We’re going waaaaay back this time, to the music I heard as a very small child. My dad grew up on a farm and liked to listen to a lot of WCMS FM, our country station... and as a result, so did I.
Listen, at least. Like? Sometimes.
Every few years, I am distressed to discover I still remember the chorus to this one.
This next one was one of my favorites when I was three or so— pretty embarrassing given what I can’t even really call the subtext. It’s just…text:
By the time I was five, I was just barely starting to grasp that whole subtext thing, though.
I’ve been trying for years, but have never managed to reconcile Conway Twitty’s lyrics with…well, with his hair, for one thing.
And there’s no way to make a list like this and not end on Dolly Parton. Pretty sure that’s a law.
Inspired by watching Heaven’s Prisoners last week, a list of (other) books I stopped reading because they were getting too depressing, with the reasons:
The Repairman Jack series (F. Paul Wilson) <—- Apocalypse seemed nigh (may have occurred in later books I haven’t read).
Hellboy (Mignola et al) <—- Apocalypse definitely occurred.*
The Kay Scarpetta books (Patricia Cornwell) <—- Unrelenting human malice, from the killers and from not a few of the recurring characters.
Charles de Lint’s novels <—- Unrelenting human and supernatural malice; it’s a bad old world out there, and the presence of magic just means more of it can literally steal your soul before it harms or kills you.
The Amelia Peabody Mysteries (Elizabeth Peters) <—- WWI. ‘Nuff said.
The V.I. Warshawski books (Sara Paretsky) <—- Unrelenting human malice again, with a soupçon of hideous sexism on top.
The novels of Thomas Hardy <—-To be fair, I barely started these, because depressing is what Hardy is known for. Hardy’s books are all beautifully written—but my god, at least none of the V.I. Warshawsky novels has anybody being sold at the farmers’ market.
King Lear <—- I used to think Hamlet was a little depressing, and then this. I’m not even going to give it the same semi-endorsement as Hardy, because even the power of Shakespeare’s writing can’t mitigate how much I hated King Lear. I’ve read less nihilism in actual nihilist philosophy.
*I’ve noted before that I find it really hard to stay away from Hellboy, but at the moment I’m holding strong.
Next time: On Friday, I continue this mournful theme with another Musical Interlude.
Last weekend, I finally watched 1973’s Soylent Green. I have a rule that if I make repeated references to a film over time, I’ll make an effort to see the original film at some point (called, for obvious reasons, “The Deliverance Rule”); in the case of Soylent Green, however, I’d been putting it off for years.
I have a problem, you see: years of religious education as a youngster have given me a lasting aversion to apocalypses and dystopias. I’m probably the only person who felt sick after Tom Cruise’s War of the Worlds movie because of the actual plot. The only exception is Hellboy, and as I read more of that, it seems less like an exception and more like long-form masochism on my part*. So I expected that Soylent Green would, at a minimum, ruin my day.
It didn’t come close.
If you’re not familiar with anything about the movie but the titular Soylent Green food substance being made of “Peeeeople!,” a brief rundown: in an environmentally depleted near future, Detective Thorn (Charlton Heston) stumbles onto a secret when a member of the Soylent Company’s board is assassinated. Soylent makes nutrition squares that meet the food needs of most of the non-wealthy in this society: think Clif Bars without the cachet and tastiness. Along the way we see glimpses of $150 vegetables, apartments that come with supplied concubines, and suicide parlors—where Thorn’s roommate eventually checks in after learning the truth about Soylent Green. In the tradition of ’70s nihilistic movies of all stripes, Thorn is fatally wounded before he can broadcast the news of Soylent Green’s very special recipe.
I think there are several reasons the movie didn’t work for me, many of which aren’t really its fault:
Their near-future plot takes place in 2022, and we’re supposed to believe the planet has been screwed up for so long that Heston’s character can’t really remember real food. I’ve never been happier about the state of the earth in 2015 in my entire life as I was while watching Soylent Green.
The scene in which Thorn is running around the factory and discovering the truth is almost laughable: bodies are apparently being turned into food while still in bags. New Chewy Soylent Green, I guess?
There are two things TV and movies in the 1970s seemed sure were imminent: the unlocking of the mind’s psychic potential and the American adoption of the metric system. This would have been a better movie if they’d gone with that first one.
The look of the downtrodden citizenry in Soylent Green is heavily derivative of pictures of Soviet breadlines, which probably worked for the film’s viewers for a while, but which now suggests that anyone looking to get rich in 2022 might want to invest heavily in headscarf manufacture.
The movie steps on its own premise as far as I’m concerned, making a world so grim it’s hard to believe anybody would care that they’re eating people. Hey, at least someone’s recycling. (This may well be just me: in an ideal world, my mortal remains would be turned into a skeleton in someone’s science class, or they’d overturn the law about binding books in human skin and I’d have to finally finish a novel before making my will. I have a very flexible idea of respect for the dead, I guess.)
As a cultural artifact, Soylent Green is people!!!! interesting, but it’s so rare that I get to write about a movie and conclude that yes, in this day and age, it maybe is for the faint of heart.
*Don’t get me wrong: Hellboy is excellent, but I shouldn’t be reading it.
Today will be the first part of my discussion about the Highlander TV series. First, a confession that will probably inform everything I write about this show:
I HATE RICHIE RYAN.
Sorry.
I do, though.
In theory, the series solves one of the problems with the Highlander franchise by removing Connor. Instead it focuses on his younger cousin Duncan, who has charm and killer abs and a visible will to live. Duncan MacLeod is played by Adrian Paul, and though I didn’t remember it when Highlander: The Series first appeared, I’d seen him before both as a dancer on The Colbys and in the early-’90s Dark Shadows revival as Barnabas Collins’s ill-fated brother. (I’ll bet you always wondered who watched that show.)
Connor does show up in the first episode to pass the torch, as it were–and since I’d never seen it before, I decided to give this one its own TCBOM! entry.
When the show begins, Duncan is living in “retirement” from the whole beheading thing with his mortal girlfriend, industrial sculptor Tessa. They are—surprise!—running an antique store, a fact that makes me begin to wonder if the next town over from mine is merely quaint or secretly infested with immortals.
Richie, a “streetwise” thief who exudes all the menace and worldly experience of the bad kid in an after-school special, is caught trying to rob the store. It’s what must, to someone else, be the beginning of a beautiful friendship (especially since Richie is a not-yet-“killed” immortal); Duncan bails him out of jail and eventually takes him as a sort of sidekick.
The episode itself is a crash course in the Highlanderverse, with the music and a discussion about the perils of mortal/immortal relationships, with flashbacks and a treasure cave of sorts (Duncan’s is less blatant and has a lovely fireplace) and the “villains should drive like madmen” rule firmly in place.
And just like the first movie, a lot of the energy in the episode comes from the bad guy. This is the last time I’ll say “and so-and-so as the Kurgan, kind of,” but Richard Moll (Bull the bailiff from Night Court, for those of us who watched too much TV in the ’80s) is not only a wild-eyed, leather-clad, articulate barbarian, he’s GREAT at it.
In fact, there are only two things I dislike about this episode, other than Richie and my old nemesis “Who Wants To Live Forever?”:
The villain’s name is Slan, which you’d think could be said in a sinister tone, but apparently can’t;
Connor is still wearing those goddamn sneakers.
I’m resisting the temptation to say this opening sequence “turns the Freudian symbolism up to eleven,” but darn it, you know what I mean. They’re missing a comma, too.
Next time: An even bigger fairy tale.
Next time on TCBOM!: Going to spend two more weeks on the series, then move on to Endgame. (Those of you familiar with Highlander movie-naming conventions will correctly deduce that’s not the last movie, either.)
An article on io9 about the rebooted Beauty and the Beast series inspired me to give the original another look.
Why Found-Again? I was 13 when the series began and immediately fell in love with the entire idea; I’ve never had many nightmares about things I watch on TV, but I can still remember a very detailed, happy dream about spending time in Beauty & The Beast‘s subterranean tunnels. I even had a poster of Vincent on my closet, next to INXS and Morrissey and REM and the rest of my musical interests. But the series eventually got…not great (I was about to write “strange.” Hah!) and like a lot of viewers, I drifted away. Now that it’s on Netflix, I took a peek at season 1.
The Premise: (Don’t laugh.) When a case of mistaken identity ends with lawyer Katherine Chandler left for dead, she’s taken in by a secret quasi-medieval society of people who live beneath New York City. Most are the ordinary lost souls of any large city, but one—lion-faced Vincent (Ron Perlman)—becomes her true love and her protector. In between times when Vincent is shredding bad guys by tooth and claw (offscreen), they read and quote a lot of poetry.
Given that I’ve been writing about Highlander for months now, I’m surprised it took me so long to realize this was another supernaturally inflected “gritty New York” show, and years before urban fantasy became popular as a book genre. But this is one of the few series in which, for me, the crime-show aspects take a distinct back seat to the romance. I gravitate to art whose central theme is “the weird are deserving of love,” I suppose, and Beauty and the Beast is certainly not the least of these.
The Verdict: This is the part where I would ordinarily say my opinion is mixed; it’s not. Instead I find myself having two divergent opinions at the same time, able to see the flaws in the story and the cheesiness of the characters even as my inner teenager revels in the poetry-reciting, face-ripping hero who lives in a modern-day fairy fortress. The result, honestly, is that I feel a little weird rewatching it: I like it but don’t feel entirely comfortable liking it.
Hey, I said don’t laugh.
Might go well with: Champagne, sonnets, the Cocteau movie based on the original tale…and I only just realized this is the second Friday in a row in which Gummi rats wouldn’t be out of place.
The dog doesn’t die. It barely matters what dog or why; I just assume that any canine on my screen or in the pages of the book I’m reading has a large target on its back, and I enjoy being wrong about this.
Mummies (animate, French-speaking mummies a plus, as I mentioned last Halloween).
The Loch Ness Monster. I have watched some incredible crap just to see a few seconds of CGI Nessie. The same could be said for dragons.
A small, informal list of actors I would follow to cinematic hell and back (in some cases literally: are we ever going to get a third Hellboy movie?). When I say informal, I mean even to me: until quite recently I thought Tim Curry was on it, yet my Wiseguy DVDs go unwatched.
Spy crap. Any spy crap, really.
Architecture. I didn’t like Numb3rs much at all, but stuck around far longer than I should have just to see the house.
“They’re romantically involved, and they solve crimes!”
Owls. There’s no good reason. I just like owls.
Homages to film noir. Oddly, I often enjoy these more than the bona fide noirs themselves.
Mythology/folklore: I was going to narrow this down to actual mythology/folklore, but the first season of Sleepy Hollow was so gut-bustingly funny in its zeal to make things up that I’m going to leave this a broad category.
Any included reference to 1) Sherlock Holmes, 2) The Pirates of Penzance, 3) poetry, preferably Victorian, or 4) art.
So there you have it, just as I realize this list could in most respects be retitled “My Love For Castle Explained, Plus Owls.”
If you read my Twitter feed, you probably know I lost my oldest cat recently: Jasper was over 17 years old, so in a way it wasn’t a surprise, but I’d somehow got my heart set on 19 to be the age at which I’d be sort of okay if the cat died of old age.
In 1998, my future ex-husband and I heard a sad little noise outside the door of our apartment. I opened it and there he was, a half-grown tabby kitten begging for food. I gave him a little of the kibble we had for our cat, and soon we were on a route the cat took around the building: on the first floor, the people who’d turned him loose in the first place were still occasionally feeding him, and he also had a benefactor on the third floor.
And on every floor he had a name. On the first floor he’d been Princess until certain facts made themselves apparent, then Prince. The third floor called him Toby. To me, he was Jasper.
Things continued like that until one day his former owner popped his head out on the balcony below ours. “You gonna take that cat?” he asked.
I said I was, and he handed up the remaining food and litter from Jasper’s brief tenure as an indoor kitten, and I was suddenly the proud owner of Princess Prince Toby Jasper, a cat who loved attention so much he purred if you made extended eye contact. When the FEH and I separated, there was no doubt who was going to take him, and Jasper and I became single at the same time.
He seemed bored, so I got him a friend.
I subsequently apologized.
A few weeks ago, it became clear that Jasper was wasting away. At his next-to-last vet appointment, he was diagnosed with kidney failure. (I’d already suspected it, since I’d seen my dad suffer kidney failure too.) As though he’d heard the diagnosis, in the space of a weekend the cat went from “kind of weak” to not being able to stand on his own. He wouldn’t eat or drink. When I carried him to the litter box, he simply fell over and stayed fallen.
Jasper with Inky, three days before the end.
As I told them vet who helped put him out of pain, I’d really hoped he’d go on the top of the sofa in his sleep. “It rarely happens that way,” she said.
I never thought I’d be one of those people who had their animal’s ashes in the house, but when it came down to it, I couldn’t put him outside again. So now there’s a little urn that wears his collar, and Jasper is again sitting on the furniture. And I am training myself to say “Let’s go feed the fish!” to the other cat in the morning when I used to say “Let’s go see Mr. J!” and not to turn back to his place on the sofa to say goodnight every night. I never look down to find I’m petting a cat with no recollection of how he got there: Inky’s no lap cat, while Jasper’s spy name was The Insinuator. No one steps on me on the way to find out how much milk is in my coffee. It’s surprisingly awful.
Presented for your perusal this super-cold Valentine’s Day: everyone can think back to a person they desired for reasons that were poorly thought out, or because they looked good on paper even if it was a bad fit in real life. But what about things?
1. The Jeep Wrangler Sahara
I have wanted one of these cars since I was 14 years old, when I entered a contest to win one in my mother’s name. There’s something about the squared-off, almost classical lines of a Jeep that really, viscerally grabs me: coupled with the unbounded potential of being able to drive anywhere you want, it’s thoroughly seductive. Less seductive, of course, are some of the safety ratings, some of the prices, and the fact that I could probably get better gas mileage driving literally anything except an older Jeep. That doesn’t stop me from sighing over them on my daily commute like some weird car lecher, however.
2. The Newfoundland Dog
I live in a small space, have other pets, and am a pretty avid opponent of drool, and yet whenever I watch the Westminster Dog Show on television, I’m drawn in by the description of the Newfie. Who wouldn’t want a big, handsome, friendly companion who’ll be kind to your other pets and frolic in the water, something 0% of my family’s dogs have ever done? An avid opponent of drool, that’s who—at least, that’s what I tell myself.
3. Excessive Amounts of High-Endish Audio Equipment
I have a pretty good car stereo and a sound system at home that justifies my Pandora subscription nicely, but I will look at literally anything that sounds (no pun intended) interesting online, and when I encounter a Bose store, it’s extremely hard not to go in and poke around. I somehow wound up on the e-mail list for these folks and have been pining for this ever since. Do I need it? Not even close. Have a place to put it? Not really. Do I recognize that part of this stems from the same aesthetic that makes me lust after the Jeep? With distressing clarity! Still: Cherry and metallic taupe 4-eva!
Honorable Mention: Amazon Prime
Like a lot of people, I got Prime a while ago, when it was discounted, even though I knew it would unhealthily feed my caffeinated-puppy level of impatience. On the other hand, if you ever want a nice fountain pen in a hurry, I can’t recommend it enough, and I am slowly working through Instant Video even though it reminds me that HBO never loved any of the same shows the same way I did.
What are your ill-advised lust objects?
As for my Valentine’s Day, I’m going to be at my second science museum in as many weeks, because nothing says romance like fossils and visible tiger willies.
Why Found-Again? This one, like a few before it, is cheating: I watch this every year on Valentine’s Day.
I can’t really remember when this became a tradition for me: I decided to watch it one year when I thought I’d have nothing else going on and wanted a movie that would have some romantic aspects, but not too many. Singin’ In The Rain still delivers all that and more, and so it’s become my go-to no matter what kind of Valentine’s Day I’m having that year.
The Premise (to most people): Handsome leading man Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) gets a rude awakening when talkies replace silent films, but prevails with the help of the ingenue he loves (Debbie Reynolds) and his best friend.
The Premise (to me and people I’ve persuaded to watch the movie): The snarky, sensible, and crazy talented Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor) rolls with the punches—in some cases literally—as the film industry changes. Also, his friend Don has problems both romantic and professional.
I stand by my interpretation 100%. Gene Kelly is good-looking and an excellent dancer, but Donald O’Connor is the star of the movie, and all too few people seem to know it. Don’t believe me?
(Warning: contains musical number, if you’re against that sort of thing.)
The actual “Singin’ In The Rain” song might be more iconic, but this is friggin’ amazing.
The Verdict: Are you kidding me? Go watch this right now. Here’s some more:
Might go well with: Given that my traditional Valentine’s Day food involves stuffing cinnamon candy hearts into my mouth until I look like a vampire, I’m just going to say champagne.
Next time: One of my favorite parts of Highlander for TCBOM!.Our long(-winded) nightmare is almost over! And no, I don’t mean me.
