Monthly Archives: May 2023

A Tragic BroMance: The White House Plumbers

HBO Studios

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The HBO limited series The White House Plumbers focuses not on the Oval office nor the exhaustive work of the reports who uncovered and revealed the Watergate scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency but rather on the low=level operatives that burgled and spied for the Committee to Re-Elect The President, with particular attention to the flowering and then dying friendship between the G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) and E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson).

Plumbers is more their story, their meeting, their close and powerful bond, and their eventual falling out which resulted in decades of stony cold silence between the men. It is four episodes of fairly accurate historical farce as bungling bumbling incompetence generates farce that could only have happened because fiction requires believability and history only required reality followed by a fifth episode of Greek tragedy where hubris and flaws destroy the men and utterly transforms the nation.

In addition to Theroux and Harrelson, both turning in fantastic performances, the series boasts a number of talented and amazing performers, Kathleen Turned coming out of her medical retirement to steal an entire episode, Lena Heady as the only real brains of the operation as Hunt’s spook spouse Dorothy ‘Dot’ Hunt, and Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson as the ever-slippery John Dean.

Paired with a companion podcast that not only interviews the creatives behind the series but also illuminates what was historical and what was dramatic, The White House Plumbers presents an under seen and covered aspect of the scandal that destroyed Nixon’s administration shattered that last fragment of a nation’s trust in its institutions. Well worth the five-episode commitment the series reveals that history can be shaped not only by the bold and the brave but also by the stupid and the fanatical.

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Head I Win, Tails You Cheated

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It has been said that Trump can never lose he can only be cheated, and that is his operating method, he wins every election and contest and when it is declared he did not then that is fraud.

Since 2020 presidential contest where Trump was thankfully thrown out on a slim margin of some 40,000 in just the right places, the Trump cult has been focused on taking over local election boards and altering election laws to allow them to cheat the next contest. It is not only an existential threat of American democracy but to the Republican Party itself.

The GOP, standing aside, too cowardly to confront the monster that they have crafted, seem to believe that this terrible fraud will only be utilized against the Democratic Party, an idiotic short-sighted perspective.

There is talk is this or that GOP pol can beat Trump in the primaries and take the nomination. Trump can never lose be can only be cheated. Any and every primary ‘loss’ will be proof of the ‘Establishment’ and ‘RINOs’ conspiring against Trump. that could be nothing but bitching and complaining but for those local election boards and seats now firmly in the Cult’s control.

I do not know if they hold the power to unquestionably throw the nomination to Trump, but I do know that they will try. The fanatics willing to storm the capitol will have no reservations about the RNC. Even if they cannot by legal means manipulate the results, they will spark a floor fight at the national convention unseen in modern times. If the future of our democracy were not hanging in this balance it would be a time for popcorn. Everyone one of us must vote against every Republican political until the party is burned to the ground, the ground salted, and a new party, undoubtedly with the same name, is constructed.

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It is Getting Tougher to Watch Silo

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While the series continues to give us good actors, kudos to Rebecca Ferguson for her non-glamorous appearance not something all model quality actors are willing to do, and decent production the continuing failures of world building are making it hard for me to suspend my disbelief in the fictional setting.

This week we learn that things that can’t be recycled or repaired are sent to the incinerators. Really? You have a close ecology, effectively a generation spaceship and you are throwing material over the side? Material that can never ever be replaced.

And where is all this plastic coming from? We see constant used of plastics, and we know it’s been more than 140 years because that was when the ‘rebellion’ occurred. I want to see the plastic oxygen mask that remained clear, perfect, and usable for 140 years.

Eggs? Really, eggs? I am not a vegan or a vegetarian, but I do know that consuming animal products is less efficient that eating the vegetable material directly. In a close ecology with very limited space, it makes no sense whatsoever to spend energy, lights, water pump, cultivation, to grow calories that you then feed to something else and consume the reduced calories from the animal. In the Silo everyone would be vegan or vegetarian.

We also had a reference to ‘burial’ in this episode. Just as with anything else the elements in human bodies are elements you can’t get back if you throw them away. In the Silo everything you eat and breathe would have been at one time a person. You can’t escape the fact that in a closed ecology everything gets recycled or the ecology collapses.

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Irresponsible

Actor Robert DeNiro, 79, has fathered a child in an act that strikes me as narcissistically irresponsible. Undoubtedly DeNiro is thrilled and proud to be a father again with a 7th child. There is no question that he possesses the wealth and resources to provide for another kid. But at such an advanced age DeNiro is unlikely to see his offspring mature and it is the child’s emotional health and mental well-being that I find myself thinking on.

Now, it is entirely possible that the emotional scars of losing my own father when I was young has made it difficult or impossible to be dispassionate about such matters, but it is also possible that it has given me a viewpoint thankfully not shared by the majority.

I do not think that DeNiro is showing a great deal of concern for this child. Losing a parent, particularly when one is old enough to grasp the concept of death but still too young to deal with the crushing reality of death is a very hard road to travel. My father dying when I was 10 has impacted me in so many ways and so shaped my emotional relationship with death and dying. Everyone dies is a truth but to have it be an emotional truth at age 10 or so is impactful on ways that are difficult to comprehend. To inflict that on a child as a probable outcome is self-centered to a Trumpian degree.

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The Experiment So Far

 

Just over two weeks ago, May 3rd, I posted about an experiment in my writing as I began a novel without a written outline. My normal process for writing a novel involves extensive notes, outlining, and breaking out all the acts, before I tackle the actual drafting of the book. With this book, working title which is very likely to change The Colors of Their Trade, I have no notes save the once I make as I write, no outline, and a bullet point of six or seven elements to break down the 5-act structure.

As of yesterday, May 18th, I had nearly 10,000 words written for Trade, major characters and relations defined in the text, and narrative momentum that so far has not abandoned me. I believe, perhaps in error, that if I can get the entire 1st act drafted, about 15,000 to 16,000 words then the project will have survived its most critical phase.

Mind you, I am not flying completely by the seat of my pants with this. I have a clear understanding of the five-act structure, 1) establishment, 2) disruption, 3) point of no return, 4) chaos and collapse, and resolution, and what elements are critical this this story’s various acts, that for each act I have a clear destination and goal. That said, while the goal is visible for each act the path to it is not.

This is an experiment in another matter as well. It is a horror novel and I have never written long form prose horror. All of my horror to date has been short fiction and one feature film screenplay that is utter garbage.

I am considering but not yet committed to the idea that when I get act 1 completed that I might show it to a few people and see if it is working as well as it appears to me.

Still, the process continues and only the future knows what it will hold.

 

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

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Quick Thoughts on Silo

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Premiering on May 5th, 2023, Silo is a limited series adapted from novels by Hugh Howey
concerning a community of 10,000 people surviving a devastated ecology by living underground in a massive silo.

Rebecca Ferguson plays Juliette an engineer from the structures lower levels suddenly pulled into a conspiracy that entangles the silo’s highest citizens, the sheriff, the mayor, and the judge.

Only three episodes have streamed, and it would be unfair and unjust to judge the series’ quality without having seen the final turns and revelations, but I do have a few thoughts.

First off, the production values are first rate. The environment and the setting feel real. There is a palatable sense that this place, with its undetermined age, has seen countless generations of survivors.

Second, the cast is fantastic. Led by Ferguson, who is also a producer for the show, everyone is real and complicated. The actors and their characters are engaging enough to endear attachment from the viewer helping to audience to flow past some of the less that ideal world building.

The less-than-ideal world building comes down to a few key issues.

For dramatic reasons in the 3rd episode Machines Juliette leads a dangerous but unavoidable repair procedure to correct the colony’s single massive generator before it fails and dooms everyone. The idea that the colony was constructed with a single generator, upon which everyone’s survival depended, without even the ability to shut it down for regular maintenance is absurd and a sin against rational engineering. (Not to mention the lack of a relief valve for the geothermal steam that powers the generator.)

Much is made of the vast distance from the top of the silo to its lowest inhabited level with such trips effectively taking an entire day even for the silo’s political leadership. Apparently, the structure has no elevators, which again is absurd considering the large amount of material that would be required to move between levels to sustain a large population.

A close ecology system such as the silo where no new material comes in from the outside would be very fixated on recycling and not wasting a single gram of material. Yet, the colony maintains a tradition that anyone who proclaims that they ‘want to go out,’ is allowed to go outside of the silo to their certain death taking with them kilos of fabric, plastic, and irreplaceable mass. Madness.

All that said I am still intrigues by the series and have some hope it might stick the landing. With conspiracy stories the revelation of the conspiracy is a major element that either contributes to success of failure and only when we reach that final turn can a valid judgement be rendered.

Silo streams on Apple TV+.

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Fast Thoughts

 

The GOP is a parade of corruption, anti-American ideology, and moral collapse.

There is no credible reason for voting for this political party save, grift, power, and bigotry. Everything else is rationalization, justification, and lies.

There are arguments to be made about the size, scope, and reach of government but that is not the question of the day.

The question of the day is do you stand with democracy or against it?

There is no third way.

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Well, This Blows

 

I had been scheduled to participate in the programming for this year’s WesterCon, a science fiction convention that moves about the American West from city to city each year.

Yesterday, I got an email from the con committee that the convention has been canceled. It was of course written in a passive voice, so it was impossible to determine what had happened behind the scenes to destroy this year’s event, but WesterCon number 75 is not going to happen.

In addition to the fun of panel pontification this was going to be my chance to see an old friend, Gail Carriger, who had been named the convention’s Guest of Honor, and perhaps even share a panel or two with her.

At least the news came down before I had ordered copies of my novel, Vulcan’s Forge to hand sell at the convention.

Still, this is a bummer.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

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Streaming Review: The Investigation

 

August 10th, 2017, Swedish journalist Kim Wall boarded a privately built submarine built by a Danish man for an interview and cruise in the harbor. She never returned and the next day the submarine had sunk, and its designer rescued from the water. What unfolded next became an international case and the subject of the limited series The Investigation.

Focusing nearly entirely on the Danish Police investigating Wall’s disappearance The Investigation takes the unusual approach of never having the subjects of that investigation,
either Wall or the suspect Peter Madsen appear in the series. Aside from Wall’s parents the focus is fixed squarely on Jens Jansen the lead detective and his team as they attempt to discover the truth behind Madsen’s continually changing story.

The Investigation does an excellent job of portraying the meticulous work of investigating a crime and slowly building a case element by elements when critical pieces are missing from the puzzle. While Jensen and his home life are the elements that are intended to give the limited series a ‘character arc’ I found them far less compelling than the actual work of solving the case, the multi-national team assemble to do it, and the extraordinary lengths required.

Like The Wire this series is not about cops and robbers in gun battles but rather on the actual work, day to day, and the frustrations of good police work.

The Investigation is streaming on HBOMax.

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Noir Sunday: Death of a Cyclist

Hailing from Spain in 1955 Death of a Cyclist follows a couple having an affair, Maria Jose de Castro (Lucia Bose) who, by marrying Miguel Castro, (Otello Toso) has become wealthy and privileged, and her paramour Juan Fernandez Soler (Alberto Closas) an adjunct professor of mathematics. While returning from an evening’s assignation, with Maria at the wheel, the couple run over a cyclist and in their panic at being discovered flee, leaving the man to die at the side of the road. Paranoid at being discovered, each descends into trouble and crisis as their carefully managed affair and lives are consumed in the tangle of their crime.

An excellent character study and noir Death of a Cyclist presents the elements of noir that I find most compelling, ordinary characters caught in a web of extraordinary circumstances propelled forward by a flaw of character that prevent them doing to right thing as their compulsions push them to an inevitable conclusion.

The film is not without its own flaws, however. It does not bear to think at all upon the ages of the actor. The lovely and talented Lucia Bose was a mere 24 when this film was released in 1955 and would have been but 5 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil war, hardly a fitting subject for a soldier’s affections. Aside from the disparity in ages Death of a Cyclist is an excellent foreign noir. Shot with expressive intent by Alfredo Fraile the film, while eschewing the typical using of shadowed bars across the characters manages to capture a stark and isolating sensation mirroring the characters’ psychological states as they are consumed by their guilt and paranoia. Written and directed by J.A. Bardem Death of a Cyclist is often referred to as a social realist film but it equally fits the bill as a film noir expressing the universality of human cynicism.

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