zach Synder - no shade, as the kids say, just saying their styles tend to call attention to themselves.)

Whenever I pop in a Walter Hill film, I’m expecting to see something thoughtful, intelligent, or at least, batshit crazy.

Every so often, he scores a grand slam again, like directing the pilot for HBO’s “Deadwood.” And a steady stream of “Alien” product probably keeps his wallet fat, so I’m sure he’s doing fine.

Some of his films have gotten some decent re-appraisal lately, e.g. Streets of Fire, Johnny Handsome, Southern Comfort… I even see people bringing up Red Heat a lot lately. So I’m gonna attempt to highlight a few lesser-knowns, that only Walter Chaw remembers. (If you’re a Hill fan, you should read Chaw’s Walter Hill book.)

(Not that these are my favorites. I’m on the bandwagon with Warriors, Driver and 48 Hrs. Just trying to give the man his dues as a filmmaker of stuff you don’t see every day.)

Hill’s done a lot of movies, that if they maybe don’t deserve a slot in THE CANON, are at least interesting enough they deserve a look.

LAST MAN STANDING

And yet, I start with this one.

Honestly, I’m a little mad at this flick, it should be one of my favorite movies of ever. Bruce Willis, in a Western-meets-Untouchables shoot-em-up set in Prohibition-era Texas, that’s a remake of Yojimbo, the template for Fistful of Dollars, both a ripoff of Red Harvest? Christopher Walken? David Patrick Kelly? Bruce Dern?

WTF? This should be a movie I’m constantly annoying my friends with. This movie screams “hidden gem.”

I mean, it’s not bad. There’s just something missing from it, and though I’ve watched it several times, I can never put my finger on exactly what.

It’s just not enough. And considering this is a director who once had gangbangers dressed as mimes, he’s a dude knows when he’s way past enough, and keeps pumping anyway.

Anyway, this movie is inspiring to me in the abstract, even if not in the actual watching, because I’d love to do a story like it one day. Western Untouchables? C’mon now.

THE ASSIGNMENT

This poor thing got a lot of flack, and I get it. The whole idea of a lead character who’s trans, you’d think, get a trans person to play it, right?

However, it’s been debated that Michelle Rodriguez doesn’t actually play a trans character, that is, a person born into a body they believe doesn’t truly represent them. She plays a cis scumbag killer who is forcibly transitioned from male to female as revenge.

Now, you can argue that’s grotesque and tasteless and inappropriate on many levels… you’re probably right.

But on the other hand, you could argue that it’s at least pro-trans in the sense that it’s trying to show how difficult it would be for somebody who’s been unwillingly reborn into a body they don’t think properly represents them. It’s at least a step in a thoughtful direction.

Though, if it came out in the 70s when it was written, it would’ve been maybe more revolutionary than in the new millennium.

Anyway, you can see how casting a true trans person in the role, just for them to play like they hate themselves for being transformed, might send a weird message. I’m not necessarily saying don’t do it… I imagine somebody like Laverne Cox or Elliot Page could’ve torn this shit right up, cuz a good actor is a good actor.

But I’m trying to give the movie room for trying something different, and maybe failing, than punishing it for trying at all.

Now, unfortunately, the movie is largely exploitative, rather than a thoughtful meditation on being stuck in the wrong body. So, y’know, maybe all that defending I just did doesn’t really mean much. I’m just surprised it had as much possibility as it did.

Somebody… perhaps, Hollywood, a trans filmmaker… should remake this their way, and do it justice.

WILD BILL

Sort of a warm-up to Deadwood, without the Shakespearian aesthetic. Has all the deconstructionist Western stuff you’d expect from Hill.

And Jeff Bridges is always worth watching, especially when he goes cowboy (his Rooster Cogburn inTrue Grit being one of my favorite of his performances).

It does suffer by comparison to Deadwood, since it deals with similar subject matter. But it’s another “print the legend” kinda story, addressing the myth of Wild Bill from a different angle.

Probably no more historically accurate, but I don’t go to the movies for my history.

It does have a good build to the conclusion we all know is coming, and some great quotes:

“This town… I really think it’s like something out of the Bible.

“What part of the Bible?”

“The part right before God gets angry.”

It also doesn’t have quite the same patois as Deadwood, unless you count Bridges announcing, “All this love talk, I got me a hard-on. Want to see?”

BREWSTER’S MILLIONS

I’m always gonna hold a special place in my heart for this one.

Quite likely my first actual Walter Hill movie (this or 48 Hours, I don’t remember). But even as a kid I was a huge Richard Pryor fan, and John Candy was always delightful. Neither is at their funniest here, but even mid-tier Pryor and Candy is the goods.

And there’s some clever bits in it. At the very least, it depicted how a rich outsider might, oh, buy his way into politics…

Yeah, I know, too soon.

These days, with billionaires playing with people’s lives, it maybe isn’t the movie we need. But I will always appreciate the way Pryor says, near the end, “… I am sick of money.”

(Though I doubt the real Pryor was.)

And for last, not necessarily a great movie, but maybe one that was too harshed on…

SUPERNOVA

This one got a ton of attention, perhaps too much attention, for the behind-the-scenes drama. Hill directed the movie, and at some point, other folks, including Francis Ford Coppola, were brought in to re-edit and re-jigger the film, and Hill took his name off it.

I watched it recently. Considering the staggering amount of name power of those two directors alone, the final product is…

… fine.

Not nearly as bad as advertised, but it leaves your brain so fast after watching it, you have to be careful, as you might go back to the thumbnail on your streamer and say, “Oh! That looks interesting! I should watch it!”, then accidentally start it again.

Also, sort of honorable mention, I liked Dead For a Dollar, Hill’s latest western, staring the fabulous Mrs. Maizel. Didn’t adore it, and its low budget is readily apparent, but it wasn’t bad.

But if you’re only gonna watch one Walter Hill movie… probably should watch The Driver. Or The Warriors. Or Hard Times, or 48 Hrs.

(And maybe save Crossroads, Another 48 Hrs. and Trespass for when you’re looking to be a completist.)

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From what my podcast partner John Longino tells me, it’s the original Backrooms movie, and after the credits, a YouTube short, with a different Backrooms story.

Sorta like what Tarantino did with Kill Bill a few months back, tacking a “lost chapter” animated by the Fortnite crew onto The Whole Bloody Affair.

(If y’all’s have suffered through my previous nattering on “Director’s Cuts,” you can guess where I’m about to go.)

I’m a guy likes to have seen the “real” version of a film. Whether that’s the way the director intended it, or whether time and popular opinion has codified a certain version of it as the “real” thing, I like to think there’s some canon version, if only so that everybody starts from the same place when talking about art.

Like, you see a painting, that’s the painting. If the painting gets destroyed, or slowly fades/erodes, or gets covered in blue paint by protestors, then in my mind, even if the painting is restored or recreated, nobody will ever lay eyes on the original again. That art has been lost forever.

Sometimes, the restoration/recreation is all we have of a thing. And that’s life, way it goes sometimes, probably better to have the copy than nothing at all.

(Perhaps with the exception of the Ecco Homo Fresco.)

But film gets confusing, because not only are there multiple ways to see a film from day one (say, widescreen vs. IMAX), but then, studios or directors feel the need to tinker.

And sometimes that tinkering is for art, and sometimes it’s for money.

Though sometimes, the money grab makes the art better, and the earnestly-intended tinkering to “improve” it makes it worse.

Backrooms reeks of cash grab. And hey, we’re all adults here, we knew the movie biz was a desperate whore, only in it for the sweet green. Backrooms is one of the biggest moneymakers of the year, they’re gonna squeeze that stone bone dry.

And, not for nothing, but sometimes, it’s fun when they do this kinda thing.

A Bug’s Life did it way back in the late 90s. In the midst of its profitable theatrical run, they re-released the film with extra gag “outtakes,” made especially for the purpose of keeping the film in theaters.

That was a fun idea. It wasn’t strictly necessary, you didn’t have to see the movie again to see a missed character or plot point or deeper themes, you’ve still “seen” the movie, it was just a fun extra.

And Backrooms sounds pretty similar.

In the Kill Bill example, it was fun to see how the Pussy Wagon got destroyed, and because it was animated, it didn’t have the feel of a “canonical” experience. (It was animated from the original script, that got rewritten during production, giving the new opponent’s dialogue to Gogo in the original movie, making it was a touch repetitive.)

That’s always the question with directors cuts and the like. Were the original movies missing something without the footage? Was the director just dying to keep it in, but bowed to studio pressure?

Does it make the film scarier, sadder, more exciting, more romantic? Does it give us new stuff to think about?

Or does it make the film more repetitive? Were the extra minutes lost for good reason?

Tough to say sometimes.

Spielberg did it way back in 1980 with Close Encounters. Nobody needed to see inside that spaceship. They wanted to, but nobody needed to. But Spielberg loves money as much as the next guy, and thus was birthed the Special Edition.1

So which is the “real” version? The original Theatrical version? The Special Edition? The Director’s Cut that followed years later where Spielberg changed his mind again and took out the inside of the ship, but left other changes?

If I don’t see all three versions, what will I be missing? What version makes the art complete?

And does not seeing the inside of the spaceship make it a better experience? If so, has the art been forever ruined, metaphorically slopped with blue paint?

Other hand, there’s a perfectly legit case to be made for altered versions. Bladerunner, Aliens, Lord of the Rings… with Rings, it even became accepted practice to release extended cuts before the next chapter was released, and everybody, studios and audiences alike, seemed happy to accept the practice. People didn’t want to sit in a theater for four hours, but were willing to do it at home.

And with all those director’s versions, the recuts showed us new depths of story or character.

But then there’s the Friday the 13th “Unrated” versions with 6.5 seconds of extra gore.

Or Greedo shooting first.

Hey, I’m a film geek, I’ll watch ten different versions of a movie I like out of curiosity’s sake, so really, it’s people like me that don’t help the problem.

But, flip side, even accounting for my geek curiosity, I’m still sensitive to films being forever mucked with.

And I’m not sure where to draw the line.

I’m perfectly willing to reconcile two different versions of Touch of Evil living side-by-side, but the idea of the three different Close Encounters makes my teeth hurt a little.

And then there’s the home media clusterbang.

Couple months back, David Fincher let the beast out his chains, with the 4K release of Fight Club.

Peoples were spittin’ mad (y’know, in the internet sense, which is to say, slightly perturbed over a thing that probably don’t matter much) that Fincher went back and re-cut and re-colored Fight Club yet again.

(You can read about it here-ish:
https://movieweb.com/david-fincher-fight-club-4k-hd-version-changes/ )

But this is hardly the first time Fincher has done this.

Fincher, like Michael Mann2, has changed all of his movies, every time they’re released in a new format.

The initial DVD release of Se7en had like four documentaries where it showed how he went through, frame by frame, and readjusted whatever he felt like needed adjusting for the DVD.

So, any of you who first sawr Se7en in this millennium, likely haven’t seen the “original” version.

Fincher and Mann are hardly rarified. I was listening to Nicholas Meyer’s autobiography, and he offhand mentioned how he made “slight changes” for the VHS copy of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and refused to let Paramount call it a “Director’s Cut,” as the changes were so minor.

Meaning, if you sawr the movie for the first time outside the theater, you didn’t see the original, theatrical version.

Which is the “real” version?

‘cause Meyer was convinced his version was the “proper” version. That he’d corrected mistakes.

But what if the audience liked that original, theatrical version with the “mistakes?”

Again, me, I like seeing things the way they were ultimately intended. Perhaps defined by what the director had in mind when he made the thing (e.g. Ridley Scott’s Director’s Cut of Bladerunner, which he fought for from early on, and lost).

Or, yes, the “corrected” version of Star Trek VI. I can see changing a couple of things, stuff that maybe got missed in the heat of getting it out.

I’ll even give preference to a movie that hit theaters and got almost instantly “fixed,” like The Shining reputedly did, losing an extra ending and a couple of earlier bits. It muddies the waters, but at least we’re still in the realm of some “original” vision, where the director was, at that point in life.

What I don’t necessarily give as much weight to is how much the director has changed their minds over the last few decades on a movie that doesn’t really need the facelift.

Like Fight Club. Or Close Encounters. Or Star Wars.

But you might argue, is this really worth getting broke up about? Most movies don’t have alternate versions, right? Mann and Fincher and Spielberg notwithstanding.

Well. Let’s go back to that “widescreen vs. IMAX” thing.

A few weeks back, a friend reposted a comparison of Project Hail Mary, with a regular widescreen frame on the right, and the IMAX frame on the left, to show how much “better” the IMAX experience was.

Man, look at that, you can see the top of the rings!

… which, I guess means that for the widescreen version, they just cut off the top and/or bottom of the screen. Kind of a reverse pan & scan.

Which is the “real” version?

Filmmakers like Christopher Nolan have been pushing the IMAX version of movies as the most “cinematic” version.

But almost every filmmaker who films for IMAX, including Nolan, has to make a “regular” widescreen version for the 99% of theaters that aren’t IMAX (which, in turn, is usually the one that makes it to home media).

Meaning, far as I can tell, punching in on the square image to make it widescreen. Which is exactly what film nerds were fighting against for decades before home media accepted “widescreen” as the default format.

Ew.

And, here’s a dirty little secret for you: most “IMAX” movies weren’t shot in anything close to IMAX, just reformatted to play in IMAX theaters.

The widescreen version IS the definitive version, and the IMAX version was made to… GASP… sell tickets at a higher price point.

Meaning, they punched in on the image, cutting off the sides to make a square.

Like… pan & scan.

If Nolan’s IMAX The Odyssey is the definitive version, but most people are seeing it in regular theaters, doesn’t that mean most people aren’t seeing the “real” Odyssey?

Look, man, I like the IMAX.

But nowadays, these movie frames being interchangeable isn’t showing that IMAX is better, just that it’s a different cropping.

And that feels like somebody isn’t making a choice somewhere.

Do we not need the extra imagery on the top and bottom? Or, if we’re going widescreen to IMAX, the imagery on the sides?

If not, then what’s the difference between that, and somebody adding extra widescreen to Charlie Chaplin movies with AI? I mean, all these different sides to movies are just window dressing, right?

If you, the filmmaker, don’t care about how we see your movie, then I guess all my complaints are moot.

But filmmakers will make MUCH noise about how they choose to frame a film, the choices they’ve made specifically. I honestly don’t understand why there are multiple versions of the Avatar movies, given James Cameron’s perfectionism. It’s like he said, “Here’s my definitive, perfect vision.

“… but sure, go ahead, go see the shitty version with the weird cropping, IDGAF.”

Speaking of, in December, I went to a screening of Avatar: Ash and Fire at the Walt Disney studios lot, in a theater, I was led to believe, would provide the ultimate experience in seeing the film.

Though, now that I think on it, I don’t believe that theater was an IMAX theater, just a pretty good widescreen theater.

Not too long after, I saw James Cameron talking about the movie, and how the sound was designed so that if you sat in a certain place in the theater, you’d get the “perfect” experience, hearing it as it was meant to be heard.

I just happened to sit about where he describing, though a touch further back. So what about the other four hundred people who didn’t sit in the vague middle and front of the theater? Did they (or we, if I wasn’t in the right spot) not hear the movie correctly?

So I didn’t see nor hear the right version?

What was the point, then?

If you’re making a movie for three people in the correct seats to enjoy, what are the rest of us there for?

So what do I expect you, the reader, to do about it?

Well, not much to be done, really. Things are what they are.

BUT, I wouldn’t mind it terribly, if, for all these different releases, we maybe get a hint from the filmmaker why these choices were made, instead of the filmmakers going, “Yes, go see the movie, BUT IF YOU WANT THE GOODS, SEE IT IN IMAX, but don’t worry, all versions are awesome, BUT REALLY, THE DOLBY VERSION SOUNDS BEST, but really, any version is wonderful, and you’ll have a great time.

“… JUST BE SURE TO SIT IN THE DEAD MIDDLE, OR IT’S GONNA SUCK.”

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2

Amazing article about Mann’s various cuts of Manhunter:

Textual Variations

Unbecoming: The Lost and Obsolete Versions of 'Manhunter'

Many different cuts of Manhunter have been know to exist, yet outside of the theatrical cut, almost none of them are available today for mass distribution. Their ephemerali-ty, coupled with the fact that multiple releases have been defined and marketed as Mann’s …

Read more

a month ago · 1 like · Mikhail Skoptsov

‘Supergirl’ Braces for $100 Million Loss: What DC Studios Should Learn From Its Box Office Bomb

Which is slightly kinder than the article’s tab title reads:

Noble of the entertainment reporters to offer up their advice.

Their actual advice to studios for the next movie about a B- or C-tier superhero? (After pounding the movie into the ground for daring to exist)

“…they’ll need to economize on the production budget and marketing spend.”

Man. Such insight.

A 1,200+ word article and it comes down to advice my grandmother could’ve given, probably without even knowing what we were talking about.

“Spend less!”

Oy.

I saw Supergirl with my family, I was looking forward to it. I like Milly Alcock, I liked her version of Supergirl in the Superman movie as a tipsy party girl who refuses to make her dog behave, and I thought the trailers showed a clever angle: a woman with Superman’s powers, but who doesn’t share his optimism about humanity.

I agree with the general impressions of the movie: it’s missing something.

(Skip to the end if you want spoiler-ridden opinions as to what that “something” is.)

But my main grief with this article is that it boils down to: you took a chance, and you blew it! Fools! Ha-ha!

Well, hate to be Dr. Obvious here, but that’s every single movie ever made.

I have my suspicions as to why Supergirl is the current Patient Zero for What Ails the Superhero Movie Biz, and most of them boil down to politics, either of the national kind, or of the local showbiz kind, neither of which are currently charitable to any movie that falls outside traditional norms.

But one of the issues that I think is absolutely killing movies, is that studios have invested purely in the blockbuster, all-eggs-in-one-basket, THE BIGGEST EVENT MOVIE YOU’VE EVER SEEN, for every last major release.

Do you know, back in the olden days, there were actually movies that came out that weren’t intended to be THE BIGGEST EVENT MOVIE YOU’VE EVER SEEN?

Sure, studios HOPED they’d make a lot of cash, but they didn’t actually have to make a billion dollars to be considered “successful.”

That part drives me nuts - when I was in film school in the dinosaur ages of the late 90s, $100 million was considered STAGGERING. Like, if a movie made that, then they were entering film history.

Sure, inflation gins those prices up over time.

But Titanic blew that $100 million goal out of the water overnight, shooting it to over a billion dollars, and that goalpost shift accounts for a lot of heartache.

It wasn’t that people took the lesson, “Oh, well, that movie was extraordinary for whatever reason, a billion dollars is too great a number for just any movie to reach.”

No, they took the lesson, “Well, one movie did it, NOW ALL MUST DO IT.”

As of this moment, Supergirl has made somewhere in the arena of $80 million bucks. By comparison, Toy Story 5 has made $327 million, Obsession has made $238 million. So, Supergirl has lost the box office fight, by any comparison.

But Toy Story and Obsession, while having huge numbers, are nowhere near the most profitable films in history.

Obsession, it’s a low-budget film, it’s the exception. Anything over $50 million was gonna excite the studio, and that movie has over-performed like a mother. It’s really in a category all its own.

Toy Story 3 made over a billion smackeroos. So TS5, by comparison, must be a flop, right?

No, the same entertainment reporters are flouting it as a major success.

But, back up a touch. Keeping it in the Superman family, the movie Superman Returns, released in 2006, made around $400 million dollars, and was considered a flop.

Man of Steel, $670 million. Considered a hesitant “success,” enough to spawn the DC cinematic universe.

The 2025 Superman topped out around $625 million. Another hesitant success.

What I’m trying to demonstrate, is that ALL movies this summer have performed comparatively poorly, when you put them up against previous blockbusters.

But by being the weakest earner, Supergirl gets to be dogpiled.

What’s my point? Who knows. I didn’t even care about Supergirl that much, but I still find Hollywood’s gleeful joy in shitting on it to be tasteless.

And Milly Alcock is getting attacked as if she was the one who caused this atrocity. You’ve got the third-most forgettable Superman, Dean Cain, running his mouth about her and sounding like a dirty old man.

James Gunn’s position at WB just got more precarious, which is fair, he’s the boss, and that’s the risk. But he’s got Superman 2 already filming, so they can’t fire him, and if that movie is a success, all will likely be forgiven and forgotten.

And a movie that could’ve maybe been taken or left on its own merits will be flushed down the memory hole as a “failure.”

But, don’t give up hope, friends, for Hollywood also has a long-standing tradition of movies that got shat upon and spat upon, rising like phoenixes to glory, when years later, a new generation discovers them, or the previous generation says, “Oh. Hey. That movie wasn’t so bad. I guess I kinda liked it after all.”

I mean, that probably won't be my reaction, but you never can tell.

SPOILERS, KIDS

Okay, so after defending Supergirl’s honor, what did I think was missing?

Couple things: filmmakers need to quit depowering Kryptonians. A little kryptonite here and there, that’s part of the mythos, I get it, and I’m down for a little bit of depowering once a movie.

Not every five minutes, when they need to get Supergirl out of the game, or the movie would be over.

They basically have Supergirl depowered as the start of the movie, then, when she absolutely needs her powers, they get restored, only to be yanked away again right after.

Lather, rinse…

Like, Supergirl traveling acrost the galaxy only to land on a planet with a kryptonite moon (or sun? I couldn’t tell…), that was clever, make that the only time it happens in the movie.

But even with that, all she had to do was lie there dying all day, and when the moon passed out of orbit, she’s powered up again. Thank goodness nobody found her and pounded the snot out of her while she just lay there, helpless.

Or just died outright from hours of kryptonite poisoning. That was convenient.

Ever notice that kryptonite has never actually killed anyone in a Super movie?

Point the second, it was impossible to tell what power level anyone was at. Supergirl, even depowered in the beginning, still seemed as strong as Superman, and took a beating that would’ve crushed any normal human.

For that matter, her kid sidekick also managed to take a lot of abuse and never got more than a few scratches, and my impression was she was of normal, “human” strength.

Meanwhile, every other character in the movie gets hit with enough brute force to shatter a building, and they shake it off. Kinda kills the tension when you expect them to be turned into exploding bags of blood and bones by a super-punch, and they kinda go, “Uh. That stung.”

Lastly, filmmakers need to decide where they sit on the fence so far as superheroes killing folk. Supergirl spends long minutes agonizing on why her partner, a young girl who lost her family, shouldn’t kill the bad guy, only for Supergirl to just go ahead and do it for her.

Then she goes home to Earth, and tells Superman she’s now ready to assume her duties as a superhero.

I don’t get it.

Yeah, I know it’s a real struggle to not kill a bad guy who richly deserves it. But as many, many before me have pointed out, that’s the narrative problem we come to see play out. How does Superman (or Batman, or whoever) justify not killing their opponent, and if they won’t do it, what will they do to ensure that opponent doesn’t get loose and do it all over again?

Supergirl killing the bad guy doesn’t have the narrative “oomph” that it should. It feels like she vaguely ran out of options, and did it, and won’t lose sleep over it.

That’s what anyone would do, but a superhero needs to do more, no?

If she does lose sleep over it, then show us. That’s the movie. That was what I thought Man of Steel was trying to accomplish. Showing us why Superman won’t kill anyone ever again, after being forced to.

Other smaller complaints, I thought Supergirl’s young partner wasn’t given much to do, nor was Lobo, though he was advertised as half the reason to see the movie. Or maybe a third, with Krypto being the other third, and he gets dispatched pretty early on.

This is one of those movies, though, that suffers by comparison to the last twenty-odd years of superhero flickers. If this had come out around Iron Man, it’d’ve been DC’s best movie ever.

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You talk about 90s comics, you’re usually talking about the art.

Some 90s comic book art is fantastic.

Some is raw, but has an energy to it, unique to that decade.

Some of it is little better than cave drawings.

I think the coloring process had something to do with how sloppy some 90s art ending up looking. They seemed to be experimenting with new tech, probably to make things cheaper.

Well, it worked, it made the comics look cheap.

Even when the art was good, everything either looked like day-go diarrhea, or had a strange faded and/or smeared look, like they’d run out of colored ink cartridges at the copy shop. A lot of it looks bleary and fuzzy, even in reprints.

And everything was busy. Not just the lines, pouches, guns, and hair, but an obscene level of detail that did little to focus the eye, everything everywhere all at once in the frame.

For artists like Todd McFarlane, who knew when to add enough detail to focus an image, you’d have others, who’d just crowd everything into the damn panel. And if you weren’t Jim Lee, or George Perez, who knew how to handle that explosion of detail and still make a stunning image, it just looked overstuffed.

But the art wasn’t the real problem.

No, while 90s comic art is a big point of contention, to me, the 90s had a way bigger issue.

The writing.

Or lack thereof.

(Yes, there was some great writing in 90s comics. Some of my favorites. Starman, Preacher, Astro City, Stray Bullets, Sin City, the list goes on. These tended to not be mainstream big sellers.)

You read a lot of comics from that time, they feel like they’re missing something.

I mean, you’re not missing dialogue, them shits was crammed to the gills. In the Tarantino, Mamet and Claremont era, everyone was trying to prove that they too had the gift of magical fake talk.

Uncanny X-Men and its many, many offshoots were the worst offenders.

Everybody loved Claremont, nobody could write like Claremont.

Like Tarantino, he made it look easy. And like Tarantino, he was oft imitated, never duplicated.1

So pages were stuffed hard with word balloons, making the cramped art even more awkward.

Didn’t seem to hurt sales any.

But worse than the faux-Tarantino/Claremont was the lack of story and character. Most times, “character” was “oh shit, my friend/husband/baby was killed by a villain! I AM CONSUMED BY RAGE YAAAARR.”

Guns, guns, fisticuffs, murder, fire, unh.2

Some of it was because the “hot” artists were trying to write their own books without having written much before, but even a lot of veteran writers were writing weird. Like they were trying to create some “neo-90s” style to differentiate them.

(Or, more likely, ride the wave of the Image artists.)

But a lot of the stories don’t click. They skip important details or transition material in their zeal to keep things pumping, and in so doing, it feels incomplete.

And everything is about “change!” and “taking it to the next level!” with little consideration of letting us live in the status quo. We don’t get any grounding. Most stories seemed written from the notion that their readers were already following the story, and had been for years.

Though it’s easy to pick on Image comics, I think the worst offenders were probably Marvel and DC. Because they knew better.

Even skipping over the Claremont-less X-Men, the Spider-Man “Clone Saga,” “The Death of Superman,” and “Batman: Knightfall” (all of which have some good stuff in-betwixt the soap opera monotony), the Big Two made some obnoxious comics.

They just seemed to be constantly dipping the bottom of the barrel, making every female into a Playboy pinup, every male into a longhaired, roided out nightmare.

And you might say, well, that’s an art thing, and I’d return with, yeah, but to quote Gene Hackman in Unforgiven, “the writing’s not that much different than the picture.”

The women became hyper-sexualized and their IQs dropped about sixty points apiece, and the dudes just shot everything with their big guns and gritted their teeth. Nuance went out the window.

I know, I know, it’s comics, but we had JUST come out of the 80s, with Watchmen and Dark Knight and Miracleman and Animal Man and Daredevil, and all these great stories that showed us a new way.

One example sticks in my craw is The Avengers big “event” story: “The Crossing.”

The elevator pitch? Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Oh, shit! The Avengers are hit with a force so hard, it breaks them up again!

Hey, I love a good “The Old Order Changeth!” story. But this one was truly missing something.

I tried to reread it a couple weeks back, to make sure memory wasn’t betraying me.

But, no, I remembered correctly. It’s a mess.

I mean, I’d been reading comics for decades by this point, so as a longtime reader, you’d think I would know who was who.

But the characters I’d “known” for years were acting completely different. And not in new, interesting ways.

Like, the Wasp, the character depicted (wholey differently than the comics, it must be noted) by Evangaline Lily in the “Ant-Man” movies. A lady character with a very troublesome publishing history. In the 60s, she was established as a rich airhead socialite, who lived only for her (Ant-)man.

The 80s gave her, if not a perfect revision, much more to do, making her airheadedness a put-on, showing she was a shrewd businesswoman, and had the stuff of leadership, making her independent of her abusive man. For a long while, she was the assumed leader of the Avengers.

So, it surprised me that in re-reading the Crossing, she’s back to being an airhead with nothing to do. The story seemed much more interested in her metamorphosis into a humanoid wasp-thing.

This version of the Wasp didn’t stick.

There would be times that weird writing style would almost work, but then the book would disappear.

Like, say, The Regulators, written by Kurt Busiek. Something with a genuinely different take on comics, that would take that weird 90s writing style, and make it work. It would run a couple of sporadically-distributed issues.

Then, the book would suddenly just… stop. No warning, no announcement that I knew of, just, whoops, over.

It was odd.

And that happened with stunning regularity, even with the big comic companies. Skrull Kill Krew was one of those weirdo books from Marvel, written by Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, with batshit ideas and goofy humor. It ran a few issues, then just stopped.

This book is kinda the epitome of that 90s writing style I’m talking about. Machine-gun stutter action and obscure dialogue. Mostly shooting, not much deeper. Characterization is mostly a shot at satire or deconstructing tropes.

Morrison, who’s already the kinda writer who’ll skip transitions and go for an avant-garde feel, really goes oblique with this one.3

That said, at least all of the weirdness and 90s style feels deliberate. And it’s clever and fun.

Most of the 90s comics eschewed “fun” in favor of “Yeargh!” and “Nooooo!” Mistaking grim & gritty for “good,” and joy for “lame.”

And maybe that was the flaw in the writing: the writers had seen what the 80s had wrought, and thought, ahhh, I too can make characters dark and complex.

It probably came from good intention.

Or to make money. They certainly nailed that part. All the books I’m complaining about were the best-sellers.

Shows what I know.

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EVERY NIGHT I GO TO BED TO THE SOUND OF SCREAMING

by Tabitha Swanson, age 5
Dictated but not read
ts/John Patrick Nelson

My parents are Millennial movie fans. Every Friday, they break out the sodas, pop popcorn, and sit the whole family down for Movie Night, a tradition dating back to before I was born. Sure, I’d rather watch Bobby Z snort up a sack of marbles on his YouTube channel, or the frothy whimsey of Skibiti Toilet, but Mommy and Daddy and Second Mommy love their silly ol’ movies with plots, and so every week, we sit and watch yet another movie from their childhood that they insist is better than the stuff they make nowadays.

They’re not cruel like their Boomer parents, lol! We only watch the PG-13 stuff. No body horror with gooey slimes coming out of human orifices. No bullets tearing through shredded flesh.

No, it’s only after they lovingly tuck me into bed each night, singing a full chorus of “For Goodness Sakes, Look At Those Cakes,” that they kiss me goodnight, close the door, and leave me in quiet darkness.

And then the screams begin.

And machine-gun fire.

And the sounds of wet, bloody murder.

You see, my parents labor under the mistaken impression that just because they shut my bedroom door, I can’t hear the cacophony of human suffering that they jubilantly engorge on, night after night.

And because I can’t see the imagery it’s associated with, the brutal yet tasteful squib work for bullet wounds, the quick-cut editing of limbs being torn from human bodies, my mind works overtime to fill in the gaps.

And oh, the terrible, terrible things my mind envisions.

I’m only five, you see. You would think that watching a housewife being torn in half by a masked serial killer, or a teenager being dismembered by a rogue biker gang by chaining the teen’s limbs to their choppers and revving in opposite directions, would be the worst thing I could see. But having never actually witnessed such a thing, either real or imaginary, in my few years on this earth, my mind pictures the thing it’s been most terrified of since I was an infant, which is BLACKNESS, UTTER BLACKNESS AND THE COMING OF MONSTERS SO HORRIBLE THAT THE HUMAN MIND GOES BLANK WITH TERROR LYING IN THE DARK FOR HOURS WAITING FOR THE MONSTERS TO COME PRAYING FOR THE SUN TO PEEK THROUGH THE BLACKOUT CURTAINS SO THAT I MAY GET A FEW BLESSED MINUTES OF SLEEP BEFORE BEING FORCED TO GO TO T-K AND MY TEACHERS WONDERING WHY I WALK AROUND LIKE A ZOMBIE AND CLUCKING THEIR TONGUES AND SAYING THAT CHILDREN ARE MEDICATED TOO EARLY IN LIFE.

I would never ask my parents to give up that which they love. Their happiness is of utmost importance to me, as I am a wide-eyed innocent, and have not yet learned the burning selfishness that will allow me to get through my days and nights.

But, I would ask, if any of you monied uncles or aunts with no children read this, could you please give them headphones for the holidays, or their next birthday? Second Mommy’s is coming up in three weeks!

Thank you for consideration in this matter.

Best,

Tabitha

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The Dark Tower, Stephen King’s 8-book opus, is currently in development, with Mike Flanagan at the helm.

The current thinking is to split it up between movies and a TV series, to really capture the entire scope of the books.

That’s what they say.

But some real S-Tier-level minds have been grinding on this for decades, and it’s no closer to happening.

Ron Howard. JJ Abrams. Damon Lindeloff & Carlton Cuse. Glen Mazzara.

The Dark Tower has actually been made twice already, once as a movie with Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, and once as an Amazon pilot. The movie you can see, the pilot you can’t, unless it’s pirated somewhere online I don’t know about.1

For those of us that were eagerly waiting, the movie was disappointing. Certainly the box office receipts were disappointing to any studio that might’ve paid money to finance the entire epic.

So I don’t see this movie/TV extravaganza happening any day soon.

I’d love to be wrong. The Dark Tower is my favorite book series of ever.

But I have given up seeing it onscreen properly in my lifetime.

Supposedly, Flanagan is still working on it, and maybe one day, we’ll see it. Most likely as a TV series, as stuff like LotR and Harry Potter are going that way.

Having a little bit of understanding about how this shit tends to go, here’s my number one main thesis why it won’t happen:

(fanfare)

It’s too damned expensive.

You need a Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter-level budget for this, and studios shit their britches when it comes to writing a check of that size.

I think it’d be great, but they want Potter- or Rings- numbers of eyeballs on this shit, and the Dark Tower has never been those franchises.

Here’s a quick list of movies that are super-expensive to produce:

Action movies
Period pieces
Westerns
Time-travel movies
FX-heavy movies
Fantasy movies
Post-apocalyptic movies
Movies set in New York
Movies with obscene buttloads of CGI

And the Dark Tower is ALL these.

It’s Game of Thrones + Mad Max Fury Road + the Good the Bad and the Ugly + The Seven Samurai + Back to the Future with a little Goodfellas thrown in.

Sounds amazing, right? Surely, there’d be a huge audience for this.

Well, but, hold on now.

There’s a few problems with this series, as I’m guessing potential studios see it, as subsets to the “too expensive” issue.

a. It’s too damned violent/dark

Roland Deschain is a true anti-hero, in the spirit of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. In the original version of The Gunslinger, he guns down an entire town, like he’s in the The Wild Bunch, with nary a second thought.

That’s just to kick things off.

Then, there’s the child murder.

One of the main characters is an 11-year-old named Jake.

Jake gets killed a few times in the series (I warned you there were spoilers). He is the proverbial sacrificial lamb. His entire purpose is for Roland to learn to love him, then allow him to die.

That happens more than oncest.

It’s an integral part of Roland’s arc. Some might say THE integral part.

The whole story revolves around Roland fighting his way to the Dark Tower, killing everything in his path, and watching those he loves die along the way.

Roland sees himself as the last hope of the multiverse - if he doesn’t save the Dark Tower, nobody will.

But there’s lots of hints along the way that Roland isn’t the best judge of this.

Who’s to say he’s the hero the multiverse needs? Nobody gave him this assignment, he just assumed it, mostly because nobody else was left alive to do it. And he made that his whole raison d’être.

But Roland isn’t the cleverest cat, see. He’s smart. He’s a strategist.

But he lacks imagination. A flaw that trips him up, something all his other friends have to compensate for.

(One of favorite moments of the entire series is Eddie Dean, who Roland has been constantly berating for being a fool, using his goofy loud mouth to save the whole team, and Roland begging his forgiveness.)

But all his friends die or peel off. Leaving the incredibly rigid, taciturn dude alone, seeming to enforce his decision to go it by himself.

But Jake, and his multiple deaths, start to change things.

Again, the whole series, you think, is about Roland saving the multiverse.

But really, it’s about one man finding his humanity.

And how often he fails at it.

Anyway, I’m going way deep, but you’re starting to see why no studio exec has let this happen.

It’s too esoteric. Letting a kid die badly to teach a grown man the value of love.

With the advent of the new Dune movies, we’re finally seeing a franchise where the “hero” is discovered to be nothing of the kind.

Maybe that’s the wind that this keyhole needs. And if the franchise wasn't SO DAMN EXPENSIVE, maybe they’d say yes.

But there’s another problem.

b. It’s too damned tricky, production-wise

Staying true to the source material means doing shit that studio execs hate.

First, there’s structural concerns.

The Dark Tower has multiple timelines. There’s Roland’s present as an older man, then there’s his past, where you see him as a youth, learning some hard lessons.

Then there’s the various timelines that take place in the 60s, 70s and 80s in our world, to introduce the rest of his ka-tet.2

These tangled timelines are less a problem than they used to be, shows flash back and forth all the time now (Lost being the big example), so brief visits with Roland in his youth would be fine, up to a point.

But in the dead middle of the series, we hit Wizard and Glass and The Wind Through the Keyhole, extended flashbacks that take up the bulk of two books. The main story would need to screech to a halt to tell them.

No series is gonna want to ignore their main timeline for a whole season or whatever it would take to tell it.

Alternately, they’d have to really figure out a good way to juggle the flashbacks with the ongoing story. Which could probably be done, if they’re clever.

They could maybe spinoff the story into a whole different TV series running concurrently with the main one. Young Roland could run as the main story continues. Other shows have tried it, so it can maybe be done.

But, aside from the structural concerns, as I see it, there’s one giant fly in the production ointment.

And it’s Jake again.

Jake is 11. During the course of The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, and The Wastelands, he’s at his youngest. And he has to remain the same age during all three, it’s part of the story. He can’t show up in The Wastelands as a 13-year-old, his voice changed and a foot taller.

It is incredibly tough to shoot with young children, as the Harry Potter franchise has no doubt war stories about. The kids are not allowed to shoot for more than a few hours a day, they have to be fed, educated, given breaks, it can easily take twice as long to shoot a scene with a child as with an adult, even if the child nailed it on the first take.

And sure, once Jake re-enters the chat in The Wastelands, you’re probably OK to let him age up naturally. But by then, you’re almost halfway through the series.

Before that, it’s incredibly important that you get all of his scenes while he’s still at a certain age.

Which means filming out of order, as Peter Jackson did for the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Which means you have to plan faaaaar in advance, shooting scenes from the second and third book before you get anywhere near finishing the first book.

Which means you’re telling the studios that you need enough money and resources not just for one film or one series but multiple seasons of a series and multiple movies, all at once.

At least the first three seasons, if we’re talking TV show.

Maybe a studio would pay for three seasons of a show, in the hopes that it would be popular enough to last seven seasons or so. I don’t really see it, but weirder things have happened.

Well, okay John, but this is all fanboy shit. What if they didn’t shoot it all at once, but just went in order, and you sucked it up and just allowed that the kid will age, and some costs will have to be cut? Would you accept that to get a show?

Well, we already got a movie that made such compromises, and it was a letdown. And I don’t think a second letdown of that magnitude is anything to get excited about.

The Dark Tower, the original book series, isn’t perfect. There’s lots of room for somebody like Flanagan to figure out ways to make a TV series work with all these issues, and still make it outstanding.

Fingers crossed that I’m wrong, I guess.

Why didn’t you like the Dark Tower movie, ass?

Let me start with: I loved the idea of Matthew McConaughey as Randall Flagg. I figured any version of MM would be great, Dazed & Confused MM, Killer Joe MM, even Wolf of Wall Street MM.

Because McConaughey makes great choices, and usually, there’s a very naughty little devil on his shoulder, pushing him to go deeper and more insane.

That’s Randall Flagg in a nutshell, a funny, cruel trickster. Imagine MM wearing jeans and a denim jacket, no shirt, hair all messy and tangled, big shit-eating grin on his face, cigarette dangling from his lips.

Right there, Randall Flagg.

So I figured this role was perfect for him.

I’ll even go one further: much as I like Idris Elba, I think McConaughey could’ve played EITHER Flagg or Roland. Or BOTH. That’s how perfect I thought he was for the movie.

And then… he went and played it the one way I never thought MM would play it.

He played it totally straight.

No wink, no playfulness.

No MM in denim and cigarettes, it was him in a black suit.

And somehow, that just let all the air out of it.

Maybe he figured he’d already done the crazy guy thing too much. I don’t know.

That was the my biggest disappointment. It was not the only one.

The movie didn’t have a big enough budget to accommodate the scope.

And… they skipped the whole part where Roland had to sacrifice Jake.

Annd… they pretty much skipped over The Gunslinger.

Annnnd… well, you get the point.

It was like a Greatest Hits record by a one-hit wonder band. Maybe some good stuff, maybe some stuff you recognize, but mostly, stuff you scratch your head at.

So, that’s why.

Thankee-sai. Long days and pleasant nights.

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(I personally preferred Obsession, if you’re looking to land on one.)

That established, I now may rant unobstructed.

Entertainment is incredibly cyclical. What is touted as new is usually something old dressed in new clothes, or given a new paint job, or re-scored with a new soundtrack.

I’m not knocking this, this is the history of entertainment.

As your high school English teacher should’ve told you, “Romeo & Juliet” was an old story long before Shakespeare got his grubby mitts on it.

The Bible wasn’t the first telling of an almighty being in the clouds, much as some would like you to believe different. It had several rough drafts with characters named Apollo and Jupiter and Quetzalcōātl.

Stands to reason that the stories ABOUT the stories are also old, reskinned in the new.

“ARE SUPERHERO MOVIES DEAD?!” the headlines have asked, constantly, for twenty years.

That headline was old when Iron Man premiered.

Likewise, movies have been proclaimed dead since around the time television showed up.

So, when Deadline tells you that “BIG BUDGET MOVIES ARE BEING CRUSHED BY INDEPENDENT YOUTUBERS!” just be aware, this isn’t the first time you’ve been sold this particular brand of snake oil.

I’m happy for the success of Obsession and Backrooms. I had a good time watching The Mandalorian and Grogu in the theater, but I’m not the least bit surprised those two movies are giving it a solid ass-kicking.

Both are a much-needed injection of fresh blood.

Old ideas dressed up new.

Obsession is basically a modern take on love potions. Backrooms is a modern take on haunted houses.

And again, they’re great! This is the indie movie version of Barbenheimer from a couple years back, a one-two punch of amazing!

BUT…

The “media,” or whatever you want to call the nebulous mass of “they” that says stuff that gets kicked around the internet, wants you to believe that this is the NEW WAY. An amazing new breaking of ground.

Sorry, kids. This has all happened before, and will all happen again.1

Every decade or so, an independent horror movie comes along to “save” Hollywood. Halloween, Evil Dead, The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, to name a few.

And those are just in the horror space. This doesn’t even touch stuff like Easy Rider, El Mariachi, Clerks, the list goes on and on.

And they always get the same headline.

“BIG BUDGET MOVIES ARE BEING CRUSHED BY LOW BUDGET FILMMAKERS!”

And then these modern Cassandras pat themselves on the back for telling it like it is.

Take THAT, Hollywood!

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Until Dune 3 or Avengers: Doomsday rakes in a billion dollars, then suddenly, big studios know exactly what they’re doing again, and always did, you were just non-believers.

I’m hoping that this latest horror success will convince Hollywood to open up their wallets for a bunch of new, inexpensive ideas. I’ve been waiting for this awhile, because, like I say, this is the cycle, you could set your watch by it.

Hollywood decides to spend 100 million to make 100 movies.

If one of those movies hits a grand slam, they can make that money back easy. If several of those movies do well, they can make a tidy sum, over time.

But usually, if one of those movies makes a lot of money, then they decide, well, if we make these movies MORE expensive, the payoff could be bigger, right?

So they switch to spending 100 million to make 10 movies.

Maybe one pays off bigger, and then they go to the next logical conclusion.

100 million for one movie.

Then 200 million.

Etc.

And unless that movie makes a billion dollars, well, then they start freaking out.

Then an indie movie made for a million comes along, and we rewind back to one.

I’ve seen a version of this cycle at least three times since I’ve been interested in working in entertainment.

Trust me, if this is what I hope it is, then this is the part where things get good.

WARTCHIN

I bin wartchin’ a lot of late, some quick takes:

Widows Bay - Fun. Many folks really love this, I like it, mostly because of the actors, especially Matthew Rhys, Stephen Root, and Kate O’Flynn. My favorite so far is “Your Baggage,” focused on Flynn’s character, who is a fun Final Girl who nobody believes survived a serial killer.

For All Mankind/Star City - The further into the present the show moves, the less connected I feel to it. I’m curious where they go with it. Star City, the FAM spinoff, showing Russia’s version of this alternate universe is interesting, but grim, grim, grim. Which makes sense, it’s Russia in the 60s.

Scream 7 - The cold open is great, but you see much of it in the trailer. The rest of the movie is solid. I’m always a little disappointed by the reveals, but probably because I feel like the franchise sets up good meta ideas, but doesn’t go all the way with them.

Are We Good? - Marc Maron documentary, if you like WTF or his stand-up, this is a great look into a person recovering from grief (he lost his partner at the beginning of the pandemic).

READIN

Are Snakes Necessary? - Brian De Palma, the director, wrote a book with Susan Lehman. I’m always curious what the contribution ratio is with an A-list director and a co-writer - another example, “Heat 2” with Michael Mann & Meg Gardiner. Both very testosterone-driven directors, and both chose female co-writers. Reminds me of Patton Oswalt’s take on male directors and female editors.

Anyway, the book wasn’t as De Palma-y as I would’ve hoped. I think De Palma, I think unhinged batshit insanity, this was mildly crazy.

Red Riding: 1974 - I liked the Andrew Garfield movie version, and I’ve lately become fascinated with book trilogies and quartets and cycles and cantos and however else writers lump multiple books together. Probably because I have some ideas of my own.

I’m about halfway through, the style of the book is capital-B Bleak. But the movie was pretty faithful so far, we’ll see how it goes.

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Me mum loved Neil Diamond.

This was something I rolled my eyes at when I was a teenager.

For her, it made perfect sense. They were around the same age, he got famous when she was in her early 20s. And she was hardly the only person on Earth who thought he was the bee’s knees. So she had nothing to explain.

Not that it stopped her eldest son from making fun of her for it.

In my jagoff 80s kid estimation, Neil Diamond was lame sauce. The only Diamond I cared about was Mike D(iamond) from the Beastie Boys.

It rolled off mom’s back. She was used to her son shitting on her musical tastes. And fuckin’ good for her, who was I to tell someone their beloved musician sucked? Fuck teen John in his stupid nose.

Really, all that meant was sometimes she’d play his records in the living room. Again, good for her. And hey, not to totally belittle mini-me, I would mostly listen with her and not be an outstanding prick about it. I probably even sang along at some point.

I’m sure I told myself I was singing ironically. Cuz that’s not douchy, right?

Neil Diamond was on tour at some point in the late 80s or early 90s, and mom went with her friends to a concert in Phoenix. This was already a big deal, because she didn’t go to rock and/or roll shows very much.

But her biggest indulgence?

She came back with a CONCERT T-SHIRT.

She’d never done that before. That was a thing people with too much money did.

But egged on by her friends, they’d all bought shirts (some even MATCHING, peoples). It tickled her to no end that she went to a concert and purchased merch.

She wore it proudly.

Even then, with my Gen X cynicism at its proudest, I was beginning to feel the early wisps of empathy for my folks. I wouldn’t fully realize for a few years that “Ohhh! I get it! My parents are human, too!” but there was something about mom’s genuine joy that started to crack my hardened anti-Diamond exterior.

How could I hate a guy who inspired such unreserved fandom from my mother?

I started coming around.

Not all at once. But, y’know, everybody loves “Sweet Caroline,” so that was easy enough to give another listen.

And “Cracklin’ Rosie,” that’s a good one.

“Red Red Wine,” of course got a new life in the 80s, thanks to UB40, so that was okay, too.

And then there was a cover of “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” (look, they can’t all be winners) in Pulp Fiction, so Diamond started getting more unironic attention.

And then, it became a case of frequency illusion; it seemed like Diamond songs were popping up everywhere, especially in movies and TV.

And then I had my revelation that my parents were also human, and at that point, I just went ahead and bought a couple of Neil D albums to enjoy for myself, cuz it reminded me of mom, and he was actually way cooler than I’d given credit for.

Now, of course, whenever I hear Neil Diamond, I think of me dear ol’ mum.

And if I want to remember my mom with a happy twinkle in her eye, I put on Neil D.

It never fails to summon up an image of mom smiling in her concert T.

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My then-roommate Micah and I were driving down Highland in his little Mitsubishi Mirage hatchback into Hollywood, and Micah was telling me about this great internet site that I needed to check out.

“It’s got every book, dude. LITERALLY, every book. If it’s in print, you can get it there, and at cost, not with this corporate bookstore mark-up bullshit.”

This was, what, ‘95?

I love books. So of course, I had to check this place out. Cheap books for less? That’s my life’s dream!

And it was as good as advertised. I was able to get books within a week that I’d been hounding down for years.

And not just books! CDs! Movies! Any kind of media, right there, for the clicking and buying! The only limitation was how much change you had jingling in your jeans.

Naturally, I ran my mouth far and wide about this amazing site.

I’m not saying between Micah and I that we single-handedly brought Amazon to life. There’s a reason it caught on. This site really was the answer to a dream, too good to be true.

But now, we’re seeing the results of that.

No, I don’t proselytize it anymore. It doesn’t need me. It broke off the leash years ago.

Sadly, it’s still the best game in town for cheap books and media, delivered quickly to your doorstep.

Don’t come at me bro, you know it’s true. What, you’re gonna stroll over to Barnes & Noble, hope they have your obscure little book from thirty years ago, and pay full boat?

Pfffff.

If you’re lying, it’s only to yourself.

My only defense is, back then, there was this thing called “competition.”

The idea of letting a company become a monopoly was still dirty in those days.

There were a zillion new e-retail sites trying to compete with Amazon. It led to about five, maybe ten years of great deals for the consumer.

I mean, I was buying DVDs as they came off the printer for like five or ten bucks, easily fifty percent or more of full retail. There were new sites every day just giving shit away to try and get you onboard.

But unlike Amazon, those sites didn’t have deep pockets and patient venture capitalists, willing to wait a decade to reap the benefits.

So, we stole their products for almost nothing, then laughed them out of the business when they asked us to pay full retail.

And Amazon quietly took over everything.

Look, I try my best to support local bookstores. What few there are. I realize that I and people like me were the ones who let good intentions and less money lead the world down the garden path.

Remember when Wal*Mart was the bad guy?

And you were like, shop at this other place!

And the person you were telling this to said, what other place?

And you looked around, and realized, there was no other place anymore?

Well, in my attempt to make karmic restitution, as you may have noticed, I’m posting photos and links to local Los Angeles book sellers that I love to frequent.

(Some are probably corporate-owned, either secretly or overtly. My only defense is, these are the ones I know of that aren’t B&N.)

All of them have more than just books - Vroman’s, for example, has frequent author readings,1 and an actual newsstand! Remember those?

Remember magazines?

Anyway, if you’re a local, you should give these, or one of the many other smaller stores, some of your cash, if nothing else, to show Bezos that the billionaires don’t own us all, yet.

Yes, I know they do, I’m trying to build morale, here…

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In a very paraphrased nutshell, it talks about how most of mankind’s great strides have been made out of sheer boredom, and smartphones are killing that boredom, and thus, stifling innovation and growth.

He’s not wrong.

Buuuut, let’s be honest, he’s glossing over the truth a little bit.

We’ve always let ourselves be sedated by whatever was at hand.

Smartphones are just the newest version of things sedating us.

One of the things he says is that TV wasn’t any good back in the day, and thus, not as much a distraction.

I disagree.

Not about the quality. TV wasn’t as good as it is now. There were far less choices, and of those choices, precious few were good. There were some gems - I mean, “The Twilight Zone” is still one of the best shows ever made, and it’s over sixty years old.

And that’s not even my point. My point is, it didn’t matter how bad TV was: we still watched it. By the hour. Just like people watch stupid TikToks now, by the hour.

The complaint that “kids today are being turned into zombies” is old sauce.

Before phones, if you were bored, you played video games.

Before video games, you watched TV.

Before TV, movies.

Before movies, the radio.

Before radios, books.

(During all those, booze and illegal drugs. Chemicals are a great way to relieve boredom.)

And again, most of it not great, some of it wonderful, but mostly, all anesthesia.

And still is, no matter how much great stuff there is out there.

(Yes, I think reading books is a fine way to get your brain working, and can lead to innovation. But it also is a great way to shut out the world. Especially if instead of doing something creative or helpful, you read.)

He’s not wrong that boredom proceeds innovation. I think he’s just forgetting how easy it is to get your dopamine, even before smartphones.

(And I don’t really think he’s forgotten it, he’s said that very thing elsewhere, I think he’s making a point by deliberately not mentioning it.)

All that said about where I disagree, I wholly agree that boredom is an amazing way to create new things.

But you have to be willing to let the boredom take you there, rather than reaching for your phone, or your book. Or doing something helpful or useful. Because let’s face it, sometimes the way you kill boredom is to do things that need to be done, but don’t move the needle whatsoever.

Sometimes boredom is forced on you, like in school.

Or prison.

Or a job.

We’ve gotten great innovations and works of art from people daydreaming when they were supposed to be studying or working.

So for creative-types, or those who want to be innovators, you either have to grab those moments of boredom when they occur in nature and squeeze them to the fullest, or create them yourself.

Meaning, you have to give your mind the opportunity to wander.

Example: I love music and audiobooks. When I’m driving to and from work, nothing is better for plucking up my spirits than listening to either.

I prefer audiobooks, because I love being transported elsewhere when I’m stuck in traffic.

But sometimes, I put aside the audiobook, and listen to music. Because music is less directly engaging. If you zone out on an audiobook, you miss things you want to hear. So I stay attentive.

Music allows my mind to wander. I’ve done a great deal of writing and creating in my car, listening to music, because my mind inevitably starts going somewhere else. And I’m not “missing” the music the same way I’d miss something in an audiobook.

I’ve also gotten a little better at sometimes just sitting and not filling the time. Not a lot. The world doesn’t seem to allow anyone to just sit and dream much. But I’m beginning to see what David Lynch was on about, with meditation and such.

My daughter takes surf lessons. I try to watch her, but she often gets far enough out that I can’t distinguish her from the other surfers. So I end up staring at the ocean. And usually, notions and ideas occur to me. I’ve written more than one newsletter watching the ocean. Part of this one, in fact.

We live in a place where if we go into our backyard and just sit, we can get a very relaxing view, hills in the background, and every so often, I like to go and zone out, whilst sipping coffee or the soda of my choice, to try and chase creativity.

I do have to be careful - not all boredom is equal, and sometimes, giving your mind room to wander just lets you think not-helpful thoughts like how to get revenge on your enemies, or how many donuts you think you can eat before you pass out or throw up.

But I definitely feel the difference of life after smart phones.

Once upon a time, boredom was just part of the natural order. It inspired people to do stuff to fill the hours, which I think has contributed to hustle culture, to overwork, to do anything to not experience those long, boring hours we felt as kids.

And I do think we’ve lost something, with every minute now filled.

So I’m sloooooooowly trying not to pick up the damn phone every time I feel that twinge of boredom.

(Or, if I do pick up the phone, force myself to open a writing app and at least do something creative.)

Okay, one last question, and we can all be on our way -

Is it irony that I based a whole essay on how we shouldn’t be scrolling by starting with a video I saw whilst scrolling?

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It got me thinking.

I’ve written before that when I was finally allowed to read King for Freshman English, I didn’t go halfway. So, when looking at this list, you have to understand, that in the 1987-1988 school year, I read almost every single book the man had written to that point in a white-hot blast (Tommyknockers came out soon after, but in hardback, which was too rich for my blood back then). So, for a good chunk of books on this list, the experience of reading them blends. There was just never a day I wasn’t reading one of his books.

And, believe it or not, I still haven’t read every last word of King’s. Part of that is happenstance. Part of it is, I like having books of his unread, so that I always have something new from him to look forward to. So, there’s stuff that could one day replace these on the list.

But something makes me doubt it. Things hit different when you’re a certain age, and these slammed me right between the eyes, probably at the exact right moment I needed them.

20. Misery

    A lot of people’s number one, but I gots to start some place, and when I read this as a 14-year-old, in that initial blast of King, this was the first one I actually had notes on. I don’t remember what they were. That it maybe was too wordy. More likely, my teacher had thought I was being too lazy in my gushing critiques of his books, and I had to think of something.

19. The Bachman Books

    I know, they’re four different novels, but I read them all under one cover, one right after the other, so they were like Night Shift or Different Seasons for me. And I mean, they were about the same length as the stories in Different Seasons or Four Past Midnight, so he only has himself to blame.
    I was fascinated at the idea of not only writing under a pen name, but deliberately writing in a different style or voice. I can see why he was eventually outed, because aroundThinner, the voices started to blend more, but these early books are rougher and angrier than King usually went. Especially Rage - I read Rage and Catcher in the Rye very close together in high school, and they seemed like flips of one another, though Rage hit a little closer to home. I’ve always thought it was a shame he let it fall out of print, but it’s his book, and I get it, sometimes, it ain’t worth the hassle of people getting on your dick about it.

18. 11/22/63

    The most recent on the list. My daughter was freshly born when this came out, so I was starting to experience new feelings and worries, and this felt like just the right story for those years: the new hope vs. the fear of what was coming, and how much you can (or should) try and affect that.

17. The Green Mile
    Like Mr. Van Horn Jr., I was one of the lucky so-and-so’s that read this book as the six-part cliffhanger chapbooks, and I loved it. A unique experience, and I was disappointed he never really went that direction again. Except maybe with the internet parsing of “The Plant.” Other authors copied him for a couple of years, and I honestly thought about buying their books, just to keep the format alive. But back then, I had to be more mercenary with my money, so didn’t end up going that way.
    And then the format died, so I failed everyone.

16. Christine
    I know this’ll seem weird when talking about a killer car story, but this was one of the first books I remember where the perspective changes mid-way. Like, the hero is injured, so he goes into hibernation for awhile, and the story switches from first- to third-person. My mind was actually a little blown. Nowadays, that ain’t nuthin’, but back then, that seemed like a wild magic trick. Like he’d broken a rule, which made him seem that more punk rock.

    

15. It

    Yeah, the kid orgy scene is a little nutso. I was only a little older than the kids were in the book when I read it, and it seemed insane even then.
    But, this was the book where I finally caught King’s trick: that the human antagonists are as scary, if not scarier, than the monster. This would be my first step down the path some authors might call “learning characterization.”

    One of his better book covers, too.

14. Cujo
    The book that taught me that “horror” didn’t have to mean “supernatural.” I love that the town of Castle Rock seems haunted by evil, and at first, the book seems to hint that the deceased serial killer from The Dead Zone will be possessing Cujo… but no, just garden-variety rabies.

    And, naturally, a creepy sex-stalker that’s worse than the dog, cuz the dog didn’t have a choice.

13. The Colorado Kid
    Love this one because it’s all about stories and how they’re told. Also, my intro to Hard Case Crime. A shaggy dog tale that warns us from the jump that you’ll never get answers (though, us Dark Tower obsessives can probably guess the answer). I know he’ll likely never give us the other side of this one, but I’d be curious to know how the poor titular character ended up how he did.

12. The Dark Tower 4.5: The Wind Through the Keyhole
    We get to our first (official) “Dark Tower” entry, and certainly not the only. Once the series was over, I was sad to think we’d see no more. And then, King surprised us with this, the spiritual sequel to Wizard and Glass, and it was just delightful. I love the DT books when we get to see flashbacks to Roland and his friends in their youth, before the world got darker and “moved on.”
    And that was before our own world got darker and moved on.

7. Carrie - Salems Lot - The Shining - Different Seasons - Night Shift
   Yeah, a five-way tie, because I can’t separate them in my mind. I read them all together in a manner of weeks, and it was like reading the early Marvel Comics in those old anthologies, a whole universe seemed to open up. If you forced me at gunpoint to order them, it would change from day to day. Call it a cop-out, like the Bachman Books entry, but it is what it is.

6. The Dead Zone
   Also in that initial burst of books, but it gets extra points for how thematically great the story is, and how eerie and prescient it turned out, predicting a politician who just did not give a fuck. Most politicians are greedy, manipulative cockroaches, but I also believe that some of them, at heart, do actually care about doing their jobs, and serving our country.
   Greg Stillson aggressively did not. Everything was about him.
   Then America went and got its own Greg Stillson. And it’s as scary as advertised.
   So this book wins for not only writing about a psychic, but being actually psychic.

5. Firestarter
   The first. The one that started it for me, that got my imagination revving, that set me down the path. A tween girl with pyrokenetic powers on the run with her father - it was the comic books I loved in my youth in novel form. Every page blew me away. It changed how I looked at writing. The love I bear it is pure and unreasoning. The only reason it’s this far down this list is because I recently listened to again as an older man, and was able to see why it wasn’t as good as the others. But if we were going on nostalgia and vibes alone, this is The One. It is… precious to me.
   (And, not for nuthin’, nowadays it reminds me of meself and me own daughter.)

4. The Stand
   Another that’s many people’s number one. A story that wrings you out. And like much like The Dead Zone, eerie in what it saw coming for America. When Covid hit, this suddenly looked less like a tall tale than an instruction manual. It was also the last time anyone was able to force him to trim his work down. (I actually like both versions, but I started with the “Theatrical Cut,” so to speak, and I think there is something to its briefer length.)

3. On Writing
   The only non-fiction on this list, and more important to me than most of his fiction - as other writers have opined, its inspirational, its practical, its useful, its, its, its… basically, for writers, it’s essential. I’ve read it many times, listened to King read it many times. Do I agree with everything he says, every rule he lays down? Of course not. But again, it’s all in the charge it brings me. It makes me remember why writing, both as an entertainment and a calling, is awesome.

2. The Dark Tower Book 1: The Gunslinger
   I’ve written before, this was my second wind on King, and in many ways, foundational for my own writing. As important to me as Lord of the Rings or The Bible to other people.
   (The original version, not the rewritten one. I like the new version fine, I get why he did it, but the original is better. Rougher. More brutal.)

1. The Dark Tower Book 4: Wizard and Glass
   If you read my previous writings on King, you probably saw this coming. My favorite of the Dark Tower, and my favorite of King’s. It has everything I love about his writing in a twisted tale of Roland’s youth, the turning (and burning) point before he started down the path to becoming the dark anti-hero we met in The Gunslinger. It also features one of my favorite characters, Eddie Dean, getting to show why Ka’s Fool is as essential to the Ka-tet as any of them,1 as well as highlighting his twinner, Cuthbert, who I always wanted to see more of. And it managed to have a satisfactory conclusion to the years-long cliffhanger created by Book 3.
   Now, if he’d only show us the Battle of Jericho Hill, I can die happy…

It is accomplished. Now it is cast in stone. Let it be known.

STORIES…

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If you’re fan of George V. Higgins, author of The Friends of Eddie Coyle or Cogan’s Trade, you might catch the inspiration.

You c’n click the pitcher to get up in it:

And whilst you’re at it, why not celebrate three years of this here Substack by checking out some of my other bon mots?

And Hell Followed Him

Impulse Kill

Dirt to Dirt

Creepy Paperback

The Coming of Krad Thunderloin

STORIES…

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And yet this summer, Coyote vs. Acme comes to a theater near you, acquired (or licensed, or I don’t know what-all) by a different company, to take all the risk, and… perhaps?… reap the monetary windfall.

Guess “forever” and “deleted” don’t mean what they thought it meant.

Anyway, I bitched loud and long about it, so now I gots to step up, as a man does, and go see the thing in a theater to prove how wrong WB was.

I mean, I’d do it for the schadenfreude alone, let alone, it might even be a funny show. I don’t need many excuses to go see a movie in a theater. I’m Gen X, bruh, the movie theater was our church. It’s not a sadness or a chore for me.

And still, Coyote’s twin sister, Batgirl: The Motion Picture sits on a hard drive somewhere, Cinderella waiting for a fairy godmother to grant her freedom.

I assume we’ll see it in good time. WB showed what it was about. Even they can’t let a completed movie sit on the shelf indefinitely, tax write-off or no.

No, no, you can’t trick me anymore, don’t bother.

Star Wars, the “original version,” the one Lucas hates, where Han shoots first, and Greedo does not yell “Macclunky!” will be back in theaters next year. I thought Disney would have the grace to wait til Lucas was dead, but I guess they figure they’ve waited ten gotdamn years, and he’s still above ground, they ain’t gonna leave money on the table any longer.

Batgirl will be with us soon. Either in theaters, streaming, a limited-edition 4K blu-ray pressed in solid gold, or a single Betamax-only tape, whatever. It’ll come around eventually. You can go to one of those betting sites and make book on that.

I might be dead by then, but it still counts.

So, my business teacher at USC film school has been proven correct again - there’s no way a completed movie doesn’t get released, if there’s no legal or physical impediment.

No, “good taste” or “quality” isn’t one of those impediments. WB claims it was.

They’re lying.🤥

Honestly, there’s something reassuring in that. That no matter what some conglomerate says, if a movie is made, and people want to see it, it’ll escape custody one day.

Now, I’m sure somebody out there will sit back with their arms crossed and say, “Fool! You fell right into their trap, like a sheep. They played the long con with you; they wanted you to pay money to see the movie, and now you will, like a sucker.”

Oh, man. You got me, imaginary antagonist who lives rent-free in my head. I’m literally going to pay money to see a movie I might like, that I was probably going to pay for before all this happened.

Damn. When will I learn?

And sure, this is all one big, long marketing campaign. WB finally got the memo, and decided that splashy billboards, trailers, Super Bowl spots and breakfast cereal tie-ins weren’t worth the expense, and a years-long shadow campaign that only 1% of the population gives half a shit about, THAT’S what gonna sell the tickets.

Ya-huh.

And again, I ask in a world where irony no longer exists, because reality is too stupid: is it irony where a movie satirizing corporate greed and malfeasance is tamped down by a corporation, only to be rescued by the whiff of money?

Gonna be funny if the movie is a hit.

But I wonder, now that it’s got the whiff of tainted goods.

Sure, there’s the suckers like me, who’ll plop down money to see if it was any good. But it was never bound to make a shit-ton of money. Doubtless, that was what started this whole mess, some marketing drone put a survey up on FaceTok, “Hey fellow kids, how many of you are exited about the new Looney Tunes flick starring Movie Star John Cena™?!” and got disappointing results.

Anyhoo, guess we’ll revisit this topic this summer, when the movie finally hits theaters, and I can write a whole column and say, “Huh. That was kinda funny.”

But I’ll say this: the anti-corporate humor in the trailer tickles me already.

A-READIN’

I finished that Jordan Harper’s “Last King of California,” good stuff.

Now I’m sorta in-betwixt books, and while bouncing’ betwixt a few short story collections, I bin readin’ mostly funnybooks. I tried out that “Task Force Z” from DC, and it was fun, but I lost interest. See, the whole idea is, a bunch of Batman villains, Bane, Man-Bat, etc. got kilt somehow, and the guvment is using evil chemicals to bring them back to life. And then, they have the similarly-resurrected Red Hood/Jason Todd leading these zombies as a Suicide-Squad-esque band to do… stuff.

Well, there’s two problems with it: One, the whole notion of putting Bane and Man-Bat in a comic is great, except, I want to see those characters and how they interact, not zombie versions that grunt and eat flesh and little else. At that point, you might as well just slot in faceless zombies.

Also, each of the characters dies in multiple issues. It kinda wipes the threat of failure off the map. And in a genre that already plays too loosey-goosey with death, it’s a little too far to draw me in.

It’s a fun idea, and I enjoyed it for four or five issues, I just kinda fell off. You might love it.

STORIES…

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I started writing it during the WGA strike of 2023, by happenstance more than design. So to cellybrate, let’s talk about how the Hollywood environment that precipitated that strike has spiraled since then!

Couple years ago, I wrote a piece called “Extinction Burst,” in which I opined that America might be going through such a thing.

A couple months later, in what I assume is a case of two genius minds thinking alike (since I’m fairly certain he don’t read my shit, and I hadn’t heard of him before I sawr it), this dude made much the same commentary, to what I also assume is a vastly wider audience:

You can read muh post to get the gag, but gist is: something increases drastically (the “burst”) before it dies (the “extinction”).

Usually the phrase applies to children with behavioral issues.

But I got to thinking:

Did Hollywood go through an extinction burst, and we just didn’t know it at the time?

Follow:

Pre-2020, the era of streaming was picking up, and theaters were flagging some in box office receipts.

However, in terms of pure product: movies, TV shows, etc, there was more than ever. Netflix, Amazon and other streamers were buying shitloads of shows and movies.

And from my pov, post-production people were getting more work than ever before. It seemed the streets were truly lined with gold.

There were curveballs and warning signs: production was leaving Los Angeles, migrating to other states, and, notably, overseas. This was not new.

There has always been a certain number of people working in entertainment. Let’s just say, for easy math, the amount of pre-streaming boom entertainment work was 100%.2

Then came the streaming wars, and let’s say that increased to 115%.

Then the pandemic hit, and briefly, shows shut down. Jobs were harder to come by for a moment.

And then, a weird thing happened - production exploded.

(At least, it did from my pov. This is all relative.)

There was more post-production than I’d ever seen. Some folks were, shall we say, “juggling” two jobs3, there was so much of it to be had. I watched new editors being birthed from the assistant ranks with alarming rapidity.

So let’s say that number peaked around 130%.

Then, it all screeched to a halt.

Strikes, pandemic blues, politics, world events - everything seemed to blow up at once.4

That number greatly reduced, practically overnight.

To say, 75%.

(It might honestly be as low as 50%.)

What I’m getting at is, the ecosystem, which had blown up to 150% its size, suddenly squeezed down to maybe half its original size.

The music stopped. And many people were left without chairs.

And the production world has been smaller and grimmer since, with 130% of workers fighting for 50-75% space.

So… was that 130% a weird outlier?

Or an extinction burst?

If it’s the former, then there’s hope! Production may one day increase again, and perhaps, surpass all previous levels.

It’s happened before.

But, if it was an extinction burst?

Well, then many of us are in trouble, with capital T, and that rhymes with P, and I don’t know how to work “pool” into this.

And the best part is, we won’t know probably ‘til it’s long been hindsight.

(Yeah, I know Hollywood isn’t exactly the same as children [or grown-ups] throwing tantrums, but…

Well, second thought…)

On a happier note…

I recently read “Coffin Moon” by Keith Rossen, which was good, and “Between Two Fires” by Christopher Buehlman, which was great. Both of them I heard of first from Joe Hill’s Substack, which is also a hoot.

Former is a 70s vampire story of a grumpy bartender defending a teen girl, latter is a medieval tale of a grumpy knight defending a teen girl, as angels and demons battle for humanity. I love grumpy main characters, and “Fires” was tops.

Now reading Jordan Harper’s “Last King of California,” in anticipation of his new novel coming out, because I also love crime stories with meth. Sweet, sweet meth.

Harper’s writing reminds me of Cormac McCarthy, stuffing a lot of imagery into very few words. A lot of sentences are little jewels of profane poetry.

My favorite line so far, about a character trying to kill time while he nervously awaits an event, “He jerks off medicinally.”

I’ve liked everything I’ve read by Harper thus far, with his short story collection “Love and Other Wounds” being a highlight, but I think this is my favorite of his.

Also rewartched Damon Lindeloff’s “Watchmen” (still good), caught up on “The Pitt” (also good), and finally watched Dennis Lehane’s limited series “Black Bird” (pretty good; maybe an episode too long).

Fer movies, I wartched the John Hillcoat-directed crime thriller “Triple 9,” which was solid, and “Project Hail Mary,” which was great. I listened to the audiobook last year, which I also enjoyed, but the movie did the magic trick of needle-dropping one of my favorite songs, “Pata Pata” by Miriam Makeba,5 and after that, I was smiling the whole movie long. Click on the link to listen, you’ll be glad you did.

STORIES…

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So for you new folk, I’ll throw out somethin’ fer meself - “The Hold Up” podcast, where my partner/fellow TV editor John Longino and I bring in a movie we haven’t seen in years (or in this case, seen at all), watch and decide, does it… hold up?

This episode, we have author and King Kong expert Ray Morton guesting, he brought Miloš Forman’s “Hair,” and man, this whole experience was a delight for me from top to bottom.

So if you need some positivity and music in your life, click below to listen for freebies.

Now, let’s talk TV.

We’re in a weird era of TV right now. Most of the shows now, if they were on before the double-aughts, would be some of the best shit you’ve ever seen.

But compared to the last thirty-odd years, they’re just… pretty good.

Still, believe it or not, there’s some recent dark horse shows out there that deserve your attention.

There’s great shows you’ve likely already heard the bells rung for, “Pluribus,” “The Bear,” “Slow Horses,” “Severance,” “The Pitt,” “Andor.”

I can vouch for all these. You should watch those first, if you haven’t already.

But today, I will sing the song for a quintet of shows that maybe haven’t gotten as much attention. Those shows that get dropped on Netflix or HBO or Hulu without so much as a “by your leave,” whatever that means.

(Most of these are crime-related, as that’s where my heart tends to pull, with a sci-fi thriller in there for good measure. Not too many lusty period pieces, if that’s your style. You’ll need my wife to start a Substack for that.)

(And yes, most of these are dude-led. There are many great ladies in them, but these are mostly tales poking at masculine tropes. Again, see “Pluribus” or any of them others for some incredible lady-led stories.)

Task (HBO)

Starring Mark Ruffalo, who, for a guy who used to play young romantic leads, is doing a bang-up job of playing weary old burnouts.

Logline: an ex-priest leads an FBI task force to capture a smash-and-grab crew robbing members of a biker gang.

Who wouldn’t want to see that?

It starts pretty small, with Ruffalo being stuck with a motley crew of various law enforcement. Part of the first episode is dedicated to him having to physically clean up the shitty house they’re given as an HQ all by hisself.

But the crew they’re tracking escalates matters when they accidentally kill members of the gang they were robbing, leaving their target’s son orphaned. Not wanting to kill the kid, they kidnap him.

I’m not sure why, but opinions are largely divided on this one. I held off watching it because the reactions were so muted. But I thought it was a great crime caper, and it has a number of thoughtful subplots, including with Ruffalo’s family, which is played against the heist crew leader’s own family struggles.

Everyone has good and bad about them here. There’s a couple straight-up villains, but mostly, the characters are nuanced and keep you guessing.

And Martha Plimpton is GREAT as Ruffalo’s boss. Goonies never say die, and I didn’t even like that movie all that much.

Yeah, I said it.

The Lowdown (Hulu)

Ethan Hawke. Keith David. Jeanne Tripplehorne. Peter Dinklage. Kyle MacLachlan. Tim Blake Nelson. Tracy Letts. Tom McCarthy.

The most Elmore Leonard-feeling crime show not written by Leonard.

Hawke stars as a bookstore-owner and investigative journalist who everybody beats the shit out of. Keith David helps him out, trying to solve a suicide that might really be a murder.

It’s a crackerjack, with everyone giving wonderful, funny, distinctive performances. And it’s a real love letter to pulp fiction and lurid old crime books. Jim Thompson is name-checked almost immediately, and it goes from there.

If you want just a taste, watch the Dinklage episode. You might be a touch behind, story-wise, but it’s mostly a standalone about the bizarre anti-friendship between the two, and Dinklage is as funny as any of his Tyrion days.

Black Rabbit (Netflix)

Jason Bateman and Jude Law star as brothers, Law as the successful, stable one, and Bateman, for once, as the down-in-the-dirt fuck-up.

Law is the owner of a hip restaurant, the Black Rabbit, about to expand his empire. Bateman, a petty grifter and gambler, rolls into NYC to basically screw up his brother’s life.

At first, it’s the typical, oh, the screw-up is dragging the good one down, but you pretty quick start to realize, both these fools kind of deserve each other.

The story is fairly standard; the acting and the dialogue are crackling. Law is incredibly charming, natch. Bateman is always a favorite of mine, there’s something about his personal intensity that just makes him extremely watchable to me.

And usually, he’s the straight arrow, so seeing him greased up and lowdown is delightful.

Dark Matter (Apple)

Okay, hang on: Joel Edgerton plays Jason, a science teacher with a wife and a son. Their lives are decent, middle-class, not terribly exciting.

And then, a duplicate of Jason knocks him out, locks him in a giant metal cube, and goes on to steal his life.

It turns out, Jason was a genius inventor who was on the verge of discovering parallel universes, but he gave up riches and fame when his girlfriend got pregnant.

But in another life, he didn’t give it up. He turned his back on his girlfriend, became the Elon Musk of his universe, and opened up a portal to another dimension.

And then discovered that he wished he had the life he didn’t choose.

So he takes it, leaving “our” Jason trapped as a rich, wifeless CEO in another universe.

But all our Jason wants is all he’s ever wanted: to get back to his wife and kid.

(Wife played by Jennifer Connelly, so you get the “why” of it.)

Chaos ensues, and gets incredibly complicated, but if you’re into sci-fi, parallel universes/multiverses, and actors playing variants of the same character, boy are you in luck.

Dept Q (Netflix)

In true modern form, I hadn’t even heard of this until I saw it listed on another Substack, and gave it a try. It’s the bees’ knees.

A British cop living in Scotland gets badly wounded on the job. He comes back to work, but because he’s acerbic and condescending, nobody wants to work with him, and his boss sticks him on a special unit… a cold case task force that has been given a huge budget to solve dead cases, a budget that his boss immediately jacks for her own department, and gives them nothing.

It reminded me of some of my favorite parts of “The Wire” and “Slow Horses” (and thus, “Task,” which also borrows from both), when a crew of misfits is thrown together to get them out of the way, and they end up forging a strong team. Matthew Goode, ol’ Ozymandius hisself, plays Morcke, the Brit cop so broken and angry, he offends even himself.

I know it’s a trope by now, but I especially liked Goode’s “assistant,” Akram, played by Alexej Manvelov, a soft-spoken but incredibly competent man from Syria who used to be “something like a cop.” When Morcke asked if he worked for the good guys or the bad guys, Akram tells him when he figures out which was which, to let him know.

Even Morcke, who doesn’t think anyone is as smart or talented as he is, begins to realize how incredibly “competant” this guy is.

There’s a mystery to be solved, obviously, and I won’t go into deets, cuz it’s better to discover, but the real joy is in watching the characters and their relationships. Again, not the newest thing ever, but I always love when a grumpy main character makes sliiiiiight adjustments to their personality, influenced by their companions.

Oh! I buried the lede. This is written by Scott Frank, who wrote “The Queens Gambit,” and a bizillion other great movies.

Okay, go forth and view, and report back. Or, suggest your own favs. I’m always hungry for MORE.

STORIES…

Click the titles to get at muh stories:

Good Manners

Whiskey Dick

Blowtorch Blues

Mob Dick

Chilton’s Hands

Bastards of a Lesser God

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