Tag: aliens

What I’m Watching

Here’s an update to my viewing habits with hopes that others will point me into new directions.

I cut the television cable cord several years ago. With digital indoor antennae, I receive signals from ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC and PBS. We have a Roku and a ‘smart’ television and subscribe to Acorn TV, Amazon Prime, HBO Now, Hulu and Netflix streaming.

It’s easy to binge through a year, a season, or a series. I’m constantly on the hunt for new offerings. I like intelligent police procedurals, good British black humor, and…well, intelligent and interesting shows.

Acorn is often one of my favorite sources. They don’t have a large catalog but they manage to pull in good finds from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. I already raced through ’19-2′, which is an entertaining series but a little uneven. Right now, I’m watching ‘Deep Water’ at the painfully slow pace of one new episode a week, and ‘Raised by Wolves’, restricting myself to one of those per night.

I’m on my last episode. I’m bracing for withdrawal. That series is just too short.

Over on Amazon Prime, I’m finishing up on the excellent ‘The Night Manager’. Based on a John Le Carre novel and staring Hugh Laurie, Tom Hiddleston and Olivia Coleman, it has a terrific supporting cast and is tremendously well written, acted, directed and plotted. High marks all around. I’ve already completed ‘Goliah’. I began ‘Fleabag’ but disliked and dismissed it after one episode. However, a dinner companion the other night told me to persevere because it gets better. We’d been comparing shows and books (I’ve convinced her to attempt Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet again as she gave up reading ‘My Brilliant Friend’) so I’m inclined to trust her. She also recommended ‘Good Girls Revolt’. It’s been added to my Amazon list.

Viewing is pretty shallow on HBO Now. ‘Westworld’ is the main draw…. I watch ‘Tracy Ullmann’ or whatever it’s called and that has some enjoyable skits. Her talents still amaze me.

I returned to Hulu for a reduced price after a few months off of them. Sadly, there’s not much that I see as quality from this consortium of major corporations. I’ve watched ‘Casual’ but the characters remain too self-absorbed and shallow, with thin and slightly recurring issues for it to remain an interesting show. I’m watching ‘The Musketeers’ but it’s popcorn for dinner when you wanted lasagna. Someone recommended ‘Blind Spot’ the other night so I’ll give it a go. I’m a Jeffrey Donovan fan so I’ll also try his new offering when it arrives in December. I’ve also started ‘Aliens’ but it’s not holding my interest. We’ll see.

Netflix continues to pull something out of the bag for me. After ‘Orange is the New Black’, ‘Stranger Things’, ‘Grace and Frankie’, and ‘River’, they gave me the final season of ‘The Fall’. I’ve also enjoy ‘Luke Cage’ on there, and to a lessor extent, ‘Dark Matters’. The last perplexes me with its industrialized vision of future travel, where keyboards remain the rage. (Or is it an alternative universe?) ‘iZombie’ was finished as far as the episode list was concerned. It’s suffering some growing pains. ‘Longmire’ has been completed to date and we watch ‘The Crown’, but their offering of Queen Elizabeth II seems so diffident, weak and unsure that we’re taken aback. We also spend much time searching for information about how much of it was true and what’s being dramatized to provide better theater. Now I’m enjoying ‘Paranoid’ and ‘Doctor Foster’  although I find neither unqualified viewing success. ‘Paranoid’ disappoints me because it features so many actors I enjoy (like Leslie Sharp, who was terrific in ‘Happy Valley’) but I’m not overly fond of the characters, especially Nina, who I consider too flaky. Her flakiness is inconsistent and I detest character inconsistency. It’s one thing if they develop as inconsistent and are known to be so but this seems to be used a device to pad the episodes and provide extra tension, basically weak and lazy writing.

And that’s where I stand, on the precipice of a viewing gap. That’s not bad, if that’s the worse matter happening in my personal life, and it is. Besides that, several interesting movies are now out (I’m thinking of ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ and ‘Arrival’) to go see, and I have several stacks of novels to read.

But if you happen to have something else worth watching, please, please…share.

 

 

 

 

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What Do They Wear?

I used to sing this ditty in the evening during my corporate existence:

“What shall I wear tomorrow? What shall I wear tomorrow? What shirt should I don, what pants should I put on? Oh, what should I wear, what should I wear?” I added more verses over the months, and then some dance steps. It became a whole Gilbert and Sullivan thing.

My wife hated it. I don’t blame her. She has good taste. Her only lapse is me.

The cats also weren’t pleased, giving me the look shared when they deem the food in their bowls unworthy of being eaten.

A confrontation is happening on the Wrinkle. I’m dressing my aliens as part of the scene, as it’s their first full on appearance, forcing me to regurgitate my old song. What do my aliens wear? Novel and movie aliens I’ve known, loved and despised darted through my thinking. My aliens are pretty uniform, partly be genetic exercise, so should they be uniformed? How much clothing is sufficient clothing for these travelin’ space people?

(Could Travelin’ Space People be a punk folk group? “She was on my ship; I shot from the hip. She had four eyes; they were full of surprise.”)

Dressing aliens isn’t an easy exercise, requiring thought about the many roles clothing can play an how these roles are parlayed into their mighty structure.

I think I need more coffee for this. Add some Irish whiskey to the four shots of espresso, please. It’s time to write like mad.

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Just Write

Just write, I told myself. The aliens hadn’t yet arrived in my head, but I can’t wait for the aliens. I need to write. If you’re not writing, you’re standing still, (with the caveats, naturally, that if you’re editing, polishing, rewriting, etc., you are still engaged in the writing process, so you’re technically still writing).

These aren’t things I say out loud. Friends and relatives probably don’t know that my increased quiet is because I’m dreaming about aliens, trying to entice them out of the air and into my head (kind of like the old Billy Ocean song, “Get out of my dreams, and into my car.” I had asked my wife and others what aliens they like in books, films and games, or who were their favorite aliens. Great conversation fodder. The baristas, twenty year old women, were into it, and the barista today created an alien on my mocha. She then brought the alien topic up for her co-worker, who didn’t work yesterday when I asked, re-invigorating the conversation.

I derived beautiful thoughts from all these words. Yet the aliens remained nebulous, refusing to get into my car. Just write, I told myself, and they will come. Okay, so what will I write? I was picking up the scenes already created. They’re wonderful stepping stones, and although I wasn’t quite to the scene that arose to be written today, I shrugged. Okay, that’s what I’ll write, and then I’ll write the bridge to it from where I’m at later. No Big Deal. I write like this all the time, seeing what is to be and writing it because I want to, and then returning to bridge the pieces together.

So what happens in the novel today? This happens, and then that happens, and then, boom, there it is, writing stuff about aliens and plot exploding into me, firing off flares and tracers that illuminated what is to be.

Beautiful. Yeah, here I go, just write like crazy, one more time. Let the rest worry itself.

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Figuring Out Aliens

A novel in progress features aliens, but I can’t see them. I know who they are, why they’re there and what they want, but beyond that, they’re not coming into my head.

I thought about all the aliens I know from movies and books. Superman is an alien but that’s not the sort of alien wanted. Didn’t want ET, and the creatures from Alien and Predator didn’t work. Nor did the man and robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still. MIB , the Star Trek franchise, Doctor Who, and Babylon 5 have many varieties of aliens but nothing that fits my requirements. Larry Niven’s aliens are interesting and intriguing but didn’t turn me toward what I think my book needs. Independence Day, Mars Attacks, The Body Snatchers, Dark City (I’m not really sure the strangers are aliens) were considered and rejected, as were the War of the Worlds invaders, and the creatures from Species and V. So was The Thing. I always liked Orson Scott Card’s alien in The Speaker for the Dead and Ender’s Game but they don’t work for my application.

The closest thing to my thoughts were from Clark’s The Puppet Masters. They don’t quite work, neither.

Gotta walk and think about it more. It’ll come to me.

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