“It’s Not a Romance; It’s a Love Story.”

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Nikki says this to Bear in the short window during the film Obsession when we, the audience, get to meet Nikki before she is replaced by the power of the wish by Freaky Nikki. Bear responds that he is unable to discern the difference between the genres.

This is an interesting observation with some commenting that the film from which the quote originates is itself a love story and not a romance. I think a strong argument both for and against that thesis is possible, but for me the deciding factor that this is not a love story is Bear’s utterly selfish disregard for the torment Nikki suffers as he continues to pursue his own base desires. With that said, I think it is interesting to investigate further the dichotomy between a romance and a love story.

The romance genre in both film and in print is a vast engine producing seemingly endless content that on the surface appears to adhere to a simplistic formula. So much so that one doesn’t need to specify the rules of the genre in order to satirize them. All you need to know is that you have a high-powered businesswoman, a trip to a small town, and a ruggedly handsome man in flannel, and you just know how the plot is going to work out. To be fair, there is a lot more to the romance genre than that oversimplification. Romance stretches from those Hallmark holiday movies to quite inventive fantasy fiction that sells quite well and pushes the boundaries beyond the heteronormative definitions most people expect. What is expected and violated only most rarely is that a romance story ends with some variation of ‘happily ever after’ while a love story is not so constrained.

I can think of two films, which as love stories, defy the happy ending trope of romance tales to quite powerful ends.

1970’s Love Story is an example that is burned into the minds of Baby Boomers with its box office success spurring imitators and satirization. With its dramatic, tragic ending eliminating the possibility of a happy ending the film is practically the platonic ideal of the concept that a love story is distinct from a romance.

The second example in both print and film is The Remains of the Day. Both the novel by British writer and knighthood recipient Sir Kazuo Ishiguro and the Merchant/Ivory film explore more than the romantic relationship of their lead characters with meditations on service and to whom we give, often unquestioningly, that service.

Both the novel and the film are presented from the point of view of Mr. Stevens, the butler and head of the household staff to a British lord in the period leading up to World War II. While Lord Darlington, seeking to avoid another disastrous war, flirts with fascism, Stevens manages the large manor while suppressing his deep emotional feelings for the newly hired housekeeper Miss Kenton, second only to Stevens himself in the hierarchy of servants. Stevens’s devotion to his duty to his lord, even as the poisonous nature of Darlington’s politics becomes evident, causes the man to miss the love life he might have shared with Miss Kenton. The story is deeply romantic but is very much not a romance.

I think one of the vectors on which we can determine the difference between a romance and a love story is that a romance is inherently optimistic while love stories may be optimistic, but often have a darker streak running through them.

While Obsession, which ends as far from ‘happily ever after’ as seemingly possible, is appropriately dark for a horror film, it is not a love story because unlike poor, self-deluded Mr. Stevens, Bear’s interests end at his own desires.

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Road Trip Tomorrow

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Tomorrow, September 25, 2026, I will take the day off from my full-time job, bundle myself into my Kia Soul in the morning, and embark on the two-to-three-hour drive from home to the dream place, Hollywood, California. There I will visit the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to get a sneak preview of the exhibit The Horror Show, a history of horror cinema, before returning to my car for the lengthy and undoubtedly traffic-congested drive back home.

It has been nearly two years since I last made a foray to the heart of cinema, Hollywood, when I drove to see Quatermass and the Pit at the New Beverly Cinema, but this exhibit at the museum feels worth the drive.

I visited the Academy Museum once before, and I learned quite a bit, such as how African American cinema invented the music video well before the advent of cable television, and I got to see many fine items and memorabilia from over a century of filmmaking. The Horror Show, in addition to having items such as the original cape worn by Bela Lugosi in Dracula and the production mask from Creature from the Black Lagoon (one of my favorite movies of the original Universal horror cycle), will also explore the impact of horror films on culture and on the culture that these movies comment upon.

I will have lunch in Hollywood, probably not at the museum’s cafe, since my meal there last time was less than satisfying, and then return home, hopefully before dinnertime, to spend the evening with my sweetie-wife. It will be a long day of driving, but one that I hope will be worth the investment of time.

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Why “Conservative” Entertainment Fails

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With the release and scathing reviews of Run Hide Fight: Infidels and the expanding slate of productions from Angel Studios, explicitly conservative entertainment is once again in the air. As with previous attempts at “right-wing” entertainment media, these releases are not finding tremendous commercial or critical success.

Some attribute these failures to the fact that they are conservative, but that is far too simplistic an answer, in my opinion. The Passion of the Christ, which presented the biblical story in a decidedly conservative (some would argue antisemitic) manner as a two-hour subtitled film, took in over half a billion dollars at the box office: hardly a failure. Outspoken and larger-than-life writer and filmmaker John Milius, he of the original Red Dawn, has never shied away from his conservative beliefs, and his notions of honor, masculinity, and living by a code infuse his writings. While Milius never found the outsized success of some of his friends, such as Lucas and Spielberg, he remained an active and vital filmmaker until he was sidelined by health issues.

No, productions like Run Hide Fight: Infidels, its predecessor, Run Hide Fight, or the ill-fated The 1/2 Hour News Hour, a poor attempt to replicate the success of The Daily Show, fail because they prioritize their political hits over any sense of what is actually entertaining.

Some may think that this is an unfair judgment because, after all, The Daily Show is unabashedly liberal, its targets are overwhelmingly conservative, and in the era of MAGA and the Trump personality cult this has only intensified. That judgment is almost correct. The Daily Show is deeply colored by the liberal worldview of its writers and performers just as Red Dawn was deeply influenced by the worldview of its creator. A piece of creative art is stamped, sometimes blatantly, sometimes subtly, by the worldview of its creator. When they sit down to pen something that is funny, thrilling, or just interesting to them, it will reflect, to a greater or lesser degree, the manner in which they see and interpret the world. When the writers of The Daily Show look upon the absurdity of the world, they are by nature predisposed to satirize and ridicule the right, but that is a predisposition and not a commandment from on high.

In 2009, during the first few months of Obama’s first term and nearly eight years after the horrific attacks of 9/11, a low-flying jumbo jet provoked low-grade panic in New York City. The Daily Show performed a bit wondering what sort of brain-damaged nut would do such a thing to the traumatized city, and then revealed, through a doctored image, Vice President Joe Biden at the controls of the aircraft. At the time, the defining image of Biden was one of a person who tended to say and do things that caused the administration public-relations troubles, and so the skit exaggerated this for comedic effect, even though the vice president was on “their side.” The 1/2 Hour News Hour never ever skewered anyone on the right, because its mandate was to deliver conservative talking points. It was never comedy produced by a conservative mind, such as the films of John Hughes; it was a terrible attempt to use comedy to propagandize for conservatism.

The very same things are true of The Daily Wire’s and Angel Studios’ productions and releases. Whether it is George Washington converting Native Americans into joyously celebrating Christ, or a very attractive young woman and her guns emerging victorious over school shooters, or a hardened combat veteran saving a feckless and impotent police force and a university from Islamic terrorists, the ideology comes first rather than emerging organically from a creative who is writing and talking about the world as they see it. That is the very heart of the trouble with most “conservative” entertainment: it is a polemic first and often only.

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The Chaos of Migraine Triggers

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Anyone who suffers from migraines knows that they have a set of stimuli that can, but not always, ignite a dreaded migraine. These triggers can be visual, flashing lights or patterns, taste, consuming the wrong sort of food, tactile, a sensation that sparks the terrible pain, olfactory, a powerful scent can trigger one for some people (marijuana prompts one for me), or auditory, a particular sound, set of sounds, or sometimes sounds in the just wrong frequency.

Sounds are my bane; for me the noise created by chewing or speaking with one’s mouth open can start a migraine. As a child, without a diagnosis for my condition, one of my criteria for true wealth was having a place to eat where I never would hear anyone else chewing. Along with the food noises, sounds at the high frequencies can also be trouble for me.

The trouble with migraine triggers, or at least mine, is that they are terribly inconsistent in causing the headaches. What might set one off on Monday is utterly benign on Tuesday. I can say that sounds at the treble end of the stereo might start a migraine but that is not always the case. Which means while avoiding the triggers is preferable, even when I can’t, that doesn’t mean exposure is a pain sentence.

Last Friday I got some more experience in that department.

At the day job we were having our ‘All Hands’ meeting on Zoom where achievements were celebrated and the plans for the next very busy quarter were disclosed to everyone in the Medicare department. These large meetings can span two and a half hours or more, but having them on Zoom has been much better than the pre-pandemic routine of crowding into a massive hall for them. So, there I was, at my desk, headset on listening to the presentations when a new presenter came on and BOOM, migraine trigger.

This presenter’s mic clipped to just the wrong part of the treble frequencies. My head began pounding almost immediately.  Their presentation wasn’t very long but the length no longer mattered. I held on for another 30 minutes or so, hoping, vainly, that once the trigger passed, I might slowly wind down from the migraine, but the inflammation in my brain refused to cooperate. I did not last to the end of the meeting before I had to crawl back home, double dose on my prescription medication, and suffer for another eight and a half hours before the cycle broke.

It is the inconsistency of the trigger that I find so maddening. If it always caused a headache, I could always avoid or take steps, such as taking my meds ahead of time, to stay safe. This works sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t. Still, I know I can count myself as more fortunate than many. My migraine do not come with visual distortions or powerful waves of nausea that many suffer, but still, the sensation of having my head split open and lava poured in is a less than pleasant one.

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Trump and The Kennedy Center

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Named for the murdered president, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, constructed of unique materials donated from nations around the world to honor the fallen man for whom it is named, may soon be nothing more than a pile of rubble, destroyed to slake the thirst for aggrandizement of a weak and vain buffoon.

Shortly after assuming the office of President of the United States, Trump, among the numerous illegal actions he has taken, renamed the Kennedy Center, adding his own name to sully and spoil the memorial to a president whose popularity burned so brightly that the narcissistic idiot found such injuries intolerable. The Center’s name, however, is set by law (not that the law has ever restrained this administration), and his illegal renaming was challenged. The courts, in an unusual move for this administration, upheld the law and ordered the offending text removed. Perhaps it was removed, perhaps it wasn’t; we shan’t know, because, with a toddler’s tantrum, a scaffold and blind were erected hiding the name from view.

Now talk has turned to the Center being in “terrible” shape and in dire need of massive restoration, restoration that requires Trump’s name to be permanently affixed to the Center as its savior. It is a move that the courts have again said he has no legal authority to make, and the administration has responded with not-very-veiled threats that the Center is in such a condition that, if not restored, it would require its destruction. As with the East Wing of the White House, Trump is likely to move fast and have the deed done before anyone could use the glacially slow wheels of the legal system to stop him.

In response to this, some voices from the resistance who hold Kennedy and the Center in quite high regard are advising us to let the petulant child have his way, to put the fool’s name on the Center, and to take it back off once he has been consigned to the trash heap of history. They implore us to do this to save the Center.

NO.

I have reasons why I think that this would be a terrible mistake. First, if you pay a blackmailer, you will always pay. Giving in only empowers him, and that must not be done. Second, if it is a bluff, then calling it forces him to reveal the bluff, which wounds him politically. Third, if it is not a bluff and he does destroy the beloved memorial to a slain president, then you hang that shit around the neck of every Republican for a generation. It becomes one more tool in de-Trumpifying the GOP, and one that would accelerate the process.

Stand firm. Either he backs down and sabotages his own standing in doing so, or he mortally wounds the GOP with his actions. In either case standing on principle ultimately accrues to the benefit of democracy.

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A Forgotten Day

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America has a number of Federal Holidays: the 4th of July, where we celebrate the American arrogance to tell the greatest empire at the time in the world to stuff it, and the only time we slip back into a European style of notating dates; Labor Day, when we celebrate the people that work hard to make everything function; Memorial Day, when we pay respects to the fallen in all our wars and conflicts we dare not call wars; Veterans Day, to honor those that served and survived; Juneteenth, to acknowledge the end of that horrific institution, slavery; and Thanksgiving, where we give thanks just for surviving at all, either the terrible New England winters or the crushing masses storming the department stores. We also have a few to recognize particular people: Presidents’ Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and of course Christmas.

There are also crowding the calendar a number of Recognized Days where events and concepts are honored, but not so much as to interfere with capitalist commerce with time away from laboring: Groundhog Day, which spurred a film and endless copycats of that movie; Flag Day; Pearl Harbor Day; and far too many to enumerate here, but there is one that slipped by this week that is scarcely noted, not called out in popular culture with a comedic movie, and certainly not used to generate an excuse to leave work or bash each other at football: September 17th, Constitution Day.

September 17th, 1787, the U.S. Congress achieved enough signatures to send its newly crafted Constitution out to the states for ratification, and nine months later it birthed the United States government as we know it today.

The document, like all things made by human hands, is not perfect. Far from it: there have been more than two dozen amendments to the document, and more need to be performed, but for more than two centuries it has guided this imperfect nation towards a more perfect union.

Fallible and flawed people have ignored it, twisted it, misinterpreted it, and outright violated it, but it remains one of the most brilliant governing ideas in history, inspiring countless other nations to follow in our footsteps, and today, at this critical moment in history, its fate and our future are in our hands.

A vote is coming in a few short weeks, a vote that will determine the future of that precious document, that dream made real. Vote carefully.

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Two Weeks With the Resmed F30i

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For well more than a decade I have been utilizing CPAP therapy to treat my severe sleep apnea. While most people take a couple of weeks or even more to adjust to sleeping with a mask that forces air into the passage throughout the night in order to keep those airways open, I found relief from the terrible effects of sleep apnea from the very first night. In all those years that I have strapped a mask to my face I have only gone without it a couple of times, when the machine or power had failed. CPAP had made a radical improvement in my life from the night in the sleep lab when I was first exposed to the therapy.

But it has not been without its own issues.

I am what is called an ‘active sleeper’ in that I toss and turn constantly throughout the night. I am asleep but I am quite active. Once when I was something like seven or eight, I awoke not having been roused by my mother for school and with a black eye that I had given myself by some unfortunate combination of thrashing and falling from the bed. Because I also tend to breathe through my mouth in my sleep my CPAP therapy requires the use of a full-face mask that goes over the bridge of my nose and down across my chin with the air hose connecting directly below my nose. Using the full-face mask as an active sleeper has always been challenging. Having a hose stand that functions much like an IV stand has helped, dropping the hose directly down to my head and helping avoid, but not entirely, getting the hose tangled as I toss and turn. Maintaining a good seal across the nose was another trouble spot. When the seal wasn’t good there the pressurized air often blew directly into one of my eyes, causing me to wake the next day with seriously dry eye.

A few months ago, I came across a new, at least new to me, design for a full-face CPAP mask. Instead of going over the bridge of the nose, the mask fits under the nose with either ports or plugs that feed air directly to the nostrils and a much smaller portion that covers the mouth. Tubing connects this smaller mask design around the face to a port at the top of the patient’s head where the supply hose connects by way of a rotating connection.

Two weeks ago, when the schedule allowed, I called my durable medical equipment provider and requested to switch to the Resmed F30i and they sent me this new mask design with a 30-day trial period that would allow me to switch back should the new mask fail to meet my needs.

I have gotten all the benefits I expected from the F30i, no leaks because this one no longer tries to go over the bridge of my larger than average nose, and complete freedom to toss, turn, and rotate in the night without ever getting the supply hose wrapped around something.

There have been some downsides, but they were part of the adjustment period. The most acute was that after the first night of having plugs in my nostrils, the next morning my nostrils felt as if they had been set aflame. My nostrils have a large number of nerve endings and having a foreign object in them for 7 or 8 hours certainly irritates them. However, two weeks on and my nostrils seem to have nearly fully adjusted, with only minor touchiness that seems less each morning.

All in all, the Resmed F30i has proven to be the upgrade to my therapy that I had hoped it would be.

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Are They Really This Stupid?

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Kash Patel, our incompetent director of the FBI — good god where is Gordon Cale when you really need him — sat before Congress, grilled on his stewardship of that organization and faced questions that before this administration wouldn’t have survived a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Senator Kennedy of Louisiana, play-acting his ‘simple country boy’ persona, zeroed in on the FBI’s loosening of standards for applicants, specifically that now, under Patel’s direction, the Bureau would no longer automatically disqualify for employment anyone who had engaged in bestiality.

Patel maintained that the purpose of the change in qualification was to ensure that victims of bestiality were not wrongfully excluded from services while Senator Kennedy seemed unable to process anything as a victim of bestiality except the animal that had been sexually abused. With blinders provided by the patriarchy, it appeared that both men could either not envision applicants to the FBI that were not men or that only men engaged in the terrible practice under discussion.

I have no idea if the urban legends have any basis in factual history, but for decades there has persisted the myth that in hidden and secret clubs in foreign lands — it is always in foreign lands — audiences can ‘enjoy’ watching women have sexual intercourse with animals. Mentioned most often in these tall tales are donkeys and horses. This urban legend is so well known that it appears as a plot point in the celebrated film The Godfather Part II.

Apparently, Kash Patel is so addled-brained that not only was he unprepared for this sort of questioning, he could not even muster the defense that this relaxing of qualifications on this point was to protect women who had been abused in precisely the manner depicted in the myth. Nope, that was beyond him because no one in the administration has any real intelligence and we are all paying the price for 70 million Americans who placed such idiots in positions of power.

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Another Prologue

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For the writing community in general, the debate over prologues is a bit of low-intensity warfare that never ends. In my writers group, I am the person who often tells another writer that their prologue isn’t working and that they should delete it from their manuscript. So, it is a bit of an ironic thing that my published novel hit the shelves with a prologue.

Mind you, I did not compose the manuscript originally with a prologue, but after beta reader comments came back with points of confusion that tracked across various readers, I wrote the short introductory scene to address that specific issue. In Vulcan’s Forge, because the novel is from the first-person point of view, and key elements of the backstory that transpired a few years before the main character entered the situation and therefore could not be directly experienced by the main character, I had the choice of having someone sit down and explain it to him in an expository dump — shudder — or compose a prologue with that critical scene. To me the prologue, in that case, was the most elegant solution.

The horror novel I am currently shopping around to agents has just gained a prologue.

Feedback from one agent that passed on the manuscript commented that the agent wanted the horror and the unsettling atmosphere to start sooner. I will confess that I have always had a fondness for the horror that is a slow build. Where we start off in a very recognizable world that could very well be our own and bit by bit, strange thing by strange thing, it shifts, transforms, and morphs into something that is hopefully terrifying. However, I also know that these days the current trend in publishing is for stories to hit the ground running, and that is particularly true for less established authors. The point-of-view character in this case cannot start the story deep in the horror unless I do some sort of flash-forward, a valid technique but one that did not feel right. What is the answer?

A prologue, of course, but not one crafted to explain the intricate worldbuilding of a second world fantasy with detailing the histories of ancient kingdoms and the like. That would be an example of how not to employ a prologue. A prologue should be dramatic and leave the reader with an unanswered question or two.

So, I wrote another prologue. One that takes place 52 years before the start of the novel and sets into motion everything that follows, but more critically, one that is welded to a tight close third-person point-of-view putting the reader, hopefully, into the visceral experience of betrayal, sacrifice, and torment beyond death.

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Secret Morgue 7

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It is September and therefore time for another horror movie marathon hosted by Film Geeks San Diego with their annual Secret Morgue.  I have attended all of the Secret Morgues except for 2023, when they hosted two, one themed on witches and witchcraft, which I attended, and the September edition focused on animal attacks, which I did not.

I knew going into the event this year that I faced the highest likelihood that more than not several if not most of the films playing would not really work for me as the theme was my least-liked sub-genre of horror, slashers and serial killers. Of the six films of the marathon, two I had not seen but thoroughly enjoyed; one was another unseen one but fell into the trappings of routine slashers that left me unimpressed; another I had seen and detested; one more I had previously watched and found mildly interesting and the final film of the evening; which I missed due to a growing migraine attack, I could tell from a trailer I would not have liked at all.

Peeping Tom from the UK kicked off the event. Released in 1960, the same year as Psycho, this film was savaged by critics and the public upon its release and fell into obscurity only to be later recognized as a work of superb filmmaking.  The film’s focus is Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), a shy, quiet young man who records the women he murders with a motion picture camera. Peeping Tom explores the damaged and lethal psyche created by years of childhood abuse, placing it far ahead of any film of its period in actually trying to understand the psychology of serial murder. This was quite good and I am happy it has been restored not only physically but in terms of its filmmaking as well.

Memories of Murder by Oscar winner Bong Joon-Ho is a police procedural following two mis-matched cops as they attempt to identify and capture a serial rapist and murderer in a rural Korean district. Where most ‘mis-matched cops’ movies are conceived as ‘buddy cop’ stories, this one is not.Memories of Murder carries Bong Joon-Ho’s biting commentary on Korean culture, inspired by and loosely based on a series of actual murders. This film sidesteps easy answers or even an illusion of closure.

The third film, which I have already reviewed here on my site and sent me out of the Comicon museum where the Secret Morgue is hosted to walk around Balboa Park for the next 87 minutes because I have no need at all to ever see again Strange Darling.

Kolobos kicked off the swing into the evening programming. A first feature from a pair of film school graduates, Kolobos does not follow in the meta commentary of the Scream clones of the late ’90s but rather is supposed to take more of its inspiration from the Italian giallo genre of the early ’70s. That said, Kolobos I found lacked the character and writing that exemplifies the best of the giallo genre. The characters were flat stock stereotypes with trite and too on-the-nose dialog. By the end of the film’s short running time I had already begun to have the stirring of a migraine attack.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare started as the fifth film of the evening, but the twin facts that I had already seen the film and the growing migraine prompted me to abandon the rest of the marathon and return home early. New Nightmare is a much more interesting meta commentary on horror film than Scream or any of its imitators. (And yes, I am aware that Craven directed both.)

I later learned that the final film, again from the UK, was Stitches, a slasher featuring a clown, that from the trailer, I am sure would have tested my patience.

Even with the headache and being haunted by Strange Darling dogging my steps, I am glad I attended and look forward to next year’s marathon.

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