Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Sunday, June 7, 2020
When things return to normal
Smooth BBC liars lull me to sleep at night, an old habit.
But I hate waking up to communists on NPR. This morning it was TED radio hour, a billionaire early investor in Amazon. No, no, not good enough to give away his own loot. The only way to end income disparity, he said, was to take away everyone's wealth, a 50% tax on income and capital gains. Those who earn less than $100K to be paid time-and-a-half for 40 hours a week, a $20 minimum wage. Big round of applause from the Stanford social warrior TED audience.
What do rioters and antifa want? Destruction and looted luxury goods. Run the police ragged and attack them with rocks and fireworks. Next it will be snipers, like the guy who killed five cops at a Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas. Bad joke on Chicago, hiring the black chief of police who resigned his do-nothing job as top cop in Dallas. Not to be outdone in symbolic idiocy, Dallas hired a black female police chief. The murder rate in both cities increased.
George Floyd? - a dangerous felon with a long rap sheet for armed robbery and assault. He resisted arrest, too doped up to talk sense, a giant that took four cops to wrangle. Did they find a gun in his car? Crack, meth, PCP, or heroin? There was a hostile crowd to watch. No wonder they called for back-up in bulletproof vests. An official autopsy showed no airway injury, no neck injuries. George Floyd tore away in a fentanyl-amphetamine "speedball" stumble. Cops knew he was seriously stoned, held him down, waited for EMS to arrive.
"Universal condemnation!" Hannity proclaims, silencing debate. "He was a Christian man!" Metaxas yells. "No justice, no peace!" mobs of brick throwing protestors cry. In Chicago they didn't need prepositioned pallets of bricks and fire accelerants like Minneapolis, New York, and Washington DC. Looters carried bowling balls, baseball bats, and long handle shovels to smash windows in downtown Chicago, with 132 Chicago cops injured by black rioters.
200 NYPD cops injured, 40 squad cars damaged. 114 District cops and U.S. Park Police injured defending the White House. Every major and minor city in America looted and burned. 75 million white people cowering at home, forbidden to work. Target abandoning 105 looted, boarded up stores. CVS shut locations in 20 states. WalMart closing 100 stores. No fire and casualty insurance payouts for civil strife. Cops in Altanta fired for arresting black agitators. Cops in Buffalo and the Bronx run over by cars. A Vegas cop shot in the head point blank.
Our nation is dying.
Tom Gresham has the right take on it. Antifa is an organized assault funded by Democrats. Don't get involved. Cops can't tell if you're a good guy. They can't see the halo on your head. If antifa rioters try to pull you out of your car, use the skinny right pedal and floor it. If you have no other choice, windows being broken out, light 'em up. Tom carries a double stack automatic, like police do, plenty of ammo to deal with multiple assailants. Antifa thugs are equipped with weapons and firebombs. They shot cops in three states. Don't be a victim.
I hope the military can contain China, Russia, and Iran, virus or no virus. Our adversaries will try to take advantage of economic collapse at home. We might lose the White House, not in November, I mean August. Depends on how heavily armed Black Lives Matter is. I've heard it a hundred times in radio ads, cheery and confident realtors and travel agents: "This too shall pass. When life gets back to normal..."
The depth of willful Republican blindness is astonishing. 82 shootings, 19 dead in Chicago last week, unrelated to the riots. As usual, Mark Levin has everything upside down, blinkered by his brief tenure working for Ed Meese. He's a Trump flagwaver, demanding military action, and he fantasizes that FBI agents and U.S. Marshals can infiltrate antifa undercover. Middle aged tough guys in crewcuts will fit right in, no problem, huh? Jeez.
The right thing to do is to withdraw the cops. Business owners can leave town or defend their property with the 2nd Amendment. Shut down all public schools and fire brainwashed union teachers. Give the school buildings to private organizations, religious or commercial. If cops want to do something, they should attack the narcotics trade as fiercely as Elliot Ness. Either that or pack up law enforcement as a proactive enterprise. Let dope-addled gangsters kill each other. Big cities are no longer needed to conduct finance, trade, or higher ed. The future will be digital and decentralized, in small towns and well-defended enclaves of excellence, none of which will be in Nigeria or Congo. No wonder that freed slaves adamantly refused Lincoln's offer to send them home with grubstake reparations.
No virtue in voting. That's how we got into this mess. Ben Shapiro is hilarious. "We're still a civilized country!" he exclaims, urging Trump to mobilize the 82nd Airborne to tame L.A. and defend Beverly Hills synagogues, jewelers, and Jewish media tycoons. "Where the hell are the authorities?" he rants angrily about Jews being attacked by black looters in Brooklyn.
Every morning another shock. Not important that cops are being shot, four more in St. Louis. There's a far bigger problem. Amazon borrowed $10 billion at 24% annual interest. Consider what that implies, if you understand credit. It has to be a false or garbled report. The least creditworthy junk borrowers paid less than 12% last year. If it's true that Amazon is shelling out usurious 24% as a bad credit risk, then capital markets are frozen shut. I think that makes sense. Credit quality from coast-to-coast crashed. Risk rocketed to the stratosphere. The oil industry is bankrupt, hanging on with Federal bailout loans. Don't depend on refineries to continue in operation. Convert as much as you can to propane or natural gas.
Cops have warned that they can't respond to home invasion or assault. Arm yourself like the citizens of Cicero, Illinois. Curfews are meaningless. National Guard helicopters might work. But martial law and social distancing have killed any hope of normalcy or progress. Trump is indelibly painted with racism, fascism, and crony capitalism. Truth is the first casualty of war, and war was declared long before Trump took office.
Postscript to Mark Levin. Dems are done with Jews. You've been cut out of the coalition. The Republicans say they care about equal rights, but it might be empty words. They remember what happened to George W. Bush, sandbagged by Wolfowitz and Pearle. Trump is in your corner, but he's on the way out. Public service is a dead ideology. Cop recruitment collapsed, resignations up. Forget about the mainstream media. They're doomed dinosaurs. Antifa is coordinated on dark web Proton. If I were you (which I'm not) I'd move to Israel. "There was progress being made!" you moaned on June 1st, but it's over, all gone, and you know it. An endless lock-down for the Wuhan panic, half of all deaths in nursing homes, something else to wrongly pin on Trump. Now a Democrat funded insurrection, New York City smashed and bleeding. No way back from Obama's calculated civil war, and Ray Charles can't fix it.
I just heard a BBC interview with the brainless girl mayor of Rochester. I hereby certify that America is finished. It's over. We're the walking dead. California and New York lawmakers and mayors are in favor of defunding police. Their summer soldiers and midnight assassins are targeting cops, three more ambushed in Brooklyn last night. Don't underestimate the criminal conspiracy to sabotage law and order. Car dealers cleaned out in San Francisco and Chicago, keyboxes pried open, 150 new cars stolen. ATMs blown up and robbed.
The BBC asks rhetorically: "Is America ready for real change?" Change from what to what? Merit to mush. Liberty to reparations. Mob rule.
Mark my words. Taking down the statue of Lee was only an opening salvo. They won't stop until they change the flag, fifty stars on a field of blue black, and the national anthem: "Oh, say, does our new spangled ban-aa-anner now way-ave, o'r the lan-and built by slaves and the home of George Floyd?" Black generals, black admirals, black teachers and doctors.
It's over. There will be secession.
The uptick in jobs and Wall Street share prices? Your tax dollars at work, $2 trillion poured into small business, used car sales, mail order consumer spending. What it amounts to is a near fatal shot of cocaine. Senate leader McConnell is in full panic, has to push through more borrowed paper funneled through terrified bankers, injecting more horse into the economy, pending more theft, riot, arson, cops and Marines told to stand down, unarmed, make nice with mobs who will castigate, chant obscenities, and throw things at them.
Oh. Something else to think about and take appropriate action. $10 or $12 trillion created by fiat, rather than creditworthiness, will exhibit itself in devaluation of the U.S. dollar overseas and domestic inflation, another reason to cut off lending. Save every penny you can, work if you can, and spend nothing. No new clothes, no new shoes, no kitchen remodel or roofing. Consider a rural Flyover bugout when your job goes poof. Rising prices will kill construction and socially distanced drinking and dining. Risk averse Americans are not going to fly more than once on a crowded plane suffocating in masks, exchanging nervous glances.
Don't be a chump. Boeing is still in business because they have a fat contract to build tankers based on the two-engine 757 airframe. Has nothing to do with passenger aircraft sales. Their order book is a big blank page, passenger airline orders cancelled worldwide. The 737 MAX might never be cleared to fly. It depends on what Obama decides to do. He might impose a hiring quota or simply push Boeing into bankruptcy, to punish white executives, engineers, and skilled mechanics. China would certainly prefer to have Boeing shut.
Eventually, we'll have a multi-billionaire Chinese U.S. president, er, Chairman. I don't enjoy being clairvoyant or realistic about the future. Obama always was and remains a completely treasonous foreign policy fool. Do you think Joe is capable of resisting what Barack tells him to do? A tiny hypodermic poke would promote Michelle to the Oval Office.
Unvarnished truthfulness is usually painful. The hundreds of thousands of black marchers infected each other with Wuhan Corona-19 virus. Our media embargo on who George Floyd was and why he died, from narcotics, a failed struggle to escape, and high blood pressure from a lifetime of greasy fast food and drug and alcohol abuse, is another suicidal march of death, 24/7 repetition of inflammatory lies, smearing cops as racist killers, all black people innocent victims entitled to six-figure reparations and public office.
Infinitely worse, the fabric of American life was shredded. No fair trial in Minnesota. Guilty by threat of mob violence. Ballot harvesting, one-party Democrat rule, confiscatory taxation, and a Green New Deal to silence and starve greedy whites.
.
But I hate waking up to communists on NPR. This morning it was TED radio hour, a billionaire early investor in Amazon. No, no, not good enough to give away his own loot. The only way to end income disparity, he said, was to take away everyone's wealth, a 50% tax on income and capital gains. Those who earn less than $100K to be paid time-and-a-half for 40 hours a week, a $20 minimum wage. Big round of applause from the Stanford social warrior TED audience.
What do rioters and antifa want? Destruction and looted luxury goods. Run the police ragged and attack them with rocks and fireworks. Next it will be snipers, like the guy who killed five cops at a Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas. Bad joke on Chicago, hiring the black chief of police who resigned his do-nothing job as top cop in Dallas. Not to be outdone in symbolic idiocy, Dallas hired a black female police chief. The murder rate in both cities increased.
George Floyd? - a dangerous felon with a long rap sheet for armed robbery and assault. He resisted arrest, too doped up to talk sense, a giant that took four cops to wrangle. Did they find a gun in his car? Crack, meth, PCP, or heroin? There was a hostile crowd to watch. No wonder they called for back-up in bulletproof vests. An official autopsy showed no airway injury, no neck injuries. George Floyd tore away in a fentanyl-amphetamine "speedball" stumble. Cops knew he was seriously stoned, held him down, waited for EMS to arrive.
"Universal condemnation!" Hannity proclaims, silencing debate. "He was a Christian man!" Metaxas yells. "No justice, no peace!" mobs of brick throwing protestors cry. In Chicago they didn't need prepositioned pallets of bricks and fire accelerants like Minneapolis, New York, and Washington DC. Looters carried bowling balls, baseball bats, and long handle shovels to smash windows in downtown Chicago, with 132 Chicago cops injured by black rioters.
200 NYPD cops injured, 40 squad cars damaged. 114 District cops and U.S. Park Police injured defending the White House. Every major and minor city in America looted and burned. 75 million white people cowering at home, forbidden to work. Target abandoning 105 looted, boarded up stores. CVS shut locations in 20 states. WalMart closing 100 stores. No fire and casualty insurance payouts for civil strife. Cops in Altanta fired for arresting black agitators. Cops in Buffalo and the Bronx run over by cars. A Vegas cop shot in the head point blank.
Our nation is dying.
Tom Gresham has the right take on it. Antifa is an organized assault funded by Democrats. Don't get involved. Cops can't tell if you're a good guy. They can't see the halo on your head. If antifa rioters try to pull you out of your car, use the skinny right pedal and floor it. If you have no other choice, windows being broken out, light 'em up. Tom carries a double stack automatic, like police do, plenty of ammo to deal with multiple assailants. Antifa thugs are equipped with weapons and firebombs. They shot cops in three states. Don't be a victim.
I hope the military can contain China, Russia, and Iran, virus or no virus. Our adversaries will try to take advantage of economic collapse at home. We might lose the White House, not in November, I mean August. Depends on how heavily armed Black Lives Matter is. I've heard it a hundred times in radio ads, cheery and confident realtors and travel agents: "This too shall pass. When life gets back to normal..."
The depth of willful Republican blindness is astonishing. 82 shootings, 19 dead in Chicago last week, unrelated to the riots. As usual, Mark Levin has everything upside down, blinkered by his brief tenure working for Ed Meese. He's a Trump flagwaver, demanding military action, and he fantasizes that FBI agents and U.S. Marshals can infiltrate antifa undercover. Middle aged tough guys in crewcuts will fit right in, no problem, huh? Jeez.
The right thing to do is to withdraw the cops. Business owners can leave town or defend their property with the 2nd Amendment. Shut down all public schools and fire brainwashed union teachers. Give the school buildings to private organizations, religious or commercial. If cops want to do something, they should attack the narcotics trade as fiercely as Elliot Ness. Either that or pack up law enforcement as a proactive enterprise. Let dope-addled gangsters kill each other. Big cities are no longer needed to conduct finance, trade, or higher ed. The future will be digital and decentralized, in small towns and well-defended enclaves of excellence, none of which will be in Nigeria or Congo. No wonder that freed slaves adamantly refused Lincoln's offer to send them home with grubstake reparations.
No virtue in voting. That's how we got into this mess. Ben Shapiro is hilarious. "We're still a civilized country!" he exclaims, urging Trump to mobilize the 82nd Airborne to tame L.A. and defend Beverly Hills synagogues, jewelers, and Jewish media tycoons. "Where the hell are the authorities?" he rants angrily about Jews being attacked by black looters in Brooklyn.
Every morning another shock. Not important that cops are being shot, four more in St. Louis. There's a far bigger problem. Amazon borrowed $10 billion at 24% annual interest. Consider what that implies, if you understand credit. It has to be a false or garbled report. The least creditworthy junk borrowers paid less than 12% last year. If it's true that Amazon is shelling out usurious 24% as a bad credit risk, then capital markets are frozen shut. I think that makes sense. Credit quality from coast-to-coast crashed. Risk rocketed to the stratosphere. The oil industry is bankrupt, hanging on with Federal bailout loans. Don't depend on refineries to continue in operation. Convert as much as you can to propane or natural gas.
Cops have warned that they can't respond to home invasion or assault. Arm yourself like the citizens of Cicero, Illinois. Curfews are meaningless. National Guard helicopters might work. But martial law and social distancing have killed any hope of normalcy or progress. Trump is indelibly painted with racism, fascism, and crony capitalism. Truth is the first casualty of war, and war was declared long before Trump took office.
Postscript to Mark Levin. Dems are done with Jews. You've been cut out of the coalition. The Republicans say they care about equal rights, but it might be empty words. They remember what happened to George W. Bush, sandbagged by Wolfowitz and Pearle. Trump is in your corner, but he's on the way out. Public service is a dead ideology. Cop recruitment collapsed, resignations up. Forget about the mainstream media. They're doomed dinosaurs. Antifa is coordinated on dark web Proton. If I were you (which I'm not) I'd move to Israel. "There was progress being made!" you moaned on June 1st, but it's over, all gone, and you know it. An endless lock-down for the Wuhan panic, half of all deaths in nursing homes, something else to wrongly pin on Trump. Now a Democrat funded insurrection, New York City smashed and bleeding. No way back from Obama's calculated civil war, and Ray Charles can't fix it.
I just heard a BBC interview with the brainless girl mayor of Rochester. I hereby certify that America is finished. It's over. We're the walking dead. California and New York lawmakers and mayors are in favor of defunding police. Their summer soldiers and midnight assassins are targeting cops, three more ambushed in Brooklyn last night. Don't underestimate the criminal conspiracy to sabotage law and order. Car dealers cleaned out in San Francisco and Chicago, keyboxes pried open, 150 new cars stolen. ATMs blown up and robbed.
The BBC asks rhetorically: "Is America ready for real change?" Change from what to what? Merit to mush. Liberty to reparations. Mob rule.
Mark my words. Taking down the statue of Lee was only an opening salvo. They won't stop until they change the flag, fifty stars on a field of blue black, and the national anthem: "Oh, say, does our new spangled ban-aa-anner now way-ave, o'r the lan-and built by slaves and the home of George Floyd?" Black generals, black admirals, black teachers and doctors.
It's over. There will be secession.
The uptick in jobs and Wall Street share prices? Your tax dollars at work, $2 trillion poured into small business, used car sales, mail order consumer spending. What it amounts to is a near fatal shot of cocaine. Senate leader McConnell is in full panic, has to push through more borrowed paper funneled through terrified bankers, injecting more horse into the economy, pending more theft, riot, arson, cops and Marines told to stand down, unarmed, make nice with mobs who will castigate, chant obscenities, and throw things at them.
Oh. Something else to think about and take appropriate action. $10 or $12 trillion created by fiat, rather than creditworthiness, will exhibit itself in devaluation of the U.S. dollar overseas and domestic inflation, another reason to cut off lending. Save every penny you can, work if you can, and spend nothing. No new clothes, no new shoes, no kitchen remodel or roofing. Consider a rural Flyover bugout when your job goes poof. Rising prices will kill construction and socially distanced drinking and dining. Risk averse Americans are not going to fly more than once on a crowded plane suffocating in masks, exchanging nervous glances.
Don't be a chump. Boeing is still in business because they have a fat contract to build tankers based on the two-engine 757 airframe. Has nothing to do with passenger aircraft sales. Their order book is a big blank page, passenger airline orders cancelled worldwide. The 737 MAX might never be cleared to fly. It depends on what Obama decides to do. He might impose a hiring quota or simply push Boeing into bankruptcy, to punish white executives, engineers, and skilled mechanics. China would certainly prefer to have Boeing shut.
Eventually, we'll have a multi-billionaire Chinese U.S. president, er, Chairman. I don't enjoy being clairvoyant or realistic about the future. Obama always was and remains a completely treasonous foreign policy fool. Do you think Joe is capable of resisting what Barack tells him to do? A tiny hypodermic poke would promote Michelle to the Oval Office.
Unvarnished truthfulness is usually painful. The hundreds of thousands of black marchers infected each other with Wuhan Corona-19 virus. Our media embargo on who George Floyd was and why he died, from narcotics, a failed struggle to escape, and high blood pressure from a lifetime of greasy fast food and drug and alcohol abuse, is another suicidal march of death, 24/7 repetition of inflammatory lies, smearing cops as racist killers, all black people innocent victims entitled to six-figure reparations and public office.
Infinitely worse, the fabric of American life was shredded. No fair trial in Minnesota. Guilty by threat of mob violence. Ballot harvesting, one-party Democrat rule, confiscatory taxation, and a Green New Deal to silence and starve greedy whites.
.
Sunday, May 24, 2020
Right as rain
I stopped to visit my pal Don after a long internet session next door. His front door was open and I tapped loudly enough to be heard over the movie, a daily afternoon event. They had a really wonderful film playing in TechniScope 2:66, letterboxed with black over and under. It was ultra sharp on a small 16x9 flatscreen, maybe a 42" LCD. Two-perf TechniScope was truly breathtaking -- loaded with visual energy and emotional power. The movie 'African Express' playing in 2:66 was a gem from the 1970s with first time ingenue Ursula Andress opposite a handsome Italian juvenile the same age, early-20s and sexy as heck. Jack Palance was the heavy, with Ozzie henchmen, stars from Down Under, convincingly tough bad guys. Shot on location in Africa, Italian color processed in Rome, a gifted Italian director and a meticulous German producer who gave his director plenty of shooting days and set-ups, nicely done.
I was fully justified when Bruno knocked aside his friend's objections, a cinematographer of considerable standing, and pushed TechniScope in my fictional tale Chiseltown. It was NOT a trivial or simple decision, and it had absolutely nothing to do with saving money. Film stock and processing are small budget items, hundreds of thousands, not millions. Chiseltown was greenlit at $12 million, typical Poverty Row starvation. By the time that Bruno was done, the negative cost of Chiseltown was $18 million, worth every penny, ultrawide comedy schtick and thrilling drama, with spectacular stunts that they had enough time to rehearse and cover from all the right angles. Skillfulness and creativity matter in low budget films.
Back to the TechniScope question. After his pal's initial objections and fussy cynicism about shooting 2-perf 35mm instead of standard 4-perf (twice as detailed), there was a passage of technical importance that did not appear in the novel Chiseltown. Tech stuff would be boring to most readers. Bruno and Ruud screened a dozen test reels, shot by a dozen TechniScope lenses. Bruno picked the three sharpest among them, limiting himself to focal lengths that determined where the camera was placed throughout the movie. The choice of a film editor was not a trivial decision, either. The producer was present in all those discussions because every aspect of a movie is always a producer's final decision. I liked my fictional producer Joe Klopp. Solid, bright, capable of managing staff, as supportive as possible to the director (with increasing frustration and worry) -- two men bonded by long experience of working together. You can't buy those kind of relationships. That's why it matters Who Knows Who, always in casting and "packaging" the money, always among the above-the-line creatives. Producers are creatives with heavy responsibilities, to actualize everything the production requires and to ultimately complete the picture. Not as easy as it sounds.
A happy day. I was right as rain about TechniScope. Looked great on a home entertainment screen. Might not be so swell in a conventional 500-seat 1970s cinema or modern multiplex, but 'African Express' was brilliant and beautiful and sharp on Don's flatscreen. Ultrawide 2:66 is a fabulous format with the right lenses, a gifted cinematographer, a talented director, and well known stars, their voices and sound effects recorded, re-recorded, and mixed nicely.
Story matters (a little). How it plays is everything.
Too bad I'm too old to direct. Oh, well. Life on life's terms. Writing was equally enjoyable and easier to complete. Cut to the starlet in his arms, successful R-rated lovers at home in robes at the kitchen counter, a happy ending. They sold popcorn at a preview in Fresno.
.
I was fully justified when Bruno knocked aside his friend's objections, a cinematographer of considerable standing, and pushed TechniScope in my fictional tale Chiseltown. It was NOT a trivial or simple decision, and it had absolutely nothing to do with saving money. Film stock and processing are small budget items, hundreds of thousands, not millions. Chiseltown was greenlit at $12 million, typical Poverty Row starvation. By the time that Bruno was done, the negative cost of Chiseltown was $18 million, worth every penny, ultrawide comedy schtick and thrilling drama, with spectacular stunts that they had enough time to rehearse and cover from all the right angles. Skillfulness and creativity matter in low budget films.
Back to the TechniScope question. After his pal's initial objections and fussy cynicism about shooting 2-perf 35mm instead of standard 4-perf (twice as detailed), there was a passage of technical importance that did not appear in the novel Chiseltown. Tech stuff would be boring to most readers. Bruno and Ruud screened a dozen test reels, shot by a dozen TechniScope lenses. Bruno picked the three sharpest among them, limiting himself to focal lengths that determined where the camera was placed throughout the movie. The choice of a film editor was not a trivial decision, either. The producer was present in all those discussions because every aspect of a movie is always a producer's final decision. I liked my fictional producer Joe Klopp. Solid, bright, capable of managing staff, as supportive as possible to the director (with increasing frustration and worry) -- two men bonded by long experience of working together. You can't buy those kind of relationships. That's why it matters Who Knows Who, always in casting and "packaging" the money, always among the above-the-line creatives. Producers are creatives with heavy responsibilities, to actualize everything the production requires and to ultimately complete the picture. Not as easy as it sounds.
A happy day. I was right as rain about TechniScope. Looked great on a home entertainment screen. Might not be so swell in a conventional 500-seat 1970s cinema or modern multiplex, but 'African Express' was brilliant and beautiful and sharp on Don's flatscreen. Ultrawide 2:66 is a fabulous format with the right lenses, a gifted cinematographer, a talented director, and well known stars, their voices and sound effects recorded, re-recorded, and mixed nicely.
Story matters (a little). How it plays is everything.
Too bad I'm too old to direct. Oh, well. Life on life's terms. Writing was equally enjoyable and easier to complete. Cut to the starlet in his arms, successful R-rated lovers at home in robes at the kitchen counter, a happy ending. They sold popcorn at a preview in Fresno.
.
Thursday, May 21, 2020
Years in the making
I re-read Portrait of Valor this morning, cried at the ending. I can accept that literary agents and publishers dislike my stories. I do things that other authors don't. Fundamentally, I'm a patriot of a peculiar sort. My heroes and heroines blaze an independent path, no different than Crockett or Pankhurst, with a modern twist. They don't fight for glory or social justice. Given a choice, they'd rather go dancing and drinking in luxurious nightclubs, tempt others into a hot wet romance. Cable and Blount are rich, resourceful, armed and dangerous, and bonded to each other by the only thing that matters in life -- personal autonomy in action, unafraid of life on life's terms.
If I had a magic wand, I would rewrite and polish The Tar Pit, but it would be wrong to dilute its terse tension. The final chapters are a miracle of heroism and its moral price.
I'm very proud of Charity, a shorter work that spans important truths and manages to be an exhilerating tale with a comic epilogue. I don't know what to say about Finding Flopsie, the same story told twice, with Chris and Peachy separated by baffling circumstances, a global chase that seems unfair and destined to end badly. A final adventure, Who Killed John Galt, passed the torch to a new generation of lovers, spared from peril, as most people are. Chris and Peachy were uniquely bold and irreplaceable, the best of an elite ruling class, fiercely independent and whole, free to thrive as wanton wildcats who faced danger as a welcome natural challenge.
Our social media distanced nation is worse without them. As proof, I offer Finding Flopsie, which I finally re-read tonight, a day after composing the rest of this post. It was wonderful. Nothing like it in literary history. Full of warmth, determination, deceit, despair, a love so deep that it hurts, and a blockbuster finish.
An easy death, achieved so much.
.
Chicks Pick Pix in Nabes and Sticks
Parody of an old Variety headline* which I'll translate for you. Girls choose which movie to see on a date night in neighborhood theaters and small towns. Past tense, of course. All 8,000 screens in America are dark. Film production has ceased, no new product. The world's longest running animation series, in Japan, has gone off the air. Australia's "Neighbours" soap opera, in production 40 years until the corona virus shutdown, might restart with social distancing (no hugging and kissing? everybody in masks?)
Chicks pick pix at home, too. Mom decides which programs the kids are allowed to watch on Netflix or Hulu or Disney. Husbands and boyfriends don't get a vote, unless pro sports are reinvented without cheering fans in the stadium. Current proposals are to use canned music, last year's crowd sound, and pre-recorded cheerleaders shaking their pom-poms for college teams, if colleges decide to reopen with social distancing in classrooms, dining halls, and locker rooms. Coaches are scratching their collective heads how to socially distance contact sports, unless they get a safe, effective CDC approved covid-19 vaccine.
Ahem. After 40 years of research, there's no HIV vaccine, and flu shots are only 40% effective. Let's talk about something else. "Chicks pick pix in nabes and sticks," Adele counsels in the final pages of Chiseltown, warning the film's director that some audience response cards at a Fresno preview screening complained that the star (his ex-wife) was too sexy. Typical Wolf, can't write a novel without erotic excess. The director's home life is decidedly nuts, married to identical twin starlets half his age. I hope you realize that Hollywood is like that and always was. Tinsel Town tolerates unconventional bedfellows and indulges a strange argot.
(* the real Variety headline said: Chick Flix Click In Nabes and Sticks, reporting success of romantic comedies at single screen venues)
Great fun to write Chiseltown, the story of a movie, from first phone call to last. If you're in show business, it might be slightly annoying, 128 pages of satire, screwballs, and skillfulness that results in a low-budget feature film that actually sounds pretty good. I wrote it with love for ordinary boys and girls who devote their lives to filmmaking, always a dice roll, always a team effort, long days and nights with grim obstacles to overcome by creative people who risk their reputations, bonded by the magic of comedy and drama and comradeship.
Chicks pick pix at home, too. Mom decides which programs the kids are allowed to watch on Netflix or Hulu or Disney. Husbands and boyfriends don't get a vote, unless pro sports are reinvented without cheering fans in the stadium. Current proposals are to use canned music, last year's crowd sound, and pre-recorded cheerleaders shaking their pom-poms for college teams, if colleges decide to reopen with social distancing in classrooms, dining halls, and locker rooms. Coaches are scratching their collective heads how to socially distance contact sports, unless they get a safe, effective CDC approved covid-19 vaccine.
Ahem. After 40 years of research, there's no HIV vaccine, and flu shots are only 40% effective. Let's talk about something else. "Chicks pick pix in nabes and sticks," Adele counsels in the final pages of Chiseltown, warning the film's director that some audience response cards at a Fresno preview screening complained that the star (his ex-wife) was too sexy. Typical Wolf, can't write a novel without erotic excess. The director's home life is decidedly nuts, married to identical twin starlets half his age. I hope you realize that Hollywood is like that and always was. Tinsel Town tolerates unconventional bedfellows and indulges a strange argot.
(* the real Variety headline said: Chick Flix Click In Nabes and Sticks, reporting success of romantic comedies at single screen venues)
Great fun to write Chiseltown, the story of a movie, from first phone call to last. If you're in show business, it might be slightly annoying, 128 pages of satire, screwballs, and skillfulness that results in a low-budget feature film that actually sounds pretty good. I wrote it with love for ordinary boys and girls who devote their lives to filmmaking, always a dice roll, always a team effort, long days and nights with grim obstacles to overcome by creative people who risk their reputations, bonded by the magic of comedy and drama and comradeship.
Friday, May 8, 2020
Very peculiar
I've been looking back at 30 something years of literary work, more than half of it nonfiction, which troubles me. I don't like it, that I had the burden of exploring the obvious. Among my too few novels, five of them were set in the future, projecting ideas into fictional lives and loves and clashes with jealous, hamhanded evil.
Five more were the sequential saga of Chris and Peachy, from first kiss to crippled elderhood. I didn't want to show them at the end of life, but it happened in Who Killed John Galt. I find it hard to re-read The Case Files of Cable & Blount, not dissatified with what was achieved, but detached and sad because I know every word.
Partners was a masterpiece, far too tragic to re-read beyond page four or five. It beckons as flawless storytelling, magnetic and terrifying and tender, the unrelenting first person song of a young man's destiny that might easily have been mine. It surprised me to write this novel. In a just world, it would be celebrated as uniquely hard-boiled hippie fiction.
That leaves two minor works written after I had resigned as a serious author. It gives me easy pleasure to savor the goofball comedy of Chiseltown and the impossible farce of Heaven, a parting salute to those I loved. On some stormy night, I'll revisit the dry romance of Cocktail and steel myself to the unlikely emptiness of living too long.
It's impossible to write more, a mixed blessing. There are no more ideas to pioneer, no more stories to conceive in a world that no longer exists. Lovers cannot wear masks and gloves.
News flash: shuttered restaurants broken into, liquor looted. No sci-fi novelist could have projected how cloddish and hostile to liberty our government has become. Private property is a thing of the past. November elections will be an exercise in lies and ballot stuffing. Oh. Wait a minute. That sounds a lot like Mars Shall Thunder. It didn't end well for most people. The hero and two women escaped in the nick of time, before Mars was destroyed.
.
Five more were the sequential saga of Chris and Peachy, from first kiss to crippled elderhood. I didn't want to show them at the end of life, but it happened in Who Killed John Galt. I find it hard to re-read The Case Files of Cable & Blount, not dissatified with what was achieved, but detached and sad because I know every word.
Partners was a masterpiece, far too tragic to re-read beyond page four or five. It beckons as flawless storytelling, magnetic and terrifying and tender, the unrelenting first person song of a young man's destiny that might easily have been mine. It surprised me to write this novel. In a just world, it would be celebrated as uniquely hard-boiled hippie fiction.
That leaves two minor works written after I had resigned as a serious author. It gives me easy pleasure to savor the goofball comedy of Chiseltown and the impossible farce of Heaven, a parting salute to those I loved. On some stormy night, I'll revisit the dry romance of Cocktail and steel myself to the unlikely emptiness of living too long.
It's impossible to write more, a mixed blessing. There are no more ideas to pioneer, no more stories to conceive in a world that no longer exists. Lovers cannot wear masks and gloves.
News flash: shuttered restaurants broken into, liquor looted. No sci-fi novelist could have projected how cloddish and hostile to liberty our government has become. Private property is a thing of the past. November elections will be an exercise in lies and ballot stuffing. Oh. Wait a minute. That sounds a lot like Mars Shall Thunder. It didn't end well for most people. The hero and two women escaped in the nick of time, before Mars was destroyed.
.
Two faces have I
This is a frame grab from Abbreviated Wolf DeVoon Part Two, a spontaneous video close-up. Note that the ears are about the same size, not drastically out of scale or tilted. Perhaps I was leading with my right eye, characteristic of thoughtful discourse.
On a previous occasion in correspondence with a profoundly wonderful female FBI agent, I created a pair of psychographic photos, two lefts mirrored and two rights mirrored, to show her that she was two people cohabiting one skull. Her femininity and innocence was obvious in one picture, and her dark ruthlessness equally obvious in the other.
Well, having little to do, except to noodle on curiosities, I repeated the experiment utilizing the frame grab from Abbreviated Wolf DeVoon Part Two. Splitting the image and mirroring two left sides and two right sides of my face produced an amazing revelation. Intellectually, Wolf DeVoon is a square shouldered champion prize fighter. Emotionally, I'm a nerdy 90 lb weakling. Very strange that my two noses are completely different.
Scroll down.
.
.
.
.
.
How humiliating. Puts me in mind of something Rex said in conversation, that his security chief thought I was a weakling. I replied: "I might be a weakling, but I'm not a chicken."
Good thing that creative writing is a highly focused intellectual literary challenge. A dollop of sensitivity helps from time to time, but it's totally debilitating when, months later, I re-read something I wrote and burst into tears. The Executive Branch is all knuckles and know how, except the family scenes, little Millie in her highchair, 9 year old Peter scolded for talking with his mouth full at dinner, and Cathy worried about her husband dressing late at night in his uniform, summoned to the base unexpectedly. Women and children choke me up. I write love stories and pay for it in spades. Much easier to fictionally kill people and break things, keep emotion at arm's length, something I can't seem to do.
Huge laugh. "I'm half a man," I said in Tin Barn Philosopher, p. 78
I think what happened is that my emotional life was battered and disowned many decades, starved and crippled. I need to be embraced and loved and honored, need to laugh and play, which seems distant and vague. Courage isn't enough. I've been sufficiently courageous to risk life and limb and humiliation repeatedly. I'm not unhappy about that, but the loneliness hurts. "You're on your way into hell, Howard," Rand warned. Were there two Ayn Rands?
A brainy anorexic wrapped in a sturdy Russian thrill seeker in 1948, after she snaggered a handsome actor (stuck her foot out and tripped him on a movie set) to become a U.S. citizen by marriage, launched The Fountainhead, buttered up C.B. DeMille, monkeywrenched two publishers, finished the novel and sold the screenplay for six fat figures in today's money.
Girls have an unfair advantage, damn it.
I have a lot of respect for Ayn Rand, did my level best to honor her repeatedly (and skewer her legendary emotional trainwrecks in Heaven). Rand's debut novel We The Living was a truth soaked truckload of dynamite, so graphic and tragic that I didn't want to read it twice. Atlas Shrugged changed my life, recounted in First Feature. The Fountainhead sent me to prison, and in the years that followed I read nearly every word she wrote. I met four of her least respectable looters -- Nathaniel Branden, John Hospers, Alan Greenspan, and Tibor Machan -- and at a NATO summit I witnessed the unshakeable power of courage that Rand bequeathed to Margaret Thatcher. "There is no such thing as society," Mrs. Thatcher said in recognition of reality, which instantly ended her political career.
That puts me in mind of today's brainless chatter, everyone talking about reviving the U.S. economy, as if "the Economy" was an anonymous animal that has to be fed and spanked by political whim. There is no economy in a totalitarian state, which is precisely what the United States has become, fulfilling the dystopia of Atlas Shrugged, a moratorium on brains, power centralized in bureaucrats and media morale conditioners, farmers dumping milk and killing livestock, unable to sell or store them. The people transported by aircraft are government officials and tame "essential" journalists forbidden to criticize psychotic Democrats.
Fortunately, I didn't have the tragic karma of Ayn Rand. I was drawn to the hard boiled tales of Raymond Chandler, a private eye investigating buried secrets. Pretty funny that Miss Rand read Mickey Spillane for relaxation, praised his literary style, and she liked James Bond. My kind of stories, with a red hot, unapologetic sexuality that Ayn Rand lived in reality, as I did likewise. A photo of Rand at age 70 would reveal the emotional price she paid, like me.
No comparison of stature intended. All I did was defend liberty and plumb the philosophy of law, a minor technical matter that the Russian and her phony acolytes never explored.
.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)