movies

Some assembly required

Sunday. That means the New York Times crossword — kind of a dull non-theme this week — and my writing group. I had to take the long way there, avoiding the Wantagh Parkway which was reportedly closed for the Long Island Marathon this morning and afternoon, and when I got there, this is what I wrote:

“This word,” I ask, “it’s written everywhere and he was reportedly shouting it at the end — what’s it mean?”

“It’s an obscure hue,” says Marcus. “A color the human eye supposedly used to be able to see until — well, who knows? A hundred, two hundred thousand years ago? It’s mentioned dozens of times in each of the diaries we procured at the scene, and scrawled all over the walls, and it turns up maybe once or twice in the referring texts we also discovered there.”

“So you’re saying he didn’t just make it up, then?”

“No, but god knows where he first found it, or why it seemed so important to him. He claims near the end to have actually seen it, seen this color, but I doubt any of that’s true.”

“The running theory in the precinct is he was nothing but a crazy man.”

“It’s not a bad theory. HE seemed to think he was mad. But I think if you could ask him — ”

“That’s not going to happen. Even if they’d let me near him after what happened, the doctors at Mercy don’t like his chances.”

“Well anyway, IF you asked him, I think he’d tell you it was the COLOR that drove him mad. ‘Man was not meant to gaze upon…yadda yadda yadda.’ It’s really just your garden-variety kind of psychosis.”

“Eighteen dead…that’s some nasty garden.”

“The color was a conduit. Old gods. He tried to sacrifice those people to make the voices go away.”

It’s admittedly nothing great, and I didn’t even manage to squeeze all of the prompt-words into it. But sometimes that’s how these writing prompts and forty-minute free-writing exercises play out.

After the writing, we went to see The Avengers. Because, seriously, how were we not? I thought the movie was genuinely terrific and enjoyed pretty much every minute of it. I’m not un-tempted to go see it again.

So, anyway, that was Sunday.

Neither too fast nor too furious

A quiet, uneventful Saturday. I mowed the front and back lawns and read some Kaleidotrope submissions. The goal is to finish all of January’s submissions by the end of April, all of February’s by the end of May, and March’s by the end of June. Which will be just in time for the zine to re-open to submissions in July. I don’t know if the number of submissions I get increased, or if I just fell really far behind — I think maybe a combination of the two — but I am kind of far behind. I’m kind of at the point where only two types of stories interest me: the kind that gives me a reason to quit reading right away, and the kind that never gives me a reason to quit reading.

I ended the evening by watching Fast Five. I’ve never seen any of the other four Fast & Furious movies, so I was occasionally lost (or just tuned out) when characters and back stories were introduced. But the movie was a surprising amount of fun. As I said on Twitter, it’s pretty much the unthinking man’s Ocean’s 11.

Cabin fever dream

I’m off tomorrow. Yay! It’s for a pair of doctor appointments, though. Less yay.

Today, I did the Sunday crossword, though I’m already on record as having not enjoyed it much. I read some more Kaleidotrope submissions, again out on the back deck. (It was hot enough we took the covers off the air conditioners today, though not quite hot enough to switch the units on.) I watched an episode of Fringe from two weeks ago. And I went to see The Cabin in the Woods, which I thought was great…but really difficult to talk about without spoilers. (Honestly, even saying it’s meta-horror feels like I’m maybe saying too much.)

And beyond that, my weekly writing group started up again. I wrote this:

“Cyanide is an unholy weapon,” said Father Franklin, eying the boy who had been brought before him. “Only a coward resorts to the ungodliness of poisons, Horace.”

“I just thought — ”

“Clearly you did not. Or your intended would be dead by now, don’t you think? You bring shame upon yourself with such an attack, young man. Even if you had succeeded, there would be no honor in your actions.”

“But cyanide isn’t on the codex of forbidden — ”

“And what would a young initiate like yourself be doing reading the forbidden codex? Didn’t your teacher — remind me, boy, who is your weaponmaster?”

“Brother Andrews,” the young Horace said.

“Did Brother Andrews not train you in the art of the weapons that God expects you to use? Were you not given a holy blade upon elevation from first year?”

“I was, Father. But — ”

“And yet you choose not to use this weapon, which God Himself has put in your hand. You sully yourself — your teachings and this entire school — by taking such a cowardly route. And worse, you failed.”

“But I — ”

“‘A blade may find its mark a thousandfold, while but a drop of water may dilute the most venomous bite.’ Do I need to quote scripture to you?”

“No, sir.”

“Then explain it to me, Horace. Explain why I have been disturbed from evening prayers to learn that not only have you failed in your weaponmaster’s assignment, but you have failed because you tried to poison the man you were assigned to kill.”

“But he wasn’t a man, Father. Not really. It — it wasn’t fair. Brother Andres couldn’t have expected me — ”

“Robert Andrews is a proven member of his guild and has served this school well for twenty years. He would not send a second-year initiate after someone he felt you could not — ”

“But this man, Father. The target. He was an initiate. I mean…or he had been. That’s why he was on the list. But I…I don’t know, Father. I think maybe Brother Andrews wanted me to fail.”

“He — ? Are you accusing the Brother of some kind of wrongdoing, Horace?”

“I…no, Father. It’s just… ‘Know your intended,’ right? Know the man you would kill like you know your own shadow, like you know your own life. That’s in the later gospels, isn’t it?”

“A rough and butchered translation of St. Marcellus, but yes.”

“Well, I studied, Father. I researched, and I followed, and I learned all I could. And the thing is, Father, I think the target knew I was doing this. Like I said, I think he was an initiate. An assassin. It was hard to find, but in the archives — ”

Father Franklin held up a hand.

“Enough. You know as well as any student here that the archives are restricted. Whatever you think you might have discovered there…”

“The target’s name, Father. That’s what I discovered.”

“And what name could have forced your hand in such a disgraceful act? What name sent you looking for poisons in the locked armory? What name made you break your covenant with God?”

“Robert Andrews,” said Horace. “The man I was sent to kill. His real name, Father…his real name was Robert Andrews.”

I’m not really sure where it was going, since I was figuring that out as I went along, but I had some fun with it.

And with Sunday overall.

“Let us be crooked, but never common.”

Isn’t March supposed to be “in like a lion, out like a lamb”? It was nasty and cold today, colder than I think it was a month ago, and definitely not very lamb-like.

I spent a couple of hours this afternoon attending an Eagle Scout court of honor with my father. These are always a little awkward for me, since I don’t really know anybody there — my father’s been involved in the troop and local district considerably longer than I ever was — but I go to show support and because I think my father appreciates it. And this one was actually pretty nice, and nowhere near as awkward as the first one I went to, when I wound up feeling like an interloper up on stage. And they had a really nice spread of food afterward, so it really wasn’t so bad.

I spent the rest of the afternoon working on the Spring 2012 issue of Kaleidotrope, which is now live. It’s another interesting mix, and I hope some of you will take the time to read some of the stories and maybe even comment with your thoughts.

And then I rounded out the evening by watching The Lady Eve, a screwball comedy from Preston Sturges starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. It was a little silly and convoluted even by those standards, but good fun nevertheless.

And that was my cold and nasty, but not too shabby, Saturday.

It’s time to put on makeup, it’s time to light the lights…

I got up early this morning to go get blood drawn, since my doctor kind of strong-armed me into scheduling a physical when I was in a couple of weeks ago about my pneumonia. I’m hoping that it, and the subsequent second chest x-ray I’ll need to schedule, will confirm that said pneumonia has made a full and lasting retreat.

The bloodwork didn’t take long, so after that I went and got some breakfast — it was fasting bloodwork — and then a much needed haircut. (I’m not sure, but it could be than my last haircut was over three months ago.)

I mowed the lawn, worked a little on Kaleidotrope‘s next issue (theoretically out next month), delivered some food to the church pantry with my father (and the dog, who stayed in the car), and went out for a really lovely dinner with my parents. (I had a very nice beet salad to start and a delicious duck breast for my entree.) Then this evening, after what was really a ridiculous amount of deliberating and looking through options, I decided to watch The Muppets.

I liked it, and I liked some of it quite a lot, but I think ultimately it made me nostalgic for earlier Muppet movies more than anything else. Because of the frame story that Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller decided to use, the Muppets, while always the focus, at times feel like secondary characters, or at least not the driving force of the movie. And because so much of the original voice and puppetry talent sadly either couldn’t or didn’t participate in the movie, some of the characters feel just slightly off at times. (I really wish, for instance, that Frank Oz had reconsidered. Did he see a script, or just that brief fart shoes scene in the trailer?) That said, there’s a lot of goofy sweetness to really like about it, and if not brilliant or even in my top three Muppet films, it’s genuinely entertaining.