The Muppets: A Review By Fans, For Fans

There are many similarities between Muppets and talking apes; they both talk, they’re both furry, they’re both intended to be reflections of humanity.  The only difference is that the talking apes don’t break out into spontaneous musical numbers, and even that’s been rectified once.
Oh yeah, there’s one other similarity: As I said in my review of “Rise of Planet of the Apes,” I will lie to you about both.  Because both talking apes and Muppets are wedged close to my heart.  They were installed during childhood, and as such it is impossible for me to be objective about such things.
The new Muppets movie is made for Muppet fans.  If you’ve ever teared up during “The Rainbow Connection,” this movie is for you.
Now, I believe it’s pretty good for non-Muppets fans.  It’s got some great musical numbers – including an excellent addition to the Muppets canon “Life’s A Happy Song,” the heartbreaker “Pictures in my Head,” and of course what we’ve all been waiting for – a barbership quartet version of “Smells like Teen Spirit.”  And the humor is appropriately meta, with a bunch of old Muppets-style references to the fact that yes, they’re in a movie.  *Diabolical laughter.*
The Muppets is, I believe, quite funny even if you’re not a die-hard Muppets fan.  But if you are, there are tons of jokes that reference all the good Muppet movies, and a couple of nons.  The more you know, the more you recognize how this movie is total and utter fan service.
If anything, the weakest bit about the Muppets is the addition of Walter, a young eager fan whose love for the Muppets kick-starts the events that bring the now-forgotten-and-far-spread Muppets team back together for one last reunion tour.  It’s not that Walter is a bad Muppet – far from it, he’s lovable and earnest.  But “lovable and earnest” is also Kermit’s schtick, so there’s a fair amount of overlap between Kermit’s “trying hard and believing the best of everybody” and Walter’s “trying hard and believing the best of everybody,” which leads to a slightly twinned climax where Kermit’s giving speeches that Walter could give, and vice versa.
…well, that and the fact that each of the Muppets gets very little air-time.  Aside from Fozzie, Kermit, and Miss Piggy (who would not be IN the movie if she didn’t have air-time), all of the Muppets are introduced quickly, so quickly I wonder whether kids will get who they are.  Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker are introduced in fifteen seconds of a montage and then largely forgotten, which is par for the course.  It worked for me, who actively cheered when Marvin Suggs and his Muppaphones showed up… But will it snare new kids, who won’t have a real handle on who all these crazy guys are?  Or will the tantalizing glimpses make them want to know more?
Regardless, Jason Segal understands exactly what makes the Muppets tick.  Because the truth is, life in the Muppets universe kind of sucks.  People have big dreams, and they don’t all come true.  It’s a reflection of the Muppet way that the two lovers, Miss Piggy and Kermit, are really not meant to be together – they have such grand love and (in Kermit’s case, hidden) affection, but their personalities are such that they can only achieve happiness in short spurts, in eternal reunions just before the reality of love comes crashing down.
That’s okay, though.  The Muppets are about what happens when dreams break and you’re still there, and what do you do then?  And Kermit winces and takes your hand and bravely tells you that yes, you keep going.  You always keep going.
The one true lesson of the Muppets is hope.  Jason Segal knows this.  And as such, there is hope, and love, and bravery in the face of total defeat, enough to make me cry.  A lot.
The Muppets is not a great movie – like Rise of the Planet of the Apes, it is a B-movie that swings hard and hits far, arriving right on target.  It’s as though Babe Ruth pointed his finger and announced, “I AM GOING TO HIT TO GET ME ON THIRD BASE!” and hit a perfect ball to the outfield.  I don’t think the Muppets was meant to be great, merely entertaining.  And in that, it succeeds.  I’ll watch it on video, probably a lot.
I can’t tell you whether you should see it, unless you still feel this soft punch to your heart whenever you remember that Jim Henson’s dead.  If you do, then you owe it to yourself to go.  Jason Segal did Jim Henson proud, I think.

The Things I Am Grateful For

With the bird in the oven and the Secret Bosworth stuffing resting flavorfully inside it, it is time to ask: What am I thankful for?
Well, first, I’m grateful for you.  All of you, reading this now.  I sit here every day and blurt off whatever comes to mind, and you people respond with such zest and thoughtful feedback and counterpoints that I want to post the next day.  The reason I have these meme-days is because I like you all so much that there are times I don’t have much to say but want to keep hearing from you.
The number-one thing I hear when people email me is, “You don’t know me, but…”  But comments are the best part of this blog.  If you’ve commented a bunch of times, there’s a good chance I know who you are, since that’s my favorite part.  Me writing?  Fuck that.  I knew I felt that already.
You responding?  That’s the juice, man.  And so I keep doing it because I fucking love you all. Seriously.
Second, I’m grateful for the poly-loves in my life: By happy coincidence, I’ve been dating Bec and Angie for three years now, since we started up in the same month, and that places them squarely in the tied third-fourth place for “Ferrett’s longest relationship.”  Only my fiancee Bari lasted longer, and that wasn’t as nearly as happy as it’s been with Bec and Angie.  Angie’s silly texts and shared joy and obscure lusts for Sims and Top Gear, Bec’s quirky attitudes and shared music and dancing movements – both of them have continually raised the bar on “what a good relationship is,” and I thank them for continuing to put up with my delightful oscillations between arrogance and neurosis.
Also, the sex is hawt.
In that vein, I’d like to thank Jenna and Jen and for being in my life, neither of whom I see nearly enough, both of whom fill my life with joy and happiness and occasional bits of blistering desire.  I generally don’t mention other people in here for fear of dragging them onto a stage that they did not ask for and would get undue attention should they left, but today’s a little different because they are awesome.
I’m grateful for a strong family; my Dad, who’s been a rock of support, and my Mom, who helped bless me with a wondrous new kitchen this year.  I got damn good parents in the scheme of things – the kind of parents so good that they divorced when I was young and yet never once did I feel an ebbing of love or felt like a football kicked between them.  Now that I’m older, I understand just how much it took to make that transition seamless, and for that I thank them.
(Also, my Uncle Tommy.  I had three parents.  Tommy’s gone now, but I still feel that ache of loss like a phantom limb every time I publish a story and realize I’m not able to tell him.  I realize now that if he were alive, it would be a ritual where he’d be the first person I called whenever I sold a story, and I can’t, and that stimulates a flow of tears.)
I’m grateful for two strong daughters, Amy and Erin.  I don’t mention them here because their story is not mine to tell, but they make me prouder every day as they find their own rhythms.
I’m grateful for a lot of good local friends who bring me joy.  I’m grateful for my um-daughters (and now an um-son!) from the Meyers, and of course the Meyers themselves.
I’m grateful for the people who are helping me along my kinkier journeys in life this year, particularly those I’ve been texting with to help me explore such things.  You know who you are, even as I do not name you today.  But I often try stuff out on you first to see how it goes over in real life, and that’s an exploratory process that really helps me more than you can ever know.  Also, I always enjoy dirty pictures and I like that you like thumbing that button.
I’m grateful for all of my writer-friends who’ve helped me grow, supported me when I thought I sucked, critiqued my manuscripts, and just shared the usual frustrations of creating beauty and getting it rejected.  In particular my Viable Paradise buddies and Clarion classmates/teachers, the Codex group, Nayad, and of course my local buds at Cajun Sushi Hamsters who have helped force-evolve me from TheFerrett to my third-stage evolution as Ferrett Steinmetz.
Also, if you’re an editor and have actually paid me money for one of my stories, I’m never quite sure why, but I remain endlessly grateful.
I’m grateful for teeth.  You never know how grateful you are for teeth until you don’t have front ones for four years, but having them has made all the difference in the goddamned world.  Even if they cost us so much that we’re gonna be in the hole this Christmas.
And lastly, the word “thankful” doesn’t even cover it for the love I feel for Gini.  I mention my other poly-loves, but I literally could not do it without her – her continual feedback and gentle questioning makes me far wiser than I ever am.  She is the other half of my soul, the person who I need to talk to because my joy is never complete until I share it with her, the best kisser in the world, and a source of amazing wisdom and beauty and holy God, stuff. Words run out when I try to describe in indescribable, and that is the gratitude and adoration I feel towards her.
Also, the sex is hawt.

A Service, Desperately Needed

Conservatives often talk about the Free Market as though it was a panacea that will create a utopia – a dash of competition’ll clear that right up!  And you talk to them, and they talk about how awful the gummint is, and how wonderful business is.  They’re like a teenager dating for the first time, so in love with the idea that they can’t see the reality.
Say what you will, but the free market left unblinkered inevitably runs towards lying to consumers and screwing over people as much as they can get away with.  I know you conservatives don’t like to hear that, but the free market is wonderfully efficient at both creating innovation when the companies are young, and in stifling competition when they’re old and powerful and don’t want to deal with competition.  Big companies lie, they waste money on projects, they’re often so caught up in cutting corners that they wind up being more inefficient and harmful than the government ever could be.
Despite the current line of thought, companies are frequently both bungling and harmful to their consumers.  So what I’d like would be a mailing list you could sign up for (or, you know, sign other people up for) that emails conservatives a regular but brief summary of news tidbits to feed them real-world examples of corporations are often wasteful of their money, harmful to consumers, and making decisions that destroy the people around them.
G’wan, liberals, cheer.  Because this service is for you.  No, literally, because there’s the other side of the coin:
Say what you will, but the government left unblinkered inevitably runs towards overusage of public funding, eddies that do nothing and go nowhere except for lining the wrong pockets, and being purchased by old and powerful companies that use them to screw over competition.  So what I’d like would be a mailing list you could sign up for (or, you know, sign other people up for) that emails liberals a regular summary of news tidbits that show how governments often abuse their regulations and laws to screw over people with perfectly reasonable needs.
Not just “The cops busted this lady for growing pot in her windowsill.”  Like, “This new regulation is putting good people out of house and home.”  “This new law is causing these folks direct misery for no reason.”  Because liberals need a reminder that the government, though also a valid tool, is often a blunt instrument that does a lot of damage.
Call me crazy.  I think Big Business and Government need each other fiercely – Big Business is so “efficient” at finding ways of profit that it’ll chop up your floorboards to sell as toothpicks, and Government is so slow and lumbering that it’ll just keep bribing its constituents with free money until it goes broke.  You need Big Business to keep the country moving, and Government to rein in Big Business so it doesn’t use up everything in a mad rush towards short-term profits.
Some days, that makes me feel crazy, thinking both methods have significant downsides.  I’d just like to remind everyone of that.

A Brief Unpleasant Metaphor On Writing

At World Fantasy, I was talking about my intense work habits, and how poor Gini had to deal with me vanishing downstairs to a darkened basement for an hour and a half every day to write.  And someone quipped, “You SAY you’re writing.”
To which I replied, “It’d be easier for her if I was masturbating. At least then I wouldn’t be calling her downstairs when I was done to go, ‘Can you take a look at this?  Am I doing this right?'”

Sale! "Rooms Formed Of Neurons And Sex," to GUD Magazine!

There is a certain satisfaction that comes from selling the unsalable story.  Which is to say that when you write a 7,000-word erotica story dealing with the BDSM relationship between a girl and a brain in a jar, you’re pretty sure you’re not going to find a home for it.
(The brain is the Dom.)
…damn if I didn’t, though.  “Rooms Formed of Neurons and Sex” just sold to GUD Magazine, which also published my girl-in-a-junkyard story “In The Garden of Rust and Salt.”  This puts GUD on my happy-list ratio of 100% submissions-to-acceptances, along with Beneath Ceaseless Skies.  (You don’t want to know what my Asimov’s ratio is, and my batting average with many other major markets is zero, just for perspective.)
The title may change, as they’re wondering whether it’s fitting, but the opening line won’t:
“The greatest tragedy of Lydia’s life was when she broke her boyfriend during sex.  Admittedly, he was a brain in a jar, but she’d been trying to make do….”

…So How Are You?

I had Big Plans for essays here today, but a rather stellar kinky weekend has drained the thought from my mind.  And yet I am greedy, desiring the interactions of comments without actually producing anything worthwhile for you to comment on.
It’s interesting, because I have a bad habit of posting various memeries when I’m down: “Ask me a question,” or “Tell me something in your life,” or “Say something nice about me.”  This is a remnant of my blogging roots in LiveJournal, where such interactions were common – but now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve seen such a thing on a serious blog outside of LiveJournal.
And that is, I think, because at its height LiveJournal was so crammed with people and interactivity that it could spark such things.  You didn’t need to have a “serious” blog with lots of entries on Weighty Topics, because it was so easy to get friends you could just pick them off the ground.  And all your friends were there anyway.
You know where I see the “entertain me” memes these days?  Facebook.  I think such posts are a symptom of critical mass, because without a lot of people you say, “Hey, tell me something cool” and not enough people are around to reply, and you just feel stupid.  It’s a corner case that can only show up on the top-tier social networks.
Strange.  Even doing one of those memes feels a little childish by now, as if it’s something a serious blogger shouldn’t do.  I’ve got my own domain, now, do I really need to do this?  And yet there’s that desire where Khan Noonien Singh pats the bed and tells the ship’s historian: “Entertain me.”
So what the fuck.  Tell me something nice about me.  Tell me something nice that happened to you.  Send me a secret.  Fill up my world with something interesting on a day when I’m too drained to dance for you.

Evolutionary Weirdness

The story I’m writing now is a clear window on how far I’ve come since Clarion, because I can view it so vividly and yet I’m spending all this time trying to figure out how to write it.
The story’s simple, and it’s set in a New England seashore tourist town… In other words, where I spent every summer as a kid.  So I have a great deal of familiarity with the location.  I know the ending, which is unusual for me, so there’s no plotting issues.
So what I have here is a tale where I know everything that happens in it, and can close my eyes and literally see the map of where it’s set… And I’m still trying to find the best way to tell the story.
The story is about a girl who goes insane and takes the sea as her lover, and it’s tricky because it’s actually several substories wrapped in one arc – the first 750 words are where she meets her only “real” boyfriend, the next 500 are where she has the fallout with her mother, the next 400 are where she loses the baby and finally snaps, and so forth.  It’s a madness tale.
And in past days, I would have written this opening (as a first draft) and been entirely happy:

Not many talked to Ella, ungainly as she was, so it was left to her mother to lecture her on what the rest of the town already knew: tourists were like the tides. They swept in with the good weather, party-giddy once they’d slipped loose the bonds of their fatcat jobs in New York, forking over $20s for conch-shell necklaces and flimsy T-shirts (“IT’S NOT A BALD SPOT, IT’S A SOLAR PANEL FOR A SEX MACHINE”), guzzling Anchor Steam down at the seaside docks and clumsily steering their oversized, electronics-packed yachts all over the damn harbor.
They flooded into Port Waukanamee in a drunken frenzy, filling it with enough money to make it through New England’s harsh winters, when the shrimp fry-stands shuttered up and a handful of loyal Waukanamites kept the city just warm enough to start up again in spring. Tourists were useful. Tourists were necessary.
Yet you’d have to be as stupid as a tourist to fall in love with one. But Ella had never been much of a girl for lessons….

Thing is, while that’s a decent opening for other stories, it’s a terrible opening for this story. This is a tale about spiraling madness, and what we have in the opening is a distant voice that doesn’t rub up close and personal against the character. It’s the voice of someone who’s not in the town, but a far-distant observer voice… And this story needs to be in lockstep with Ella’s descent, walking right with her into the abyss.
So then I tried starting at the point of maximum impact:

Ella kneels in the salt muck, hermit crabs scuttling away from her screams, jagged oyster shells slashing her feet. Between the contractions, she hears Mama’s words: never fall in love with a tourist, never fall in love with a tourist, never fall in love with a tourist.
She’s been a fool. She hugs her belly tight, hoping to keep the baby pent inside by force of will alone, not sure what’s happening, knowing no one she could ask. The only person left in this world who might love her is now dribbling down her thighs.
She howls, her anguish echoing across the cold September bay.

That’s got everything I would have killed for before: a strong start, a good hook, some strong raw prose. But that’s not the story; the story is the arc of her madness, seeing her start from dumb teenager to old crazy lady, and by starting in the middle you get a stronger start but no middle. You’re seeing this intense moment happen at a time when you know the least about our lead, and as such you take a potentially climax moment and turn it into a “What’s going on?” moment… Which can work for certain stories, but not in a story where the story is the journey is the descent.
I eventually traded in for a not-quite-as-dramatic opening, one where she’s going to meet her boyfriend that she met at the Shrimp Shack, and as such you get to see her at the beginning so the full slide as she becomes loonier and loonier is (hopefully) more unsettling.
The interesting thing is that this story may never gell, because there’s all of these other elements about it that become tricky – it’s the story of about two decades’ worth of crazy, told in flashfic segments, and when you take on something like that then you have this twinned problem in that every flashfic segment has to be entertaining and compelling on its own (so effectively, this one story is about seven separate stories), and it has to pull you through with a linked nature so that there’s a narrative thread that pulls you through the individual segments, like the string on a necklace.
Regardless, it’s just a show of how much damn craft I’ve accomplished.  What I’ve written for beginnings are decent beginnings for the wrong story.  And now that I know enough, I keep turning my tales over and over again, analyzing them with an increasingly experienced mind, to recognize not just works for this sentence but what serves the story as a whole.