Month: October 2018

When this posts it’ll be Halloween time here in the States. An interesting Holiday, Halloween. Uncelebrated in any official sense, and yet possibly because it’s not tied to any widely observed religion here, the modern version is possibly the most unabashedly commercial of all and thus quintessentially American in its nature. Where Thanksgiving and Christmas bring expectations of travel and family gatherings and gifting, Halloween offers an enticing combo of none of the obligations with all of the consumption.

But enough of that. Enjoy the day, and enjoy a video of a horse made up as a skeleton (which came to me by way of a horse veterinarian friend, so don’t worry, I’m pretty confident whatever methods were used are non-harmful):

Serial comics. Long-form comics. Basically, what Zombie Ranch is: a tale told over weeks, months, or even years, rather than the more-or-less isolated punchlines of a gag strip. The payoffs for reading aren’t necessarily as immediate, but (hopefully) good enough to justify the commitment.

Ah yes, commitment. Earlier this month marked nine years since we got all this started in a whirlwind fervor and fresh-facedly made our first convention exhibitor appearance. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs since then, but one thing I can admit is that the early sense of infatuation, of being borderline obsessed, is no longer there.

That might sound bad, but it’s not far off from how Dawn and I feel about our marriage. Ooookay, that probably sounds worse. Love is supposed to be forever, right?

Well, there’s love and there’s love. In particular, there’s love and there’s limerence. Limerence is the term for that whirlwind romance state. The proverbial “honeymoon” referred to by such ominous phrases as “the honeymoon is over.” In terms of relationships, the limerence period typically lasts between 18 months and three years, but it’s widely agreed that it won’t last forever.

Terrible, huh? Well, only if your definitions of love and limerence are conflated, so that when limerence goes you feel like love is gone, too. Since pop culture bombards us all our lives with stories of “love at first sight,” “true love,” and “happily ever after,” it’s not an easy conflation to avoid. When “love” has been lost, then why are we even doing this?

That’s the big question, and my answer is: friendship.

Call it friends with benefits if you will, although I’m not going to transfer that particular metaphor back to the comic (because eww, messy). If your lover also happens to be your best buddy, then the loss of limerence doesn’t need to lead to failure and separation. You’re still friends, you still enjoy each other’s company, you’re still giving and getting something important out of the arrangement.

Not so bad, that.

I don’t know precisely what I expected when Dawn insisted on watching Netflix’s latest binge-a-thon offering, The Haunting of Hill House. Probably not much. Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel of the same name has been adapted several times over the years, to varying degrees of success, and so I think I greeted another telling of it with the same amount of enthusiasm I greet the announcement of another Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood show. Again, probably not much. Ho hum, Halloween is around the corner so everyone wants their scare fix, no matter how mediocre it might be.

But our apartment is small and I can see our television from my computer, so whatever Dawn happens to be watching is something I’m at least half-watching whether I feel like it or not. By the end of the first episode, it was clear to me this was not going to be a “half-watch” scenario. By the end of this past weekend, we’d binged through to the end, in part because I figured I needed to write about it for this blog and for once I was going to base my impressions on the whole damn package rather than a handful of initial episodes. I’ve had a few times over the years where that early enthusiasm and resulting glowing recommendation didn’t pan out in the final tally.

This series gets my unreserved recommend from start to finish. It is exceedingly well-crafted in all aspects of its design, from actor performances to set design to the script and camera work. It is a more subtle and patient work than much of its genre and has been compared to a family drama that happens to have ghosts in it. And in this man’s opinion, that totally works. I’ve talked in this very space about an arguable character flaw of mine where I can get bored of drama that’s too grounded in reality. Give me some fantastical elements with which to play out the metaphors and foibles of interpersonal relationships. This show provides that. Oh boy howdy does it ever. And for that matter it’s a damn good and at times damn scary ghost story precisely because it hews so closely to studies of character and makes you care. These aren’t just the nigh-interchangeable victims of your average “evil house” lock-in. Actually you learn early on that showrunner (and director of all 10 episodes!) Mike Flanagan has remixed the foundations of Jackson’s novel in a… well, very novel way, because there’s no (well, almost no) lock-in at all. Gone is the literal claustrophobia and isolation that’s become such a staple of ghost and monster stories, including previous adaptations of this story. In its place is something far, far more unsettling.

The most insidious thing for me about the new Haunting of Hill House is how aggressively normal a lot of the settings are presented, including the House itself. Rather than detracting from the horror, though, it emphasizes it because by the time you’re a few episodes in the message is loud and clear: nowhere is safe. Not your home, not your office… fear will follow you into the most mundane places. In part this is framed by the show as being because there is no getting away from your own mind, but also in part the show is very clear that this is not just a matter of hallucinations and hysteria. There are ghosts — and while their influence is strongest within the House itself, they are not confined to it. They will manifest to sensitive and skeptic alike, and can only be explained away for so long before they must be confronted. Don’t be so complacent just because the lights are on… they can go out at any time. Or perhaps worst of all, won’t go out, and you’ll be denied even the fleeting succor of not clearly seeing what’s in front of you.

That’s not the only horror trope subverted, inverted and otherwise manipulated in the course of the series. There are a few jump scares and moments of gore, but parceled out sparingly enough that they retain their impact when they happen. The jump scares don’t happen when you expect, for one thing. Flanagan is both a lifelong horror fan and a skilled director and you can tell he really went all out with this project as both a love letter to the genre and a gentle deconstruction, but the kind of deconstruction that’s more of a back-to-basics, “this is why we have always been fascinated by ghost stories” reminder.

Now there’s more I could say but it would be edging into spoiler territory, so again I just leave you with my recommend, and a warning that once you’ve watched all the way through, you may need to watch again. Let’s just say that if Hill House seems underpopulated with supernatural manifestations (save for a few very noteworthy exceptions), you just weren’t looking hard enough.

To say I’m not a big sports guy these days would be an understatement. It was only a few days ago that I pretty much stumbled on the fact that my hometown baseball team, the L.A. Dodgers, were in the playoffs and potentially making another run at the World Series. I used to follow them a lot more as a kid, but these days, yeah, I’m one of those bandwagon jerks who only maybe gets excited when they’re doing well.

Also before any of you internationals comment, I am well aware that the World Series is a highly ironic moniker for the championship of a sport that most of the world doesn’t care about. Hell, baseball is maligned by many in the United States as well, with such luminaries as George Carlin mocking “America’s pastime” as irredeemably boring.

But despite what I say in the first paragraph, I still like it. I won’t necessarily go out of my way for it, but I can still get caught up watching in a way I don’t with other sports. My half-remembered youth still downloads the intricacies of batting averages and designated hitters and ground rule doubles into my brain so that I can play armchair manager and shout obscenities at the batter who decides to chase a wild pitch on a 3-0 count.

Don’t get any of that? No worries. I’ve come to a conclusion over the years that I still prefer baseball over many other sports in the same way I prefer the X-Com video games over, say, Starcraft: baseball is turn-based. Baseball is thought and strategy free from the pressures of a clock, that is then punctuated by moments of white-knuckle excitement as the element of chance comes into play.  The “downtime” in between plays is for me not a bug but a feature.

And as I found myself drawn into watching it this week, it occurred to me that it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that fans of serial webcomics either enjoy baseball or would enjoy it if exposed to it. Because there is that similar feeling of moments of drama couched in between periods of reflection. There’s a want to know what happens next, but also a patience to let that happen in its own time. Even a webcomic that updates seven days a week will never approach the “real time” experience of a movie. But does that make it any less impactful?

Maybe, maybe not. But baseball survives to this day. And serial comics do, too.

I’m fairly certain I’ve written before about the kinds of epiphanies you can experience as a writer, at any time and place, where suddenly all the figurative obstacles of a particular narrative point blow away and a light shines through. It’s those moments that for me make all the stress of wrangling an ongoing story worth the trouble, because preceding it are always those times where you feel like you’ve “painted yourself into a corner” with the tale so far and there’s no clean way out. That’s a suffocating feeling, and the confident decision you made a few weeks, months, or even years back might have you regretting that you didn’t take another track.

But I’ve learned through many of these moments to trust myself and my instincts. It helps immensely to have a wife who occasionally admits she thinks I’m some sort of magician at this point for the way I can continue to produce meaningful progression of a nearly ten year old story, weaving in elements that may give an entirely new but still plausible way to look at older stuff. Sometimes it’s all planned, and sometimes I’ll admit that I’m just an opportunist who has that flash of insight that the stuff I worried might be off-topic or meandering nonsense had a point after all.

It’s weird to think of interpreting your own text, and yet if you write the same story for long enough, I think it’s bound to happen sooner or later. Your brain connects the dots you didn’t quite see clearly.

That’s what I tell myself, anyhow. And hey, when life hasn’t exactly been free of stress, you take whatever epiphanies you can interpret.