Honored and thrilled to have been asked to contribute a story for Volume II of “States of Terror,” Matt Lewis and Keith McCleary‘s horror anthology concerning cryptozoids and other beasts of urban legend from all fifty nifty United States. I’ll be tackling Florida’s answer to Bigfoot, the legendary Skunk Ape. In the meantime, throw them some love and support and check out Volume I!
As a long-time member of SAG/AFTRA (and a soon-to-be-ex-member of the Writer’s Guild), the holiday season officially begins when the awards screeners start to trickle in, appearing sporadically in my mailbox from early November to late December. This is the time of year that ostensibly gives the lie to the notion that all Hollywood produces is superhero movies and CGI blockbusters. The movies that arrive, the ones comprised of scripts and performances allegedly worthy of consideration among the pantheon of serious, award-worthy efforts, range from the heavily heralded (Angelina Jolie’s tale of WW2-era triumph of the spirit “Unbroken”) to the borderline invisible (Julianne Moore as an early-onset Alzheimer’s sufferer in “Still Alice”). Packaged in tasteful boxes or indifferently stuffed into generic slipcovers, these are the real gifts that my family looks forward to me dutifully packing into my luggage and bringing home to Texas so they can enjoy or dismiss them all from the comfort of my parents’ living room before their friends can even get out to see them in theaters. Inevitably, one of the “must-sees” always gets lost in the shuffle and left behind at home (this year, it was the Reese Witherspoon-goes-walkabout character drama “Wild”) and I feel guilt disproportionate to the crime for not being able to give them this rare and special treat.
We gather and watch them one and sometimes two a night, working through the stack and ticking them off the list. Most of them are entirely watchable, even the ones that I had little personal interest in seeing based on mediocre reviews or tepid-seeming subject matter (Robert Downey Jr.’s foray into intimate family drama “The Judge,” which boasts fine performances from a cast of ringers including Robert Duvall, Billy Bob Thornton, Vincent D’Onofrio and Vera Farmiga). Some of them are mildly interesting variations on an expected genre or theme (“A Most Violent Year,” despite its title, is intentionally as near-bloodless as a crime drama about a mob-averse businessman can be; de rigeur disease pic “Still Alice” contains an incredibly nuanced and sympathetic performance from Moore; as for “Unbroken,” I liked it better 30 years ago when it was called “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence”). Some of them I know are not going to be for everyone, or maybe anyone (creepy “Nightcrawler” was reserved for just me and my old man to view, and we enjoyed it well enough, though it’s not the second coming of “Taxi Driver” early previews might have suggested, and I still haven’t found the right time to pop in PTA’s “Inherent Vice”).
The point here is, somehow, year after year, despite the dire pronouncements of friends, family and film reviewers, small human stories still get made, somehow. And while it’s impossible to argue that the big Hollywood machine has shifted focus to superheroes in a way that’s not only extreme, but borderline absurd, I bristle when I hear cinema snobs blame the fanboys for that fact. Obviously, the movie business is about the bottom dollar now more than ever, but if superhero movies are what’s dominating the global box office, there aren’t enough fanboys in the known multiverse to account for all that money. It’s the average filmgoer, looking for adrenaline-fueled escapism just as they did during the action movie dominance of the ’80s, or the better part of the 20th century, when something like 70-80% of movies produced in Hollywood were Westerns (before CGI, what gave you more bang for your epic Cinemascope buck than Monument Valley teeming with a thousand extras, herds of buffalo, and galloping horses being run to death). And many of those much-derided genre movies are now beloved timeless classics, from “The Searchers” or “My Darling Clementine” to “Die Hard” and the early Terminators, while a multitude of the “intimate human stories” and art house favorites of those eras have tumbled into obscurity along with all the other piles of pure product.
As a part-time fanboy, I love quality small scale, art house and original cinema as much as I enjoy the Marvel Universe. One of the best movies I’ve seen in the past two decades is Jennifer Lawrence’s breakthrough “Winter’s Bone,” and I could watch it a thousand times to the single viewing any of the “Hunger Games” movies deserve. Conversely, my favorite movie of 2014 was and remains “The Winter Soldier,” as good a piece of smart high-dollar cinema as the Big Machine has ever produced, “The Searchers” of the superhero genre, and it doesn’t hurt that its filmmakers boldly chose one of the greatest periods of American cinema, the dark, paranoid ’70s of “All the President’s Men” and “The Parallax View,” as its main source of inspiration. I rewatched it with my dad this Xmas–one of the few movies he hadn’t already seen, because my septugenarian and semi-retired parents go to see EVERYTHING–and he loved it as much as I knew he would. For me, it holds up to repeat viewings in a way that none of these awards-bait pics has so far. Sure, “A Most Violent Year” was completely watchable, but was it rewatchable? Not really. Even if you love “Unbroken” (which I didn’t because see above), would you want to sit through that highbrow torture porn twice? I thought last year’s “12 Years a Slave” was fantastic and essential and important, but do I want to tune it in on late-night cable and fall asleep to it? No thanks–I’ll let “Django Unchained” be my slave-narrative lullaby. Does that make me shallow? Maybe, but it also makes me pretty normal. I don’t think all film needs to be comfort food, obviously, and I frequently get “more” out of those films that are anything but, but I don’t tend to revisit them, and therefore they don’t become favorites. Oftentimes, they just feel like chores.
“The Judge”–an unfortunate box office failure for Downey–is a very watchable, at times highly entertaining piece of fluff masquerading as “human drama,” every bit as much a slice of comfort food pie as any superhero flick, and every inch its own kind of Hollywood fantasy–the big city slicky returns to his small town and his dysfunctional family to recover the soul he left behind, and find a little redemption for everyone in the bargain. In terms of RDJ’s performance, it’s basically Iron Man Goes Home, his fast-talking lawyer spouting Tony Stark quality laugh-lines several times per scene. It’s an enjoyably crowd-pleasing star turn that he could deliver in his sleep at this point, and for my fanboy money, his emotional arc in “Iron Man 3” is still more satisfying. And rewatchable.
If you’re looking for real outside-the-box (and outside-the-box-office) human stories, which do somehow continue to defy the odds and get made despite the total global domination of special effects and spandex, I recommend trawling Netflix for the endless stream of amazing foreign and independent films across all genres that I stumble across on a weekly basis. In the coming weeks I’ll recommend a few of my favorites by genre as definitive proof that if you love film, and regardless of your feelings regarding Hollywood product, genuine original cinema is alive and well in the world, and there seems to be as much or more of it than ever.
In the meantime, hey Academy, where the hell is my awards-season screener of the best indie movie of the year, “Blue Ruin”? It’s almost like these award things are complete bullshit or something.
When I started this blog, it just seemed like a necessary move to kickstart my “web presence” in the wake of publishing my first book. I don’t tend this little thoughtspew garden as frequently as I assumed I would, because I am prone to sloth by nature and because I have a LOT of other shit to do most every day. Sitting down to journal is a luxury from a past life. I had forgotten how much I used to do it until I cracked open a trunkload of my old spiral diaries and faux-leather-bound notebooks , vigorously and desperately maintained from the mid- ’80s through the late ’90s, a wild minddump of my (pedestrian, suburban, naively whitebread, hopelessly adolescent) innermost feelings, scraps of poetry, false starts at novels and short stories and scripts, and my most significant creative outlet until I started writing in genuine earnest and eventually getting paid for it sometimes.
What surprised me, and in equal parts heartened and frustrated me as well, was that much of the writing, in spite of the sometimes pathetic, navel-gazing, fear-stunted subject matter, was actually pretty good, especially for a guy in his 20s. Heartening because I know that writing is hopelessly entwined with the strands of my very DNA, and frustrating because I didn’t have the werewithal, back in those long-lost floundering days, to see things through to completion and start making my mark in some small way when I burned with that youthful energy and helpless need to find a way to connect with the world. When I had all the time in the world with me and ahead of me. And there’s that part of me that can’t help pondering, however uselessly, how different my life might have been if I had just knuckled fucking down and done it. But then I remember how much I genuinely like, even love, my life as it is now and realize that it’s all okay, and I can forgive myself my mistakes and lapses and not let them freeze and paralyze me in place the way they evidently did when I was young. Because I still have all the time in the world, even if I do have less of it.
I don’t know why I stopped journaling, except maybe I felt less desperate and started looking out more than in, or maybe my laziness just manifested in some new way, but honestly, what is a blog but a journal for the whole world to see (well, let’s be realistic–for the few dozen of you who might even bother to read this). The fact is, I’m supposed to be journaling as part of my sixth step in recovery, but I’m not sure I’m ready to bore, disturb, or frighten you all with a litany of my defects of character.
But I do recognize that my entries here, from the first one, have functioned as a kind of confessional self-appraisal blended–with little to no nuance–with my pop cultural obsessions. So as I continue to focus and figure out what I’m doing here, I figure I’ll just stumble forward in that direction, and I’ll either alternate or find unusual, hopefully interesting, frequently hamfisted ways of confronting my recovery while continuing to talk about my process as a writer, what I’m putting out in the world–or attempting to– creatively, and espousing the genuine virtues of comics, graphic novels, science fiction adventure, superpeople and capepunkers.
There will be the aforementioned navel-gazing, the requisite “what to watch/read/listen to” suggestions, the occasional shameless plugs for my books when they’re on sale or on the verge of publication, and whatever else crosses my fevered, frenzied, sometimes inspired, often dog-tired brain.
And this being October, I might as well suggest some horror shit for you people to investigate at your leisure.
I probably don’t have to tell most of you that the “Walking Dead” premiere was as good an episode as that show has done–fast-paced, probably a little slim on genuine character beats except for Tyreese and Carol, but filled with action that bordered perilously and brilliantly close to cinematic. Also shied ferociously away from that show’s tendency to drag things out when it comes to settings and certain main characters’ old tendency to spend more time talking than surviving. This one managed to be brutal, tense, and had me cheering for Rick in a way that I have been since he bit that son-of-a-bitch’s throat out. I was worried he was on the verge of becoming Jack from “Lost,” but Sheriff Grimes is really coming into his own. And it even managed to end on a warm, upbeat note in a way this show almost never allows for, with all of our heroes finally together and moving as one. I hope they can maintain this kind of confidence in both narrative and character going forward. This show might finally be ready to become great.
Speaking of WD, I started reading “Outcast” by the creator himself, Robert Kirkman, and artist Paul Azaceta and I gotta say, so far, so great. It’s about a lost soul with an apparent gift for exorcising demons, which is a good thing because they seem to be popping up pretty much everywhere in his world. Terrific art and intriguing characters. Definitely worth a look.
And finally, because I do have some of that other shit to do today, if you’re looking for some supremely weird and at times darkly funny low-budget horror, you could do worse than “The Banshee Chapter,” currently streaming on Netflix.
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This caught my interest when I learned that Ted “Buffalo Bill” Levine from “Silence of the Lambs” and the amazing adenoidal voice and too many memorable character roles to count, was one of the stars. Only when I started watching did I realize that he was playing a Hunter S. Thompson analog (with savory dollops of Philip K. Dick mixed into the sauce) in a story about ill-advised MKUltra experiments involving a powerful psychedelic drug that opens a doorway to a very dark, Lovecraftian dimension. There are some “found footage” elements but it doesn’t stay stuck in that subgenre rut. It’s not easy to follow, but it’s fun to try and fathom what the fuck is going on. The acting is solid and Levine is amazing. Creep yourself out.
And while this probably deserves to be a post all on its own, this weekend marks the third (fucking unbelievable) anniversary of the unexpected, tragic passing of my brother Michael. I have more thoughts and feelings around this than I can hope to process here or anywhere, but suffice to say he was special, wildly important to me and my family, and while I’ve found a place for my grief over the passing years, I still get frustrated, furious, and sloppily sad whenever it occurs to me (almost daily, really) that I will never get to share anything new with him ever again, and that he won’t be there to comfort me when the other inevitable tragedies of time befall me and the rest of my family. And while I was writing this post, this song came up on my iTunes. It’s a song that made me think of my siblings–for obvious reasons–from the first time I ever heard it, and I insisted it be played at his funeral as my way of saying goodbye. It’s called “Orange Sky” by Alexi Murdoch and I only recommend clicking if you’re in the mood to weep.
If I were to try and trace the beginnings of my midlife crisis–such as it’s been–I imagine I could source its origins back to early 2008, when I was deeply unemployed and desperately depressed enough to seek help via a depression study I heard about in a radio ad. I’d been in a deep funk for months, the kind of constant emotional turmoil and pain that was reminiscent of the darkest depths of heartbreak I’d experienced at the crash-and-burn of romantic entanglements, or the bleak apocalyptic despair that inexplicably overwhelmed me during my first semester at college, when my personal uncertainties about the future manifested in the certainty that mankind as a species was doomed. A chronic self-medicator, I’d eschewed therapy and prescribed chemical assistance for the depression that had been my bane for most of my existence, from at least adolescence onward.
That depression, which the octogenarian head of the study would later refer to as “profound,” consisted of some fairly straightforward talk-therapy sessions, some very “Parallax View” computer memory tests, a little bit of cognitive conditioning, one of the scariest blood draws I ever experienced in my life (the slightly daffy, possibly incompetent nurse couldn’t seem to locate any of my admittedly pale veins, and I doubt GPS tracking would have helped her), and the administration of a drug that may or may not have been akin to Lexapro. It was a blind study, and of course no one could tell me if I was in the control group or the experimental group, so I had to take it on faith that I was actually getting help in that regard. I drew my own conclusions when, within two weeks, I started to feel like a human being and not a shambling meatbag full of simmering anxiety, swampy self-pity, bitter resentments and societal rage all swirling in my personal shame spiral.
Equally important, my wife noticed too, which was fantastic because my moods were not exactly contributing to harmony in the homestead, as you can imagine. Our son was a toddler at the time and my inner lethargy and emotional muck-wallowing meant I could barely see past the tip of my dick, much less offer any meaningful parental assistance. So in the nick of time, and while I had the time, thanks to unemployment, I took some action–mildly absurd action, it felt at the time, but at least a research study seemed like an interesting thing to do–and managed to rescue myself from ennui and maybe oblivion in the bargain.
There were still plenty of challenges to come–shitty jobs and worse bosses (but at least I was working again), personal setbacks, life shit, plus while things got easier at home, they didn’t suddenly become perfect. Magic pills they may have seemed, but even magic takes effort to keep working. I’ve remained on medication ever since, and fortunately I react well to what I’m on–no noticeable side effects and no recurrence of major depression, which is a big deal considering that in those early years I was still augmenting the meds with alcohol and drugs, self-medicating my mid-life away.
I suppose phase two of this crisis made itself known in earnest around 2010, when I was deep into popping a constant stream of unprescribed (at least to me) painkillers while simultaneously rekindling my long-shelved love of funnybooks. I’ve written a bit about this before, but I blame Ed Brubaker, particularly his Sleeper, Incognito and Captain America, in re-igniting this fire, to the degree that I began reworking a straightforward but stagnating (and still not quite finished) scifi novel I was writing into a superhero-stuffed opus involving Nazi scientists, atomic-powered sex goddesses, human-ape hybrids, ultrasecret agents and all manner of mid-20th-century craziness (gimme a couple more years and a few more books in between and I promise you it’s on its way).
The drug and alcohol abuse went the way of the dinosaur, but the reborn passion for comics didn’t. Good timing, too, because somewhere in there my wife bought me a Kindle and I discovered the joys of comixology and digital comics in general (if you’re a Luddite print-freak who takes issue with this, I respect that, but I still selectively collect when I can, and I only got so much shelf space). Not to mention the fact that Marvel’s complete takeover of Summer blockbuster cinema also coincided with all this, and suddenly my deep middle ages are a pretty incredible time to be a fan of well-made escapist entertainment.
Don’t get me wrong–I still enjoy serious grounded arthouse drama onscreen and on the tube and on the printed or computerized page–but if I have to be honest, 40-something me seems to crave, desire and appreciate the indulgent fun of alternate realities and costumed crusades more than adolescent me ever did. Which makes sense, seeing as I’m more or less the same age as a lot of my favorite creators of this material.
I’m also fortunate that, in creating and publishing my own superhero-centric fiction, I’ve discovered a whole vast narrative prose subgenre, much of it of great quality and sophistication. From Austin Grossman’s “Soon I Will Be Invincible” to Mike Leon’s “Kill Kill Kill” to Casey Glander’s Gailsone series and on and on, there is just a wealth of this stuff to be found on Amazon and elsewhere at very affordable prices and it’s a shit-ton of quick-reading fun that covers a lot of ground, from balls-out satire to sharply human drama to blood-soaked action.
And then there’s TV. I mean, seriously, just between Arrow and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. alone it is truly a great time to be a fan of this stuff, weekly doses of genuine comic book awesomeness beamed straight into my eyes for free! And if you’re a true Marvel fan who checked out on S.H.I.E.L.D. in the early, pre-Winter Soldier portion of its first season, I strongly urge you to give it another shot because not only did it come screaming to life after that shot in the arm in the back half of last season, it’s come roaring out of the gate in season two with a kind of confidence in its characters and storytelling that makes it seem like everyone on staff over there started taking the creative equivalent of supersoldier serum over the Summer. Seriously, last year Arrow was my favorite piece of pure entertainment on the idiot box, but so far this year S.H.I.E.L.D. is just crushing everything in its storytelling path. But I digress.
I guess my point, if I have one, is that there are certainly worse ways to “suffer” a midlife crisis. My life is better than it’s ever been. I’m writing, I’m creating, I’m being a better husband and father than I ever thought I could, and in between, I spend a lot more time with superheroes than I do with drug dealers.
So my Bukowski and Hunter Thompson-worshipping/emulating days are behind me. I’m not going to buy a Harley, have a tawdry affair, go on a wild bender, quit my job and run off to an ashram. Or at least, I won’t as long as I can keep getting my superhero fix.
Hey all! New pub from Budget Press! What happens when you’re in the middle of destroying the planet and you find out your wife is pregnant? In this prequel to The Villain’s Sidekick, Stephen T. Brophy combines action, humor, and a little bit of heart to give proof that supervillian’s are people too. Buy now! $3.00 hard copy – 99 cents e-copy!
In honor of the one year anniversary of its publication (and holy shit, really? Has it been a year?) “The Villain’s Sidekick” will be available to download from Amazon for the low low price of FREE beginning Friday, September 5 and running until Tuesday, September 9. So if you’re one of those rare fans who haven’t actually read it yet, now’s your time.
My best Robin Williams memory comes from watching him perform live, from about ten feet away, at a tiny tiny club in the Mission District in San Francisco called The Mock Cafe. When I first started performing there, I think it sat about 11 people, and two of those seats had their view blocked by a support column. When Robin started dropping by to perform there on occasional Friday and Saturday nights, I think they’d expanded to hold about thirty, maybe forty if they broke the fire code. Anyway, my sketch group kind of accidentally ended up “opening” for him one night, meaning we did our little set and he then went up and erased all memory of us from the audience with forty five minutes of blistering improv’d stand-up. He was sweating like a beast within ten minutes. I had a friend in the front row who was a budding entomologist and had a multitude of gorgeous insect tattoos. Once he saw her, and her ink, his eyes lit up and he did about fifteen or twenty minutes on the life, thoughts and inner monologue of a bug.
Throughout his freewheeling set, whenever he started to lose the thread, he would return to my friend and use her as a springboard for further riffing. Backstage and out on the sidewalk between sets, he was warm and gracious and friendly and as many others have said, treated everyone like an equal. He obviously was energized by being in a place where real comedy was happening and up and comers (and never-quite-wases like me) were getting their feet wet. I remember riffing with him about the odd fact that Martha Stewart and P-Diddy were friends who hung out in the Hamptons together, and I made some crack about them making a gingerbread crackhouse together. He liked the line enough, I thought I saw the glimmer of the joke thief in his eye. I wouldn’t have minded, to be honest.
The first time I met him, outside that same club just a few weeks before, I was just drunk enough to think “When am I gonna be this close to Robin Williams again?” so I hit him up for a ride home. He found a very nice way to say no, because he had to pick up one of his kids and only had the “small car.” “Next time, I’ll bring the big one and we’ll all go!” he said. Then he tried to offer me 20 bucks for a cab but there was no way I was taking his money. I probably should have been embarrassed but he was just so goddamn sweet about the whole thing.
He did a lot of things over the years, between those days when me and my best grade school buddy would sit around listening to “Reality…What a Concept” and memorizing his bits, and the less illustrious film roles that we all couldn’t help but question and mock, but he was a truly funny man and a force to be reckoned with. I’m forever fortunate I got to see him work and sweat up close and bask in the glow just a little.
Now available on Amazon, the short but sweet (but not too sweet) prequel to “The Villain’s Sidekick.”
Duke “HandCannon” LaRue is a bad guy, an angry nihilist who’ll lease his prosthetic gun-arm to the highest bidder. Today it’s Dr. Shocktagon, who’s just one major player in a nefarious plan to rewrite reality and unleash an ancient nightmare on Earth. But when Duke gets life-changing news, he’s got to decide if now is the right time for end of the world and everything in it. Of course, changing sides in the ultimate war between Good and Evil is never as easy as you think.
If you liked the other one, you’ll like this one. If you haven’t read the other one, this’ll make you want to. Promise.
The long-awaited (by some people, I guess) mini-prequel to “The Villain’s Sidekick” will be showing up in no time. Pinky swear.
Every 90 days, as Kindle Countdown Select permits, I put my book on sale for the absurdly cheap price of .99c. It’s like you could spend that, and even if you ended up hating it (and honestly, most people really don’t) you wouldn’t have spent enough to even get mad about.
Beyond that, there’s a couple of surprises ahead, if you’re patient and diligent. I’m nearing completion on the first draft of the epic sequel and just so you don’t have to wait so long to get your next dose of HandCannon, I’m gonna put something short and sweet and reasonably gratuitously violent out in the world between now and then to tide you over. For free! Give me a month or two for that and you won’t be sorry. Promise.
In the meantime, tell your friends, loved ones, strangers and people you can barely stand that The Villain’s Sidekick for less than a buck will make them feel like they just got away with the Supercrime of the Century.
The sale starts at midnight.
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