Tag Archives: personal

Happy Carb Hangover Day!

At this moment, the clock has just ticked off 7:15 AM, and it is my understanding most of you are already awake, shopping for whatnots along with approximately 19 million others also shopping for the same whatnots at low, low prices. Frankly, this baffles me, because one of the best things about the internet is a little thing I like to call online shopping, and after a long day of gorging on carbs and poultry, I can’t imagine getting up early feels like the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, El Brendel is still trying to get Thanksgiving dinner started.

 

Monty Hawes of All Good Things was kind enough to interview me for his Be My Guest feature this month, and the interview has just gone live. Read it here! You’ll learn who I got all my worst social habits from, the first 3D movie I ever (partially) saw, and I also reveal some especially embarrassing things which you can lord over me for years to come. Big thanks to Monty for asking me to join in!

I spend most of my time here on SBBN apologizing for not being here on SBBN, which is what I’m doing now. The last couple of months have been chaos: Vacation -> Unemployment -> Deadlines -> Virus -> Broken Computer -> More Deadlines -> Another Virus. While the deadlines will continue as there are quite a few awesome year-end features going on at Spectrum Culture, I hope the rest has resolved enough that I can finally get some blogging work done.

On that note, I suggest you all familiarize yourself with Episode 10 of The Phantom Creeps, because the final two episode summaries are just around the corner. The overload of both herp and derp in these final episodes has made them a bit more labor intensive than usual, but it’s worth it. So worth it.

USians, please enjoy the rest of your holiday weekend, and to everyone not recovering from Thanksgiving, have a great regular weekend of partyin’ down!

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State of the Blog: The Projects, Publishing and Pop Stars Edition

I know what you’re thinking: “Uh oh. There aren’t any pictures in this post. That’s never good.” But wait! Before you leave for peppier climes, read this one important bit: Over the next few weeks, I will be importing a lot of posts from the old Blogger site to this one. I’ve already imported three, as those of you who read SBBN through an RSS feed already know. The dates on many of these will remain the same as on the old blog, and being backdated means they won’t show up on the front page. However, they will show up as new posts on the RSS feed, so you may get spammed. I’ll try to be responsible with the imports, but after playing around with the import/export functions, I can make you no promises.

And now, very exciting updates about all manner of interesting things, i.e. the part you can skip:

1. The Projects: About a year ago, I abandoned basically all SBBN projects and other various items I was working on. It wasn’t a permanent abandonment, and most of those posts I’m bringing over from the archives are the Bette Davis and Marie Prevost projects, which I am determined to continue, though Marie will be in a limited capacity.

2. Limited Marie: I’ve never made an official announcement, and now is as good a time as any, I guess. I have been working on what will eventually be a book on Marie Prevost. Now, the kicker is that two separate people — at least I think they’re separate — have contacted me wanting more info beyond what I’ve posted. And because I’ve posted so much information they now are going to write a book on her based heavily on my blog posts. They, of course, want all my subsequent (and as-yet unposted) research for free.

That’s the main reason  I haven’t been posting anything for the Marie Project, because there were some obvious decisions I had to make. It was a choice between making this an online only project or going forward with a book idea. Just to be clear, I firmly feel that anyone at all can write as much as they want about Marie Prevost. That’s the absolute truth. I don’t have dibs on the topic. Yet I do think people who want free research out of me or are taking my posts as their own (though the latter is mostly spammers) are acting unscrupulously.

However, I have to protect all the time, money, and effort I’ve put into this, and sadly that means I must stop sharing what I’ve learned and save it for the book. The Project will continue, though no more personal information about Marie beyond what is already out there will be posted. Even if I’ve seen some of the more difficult to find films, I won’t be posting about them beyond sharing pictures and maybe a short blurb.

As a rather humorous protip, though, I would like to point out that a vast majority of the information out there about Marie is wrong. Even some of what I’ve written is wrong, not that I knew it at the time I wrote it, but subsequent investigation revealed errors. Anyone who wants to write about any halfway obscure movie star is going to have to do more than read a few of my blog posts or shell out $20 for a couple of old Screenland Magazines.

3. Speaking Of Money: I write a hell of a lot of stuff, both online and on the book, and I am paid for very little of it. Research costs a lot of money; you’re buying information and paying for access to online archives. Not only that, but regular blogging costs, even if it’s just hosting fees and bandwidth.

It has been a trying few weeks here at Casa de la Stacia. After my husband and I returned home from the only real vacation we had in the 22 years we’ve been together, about a million unexpected and expensive things happened. I was fired (the company was breaking a few laws, the Department of Labor got involved, people got fired). It’s a huge blow, because I worked in a field that is being phased out, so jobs are scarce. Also, I am not employable on any real level, at least not for the kind of jobs found in small-town Kansas. Those who have read SBBN from the beginning know I’m gone for days or weeks on end because of my health; coupled with a lack of advanced degree, I have no chance of being qualified for anything in this town that I could physically handle.

It wasn’t merely getting fired, though. My husband’s company shut down (without pay) because of a few catastrophes during the last month. A cat became expensively ill and my husband is about to undergo another round of very pricey medical tests that our shithole insurance will not cover much of.

Amidst all this though is the realization that, for this one brief moment, I have the opportunity and the time to actually work on making money from my writing. This is not a chance I can pass up. I can’t explain it really, at least not in a quickie post like this, but I put everything in my life, especially my writing, on hold for decades and it can’t wait anymore. Writing and analysis and research are the only things I’m moderately good at. I absolutely have to try to make money at them, though fuck knows how I’ll do it. It’s not for lack of trying, but it is a very difficult field to get in to, plus sometimes I really suck at this.

You have no idea how much I would love to be able to write fiction, which isn’t easy at all, let alone an easy field to get published in. But with fiction I’d have a chance of getting some crazy stupid luck and selling the movie rights to my hot Archie-Bunker-on-Optimus-Prime slashfic to Universal Pictures for $47 million. You don’t get that chance when writing books about silent movie stars that debunk the one salacious thing everyone wants to hear about. You don’t sell movie rights to essays on Neil Diamond taking hotel keys from young blondes in Vegas, or garner a three-book deal after writing about the transphobia in Freebie and the Bean. Sure, there’s a market for that sort of thing, just not a paying market.

That’s why the tip jar has made an appearance on the sidebar. I know no one has any money right now, but if you can spare a few dimes, I would appreciate it greatly.

4. And Now To Ruin Any Sympathy I May Have Generated: The Neil Diamond posts will begin again by the end of the year. I am absolutely dying to get back into the research, hole up in my house with a bare 100-watt bulb burning over me as I suffocate under a mound of late-60s teen magazines and listen to live performances until my eardrums pack up their suitcases, put on their fedoras and storm out of the house.

I keep apologizing for this Diamond thing and putting it off because I know it irks some of you, though I don’t know why I keep apologizing because I’m not doing it for you, I’m doing it for me. That is perhaps a shitty thing to say, but it’s the truth, which I assume mitigates some of the selfishness. There are things going on with Diamond that I have to write about, though, enormous issues of celebrity and fame and commercial art and personal life versus public life and PR image and the role of the critic. Neil Diamond is the perfect subject matter for this, at least for me, for right now. It’s not that I don’t like his music, because I like quite a bit of it, but ultimately I see Diamond as an infinitely interesting guy who also happens to sing.

5. There Is No TL;DR Summary, Except Maybe This One: Blog posts will be moved over and might spam your RSS feed, the Bette Davis Project will continue, the Marie Prevost Project will continue in a limited capacity so I can hoard all my research for myself, I’m going to try to make a living from writing, but also I’m broke so give me your unwanted pennies, plus Neil Diamond posts are happening and bite me if you don’t like it.

The Halloween pictures will continue tomorrow, and now that I’m finally over that virus the Phantom Creeps will finish up, too. After that, there are a lot of ‘thons and theme weeks and articles for Spectrum I’ll be doing at the end of this month. Expect the importing of posts and everything else to start in November. Thanks for reading.

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That Was The ‘Thon That Was

Thank you everyone for a delightful Camp & Cult Blogathon! There were 29 entries, which is amazing; even more amazing is that every single post is terrific. I don’t just say that as vague praise, I genuinely mean it. The page will remain up indefinitely, so if anyone ever needs some inspiration, dive on into those links. You won’t regret it.

No good ‘thon goes unpunished, as I learned during the Shatnerthon a couple of years ago, and the same held true for the C&CB. There were a few technical glitches, the usual hacking attempts that apparently every WordPress blog endures, and one self-inflicted issue where I added new links to the main page and then promptly forgot to save the changes. I won’t take full responsibility, though, partly because I’ve got kind of a thing with responsibility (it sucks, as any adult will tell you) but also because my brain was fried after 12 posts in 12 days, even if one of those posts was just a photo gallery. My AC joints, my carpal tunnel and my neurons are all still bruised, but it’s a good bruise.

Today is October 1st, which means most of you are embarking on a month-long horror gorge, and you all have my most sincere blessings in your endeavors. Now that the chaos of the last month is over, I hope to catch up on your blogs and regular SBBN posts and things. A State of the Blog will be coming in the next few days as well.

On that note, I want to mention the Val Lewton Blogathon, held by Kristina at Speakeasy and Stephen at Classic Movie Man. Entries are due by October 26, and they will all be listed on Speakeasy and Classic Movie Man on Halloween, making that day even better than it already is. Check it out and sign up!

Thank you again for stopping by, and I hope you all have a wonderful October, which is the Latin word for “BEST MONTH EVER.”

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Blogiversary V: Texas Blood Money

It appears that today is my fifth blogiversary, which is kind of scary but mostly frightening. It’s difficult to believe I’ve been doing this for five full years. Over the past few months, I have been replacing the old broken URLs of my photos at the SBBN archive with the new URLs, and while doing so I’ve had a chance to re-read my older posts. Boy, did I suck on ice when I started out. Not that I’m the second coming of Pauline Kael or anything now, but I like to think I’ve improved. Maybe I’ve even written that proverbial first million words, though I don’t know how that works with film criticism, although I imagine it involves semicolons and long strings of prepositional phrases.

In the time-honored tradition of all previous SBBN blogiversaries, I present a lovely assortment of some of my favorite photos collected over the years.

Edith Head and Gloria Swanson.

Boris Karloff, courtesy Dr. Macro.

Richard Schaal, Severn Darden and Del Close of Second City.

Robert Taylor.

1931 photo by Robert Coburn of a Hollywood camera crew.

Hitch’s usual sense of humor, courtesy Immoral Tales. He’s wearing two ties, one to go with his suit, the other to hang himself with. Such a practical man.

 

Thank you all for still being here.

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Everything I Do Is Cute

SBBN is not a personal blog, but I wanted to jot down this recap of my recent trip to Vegas, full of explanations and anecdotes and all sorts of nifty things to read. And the sarcastic quote from a Bette Davis film for the title is your guarantee that this post is crammed full of quality wordsmithery.

If you followed my Twitter over Labor Day weekend then you already know a lot of this, which is a perfect example of how multi-platform social media exposure is going to ruin society as we know it. Or something.

I had a husband but got married anyway: My husband and I have been together since high school, which was about 72 years ago, as you can tell from the photo in the last Phantom Creeps recap. In fact, about two hours after that pic of me and my spiral perm was taken, Vincent and I started dating. We considered ourselves common law married nearly two decades ago, but for the last several years it became clear that certain elements in U.S. society wanted to codify their religious beliefs about marriage into law, and these efforts have been at least somewhat successful. A side effect is that living together, also known as living in sin (sin!), was often looked down on by hospitals, banks, and worst of all, the courts. Thanks to the current political climate, we couldn’t rely on a judge to agree we were common law married in case something happened to one of us, so we decided to get married with a license and everything. That’s why I got married even though I already had a husband.

 

My bitter hipster irony will not save me. Vincent and I went to Vegas thinking a drive-thru wedding would be cheesy and a perfect way to show our contempt for marriage. Not so, friends. The vows were lovely and our limo driver was so sweet, and two seconds after the vows started this cold-hearted bitch of a critic and her big burly bouncer husband in fingerless leather gloves and zombie t-shirt were sniffling, then gentle tears, then finally we were a couple of gibbering idiots who got a well-deserved lesson in humility.

 

I like shiny things. Toward the end of this summer tour, these epic, gaudy, enormous flashing plastic rings, unofficially called Bling Rings, were being handed out for free by the box-fulls at Neil Diamond concerts. I snagged myself a couple, and they’re great, though the on-off button under the ring toggles too easily when you clap, meaning there is less flashy-flashy than one really wants at a Neil Diamond concert. But they were surely giving them away not for the flashy-flashy but because there were so many left unsold from earlier concerts, and Neil was probably all like, “There is no way I’m drivin’ home with 17 boxes of Bling Rings in the trunk of my Toyota, blinking on and off every time I go over a pothole.” Also, I am not a law enforcement expert, but I’m pretty sure it’s against the law to have too much fabulousness in one’s possession, so he needed to divest himself of some bling before the Bling Ring Interdiction Agency got wind of it.

 

I didn’t have one mean thought about Neil Diamond during the concert. After all the shit I’ve said about him on the blog and Twitter, once the concert began I didn’t think one negative thing… well, almost. During “Shilo,” Diamond strolled to house right just like he did during the 1976 fiasco I blogged about and which my good ‘net friend Wally K has very kindly uploaded to YouTube.  As a side note, I have since discovered other people — normal people, probably — are delighted by the 1976 performance. As for me, all I can tell you is that an entire bottle of wine could not prepare me for the moment I first watched that little “Shilo” scene. So when Diamond moved to the same side of the stage for “Shilo” as he had 36 years ago, I gave him Philip J. Fry eyes until I was sure his ass wasn’t going to go renegade like it did back in ’76. And it didn’t.

Speaking of normal, I was anything but during the concert. I shook for the first quarter of the show, so badly that all my pictures look like this:

That grey spot at the very bottom is Neil’s hair. You can tell because all the spotlights are pointed toward it.

People are awesome. A wonderful usher at the concert moved us from the 19th row to empty spots in about the 7th row as we waited for the encore; I felt like I was only a few feet away from Neil Diamond during “Brother Love.” It was overwhelming, and that’s the best I can do for a description because COMPLETELY OVERWHELMED, in part because after the concert, the usher gave me an absolutely unbelievable souvenir. Not just unbelievable, but surreal, and I’m convinced if I tell anybody what it is it will disappear and everything will turn out to have just been a dream, I’ll still be married to Patrick Duffy and all my clothes will have shoulder pads again.

Our limo driver in Vegas was the sweetest guy in the world, too, and he mentioned that a Neil Diamond concert on our wedding day was very romantic. And Vincent and I both laughed because we had never thought of it that way, a very stupid thing for us to do considering when Vincent wooed (get me, I just used the word “wooed”) me in high school he wrote me romantic notes that were taken entirely from the lyrics and banter of Hot August Night. Over the school year he quoted everything, even the tree people stuff, except for one bit: Neil mentioning a doorman who looked like Guy Kibbee. This lead to a this conversation a few months ago when I was still a newbie Neil fan and hadn’t listened to HAN in about two decades:

ME (watching TCM): Yay, it’s Guy Kibbee! (yes, I really said this, shut up)

VINCENT: Really? So that’s what he looks like.

ME: Yeah, very distinctive. Love this guy.

VINCENT: Neil mentions him on Hot August Night.

ME: Someone tried to tell me that once, I think they were screwing with me.

V: No, really, he mentions Guy Kibbee.

ME: Uh-huh.

V: I’m serious.

ME: Neil Diamond.

V: Yes.

ME: Talks about Guy Kibbee.

V: Yes.

ME: During Hot August Night?

V: Yes.

ME: …Really?

V: YES.

ME: …

V: (walks off, shaking head)

Looking for answers when you don’t know the questions sometimes works out okay. I’m not gonna lie to you: I mostly went to see Neil Diamond in Las Vegas because I needed answers. Then, about a week before we left, it became clear that I didn’t honestly know what my questions were. That changed once I saw Neil on stage; the reason I didn’t post this last week is because I have been trying and failing so very hard at explaining what happened at the concert. Much of it you wouldn’t believe, most of it still needs to bubble away in my brain before I’ll understand it, but I can at least say that I am finally at peace, at least marginally at peace, with myself for being so heavily inspired by Neil Diamond a year ago.

Revelations, like Futurama jokes, are always hilarious: One particularly angry fan left a comment on my Laughing Devil post last year implying that, having never been to a Neil Diamond concert, I didn’t really understand his craft.  I had already thought of that point before Anonymous Greg brought it up, so the potential aftermath was always in the back of my mind. What I learned after seeing Diamond in Vegas is that, had I been to a concert before I wrote “Laughing Devil,” I would have been a million times harder on him in that post than I already was. I cannot imagine watching the ’76 Vegas performance after seeing him in concert a few days ago; I would have been heartbroken.

The future? Also hilarious: For anyone who has read this far, after the Camp & Cult Blogathon and after I finish Phantom Creeps, it’s going to be All Neil All The Time around here, a little like Sheila O’Malley’s amazing Elvis series except not as insightful or prolific, which goes without saying. But there is a lot I’ve put on hold that I need to get out, and soon.

Getting it out means I’m going to occasionally say some harsh things about Neil Diamond. There will be strange connections made and tasteless implications and jokes and unabashed adoration and pictures for every gaze and some of you won’t like a bit of it. I’m okay with that, and I hope you all are, too.

And, finally, a tip from someone in the know: Silly fish stories are very in this season. The day we left Vegas was my BBFF Ivan’s birthday, so I called him and we had a blast. He’s a funny guy, which you all know already because you read TDoY, but he’s even funnier on the phone. I like to think I have a pretty sophisticated deadpan, but Ivan’s blows me completely away. I am but Donald “Bland” Cook next to his Jack Benny. One of his best stories that day was about a woman who had her vacation ruined because she got bit by a fish. This started an epic discussion where I, world famous fishologist, said the most sensible thing I could: “Uuhhhh, I don’t know if fish even have teeth. I’m gonna have to get back with you on that one.” You see, I was convinced only some fish had teeth, and also that sharks were mammals, which shows you how punchy I was by that point in the trip.

When I got off the phone, my husband very rightly started making fun of me, calling me an “icthy-noramus” and reminding me that piranha movies wouldn’t be much fun if all they did was gum people for a bit and then swim off. Then only few days later, Neil Diamond tweeted a fish joke, proving without a doubt that fish jokes are in. Don’t be unhip, kids: Say something silly about fish today!

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