The story was accepted last May, but I found out this morning that “Pain-Man” will be included in the July/August issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. My first appearance there. It’s about a man of a certain age who decides to fight crime after a humiliating incident.
I made my first risotto last weekend, and it turned out pretty well. It’s more labor-intensive than most of my cooking projects. You have to babysit it for nearly half an hour, adding liquid, stirring, adding more liquid, and so on, but the results were worth it. It went well with the marinated tuna steaks.
I’m really enjoying Hotel Beau Séjour on Netflix. I’m eight episodes in (out of 10) and we still don’t know who killed Kato (and others), but some secrets have been disclosed.
We watched a couple of films last weekend. First up was 20th Century Women with Annette Benning and Elle Fanning. It’s set in 1979 and focuses on a single mother who decides she needs to do something to guarantee that her 15-year-old son gets everything he needs to become a proper man, so she enlists the help of various people in her orbit, including a couple of renters in her rambling old house. The characters are terrific and the plot is ramshackle and spontaneous. There’s no end game in sight, just evolution and a gentle reminder to not look for problems where there might not be any.
Then we watched Miss Sloan, with Jessica Chastain as a lobbyist who jumps ship to take on a gun control bill with a boutique agency. She’s hard as nails, calculating, manipulative and cold, and the movie never does answer how she got to be the way she is. There’s a passing reference to a youth where she had to lie all the time, but nothing more, and maybe that’s for the best. Any answer to that question might have been found wanting. The movie dives deep into the kinds of antics that take place in D.C. all the time, and there’s a wonderful twist at the end that makes the whole thing pay off. Sure, the gun lobby hated the movie and reveled in the fact that it made no money at all, but any other issue could have been chosen. The film isn’t about gun control so much as the dirty tricks and deals that go on behind the scenes around any hot button topic.
