February Ahoy 30 Jan 2020 1:38 PM (5 years ago)
January was exciting overall, I guess, but I feel generally sludgy and therefore have decided to make some changes. These are, as follows--
Change one: Stop eating pre-made stuff with sugar in it; this covers chocolate, obviously, but also all drinks aside from water, herbal tea and coffee.
Change two: Work coffee down to one cup a day, then switch to decaf, see what happens (aside from headaches).
Change three: Get up at the same time no matter what, go for a half-hour walk immediately, try whatever coffee shop looks good in the area, write for at least an hour.
Change four: If I feel like lying down in the evening, go downstairs and stretch instead.
No doubt there'll be more changes as the year goes on, but those sound at least doable. I'm just tired of feeling tired and waking up tired and going to bed tired. I'm also REALLY fucking tired of not actually having written anything except Facebook posts and that Spec Chic BBC Dracula review, and I can't help but think that if I wasn't so fucking tired all the time, my writing module might reboot itself. We'll see.
MOVIES WATCHED, JANUARY EDITION:
NEW: Knives Out (2019); The Initiation (1984); Bog Bodies (2003); Vampariah (2016); Aenigma (1987); Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977/2003); Ghost Stories (2020); Ghosthouse (1988); Patient Zero (2018): The Great Gatsby (2012); The Lighthouse (2019); Luz (2019); Mary (2017); Underwater (2020); Lust for a Vampire (1971); Shin Godzilla (2016); Fury of the Demon (2016); Itsy Bitsy (2019); Contamination (1980); X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Rogue Cut (2015); Patients of a Saint/Inmate Zero (2019); Casting the Runes (1979); The Ash Tree (1975); Deadcon (2020); Hex (2017); The Turning (2020); Pray (2005); Extraction (2015); Viy (1967); Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindlewald (2018); Parasite (2019); Loft (2011); Ready or Not (2019); The Saragossa Manuscript (1965).
REWATCHES:
The First Power (1990); The Unholy (1988); Witchery (1988); The Last Seduction (1994); A View From a Hill (2005); Lost Souls (2000); Night of the Demon (1957); The Seventh Victim (1943); Burn Witch Burn (1962); The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995); Mother of Tears (2007).
TV SERIES (NEW): Chiller (1995); BBC Dracula on Netflix; The Firey Priest on Netflix; Blood Ties (2007-2008); The Outsider on HBO; Hammer House of Horror (1980).
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Gosh! I Feel So Victimized! 21 Jan 2020 12:06 AM (5 years ago)
I've been keeping a list of movies seen since the beginning of 2020, and it's up to thirty so far, which is like...approximately 1.42857143 a day. Plus TV, of course. The most recent thing I've been watching, on Netflix, is a K-series called The Firey Priest that often provides a spirits-lifting chaser to whatever other crazy/disturbing/emotionally exhausting shit I might've been ladling into my eyes. The main character, Father Michael, is a former Korean Special Forces soldier who suffers horrifying PTSD after throwing a grenade into a room he only realizes is full of refugee children just before it goes off; he tries to kill himself with alcohol and bar-fights, then trips across the Korean version of that Monsignor in Les Miserables who gives Jean Valjean his silver candlesticks. This guy manages to convert Father Michael, get him to go to seminary and (later) presides over him taking his vows.
But even as a priest, Father Michael continues to be proud and argumentative, possessed of both an intense temper and the martial skills needed to back it up. We're introduced to him when he interrupts a fake exorcism arranged to shake down the "possessed" man's family, then pursues the shady shaman across a causeway at low tide and holds his face down into the mud until the dude tells him a local gangster put him up to it. Father Michael then fights his way through all this guys' thugs until he finds him hiding inside a cabinet in his office, pulls him out, and hauls back his fist. "Wait!" the gangster complains. "You're a priest! Listen to God!" Father Michael looks up, smiles slightly, and replies: "Ah yes, I do hear the voice of God--and he's telling me to knock you out." POW!
(BTW, his fist literally does often burst into flames before he lets loose. Not all the time, but enough. It's probably a metaphor. It looks amazing.)
At any rate: Father Michael's God-inspired rampage gets him thrown out of his diocese, so he has to go stay with the Monsignor for a while, ostensibly to learn to calm the fuck down. Unfortunately, the Monsignor's church is located in Gudam, possibly THE most ridiculous corrupt district in all of South Korea, which is really saying something. Father Michael quickly runs afoul of the incredibly dirty mayor and her cabal of similarly bent lawyers, business-people, cops, etc. Possibly the worst of the bunch is Mister Hwang, ostensibly CEO of a local trading company, who's basically just a really well-dressed but slightly neurotic gang boss. Father Michael also antagonizes the highly ambitious and beautiful DA ("Gosh, why is he so damn handsome?" she keeps asking herself, internally, even when throwing out snarky lines like: "Are priests allowed to drink that much?") and Detective Gu of the Violent Crimes Squad, a man so hilariously stupid he almost seems like he escaped from some Korean-language Brooklyn Nine Nine rip-off filming next door. Then the Monsignor gets murdered in order to advance one of the mayor's schemes, and things really take off.
I get that it probably doesn't sound funny, but it's actually made me laugh out loud multiple times, especially during the plot twist which had Father Michael taking the DA's satirical advice to "Write to the Pope, why don't you?!" I'm only five episodes in, but thus far the enjoyment factor hasn't faded, which is more than I can say for a lot of other stuff I've started (and later discarded) on Netflix.
All right, time to go to bed.
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Needed To Lose You To Love Me 15 Jan 2020 7:35 AM (5 years ago)
...is the song Cal's listening to most, these days. Selena Gomez, his fave pop idol. She has good taste in songs, as does he, IMHO. (He's also figured out that the chord progression of that song mimics that of "From Now On," from The Greatest Showman, as well as part of Maroon 5's "Payphone," his almost constant go-to. We sang a version of "From Now On" together before his choir practice this week, with him accompanying me and himself on piano, and I sang an a cappella version of "Lose You To Love Me" to call people back from break during MY choir practice. It goes 'round and 'round.)
Otherwise, I made some hopefully smart business decisions this week that I can't talk about yet, and one again had reason to thank Whoever that I'm on anti-anxiety meds during one particular email exchange with Nancy Baker, who's taken over CZP's business correspondence for the nonce. It was the sort of thing that would've made me fly right the hell off the handle, back in the day--an opportunity for true foot-shooting, or at least for shooting off my mouth (over the Internet). Didn't do either, just made some calls and went: "Huh, interesting. No, I think I'll pass." And this too is part of today's email.
Now I need to write a response to the BBC/Netflix Dracula, because I promised I would. And is this making you any money, Gemma? No, Mom, it's not. It's fun, though. Keeps my name in front of the public, too, as my books disappear. And it's better than nothing, as most things usually are.
Three things make a post, yes? Yes.
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I'm Back 3 Jan 2020 11:45 PM (5 years ago)
Nothing huge right now, but I'm going to start posting again, because...well, I think I probably should. Maybe I need to. I've been doing most of my business on Facebook, which I get is probably collaboration with the enemy, but--better yet, or worse--it's also super-public, and I need some place a bit more private to occasionally pour out my heart. So back to Dreamwidth we go, hi ho, hi ho.
It's 2020. Australia's on fire. America just went back to war with Iran. My son is fifteen, and my publisher collapsed, and I have so many things to do that I can't spend lots of time worrying about the fact that those of us who were born in the 1960s (like me, barely) may quite likely be the last generation to hit every point on what's hitherto been assumed to be the "normal" lifetime schedule. I just can't, except maybe here.
Anyhow. Back to it.
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In Lieu of Nada 18 May 2018 8:49 AM (6 years ago)
Has a very weird dream in which I was touring the Royal Ontario Museum with Steve and my friend Nancy Baker. Parts of it were familiar, while others seemed to have been hooked together with the Planetarium (now up and running again, but showing things like "Asgard and the Nine Realms: The Tree-Shaped Universe"), an art museum full of weird installations and some sort of symphony hall. You had to go outside to reach at least one of these places, crossing a bridge so high/long it even gave Steve vertigo, and the articulated skeletons of ichthyosaurs and pteranodons hanging from the Museum's ceiling had been rigged with animatronics that made them look like they were flapping or swimming above us. "That's cool, but really gross," I told Steve, who agreed. Nancy then took me upstairs along some tiny little corridor at the end of which was a secret door in the wall which opened when she pressed it, showing us the symphony hall's interior. A concert performance was about to start. "I wonder how long we could stand here listening before they noticed," she said. "We should probably go back," I replied, so we did, claiming we'd gone looking for the bathroom. "That's the other way," our tour guide said, haughtily, and I finally noticed he was Tom Hiddleston as Loki.
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Today and Every Day 7 May 2018 2:11 PM (6 years ago)
So Cal is very much officially a teenager. I've taken to calling him "Teenaged Groot" when he gets gruff and huffy and annoying, which he really hates ("Uh, you have to call me Callum Barringer!"). He's definitely taller than me now, and his giant feet have grown a whole size, rendering all his boots obsolete. He's also going through phases of being super-oppositional at school, apparently, although I'm hoping that's probably restricted to things like calling people "crapula" rather than violence. I think I would've heard about it pretty quick if actual hitting, shoving or spitting was involved.
Cal's Speech-Language Pathologist, Sari, said the other week, while giving us instructions: "...and then you guys can call each other Dracula or whatever, like you do..."
Me: "Excuse me?"
Sari: "You know, like when you guys call each other Dracula! It's cute."
Me: "Um...he really isn't calling me Dracula."
At any rate. I'm currently fielding assignments from my Litreactor class, and still working on the puke-a-fairy story, now re-named "Thin Cold Hands." I've got all of it down, so now the trick is to shuffle all the sections into the right order. Oh, and I finally placed "Cuckoo," that story I was afraid I'd never be able to pass off on anybody, because it basically struck me as a lecture thinly wrapped in a light layer of fiction. But maybe not! I'm also still tired as hell, walking around in a bit of a daze. I wish I could say that this helps me do what needs to be done, but often it doesn't. (Then again, maybe I can write another story about insomnia, and make a little somethin'-somethin' out of it that way.)
In other news, I've spent the last day and a half linking to various types of black metal on iTunes (Nile, Emperor, Myrkur, Burzum, Rotting Christ, oh my!), followed by three collections of Greek Orthodox Byzantine liturgical chant. And the soundtracks to The Ritual, Marco Polo and Angels & Demons. And two different versions of Vivaldi's Gloria, which I'm singing soprano in as a part of Viva!'s Community Choir, keeping Cal company as he does his own part along with the basses of the Everybody Can Sing Choir. It could be worse.;)
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Let's Try This Again 24 Apr 2018 12:20 PM (6 years ago)
Yeah, so apparently, there are a whole lot of people here who post almost every day! How bizarre, as the old song goes.
I'm still very tired, to the point where this is the second day in a row that I've crapped out halfway through the day and been forced to lie down because I literally felt as though I might lose consciousness. Not sure what that's about, but it doesn't seem good. I'm hoping it's just PMS, or something similarly easy to understand. Then again, I do have to go to the doctor soon to get my prescription renewed, so perhaps I should talk to her about it.
My work at the moment involves popping back and forth between "The Corpse-Door," which is set in Viking times and hopefully reads somewhat like the sagas I read before starting it, and what I was referring to as the "puke-a-fairy story," which will be known from now on as "Swallowed." The deadlines involved are both soonish, though as ever, I think I can push them at least a little bit. I also have three edited files to check and return to source, plus some ongoing correspondence about a few different matters. This was thrown off by the fact that my Gmail account suddenly stopped displaying correctly unless I accessed it via Firefox, which meant I had to devote some time to solving that particular problem--though I did manage to get it solved, even without talking to Steve about it. Go me.
In true tales of RL horror, meanwhile, a guy drove a van headlong through a bunch of pedestrians up at Yonge and Finch yesterday. Ten dead, fifteen wounded; there's been a lot of international attention, I guess to some degree because of the prospect of terrorism having "finally" entered/impacted upon Canada (we usually practice that sort of shit institutionally, on our POC and indigenous citizenry), which is why I got a frantic email from Dad yesterday asking if I was all right. I was and am--Finch is very far north from me, so much so I don't think I've been up there for years. More blackly amusing is the way that Americans have been exclaiming over the fact that the cops who showed up managed to get the guy to stand down without shooting first and asking questions later. I'll point out that he was white, though sadly he may also have been neuroatypical. There's also been a fair deal of: "Whaaaat, your constitution enshrines the rights of Peace, Order and Good Government rather than Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness?!" Darren Aronofsky would approve, but everybody else seems to find it sort of baffling.
At the moment, my Netflix of choice is Tabula Rasa, a Dutch co-pro telling a mystery in which our protagonist is a woman whose short-term memory flushes itself completely under stress, rebooting her to just before the car accident that damaged her brain. It's creepy and emotionally engaging, especially because we're always second-guessing ourselves, much like poor Annemie D'Haeze, who's always on the lookout for the metaphorical red sand hallucination that indicates she's about to lose everything yet again. And she may also be being lied to and gaslit, on top of all that. It's a fine distraction, and entirely defensible, as opposed to Netflix's equally addictive Dynasty update, which is just tasty, tasty trash.
All right, Cal is home and friends are on their way. Later.
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Ah, Dude 20 Apr 2018 7:50 AM (7 years ago)
Well, it's finally happened: as of April 4, I am officially fifty years old. I kind of feel it. My insomnia is so bad now that today I posted on Twitter:
Gotta turn my clock around/Start living like a person./Don't keep vampire hours/Or things will much worse than...they already are. Forgive me, I think that might have been three hours' sleep.
And so 'tis! I'm beginning to feel human only now, two hours before I have to go out, visit my personal trainer, come back, pick up Cal, hopefully hand him off to his respite worker Lucas, etc. Yesterday we did our tax appointment, at the absolute last moment, and discovered that we're in pretty good straits. I was able to claim income from beading for the first time, which meant I could expense my beads and findings; sweet. No refund, but I don't owe anything and I'm going to get money from HST, while Steve is getting a nice chunk. The plan is to put at least half of both straight into Tangerine and fucking leave it there for as long as we can. Toting up that receipts was an eye-opener, especially in terms of eating out, which we just have to stop doing unless it's a very, very special occasion. (I actually sorted the receipts and boiled them down to the largest ones before I reckoned them, so while it looks like we spent $4,000+, it's more like $6,000+. What the fuckitty fuck.)
Even better is the fact that hey hey, if we actually managed to get our shit together and re-qualify for the respite/therapy expenses we've been racking up, the government might end up owing us $30,000 back-dated dollas that could then be applied to saving money for Cal's inheritance, or getting him more therapy, or whatever the hell. Oh God, I am the shittiest mother sometimes.
Otherwise: I'm working on a story, waaaay too slowly, and considering a bunch of essays. Could I actually sell them somewhere? Man, that'd be nice. Today's Tor.com gives me to understand that people are hungry for female villains, which got me thinking about how I tend to see the first Saw trilogy not as the tragedy of John Kramer's failure to teach any-fucking-body any-fucking-thing but as the tragedy of Amanda Young's failure to believe that change is possible, even if you've previously survived having a reverse bear-trap bolted to your face. It's her vaguely sociopathic life-instinct that allows her to become his (supposedly) first apprentice, her drive to revenge herself on her own life, but that's also the thing that John ends up condemning her for rather than actually taking her aside and teaching her to overcome it--what he wants is for his apprentices to be as objective and emotionless in their judgements as he is, but he's dying of a brain tumor, and they're not. It's never gonna work, and Amanda proves why: her very human but also specifically female sense of despair, of self-punishment, leads her to undercut herself even as she seems to bloom toxically, and the result is near-Jacobean carnage, a total party kill that's like a demonstration of Nihilism 101. Nihilism vs existentialism, I guess. "I Hate Myself And Want To Die" would make a good title. But will anyone find this interesting aside from me?
Okay, back to it.
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Praise! Praise! Praise! 18 Feb 2018 11:31 PM (7 years ago)
Once again, such a long, lonnnnng time coming. I apologize for that. It's been an odd intervening period; I got an opportunity to go Costa Rica with almost no warning, subbing in for my Mom, who suddenly found out (right on the eve of leaving for a singing retreat at a yoga studio/compound in the middle of the Caribbean-side rainforest) that she would be uninsurable for travel until she'd been on a drug she'd just been prescribed for at least three months. But she'd already persuaded a friend to go with her, and said friend--Jill--couldn't get out of it, so I became Jill's new travel-partner.
The singing--five hours a day of it--was ecstatic and joyous and strenuous and bonding. We did Shape Note, Appalachian, general Folk, stuff written by instructor Brendan Taaffe (prn. "Taffy"), who I'd already worked with when he visited the Echo Women's Choir. He's from Michigan but lives in Vermont. My co-singers included a very tall British couple, Daniel and Louise, plus a quartet of ladies from New Mexico (Sue, Nancy, Caroline), the youngest of whom was a dairy farmer (Erin); a former minister with severe degenerative glaucoma (Jay); a former farmer turned emergency room nurse (Robin); a very tall lady whose name I can't remember, also from Vermont; and Isabelle, who used to be dean of a business college in the North of England. She roomed with me and Jill. I have all their email addresses, so I guess I could try to keep in touch with them. It's entirely likely I might see Brendan again, at least.
We also sang a whole lot of gospel, as taught by our other instructor, the Reverend Dr Donna Cox from Dayton, Ohio, who specializes in spirituals and jubilee choir singing. In a way, it was a bit like Brendan described the Zimbabwean Sunday Mass he'd once attended: three hours of singing followed by a break, then another three hours of singing. I had to listen a lot, carefully, and not least because Donna is currently suffering from stress dysphonia; I had to be quiet, sometimes quite literally. Brendan is a Quaker, and we did what was almost a Friends Meeting Circle on the last day, totally silent until someone would suddenly break out with a surprisingly moving statement. It reminded me that singing with other people is pretty much as close to a spiritual practice as I currently have.
Costa Rica itself, meanwhile...gorgeous, torrid, humid. It rained a lot (rainforest). Animals and insects everywhere. Great beauty, great poverty. We wore the same clothes over and over and by the end I could smell myself sharply even when I'd showered. When I got home, my sandals were so mouldy I stuck them in the freezer. The sneakers I wore almost daily were so wrecked I just threw them out. Then I almost immediately picked up the cold Cal had when he welcomed me home, and was laid out for two solid weeks. I've barely been able to pop my head up for Spectral Evidence's official release, two interviews and Black Panther, which I need to talk about yesterday. Not tonight, though.
Okay, that's something. Now: bed.
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Anxiety and Proof 14 Jan 2018 1:02 PM (7 years ago)
Last night I had what I can only describe as an anxiety attack. I think it would have been far worse without my Cymbalta, but I gotta say, it wasn't great. It was, in fact, so bad that I ended up taking Trazadone just to get to sleep, even though I stopped taking Trazadone some time back (on my doctor's advice) because I figured out that taking two drugs originally designed to be anti-depressants at the same time was making me sleep super-long and feel drunk most of the time when I was awake. Luckily, today's hangover doesn't seem so bad, though I'm certainly feeling...slow. It was fascinating to note how quickly my anxiety disappeared after I took the Trazadone, though. Like turning off a switch.
The trigger seemed to be the fact that when Steve and I began to discuss trading up to a bigger apartment, the first thing he said was: "It'd be really helpful if you could think about getting a job again, then, so we'd have a bigger budget to work with." At which point I immediately started thinking my usual self-sabotaging crap: But what kind of job could I get? Who would ever hire me for anything? What the hell am I qualified to do, anyways? "Teach," Steve immediately suggested, which just made me feel even more insane: Teach where? Teach what? For whom? To whom? Writing, obviously, and yet. I still remember how difficult it was to write books when I was teaching, how wiped out it made me at the end of every day, how annoying dealing with the faculty itself was. How it became a chore, like every other job I've ever had.
I'm not good with being in a position where I'm not the main authority. That's the truth, sadly; that's probably always been the truth. It doesn't make me very marketable. And even if I managed to--say--line up an online teaching gig for every month of the year, I'd still probably only make $1,000 a pop at the most. That's $12,000/year to Steve's $100,000/year, with maybe up to $10,000 in writing money folded in on top: $22,000, at most. I do, after all, have other shit to do on a regular daily basis, none of which I'm getting paid for.
Ugh, anyhow. This isn't going to get solved anytime soon. Better to just go back to the shit I can control, ostensibly.
The night before last, I got Steve to watch Proof by Jocelyn Moorhouse, a film I've owned for I don't know how long but definitely haven't seen for at least fifteen years. It stars Hugo Weaving (so young he has hair) as Martin, a blind man who carries a camera with him at all times so that he can take photos of stuff people tell him is there, then get different people to describe the photos to him in order to prove whether or not the first people were lying to him. This obsession goes back to his childhood, when he began to doubt that his mother was describing the world around him accurately. ("Why would I lie to you?" she asked; "Because you can," he replied.) Born without sight, he resents the fact that he has to take everybody else's word for...pretty much everything, and it certainly doesn't help that his only current caretaker is Celia (Genevieve Picot), the cleaning woman he knows "wants him" and takes a bitter pleasure in denying her any sort of love in return, because he believes that as long as she hates him, she'll at least never pity him.
Martin's static life is shaken awake when he meets Andy (Russell Crowe, so young he's thin) by accidentally stumbling over a pile of garbage cans behind the restaurant he works at, thus supposedly killing "Ugly," the stray cat Andy goes out back to feed throughout the day. The next time he sees Martin taking a shortcut through that alley on his way back from the park he frequents, Andy challenges him and shows him Ugly's "body," at which point Martin--with his flexible, sensitive, intrusive fingers--realizes that the cat's merely wounded, and directs Andy to the same vet who treats Martin's beloved dog. Andy helps Martin take photos of the waiting room, then describes them for him afterwards so Martin can label them; Martin offers to pay him to do it on a regular basis, but Andy declines the money, offering friendship instead. A tenuous relationship develops, one Celia--who discovers it when she makes a collage from all the sections of Andy captured by Martin's camera--is jealous of, and immediately starts plotting to destroy.
For such an emotionally stunted, haughtily fearful, rejecting on principle and apparently bitter man, Martin also proves to be capable of a surprising amount of joy, at least when Andy's around. (The sequence in which Andy volunteers to describe a drive-in-movie to Martin, who accidentally provokes some nearby hoons by exploring Andy's car and not realizing he's come up with a bunch of condoms that he's now displaying to them in apparent mockery, is a classic--Andy gets beat up and Martin's forced to drive them away, then tells the cops who stop them: "My eyes...oh my God, I can't see!" in order to get out of being arrested. "You've been blind all your life," the doctor examining Martin concludes, to which Martin replies: "I know." "So why were you driving?" "I forgot.")
"I didn't think he could not hate anything," Celia admits to Andy, "but I was wrong. I think he loves you." She retaliates by taking a Polaroid of Martin on the toilet, using it to blackmail him into a date whose highs and lows are equally huge, before seducing Andy and letting Martin walk in on them having sex on his couch. Things fall apart, spurring a final series of realizations: Martin must extricate himself from the trap he's been calling home, forgive his mother, Celia, Andy, himself. "Everyone lies, mate," Andy tells him, "[but y]our whole life is the truth. Have a little pity on the rest of us."
I was struck by how well Steve responded to it, considering how difficult all the characters are. Casting probably helped, as did Moorhouse's frankly amazing visual storytelling. This is one of those movies I'd pull out if anybody challenged me to "prove" that women can direct; it's a fucking tragedy how few projects she's been allowed to helm since. Not exactly a surprise, though.
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Of Course I Fucking Know Who You Are, YOU WERE YELLING IT 12 Jan 2018 6:01 AM (7 years ago)
So: yesterday I slept for eleven hours; last night I slept for none. This is my adult fucking life in a nutshell, folks.
Aaaaaaanyhow. Wow, been a while, eh? And what have I been doing? Getting better, mainly. Not writing. Watching a hell of a lot of stuff. Reading some other stuff. Listening to podcasts and books on Audible. Making sure Cal gets to school, laundry gets done, the hole in the bathroom ceiling gets fixed. My copies of "Coffle" came from Dim Shores, and they're beautiful. I sang an impromptu carol called "Viking Santa" at the ChiZine Christmas Show, then stupidly performed it for Steve without remembering that hey-ho, you could potentially call it fairly anti-Christian. It went thusly:
Yol
Yol
Yol
Yol
My mother said
Someday I would buy
A galley with great oars
Sail to distant shores
Stand up in the prow
Straight and tall
Make straight for the haven
Kill many foe-men, kill many foe-men
Dye my suit in red
Grow a long white beard
Bring back lots of toys
From slaughtering girls and boys
From slaughtering girls and boys
When Thor and Christ fought
We went underground
Little did you know
I am still around, I am still around
Your stupid church
Made me a saint
But this is our revenge
'Cause Christian I ain't
Christian I ain't
CHRISTIAN I AIN'T
Yol
Yol
Yol
Yol
Yollllllllllllllll
Since then, I've almost finished two miniseries on Shudder TV--Black Lake and Jordskott--and also watched La Mante (The Mantis) on Netflix, a miniseries that could easily be subtitled "Or: What If Hannibal Lecter Was Yo Mama?" I've also fallen straight down the hole on a completely new 'ship, the Vikings pairing of Ivar the Boneless and his own personal Christian prisoner from England, Bishop Heahmund (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Unlike Ragnar and Athelstan, their attraction is based mainly on mutual berserker-dom; their version of a meet-cute came when a knocked-from-his-chariot Ivar scared off the entire Wessexian/Mercian army just by screaming at them ("YOU CAN'T KILL ME! DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I AM? I AM IVAR THE BONELESS!!!!") even as Heahmund loudly invoked God's wrath on King Aethelwulf's enemies, reversing his sword to use it as a cross while praying.
Next episode, Ivar watched Heahmund--now trapped behind enemy lines--trample a shield-maiden to death before his horse rolled on top of him, stopped the fight to donate his own horse to Heahmund instead (they both made mocking curtsies at each other before Heahmund re-mounted) and watched him get taken down again, after which the Vikings dragged the Bishop before Ivar so he could scream "Heathen!" in his face, to which Ivar just grinned and spat back: "Christian." Ivar then decided to bring Heahmund back to Norway with him, ostensibly to use him as a human weapon against Lagertha in the inevitable battle for Kattegat...a plan Heahmund eventually decided to go along with, claiming that slaking his sword in pagan blood meant he was still "doing the Lord's work." "And mine, Bishop Heahmund," Ivar reminded him, in Old Anglo-Saxon. "And mine."
So yeah, it's my jam, basically. With the Great Heathen Army's victories over Kings Aelle and Ecbert behind him, Ivar's become a Machiavellian battle-genius given to off-handedly saying things like (to his "ally," King Harald Finehair): "But who's to say you won't inherit Kattegat's throne after my death? I'm not a well person, after all; I'm a cripple." And Bishop Heahmund is a self-confessed sinner who's full of pride and fury, a born warrior whose strong, whole body Ivar both envies and possibly wants to jump, the perfect person to witness for Christ amongst the Vikings. (I could totally see him giving that sermon where he points out that Jesus would win a fight with Thor, because Jesus can come back from the dead.) At the moment he's been wounded and taken prisoner by Lagertha's side, but there's still two more episodes to go this season--I'm holding out for a bloody, bloody reunion.
Otherwise: got some corrections to do, have to finish "Halloo," then go on to another short story I owe. And back to Nightcrawling, damn. Also, I may be going to Costa Rica to do a singing workshop Mom can no longer do in her stead. I'll keep you all updated.
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2017: The Tired Sounds, A Wake 14 Dec 2017 9:36 AM (7 years ago)
2017 summation post: This year's been an interesting case, for me. I taught two Litreactor courses, lectured at the Odyssey Workshop, and travelled far more than I usually do--I was a fill-in guest of honor at Necon, then ended up going to Necronomicon for the first time (with Steve, which was fun). I didn't go to Readercon, for the first time in years. Though I didn't write as much as I should have, every story I wrote was at least either solicited or placed while I was still writing it, and my bibliography has finally passed the 100 short stories mark. I made a deal for two more collections of short fiction from Trepidatio, and continued to put together my forthcoming collection from Cemetery Dance. I worked on Nightcrawling, my next novel, and did an amazing three-part interview with This Is Horror. I wrote one poem and a bunch of Dark Comforts Patreon posts. I finally managed to get Cal's tonsils removed, and scouted and applied to high schools for next September. I continued singing with Echo Women's Choir and beaded a crazy amount of necklaces, some of which I sold. I got used to referring to myself as neuroatypical, and thinking of myself as a writer with a 30-year body of work. I also suffered from near-constant insomnia, eventually beginning a course of medication for anxiety and depression, which has definitely improved my outlook.
The world in general continues to spiral out of control, meanwhile, which I have no possibility of doing much about. Things are as they are. All I can do is deal with what's in front of me, love my loved ones, and keep on going.
So--what did I like, this year? Let's talk about that, because it's always a little more interesting.
This year saw the release of S.P. Miskowski's short story collection Strange is the Night and Nadia Bulkin's collection She Said Destroy, both of which I was really happy to be asked to blurb. I think of them as role models, women whose ideas and style will heavily influence the genre going forwards. This year also introduced me to the work of Kristi DeMeester, whose novel Beneath and collection Everything That's Underneath are equally brilliant. Her story "The Room in the Other House," in particular, rocked my world in that eat-your-brains way, just like Nadia's "Endless Life" and S.P.'s "Ms. X Regrets Everything," which made me even more certain that I need to write a book about a cult.
From amongst my uniformly great CZP publishing-housemates, David Demchuk's The Bone Mother and Stephen Michell's Only the Devil is Here really knocked my socks off. I was also happy to blurb my former student Victoria Dalpe's first ChiTeen imprint novel, Parasite Life, a nominal YA vampire story that happily breaks all the rules of that genre.
I linked to a bunch of brilliant short stories over this year, mostly by women, mostly from Nightmare Magazine and The Dark. Some that stand out are Amal el Mohtar's award-winning "Seasons of Glass and Iron," Tamsyn Muir's "The Woman in the Hill," Cassandra Khaw's "Don't Turn on the Lights," Silvia Moreno-Garcia's "Jade, Blood," Chesya Burke's "He Who Takes Away the Pain," Robert Jackson Bennet's "Hollow Choices," Livia Llewellyn's "The Low, Dark Edge of Life," Eliza Victoria's "Queen Midnight," Bruce McAllister's "The Witch Moth," Carlie St. George's "If We Survive the Night," Nadia Bulkin's "The House That Jessica Built," A.C. Wise's "The Last Sailing of the Henry Charles Morgan in Six Pieces of Scrimshaw (1841)." Stuff I read on my own includes Helen Marshall's "Caro in Carno," A.C. Wise's "I Dress My Love in Yellow," Anton Rose's "Mandible," Matthew M. Bartlett's "Master of the House," Megan Arkenberg's "But Thou, Proserpina, Sleep," Richard Gavin's "Banishments," Mike Griffin's "The Lure of Devouring Light," Daniel Mills's "The Christensen Deaths" and Sonya Taaffe's "The Creeping Influences." There were no doubt many others, but these stick out.
On TV, I enjoyed The Exorcist Seasons One and Two, Twin Peaks: The Return, Netflix's Mindhunter, The Punisher and Stranger Things 2, and a variety of other seasonal divertissements, including way too much HGTV. I began catching up with the later seasons of Oz, moving backwards, and have just reached season one; this probably explains why I was moved to post just over 45,000 words' worth of new Oz fic on AO3, along with my fixed-up old stuff. That story, a cisswapped Beecher-centric AU called "Always Tried to Be A Good Girl, But I Can't Really Say That That's True," is ongoing.
One of the most exciting books of this year for me was Grady Hendyx's Paperbacks From Hell, a glossy tour of the 1980s horror boom that reminded me where my formative influences lie. This caused me to dig out lots of used paperbacks from that same period that I've amassed over the years and cut them with "new" ones, including stuff like Judith Hawkes's lost classic Julian's House, Alan Erwin's batshit insane Skeleton Dancer and Maggie Davis's surprisingly wonderful Forbidden Objects, which reads like All Heads Turn as the Hunt Goes By written by somebody who gets that slavery was a bad fucking thing whose influence no one will ever escape. I was also chuffed to realize I had one book that he champions already, Jessica Hamilton's Elizabeth, which could potentially be reprinted as the weirdest piece of YA ever. Scott Thomas's Kill Creek, John Connolly's A Game of Ghosts (I just walked into Chapters-Indigo one day and found it waiting!), Adam Nevill's Hasty for the Dark and a quick tour back through Ramsey Campbell's novels and short stories complete my list of literature consumed during 2017 that made enough of an impression on me to remember.
Amended to add: Okay, I'm a dumb-ass--I also read and enjoyed Nick Cutter's Little Heaven, Caitlin R. Kiernan's Agents of Dreamland, Josh Malerman's Black Mad Wheel and A House Under a Lake, Paul Tremblay's Disappearance at Devil's Rock and Benjamin Percy's The Dark Net. I started/bought other stuff from this year, but didn't get to or through it. This is how the Gemma Files do.
In terms of films, I saw less films in the theatre than probably ever before. Wonder Woman, obviously; Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, It: Chapter One, Thor: Ragnarok, Justice League. I went with my Mom to see I Am Not Your Negro, Pedro Almodovar's Julieta and Paul Verhoeven's Elle, but caught up with Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper on demand. I saw Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water in the theatre, with an audience that was huge, mainly my age and monumentally pleased. Saw Logan with the same sort of audience, most of whom were weeping. Oh yeah, and The Dark Tower and Atomic Blonde, my first double bill in years, the first showing on my own (also unlikely!).
On DVD, Netflix and BluRay, you can take that number and probably triple it. I re-watched a lot of things, but also just watched stuff, some of which went right in one ear and out the other--pure eye-candy, pure background noise. I watched Viral three times on VOD just because it struck me as somethjing Nadia Bulkin might like. Because of re-reading Kier-La Janisse's cinematic autobiography House of Psychotic Women, I watched/re-watched a fair deal of things like The Blood-Spattered Bride, Let's Scare Jessica to Death and Symptoms, seeking to codify my own neuroses. I also watched a lot of demented Indian horror movies like Ludo, which starts out as a Tarantino-esque sex comedy but ends up like some weird Anne Rice back-story about a possessed ludo board that turns you into an incestuous vampire forever trapped in the shopping mall built over your grave, as well as the first Pakistani zombie film, Hell's Ground. And all that.
In podcasts, 2017 brought the debut of Sunny Moraine's one-woman apocalypse Gone, while it also brought the crash-and-burn ending of The Black Tapes Podcast. The Magnus Archives, Pseudopod and No Sleep continued strong, and The White Vault made a good showing. These Are Their Stories enabled my crushing habit of mainlining Law & Order: SVU while up all night, but Nocturne, Unexplained, Haunted and Criminal both helped me sleep and kept me interested while awake. I'd love to guest-star on Norman Wilner's Someone Else's Movie. Serial Killers and Cults remain guilty pleasures, just like the Paris catacombs episode of Haunted Places. The Mysterious Old Radio Show Appreciation Society is always fun, and Knifepoint Horror came out with a bunch of new stuff as well, which had me loving Soren Narnia's odd, hushed, flat delivery. I'd kind of like to start my own podcast, but have more than enough shit to do already, right? (Right?)
In other listening-to-soothing voices news, Audible has ALL the Valancourt re-issues of Michael McDowell's wonderful 1980s Southern Gothics. This allowed me to catch up with Cold Moon Over Babylon and The Amulet, neither of which I'd read for twenty years. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, folks.
All right, that's about it. And now, on to something less enjoyable.
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Let's All Sing That Martha Wainwright Song (You Know The One) 30 Nov 2017 7:24 AM (7 years ago)
I've been thinking about my Dad for a while, tonguing past him in my mind like a sore, a rotten tooth, an empty socket. On the one hand, it feels a bit as though I've finally got him sorted: he's never going to be the father I once wanted because he was never capable of being that sort of father, and while it's disappointing to realize that I've wasted so much time wishing things could be different, I'm not dead yet--I have a family, a husband, a life of my own. When I needed him he wasn't there, but I don't need him anymore, and it wasn't something in me that made him go away in the first place, either; no, that was all him.
"And Mom," I could add, without being anything but honest--but seriously, I've been exactly where he was back when, feeling like I couldn't stand to be in proximity with the person who'd hurt me ever again, and guess what? I didn't leave the fucking country, never to return. Would it have been hard to interact with [that guy] on the regular, if I'd had a child with him? Hell, yes...but I would have done it. I would have expected HIM to do it. Because it wouldn't have just been about us, at that point--and when that happens, things change, or should. They fucking well have to.
You know, the funny thing is that it's actually pretty easy to cut somebody out of your life, even when you're still occupying the same hemisphere. I've done it with friends, with ex-lovers; when you don't see people every day, you really do tend to forget them--I do, anyway. Mom could've done it with him, especially considering that she now says she never loved him at all, not really...and that hurts a bit, but not as much as I might have expected it to. It mainly offends me because he's still part of my DNA, literally, so if she never loved him, isn't she sort of saying I shouldn't exist? I know what it is to be a mother now, though, so I don't even vaguely think that IS what she's saying; I do exist, I'm like a part of her body walking around somewhere, which means that to deny me is to deny herself. Not to mention how no me means no Cal, and she sure doesn't want that.
But in the final analysis, I just can't think that a man who wrote an entire (half a) book chronicling in great detail how he so consistently gave more of a shit about his career than he ever did about being there for me can ever really be said to have felt the same. Gary Files says he loves me, sure, but it's not unconditional, and it never has been; it's always been contingent on my being what he wants, doing what he wants. He's never had any respect for what I've spent my entire life building, and that goes both ways--if I've devoted myself to a bullshit genre when I should've/could've been doing almost anything else, in his opinion, then it's equally true that my critic's sensibility makes me objectively assess his IMDB.com entry like so: "Some hits, mostly misses, an attendant lord to swell a scene, now best-known for vocal work on a cult marionette TV show. The kind of guy you have to give so much context for every time you mention him that after a while, you just stop doing it."
It all comes down to this, forever: he left. He stayed away. He made it easy for me to choose to forget him. And then he made me wish I could.
Fuck, how I wish I could.
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Placeholderin' 17 Nov 2017 6:12 AM (7 years ago)
Soooo...it's been roughly a month since my last entry. Cal is entirely recovered from his tonsilectomy, thank Christ; we had some bad times there for a while, mainly during the first week and a half, when I swear he was having some sort of existential crisis. I'd come into his room to find him moping around in his underwear, chin in hand, staring off into the middle distance like: Why did this happen? Why would Mommy and Daddy do this to me? Will it ever stop hurting? Morphine helped, but only a little, and I stopped giving it to him after the first week, for fear of addiction. I've never seen anybody so damn happy to go back to school.
Since then, it's mainly been writing--I'm almost done with "The Church in the Mountains," which I placed about halfway through putting it together, after which I have another story to write by December--and Litreactor, which takes up a surprising amount of my time. I also started a course of Cymbalta, which I'm mainly using to combat my insomnia; it works, to a point. I certainly stay asleep once I get there, and my sleep is good. Then again, it sometimes makes me sleepy during the day, which can be counter-intuitive. I've been listening to Audible again, too--Scott Thomas's Kill Creek, in particular, which isn't the best thing in the world yet worked really, really well for me nonetheless. I was impressed by its ability to evoke the process of being a horror writer, pitting four different types of such against a haunted house that desperately wants to be told of. The section where two very different authors each brainstorm how the other would write about the house made me laugh out loud, more with delight than anything else.
Otherwise--totally failed NaNoWriMo, as usual. Went to a party. Saw Thor: Ragnarok. All that.
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A Short Update 19 Oct 2017 1:53 PM (7 years ago)
Monday is now Cal's surgery date. We got to the hospital, he puked, people saw him, so eventually the doctor decided it wasn't worth the risk. I obviously couldn't refute it. So we got back home and I went to sleep, woke to find hm suspiciously happy--stress, faking, a one-day virus? Impossible to tell. I have to phone by four tomorrow to get the new surgery time, but which point I'll be in Windsor, attending Bookfest Windsor. Hoop-la.
If anybody's interested, I managed to finish a Patreon post and it's up here (http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.ca/2017/10/patreon-post-self-made-awful-objects.html). Love to get some commentary on it, here or there.
Oh yeah, and just to say, the kind folk at Litreactor agreed to move my Write What You Fear course up, which means that there are still spots and now much more time to sign up in. The link is here (https://litreactor.com/classes/write-what-you-fear).
Meanwhile, my body genuinely feels like it's falling apart. Last weekend was nothing but stress, and this weekend is going to be the exact same. I just have to suck it up.
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That Terrible Syllable, NOW 12 Oct 2017 7:33 AM (7 years ago)
Tomorrow's Cal's surgery, but I won't find out exactly when until four. My bowels and stomach are full of bile; I'm eating stuff just to drive other stuff through my body. "The Church in the Mountains" is up over 6,000+ words now, but I can't do much about it, because I'm rigid with general worry. Just have to bull through things, I guess, like always.
In other news, I met with one of my necklace customers on Monday, passing it over to her before she started her day at Bouchercon. We had an interesting chat during which she self-identified as Aspergian as well, and used terms I've stumbled across myself, when talking about the way I negotiate my way through the world. "It's like I have to design little algorithms and sub-routines for myself," she said, and I got an immediate flash of talking to my Mom on Sunday, telling her about an essay about Japanese folk horror movies I'd written. I was defining terms for her, telling her the movies I'd covered--Onibaba, Kuroneko, Kwaidan--before moving on to talk about the Mononoke anime, then the Japanese tradition of bathroom ghosts, etc. I remember having this moment where I began describing the kappa to her after having covered three other bathroom ghosts already, only to tell myself: Oh no, that's too much--you can give three examples in a row of something, but just three, no more. Because I could literally see her start to detach, this clear why would you think I want to know about this, exactly, Gemma? message beaming from her eyes.
It was an interesting intersection of our social scripts; she was trying really hard not to cut me off while I was trying to cut myself off, at exactly the same time. And this is the sort of thing I used to not be able to see, yet now can't stop myself from seeing--beats having to think about Cal's surgery every minute of the day, though. Which is useful.
Okay, that's about it. By this time tomorrow, Cal will hopefully be in recovery and Steve will be at home putting his loft-bed together, breaking down his old bed and getting it down to the loading dock, etc. Then the first week will go by, then the second, then he'll be all better, and so on. Nothing lasts long, in context; this, too, shall pass. I have to have faith in the pattern, not to mention my own ability to recognize it.
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Drive-By Review: A Dark Song (SPOILERS ABOUND) 4 Oct 2017 8:52 AM (7 years ago)
As a person who spent her teenage years studying books by William Seabrook, Colin Wilson and Aleister Crowley, one of the things I've observed is that while there are a lot of movies out there about witchcraft and black magic of almost every stamp out there, very few take on the challenge of depicting ritual, heirarchical magic--what practitioners sometimes call "la haute magie," an almost mathematical mixture of sigils, invocations and sacrifices done inside a series of closed magic circles, aimed at bending angels or demons to the power of the magician's will. Sympathetic magic, witchcraft's backbone, involves the simple identification of target with object, so that (for example) a human being can be affected by whatever is done to a doll, or what have you. In ritual magic, however, the magician supposedly thrusts themselves out of their fleshly comfort zone and out into the magical universe, where--providing they follow all the rules--they will eventually be able to treat with supernatural beings face to face, armed only with their own force of personality and the various holy names they've worked into their ritual. It's a lot like weaponized meditation, or even weaponized prayer.
A Dark Song, written and directed by Irish filmmaker Liam Gavin, takes on the challenge of admitting both its characters and potential audience members into the hermetic, super-concentrated world of ritual magic. We begin with Sophia Howard (Catherine Walker), a brittle, upper-class woman who we first meet shoving a wad of money at her realtor, ordering him to make sure her year's lease on a drafty old mansion located deep in the Welsh countryside goes through quickly and quietly, with no interference. A day or so later she's down at the train station meeting career magician Joseph Solomon (Steve Oram), the man she hopes will guide her through a ritual described in the grimoire of Abramelin the Mage, designed to invoke her personal guardian angel. When--or if, more accurately--the angel appears, both Sophia and Solomon will be able to ask it to grant them a single wish. Solomon eventually admits he wants the power of invisibility, so he can fade out of the public eye and escape petitioners like her, gaining himself some peace and quiet "before the screaming." Sophia at first says she wants a person who doesn't love her anymore to love her again, then that she wants to hear her dead son's voice one last time. What she really wants, however, is vengeance against her son's murderers.
Like any good brainwashing campaign, the Abramelin ritual requires isolation, submission and constant, repetitive activity, a paring away of the surface ego to expose a far deeper core of willpower. Solomon refuses to be treated as an employee just because Sophia's offered him her life savings--to him, he's the master adept and she's his student, his servant. He wakes her at all hours, makes her commit to doing all the cooking and cleaning, douses her in icy water while she prays to be made fresh and clean, forgiven her sins, made worthy of an angel's attention. When she refuses to forgive those who've trespassed against her because she "doesn't do forgiveness," he makes her drink an entire glass of his own blood in order to skip that step of the process, then makes her shave off all his body-hair and uses her as a masturbational aid in a joyless session of "ritual sex." It's all a bit dicey to say the least, especially since she's effectively trapped inside the house with him once he's closed the circle around it, laying down a trail of salt he claims would kill either of them if they step over if before the ritual is completed.
But then the ritual IS completed, yet nothing happens. Solomon claims this isn't unheard of--they'll just have to start over, and keep doing it until they get results. And Sophia's doubtful but her hunger for revenge drives her on, a sort of black act of anti-faith, rewarded at last when things do seem to begin to occur: a knocking under the floor, whispers through the walls, her son's favourite toy disappearing, then re-appearing. At the end of one particularly gruelling meditation, she opens her eyes to see flakes of gold falling from the ceiling and starts to laugh in delight. "Now it's happening," Solomon claims, but viewers can't help remembering those magic mushrooms he's been slipping her. Is this folie a deux, or is it the numinous seeping through a dimensional wall worn thin by longing?
I like it either way, personally, or both. But part of A Dark Song's power lies in the fact that it could very easily be read as an intensive look at the world's most fucked-up therapy retreat--Sophia's hind-brain giving her the closure her soul sorely needs, as Solomon works out his own issues until he can't anymore. He claims it's Sophia's initial and continuing dishonesty that makes the ritual not work the first few times, once she finally admits what she actually wants is for the teenagers who killed her son as part of their own investigation into the occult to suffer and die; "I don't need you to be virtuous," he yells, "I just need you to not lie to me, you fuckin' cunt!" If you believe what he believes, it's easy enough to make the leap and assume that that's why he's later unable to heal himself after getting accidentally stabbed, and ends up dying of sepsis. But certainly, things take a turn after that--Sophia tries to leave the house while Solomon sleeps but soon finds she can't drive or walk anywhere but in a huge circle, constantly returning to the house; she starts to see "the dead and the damned," then does hear her son's voice once again, but just as a cruel trick ("You know it's just one of them using my voice to get you to open the door, Mummy." "I know.").
And here's where we get to the truly divisive part of the movie, the ending, which prompted at least one Facebook commenter to rave about how it confirms "the slave mentality of religion": after Sophia descends further and further, surrounded by demons who harass and frighten her as darkness rains down in ashy clumps, knock her out, drag her to the basement and wound her before she breaks free, making her bloodied way back up the stairs from nigredo into albedo--she re-enters the magical chamber at last to find her guardian angel literally waiting there for her: representation, palpable, so huge it has to kneel, glory-blazing, androgynous in armor flecked with falling gold, wielding a sword. "So beautiful," she says, out loud. The angel asks her what she wants, its voice imperceptible to us, and she says what she wants is the power to forgive. Next thing we know, she's sinking Mr Solomon's body in the river outside and driving away, still missing the finger we saw the demons take from her. Something definitely happened, and now she can move on, no longer frozen inside her own grief and hatred.
All of which really does seem perfectly congruent with the rest of the film to me, though I understand why it might not to other people. I get that I'm biased; I am a mother, after all, as well as a horror author, so this is a scenario I've played through in my own mind, eventually being forced to admit that while I wouldn't necessarily want to survive my child, I might nevertheless have to--which is why forgiveness seems essentially healthier to me, in the end, whether it comes wrapped in religious imagery or not. I mean, even most pagans believe it's a bad idea to try to kill people with magic; "take what you want and pay for it" seems logical when you're still in the "You have two beautiful, live children, I have a fucking hole" stage of things, but it means a who lot less when paying for it becomes synonymous with "ruining my own ability to enjoy any fucking thing at all, including my revenge."
Sometimes I think people just want to be able to say: "Whatever you're gonna do, not that"--that any twist, in any direction, is unlikely to satisfy because no matter which it turns out to be, they'll still want to call it predictable. But this is a ritual, and rituals only go one of two ways--they work, or they don't. This works, in my opinion. Or, to put it another way...while there may indeed be some crimes that are humanly unforgivable, those crimes might be forgivable through grace, that annoying religious term. Yet when an angel of the Lord appears before you, when you ask for the power to forgive, you're asking for grace--the grace of God, the strength of God, the strength to not be human anymore for just one second, to step outside time and space and stop being a hating, vengeance-seeking animal long enough to get right with yourself, if no one else.
And if you flinch at the mention of Christianity in general then I guess that's likely to feel like a slap, so sorry for that--but I am not religious, yet I still feel guilty enough over my own many failures and transgressions to want grace, to crave it. I can't see how any of us wouldn't, considering it might help us balance things just enough so we can walk away, keep on living and enjoy that life, without feeling bad for doing so. As sovay says: "[E]ven if you don't believe in God, either you have to believe that humans are capable of that kind of turning away—or turning back—or what do you think happens, reprisal on reprisal, world without end, and that's okay? I feel like forgiveness has gone out of fashion because it has so often been used as a way of limiting the pursuit of justice, and I agree it shouldn't be a thing to hide behind, but I also feel that doesn't mean it's an inherently invalid concept any more than love should be thrown out because so many people are better at hatred."
In conclusion: the world is just getting really fucked up, these days, in my opinion--unbalanced and hard, on every side. This may well explain why I don't feel like quibbling vocabulary anymore.
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A Brief Interlude 29 Sep 2017 5:32 AM (7 years ago)
Back to "The Church in the Mountains," hopefully. Yesterday I got the schedule for high school open houses, two of which I've already missed because they didn't send me the schedule soon enough; the next one is on October 12, the night before Cal's surgery. This is all business as usual, really.
Last night, meanwhile, I finally finished the only thing I've been able to get done this week, which was another version of the Halloween 24 Hours of Horror program I did like...four years ago, now? I like to think it's a nice mixture of genuine creep and crazy whackadoodliness, thus running the gamut of what I personally want/get from horror stuff in general. Like Orrin Grey, I'm in it for the monsters (if you consider ghosts monsters, which I personally think you could). There are a lot of things I debated putting on the list and then pulled at the last minute, at least one of which was Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper; after long debate with myself, I've decided that even though it's about A) ghosts and B) death, I cannot in all conscience call it a HORROR film per se. Too bad there isn't such a category as "numinous film," at least not currently.
At any rate, back to it.
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Why I Can't Sleep/Sleep Too Much 26 Sep 2017 9:56 AM (7 years ago)
Yesterday was Cal's thirteenth birthday, giving me once again an opportunity to reckon just how amazingly he's grown since...well, since he was born, obviously, but also since last year, and the year before that, etcetera. He's officially a teenager today. I bought him his first batch of student's tickets, made him stick one in the till as we went through the turnstile at Coxwell subway station. At Sherbourne, he suddenly turned to me and, quite seriously, said: "Mom, this is our stop." I'd intended to go to Yonge/Bloor and ride the subway all the way around to King, but I asked him: "Do you want to get off at Sherbourne?" "Yes." "You want to ride the Sherbourne bus down to our building?" "Yes." "Okay." So that's what we did, and when I told him to show the bus driver his transfer, he did. And then we went back to Sherbourne and I fell asleep on the couch, utterly gutted by a post-adrenaline surge exhaustion that later gave me a massive sick headache. I feel like I haven't quite recovered even today.
Because the other thing about yesterday, of course, is that it began with an 8:30 AM pre-op checkup appointment at Toronto East General Hospital, where Cal and a bunch of other kids got a little lecture about what to expect when they got their tonsils and adenoids out. I and the other parents were given a small tour of the pediatric ward, told things like "the parent who goes in with him gets to stay through recovery, no one else"--because he actually does have to stay overnight, ha ha ha, which means so do I--and "this is a fasting ward, you won't be able to eat until they go in, so have a big breakfast before you get here." Then we saw the anesthesiologist, who was so kind and pleasant I started to cry at one point, without even vaguely knowing why. I've signed off on them sedating him before giving him the gas, because he sometimes fights it at the dentist. And then there's two weeks of after-care, pain and weirdness and the constant threat of infection, bleeding, whatever. That terrible sense that something has changed, permanently.
I don't want him to feel like we've tricked him or betrayed him, but he probably will. I can't see how he wouldn't. I'd give my right arm to be with him through the procedure, even though the idea of seeing them cut into him is...awful, horrifying. He's literally never been in hospital before, aside from that time they put him to sleep to remove four rotted baby teeth and a recent-ish trip to Emergency Mom had, which he got caught up in because I had committed to walking up with her and Steve wasn't yet home to take him away. They have a lot of toys there, at least.
I know it's the best idea, that is really does have to be done; shit, I fought for this, after all. But yesterday, when he literally exploded into song after we left, then did it again after our birthday dinner with Mom, I couldn't help thinking that we don't even know if he'll be able to sing anymore after this surgery. Or if his voice will suddenly change in some wrenching way--drop, maybe. He sounded beautiful last night. He sang "Beauty and the Beast" all the way through, maybe because he knows Mom likes it, even though Mom was already far behind him. He let me sing along with him, even though I don't have perfect pitch, like he does.
I don't want him to hate me, even for a moment. I love him. I need him to love me. To keep ON loving me.
So there we have it: why I can't sleep, why I sleep too much, why I'm finding it hard to write, why why why. Because my heart permanently lives outside of my body, forever stuck inside a piece of myself that they cut out of me thirteen years ago. Because I am a Mom, along with everything else, and goddamnit, it did change me. It made me better, and worse, and different. He made--and makes--me who I am.
Happy birthday, Callum Jacob Barringer.
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I've Been Negligent 18 Sep 2017 10:35 AM (7 years ago)
...in terms of posting here, as with so much else. It's a lot easier to just like and reblog a bunch of shit on Tumblr, or have my conversations on Facebook, and that's frankly sad as hell. But then again, both Livejournal and Dreamwidth appear to be almost exactly as mordant, these days. Comments conversation is a dead art, I fear.;)
Anyhow: I went through my notebooks again, did a transcription binge and moved all my In Development pieces into a folder, thus discovering that while I may have far more upcoming deadlines than I thought I did, I also have roughly fifty things I could potentially use to plug those particular holes--seeds, sketches or outlines, as I like to call them, depending on the level of content. (A seed, for example, might be as simple as the sentence "Break John Wyndham's "Close Behind Me" down for parts and remix it to my own satisfaction."; an outline goes all the way, from first few sentences to three-act structure and coda sentence, with nothing left un-worked-out.) So that's good.
All of which goes to explain why I'm currently in the process of bulling my way through a new story called "The Church in the Mountains," based on the vague yet highly specific memory of something I thought for years that I must have caught on TV sometime in my teens, maybe as part of a Canadian anthology series, except that Google Fu has completely defeated me in terms of working out exactly what the hell that might have been. Thus leaving me with the floating question of "If this comes from inside me rather than outside me, then what IS it, exactly? A really detailed dream? A story idea that came to me so full-blown I convinced myself someone else had already made it? Where do these tropes come from, these images? Does the simple act of trying to tell it to other people make it change and evolve, and could disseminating that telling start to alter the world around you?" (That last part seems unlikely, yet makes for a pretty good thesis statement.)
In other news, I finished "The Puppet Motel" and sold it, then finished a shorter piece called "Come Closer," and sold that too. I posted the contracts on that one today, so I guess I can count on being paid for it soon. I also placed a couple of reprints and did more brainstorming work on Nightcrawling; I think I'm almost ready to start the first real chapter, now that I'm done with the prologue and I understand the overall structure. It'll be set back in 1990, so that'll be interesting--weird to think of that making it a period piece, even though it totally does. The other day it occurred to me that that's around the time I started writing many of the stories that eventually made it into Kissing Carrion, so maybe I should go back and take a look at some of those, because it'll give me a sense of how Lennox Frewer might write for that Creative Writing 101 course she and Ancke Ewert (Nightcrawling's protagonist) meet at. Everything eventually folds in somewhere, doesn't it? Which is sort of one of the refrains of the book, so there you go.
In personal news, we're proceeding apace towards Cal's tonsilectomy, which is going to happen (fingers crossed) on October 13. Not even a stay-over procedure anymore, as I recall--he gets it done, then comes home with us, has two weeks of recuperation and might even be back on track just in time to go off to the Viva! Youth Choir's annual music camp. Tomorrow I'm in Peterborough, doing ChiSeries Pride; mis-October I'll be in Windsor, Ontario, doing another book festival. It doesn't stop, which I guess is good.
Oh yeah, and I need to do some reviews pretty soon, drive-by or not, or people will stop reading this. Ha!
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Drive-By Review: Demon (Marcin Wrona dir.)--SPOILERS ABOUND 26 Jul 2017 6:02 PM (7 years ago)
Some time back—you'll notice that a lot of my reviews start like this—Marcin Wrona's final film Demon turned up On Demand, and I watched it; I definitely wouldn't have been able to see it otherwise, considering that it still somehow hasn't gotten a Region One DVD/Blu-Ray release. At any rate, it's an amazing piece of work. The demon in question is actually a dybbuk, accidentally conjured when a young Polish-British man—Piotr, who's come to Poland to marry Zaneta, his Polish fiancee—wanders outside the family farmhouse he's vowed to restore for her the night before their wedding, only to fall headlong into a sinkhole that proves to be a not particularly well covered-up mass grave.
In the morning, he's slightly ill and disconnected, but no more so than anybody else who got roaring drunk at their own bachelor party. The wedding proceeds as planned, getting steadily wilder and odder, until at last a beautiful young woman no one else seems to see enters the repurposed barn they're using as a festival hall, walks straight up to the groom and kisses him on the lips before disappearing. He immediately goes into spasms and begins to act as though he's lost his mind, weeping and raving in Yiddish, accusing his father-in-law of long-forgotten war crimes. The increasingly off-put wedding guests collude with the bride's family to cover this up until, eventually, Piotr simply disappears, leaving nothing behind but his widowed bride and an open mystery nobody actually probably finds all that mysterious, in historical context: “What we thought we took part in, we merely dreamed. There was never even a bridegroom.”
Though my husband was a bit dismayed by the film's apparent final open-endedness, I came into it having seen a lot of other films about that same sort of deep post-Holocaust social guilt, the deliberate dismissal of memory—the Pact of Forgetting, as survivors of the Spanish Civil War call it. Thus, I know that these are stories built around lacunae, the filled-in historical holes that tell you exactly what sort of horror your current life is built on top of. You really don't need it all spelled out: "Did [Zaneta's] grandfather build the house?" The groom asks, to which his prospective brother-in-law replies: "Oh, it was already here." The skipped-over question provides its own answer: someone else built the house, someone else owned it, but where are they now? Hana—the dybbuk—married the Polish boy who forgot her essential Otherness long enough to love her, and it was the end of both of them; now she doesn't even have a tombstone, let alone the bridegroom she was promised, so her unspoken presence constantly eddies back and forth like weed under the same lake Piotr's new relatives eventually dump his Range Rover into, re-erased again and again by the people who profited most directly from her murder.
And it really doesn't matter that Zaneta's father was probably only a child when all this happened, that he maybe truly doesn't know the details of his father's crimes, because his sheer devotion to destroying any lingering remnant of the world old Professor Shimon (sole survivor of an era when the town was half-Jewish) cries over—the one where even Orthodox Christians and Catholics wanted the local tzaddik's blessing—is enough to pull him and all his blood down, so much so that the only thing Zaneta can eventually do is simply leave her own home forever, take what little's left of Piotr back to the U.K., and start over. "This whole country's built on corpses!" As one guest blurts out. Or then there's the sentiment echoed by that one drunk guy, monologizing: "Once Poland was everywhere, it was as big as the world, it was peaceful and beautiful, everyone was Polish. But then evil ghosts came, and the land was split—first the Germans, then the Russians, then Israel!" Such a very shallow amount of dirt to scratch through before the blood and the prejudice seep up. It's horribly relevant, both generally and in specific.
I think more than anything else it's less the willful non-ending—Zaneta reborn as Piotr, wearing his jacket and making the same journey, becoming a stranger from Away—than the sense of resounding, un-fillable guilt that you get in so many movies from those areas, this sense of saturation as pollution: Europe is all so crushed together, and you've got genocides on top of genocides almost everywhere you look; someplace has always been someplace else, every green field is a ploughed-over grave. There's holes under every landscape. When I was still reviewing films, I saw a lot of stuff from the Balkans, starting with Before the Rain by Milcho Manchevski (the guy who managed to get himself bounced off of Ravenous in pre-production, opening it up for Antonia Bird), which has a literally circular motion; the three parts lead into each other, then braid and repeat, like a cycle that can never be broken. Tribalism overlays everything like radiation, like a gun you bury only to watch your children dig it up again, try to use it and blow their own hands off.
But what makes Demon so interesting is that most of these movies are about the acts, the events, not their fallout—they feel like they have to show them in full, accurate, terrible detail, just to be able to make you understand what they're talking about. Demon, however, knows that an empty hole is worse than any mass murder scene, and seeing people you love lie about these things having happened at all can be just as bad as seeing the things themselves happen...not worse per se, but a very different sort of pain. Weirdly enough, one of the few Hollywood films that ended up having a similar impact on me was Costa-Gavras's Music Box, from a Joe Eszterhas screenplay, which has Jessica Lange figuring out that her beloved father is an uncaught Hungarian war criminal—it's not exactly subtle, but it puts the point across that just because you love people and they love you, that doesn't in the least prevent them from being guilty and you from being equally so by association. (A lot of films from Argentina and other parts of South America play out very similar cycles of horror vs. erasure, as well as from Spain, while the U.S. has 12 Years A Slave and Beloved vs. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and The New World, but not enough of either, and far too many times told through white people's eyes, as though the mere testimony of the people who actually suffered through these deliberate genocides can never be enough.)
Retroactive amnesia is exactly what Zaneta's father is trying to sell his wedding guests, even though the shot of them staggering home past (someone else's) funeral procession after Piotr's disappearance gives the lie to it. There's just this basic human impulse to cover things up and "agree" to forget, connectedly intimately to the knowledge that if you allow people to remember these horrifying spasms of Othering violence, the cycle of revenge will never, ever stop. People reduced to bone fragments; people reduced to ashes; people reduced to rooms full of hair. We really are awful animals.
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Don't Drink and Drink 24 Jul 2017 6:41 AM (7 years ago)
Just came back from the States again, after serving as co-Guest of Honor with Laird Barron and Weston Ochse at Necon 2017. Everyone's been telling me what a great time that is, and heigh-ho, turns out they're right! Though I could probably have done without literally drinking myself into a blackout on the last night.
Me: "Yeah, I have a vague recollection of being in Catherine Grant's hotel room, and then the next thing I knew I was waking up at 11:30 AM. My underwear was lying on the floor, totally soaking wet; I had my pants on inside out and backwards, and my shoes were shoved so far down the bottom of the bed I couldn't find them for five solid minutes. So I packed really quickly, went outside and asked the first person I saw what I might have done during the portion of the night I couldn't remember. 'Nothing I heard about!' he replied, cheerfully."
Sovay: "That's hilarious. And sort of horrifying."
Me: "Yep."
Well, it is what it is. The rest was wonderful, and I'm an adult; I made my choices. And now I'm home.
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A Sinister Kid Is A Kid Who Runs To Meet His Maker 20 Jun 2017 12:56 PM (7 years ago)
As ever, what I've been doing recently is running in place, pretty much. That's going to have to stop soon, though, because we're coming up fast onto June 26 (the beginning of my new Litreactor course), followed by July 6 et al (my Odyssey Workshop appearance), then teaching frantically, then going back down to Rhode Island by the end of July to be Writer Guest of Honor at NeCon. This last I got because Cherie Priest dropped out due to life-fuckery, though I was surprised as hell to learn they'd been planning to ask me sometime in the next couple of years anyhow. And all of this presumes I'm going to be allowed across the border anyhow, but I guess we'll see; one way or the other, there's a whole lot of New England in my future, though no Readercon this year.
And I have a new deadline, too: a story that has to be in by the end of August, for a venue I'd completely forgotten about. Much like Looming Low and "Distant Dark Places," and hell, THAT turned out, right? Riiight.;) Well, I've started to rough it out, and it's going okay. As ever, the main character is currently in the "so there's this [person]" stage, nameless, faceless and genderless, but at least I know their situation fairly intimately--I've decided that this is the perfect opportunity to use all my hard-gained intimate knowledge of what it's like to run a couple of illegal Air B-n-Bs, especially since Toronto's apparently become so infested with the things that they're currently being debated down at City Hall. There was this fairly amazing article I ran across describing how a downtown landlord had forced all his real tenants out, then basically converted the apartment building into an Air B-n-B hotel--he just pays people to come in and clean the apartments before and after, as well as maintaining someone on site to let people in and out; all the bookings and payments are done electronically, while he communicates with his staff by text. "Sounds exciting, and I'm sure not at all illegal," as Tobit Beecher might say.
As I recall, my basic thesis was that the main character would end up taking this job and then losing their home (maybe temporarily), thus necessitating them using the Air B-n-Bs as floating crash-pads while waiting for something better to come along; giving them a deadline would be good, because then you'd be like: "Okay, just a little longer, let's just deal with this for one week/half-week/day more..." And one apartment would be okay but constantly monitored by building security/neighbours who were trying to trip the owner up and get them bounced from their condo, thus making it increasingly difficult to squat in, while the other one would be overtly haunted, which would really suck when circumstances rendered it impossible to stay at the "good" one. I like the idea overall, given how super-Millennial it seems; it's got that nice punch of "yeah, we all think we'd hear the voice saying GET OUT and do so, but some of us are just too fucking poor to do so" that I think contemporary horror could benefit from. So...yup, that's where I'm going with this, I think. Now I just have to make up a ghost.;)
Otherwise, I've been beading like a fiend, making necklaces that I've sold to both friends and Facebook friends. At least ten of those are going down to Readercon, where we'll see if my name on somethinga lone is enough to pry $100 to $130 a pop out of fellow broke artistes. I can't really sell them for less than $75, though, and that's my "know and like you" rate--the component parts alone set me back more than you'd think, but then there's the labor piled in on top. (I can bead a necklace in sixty minutes, usually, and my time is worth at least $50/hr.). Again, I think this activity will probably turn up in the story, or possibly even in Nightcrawling, which I'm also picking away at. Firm February deadline on that one, after all.
In news slightly closer to home, we finally got Cal a tonsilectomy date--October 12th, God willing and the rescheduling don't rise. I had to keep him home from school to take him there today, but it was worth it. We've also finally started swimming at the Cooper Koo Y again, which is wonderful. I'd do that every damn day if I could (and I probably could, if I just drove myself to it. So who knows?).
Okay, so: those are the haps. And now I must get back to it.
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Drive-By Review: Evolution (2015) 15 May 2017 11:22 AM (7 years ago)
I make a point of trying to seek out and watch horror movies by female directors, especially ones that come with a recommendation, and the general consensus on Lucile Hadžihalilović's Evolution (2015)--which I agree with, BTW--is that it crossbreeds Lynch with Lovecraft, which sounded really keen. So when it turned up on Netflix, I checked it out.
The film has some of the most beautiful imagery I've seen in quite some time, especially in its underwater shots. It begins with a boy (Nicholas) swimming in the ocean, off the rocky shore of a small island entirely inhabited by creepy red-headed women and eleven- to thirteen-year-old boys. Nicholas tells his mother he found the corpse of another boy grown into the coral and snagged in the weeds, a startling red starfish nesting on his abdomen; his mother tells him he must have imagined it, but late at night we see her emerge from the sea with the corpse in her arms, then watch her and the other women burn it on the beach.
Things continue in this way, with dialogue at a minimum and creepy shit at a maximum. Nicholas ends up in hospital for a supposedly long-standing illness which requires multiple abdominal surgeries; his ward is full of other boys with similar abdominal incisions, all in various stages of healing. Sometimes boys are taken away and put into a tank full of seawater, from which they only occasionally emerge alive. At night, the doctors, nurses and mothers all assemble to watch films of caesarian operations, one of which pulls back at one point to reveal the caesarian being performed on an obviously male figure with a massively swollen abdomen.
Nicholas develops a crush on Stella, a nurse who takes him down to the sea at night and lets him touch the suckers on her back before swimming down into the sea with him until he starts to drown, at which point she pulls him back to shore a resuscitates him. On another night journey, Nicholas and his friend Victor follow their mothers down to the shore; Victor freaks out and runs away, but Nicholas persists, spying on his mother and the other mothers rolling around naked in mud in a vaguely starfish-shaped pattern. Later, he watches her shower the mud off to reveal more suckers on her back, and after that, he refuses to acknowledge her as his mother anymore.
Victor dies after his last surgery, but Stella's treatments--which may eventually have caused Nicholas to grow gills--seem to do the trick in Nicholas's case, in that he wakes up from HIS last surgery to find himself in the tank, with a really freaky-looking baby floating near him. Shortly after that, Stella steals Nicholas from the ward, pushes him out to sea on a dinghy and abandons him in the middle of the waves, allowing the current to pull him away from the island. He wakes up to find himself drifting into a brightly-lit harbor full of people who probably don't even know "his" island exists.
What's important to understand about all of this, though, is that even if I recall most of the above in some detail, I can't remember whether much of it occurs in the same order I've just placed it in. The film seems to drift from point to point, devoid of explanation for almost anything; time is marked and punctuated by weird lingering shots on stuff like the conch shell one nurse presents the ward of boys with after Victor supposedly "recovers" and moves away, or the grave the boys dig for what looks like a decayed, inside-out horseshoe crab, or the strange scribbly pencil-drawings Nicholas makes not just of (say) the boy's corpse and the starfish but really normal stuff too, exotic only by virtue of where he lives, like ferris wheels and dogs.
The music is hypnotic, but there's a lot of silence and sea-sounds as well, a uterine heartbeat sort of pulse underneath much of the action. It's definitely not the sort of movie where things build to much of a climax, but rather something cyclical and natural, a pattern of growth vs. die-off that's repeated itself an infinite number of times. Nothing that happens appears to interrupt it.
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A Million Years 4 May 2017 9:45 AM (7 years ago)
It seems roughly that long since I've posted anything here, and indeed since I've thought creatively or analytically about anything. Part of that is because Cal got strep, yet again; we have an appointment with an ear, nose and throat doctor on May 10, thank Christ, and I will push extra-hard for the idea that taking out his tonsils seems like it might save us all a lot of grief. Will it work? Who knows. Then there was Echo Women's Choir's Spring Concert, followed by me thinking I had strep ("just" a cold, apparently), followed by various other forms of bullshit. Chores have taken over my life yet again; my digestive system hates me; I can't sleep and take my waking slow; yadda yadda yadda. All fucking that.
At any rate: I'm working on an essay for Nightmare magazine's "The H Word" column, because I can and because it's due on June 20th. I also have a couple of prospective story fills that I owe various places, and "Always Tried To Be A Good Girl..." is up to six chapters, just over 30,000 words. I've spent much of the last four days either beading necklaces (eight in two weeks, not bad for a hobby I let lie fallow at least five years) or reading my way through Blackchaps's Oz and Oz/Law & Order: SVU fanfiction, all of which makes me feel like a real dilettante; this person seems constitutionally incapable of writing something that isn't multi-chaptered, and her canon-based AUs rock hard. Her SVU stuff, in particular, is very enjoyable, because she almost always manages to create scenarios which posit a happy ending for Tobias Beecher yet never gloss over his inherent trauma and difficulty--her Elliot Stabler isn't just some sort of Chris Keller-shaped human door-prize, but a person with his own problems who manages to make a place for himself inside Beecher's often almost Gothically complicated life. And if she'd just transfer all her older stuff over to AO3 then things would be perfect, but I understand how hard that can be.;)
Last night, meanwhile, I watched two movies, one merely adequate--The Take, a Parisian-set thriller that doesn't quite manage to take full advantage of Idris Elba as a grumpy CIA agent, while also saddling Richard Madden with a truly shitty American accent as the pickpocket who stumbles into what initially seems like a terrorist plot to disrupt Bastille Day but (hey-oh) turns out to be camouflage for a heist--but the other quite low-budget brilliant. This latter film was We Go On, co-directed by Andy Mitton and Jesse Holland from a script by Mitton, who also composed the driving, skittery score. Miles Grissom (Clark Freeman) is an intensely phobic video editor who decides to master his constant anxiety by offering a $30,000 reward to anyone who can show him positive proof of an afterlife. His caustic, loving mother (Annette O'Toole) comes along for the ride, determined to make sure he doesn't get cheated, and the two of them make their way through a pile of submissions--restaurant-dwelling mediums, fear-studying scientists, a man who claims to own a Tibetan artefact that will show you the Other Side but turns out to be a complete charlatan. (This last guy at least doesn't get to waste much of their time, since Miles recognizes an FX expert he sometimes works with outside the dude's home, and gets him to spill the beans about his latest job.)
Things kick into gear about forty-five minutes in, when Miles remembers a weird voice message he got from a guy who claimed a woman's ghost told him Miles had already seen her "in the grandfather clock"--weird specifically since Miles's original ad didn't include his phone number. While editing some footage, Miles does indeed spot a female face reflected in a clock in the background, and realizes there's been a bit of a time-slip; he agrees to meet the guy at a park near the L.A.X. airfield, sneaks out of the house while his mom is sleeping, then downloads driving lessons as he sits in her car, willing himself calm enough to use them. At the park, Nelson (Jay Dunn) tells Miles there's "something not human" in a nearby abandoned house that's part of the original Hollywoodland complex, so they walk over there. "You already know it's real," he tells Miles, as Miles hesitates; Miles takes a deep breath, walks upstairs...only to find Nelson's own dead body lying there in its filth, apparently the victim of a drug overdose. "Surprise," Nelson says, from his elbow. "Now we're together." And Miles faints dead away.
The ghosts in We Go On are interestingly palpable, reminding me strongly of the spectres from Gotham; yes, they can sometimes appear and disappear in chunks or flashes, snarling interstitial cuts, but they can also just approach from the middle distance, slow and unsmiling, to stand rooted in the middle of the shot, or simply be discovered all soft-focus in the background. Nelson still talks like the person he used to be, though probably slightly more circularly, considering how his interests have been truncated by death; what he wants is for Miles to find and kill his girlfriend Alice, so that if he has to pass on, she'll be forced to go with him. And though Miles refuses to do this, giving rise to some of the best Lawful Good speeches I've heard in a while, the fact that he can now see ghosts everywhere--or, more importantly, be seen by ghosts, everywhere--makes it increasingly difficult to hold onto his moral standards.
In a lot of ways, it all goes back to something I've believed for quite some time now, which is that bad as not knowing what may or may not wait after death can be, having a definitive answer might be even worse. "We go out like lights, that's all," Miles's mother says, at one point; "that's what I want to believe, because the idea of there being more...well, that's not really very comforting, to me. I mean, it'd be nice to see your father again, but...I've done things in my life I'm not proud of, and if there was more, I might be judged. And I don't want to be judged! That would be worse than anything." And for all that Miles, when later facing his own death, feels qualified to whisper: "There is no Hell," the film as a whole does seem to agree with her thesis. It's back to the old refrain, one I've built into a couple of different stories, at the very least: Show me something, please...but oh God, please don't SHOW me something. Because doubt is grinding and fear is exhausting, but to know, completely, forever? That's when you've REALLY reached The End.
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