SUCCESS KILLS ... if you're not young.

When a television show is consistently popular, its reward usually isn't getting canceled.

 Based on author Craig Johnson's mystery books about Walt Longmire, a Wyoming county sheriff whose laconic personality belies his razor-sharp detective skills, 

"Longmire" was A&E's second-most popular show behind the reality hit "Duck Dynasty," averaging 5.6 million viewers this season, according to Nielsen. 

That is better than critical darlings "Mad Men" on AMC and "Justified" on FX.

 Unfortunately for "Longmire," it has the wrong audience and the wrong owner. 

A&E said it pulled the plug on "Longmire" because it appeals primarily to older viewers: the median age of the show's viewers is 60 versus 48 for the network as a whole 

And it doesn't have an ownership stake in the show.

I think that last was the true reason.

How accurate are Nielson's ratings anymore in this digital age where shows can be seen on Amazon and a half-dozen other venues?

 "Longmire's" fate is reflective of two growing trends in the television industry:

the obsession of advertisers with younger viewers and the desire of TV networks to own as much of their content as possible. 


 Last year, A&E also canceled "The Glades," 

a quirky crime drama with solid ratings that also had an older audience and was produced by a unit of 21st Century Fox.

 Longmire was not a cynical show; it was designed for people who don't see their views and struggles represented.

So A&E is telling those nearing 50 and those over: 

you no longer count.  

It is an odd mind-set when Baby Boomers still have the most disposable income.  

Alas, those of you out there in your mid-forties, you are about to become disposable yourselves.

DOES THIS MAKE SENSE TO YOU?  WHAT DO YOU THINK?

A BLACK WIND BLOWS

 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00N758R96

 

“All of us have a path to follow, and that path begins in the heart.”

           - Samuel McCord  {a supernatural LONGMIRE}

 

          The world is filled with mystery and shadow.

 

What is life?  The years bring us the conceit that we grasp life.       

 

What we grasp is but illusion.

 

Childlike we seize a fistful of seawater and say we hold the ocean.  And even that slips through our grasping fingers.

 

As the ocean holds depths Man will never see so does Life.

 

But one cursed man has seen more than most.  And the enemies he has made doing so are now trying to un-make him.

 

From the undead halls of power in colonial Washington, D.C. to the bloody plains of India to the mystery-shrouded deserts of Egypt, Texas Ranger Captain Samuel McCord is spoken of in whispers lest he take notice of the speakers.

 

Follow his cursed footsteps from 1826 and the death bed of President John Adams to the blood stained hills and ravines of 1857 India. 

 

 

And finally to 1895 Cairo and the far deserts wastes of Egypt. 

 

 

Some fool has disturbed the sleep of something that should never have been awakened. 

 

 

And it is up to McCord, his deadly wife, Meilori Shinseen, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Nikola Tesla, and Lt. Winston Churchill to keep the world from slipping into a new Dark Age of madness and death.

 

But this time, the past has caught up with McCord in the form of the undead Abigail Adams and the revenant Empress Theodora of the Unholy Roman Empire.

 

 

Worse, an ancient Pestilence in the body of a mummy child now reaches out for him and those he loves.

 

And his friends and even the world itself may pay the terrible price if he cannot be more than what he believes he can be.

Don't forget

HIBBS THE CUB WITH NO CLUE

only 99 cents

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MT8DNLY/ref=docs-os-doi_0

 

LONGMIRE MURDERED BY GREED!

 



Longmire,

A&E Network's most-watched original drama series of all time,

will be ending its run on the cable network after three seasons.

In a surprising move, the network has opted not to renew the series for a fourth season.

Warner Horizon, the studio behind Longmire, will be shopping it immediately.

The White Wash:

“We would like to thank the phenomenal cast, crew and producers of Longmire, along with our partners at Warner Horizon, for their tireless work on three seasons of quality dramatic storytelling,”

A&E said in a statement. “We are incredibly proud of what we have achieved together.”

Truth:

There has been a drive at A&E Networks to own a large portion of their scripted programming,

which was also the impetus behind the launch of A&E Studios.

Both Longmire and The Glades came from outside suppliers, Warner Horizon and Fox TV Studios, respectively.

What’s going on is that A&E doesn’t own the show outright, so they don’t want to pay for it anymore.

When a network buys a show from a production studio, (in this case A&E has been buying the show from Warner Horizon), they pay big bucks.

It’s a combination of this and the fact that A&E is moving back to unscripted, cheaper to produce, reality programming.

.

IS THERE ROOM FOR HEROES ANYMORE?

Is every police officer in police procedurals corrupt?

Is every politician in nightly TV or movies dishonest?

Then, there is the clergy on TV and in the movies.  Every one a hypocrite or worse.

Really?  How against the law of averages is that?

I watched the second to last PENNY DREADFUL this morning admist multiple interruptions to do blood runs for hospitals. Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) spent most of the hour possessed by a being of ancient evil.  Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), one of the two lone men of honor in the show,  threatens Sir Malcolm to rip out his throat (not an idle threat from a werewolf) if he does get a priest to perform an exorcism. Of course, much to my disgust, the priest turns out to be a stodgy ... hypocrite.  What a surprise.  Not. What WAS a surprise was that, when Vanessa starts tearing bloody chunks out of everyone, she begs Ethan to kill her with his Colt. Tears in his eyes, he shoves the gun's barrel against her chest,  rips off the blessed St. Christopher medal about his neck, presses it against her forehead and ... Performs the rite of exorcism in Latin. The Monster was a Man of God.  (Much like my own Samuel McCord -- though he calls God the Great Mystery -- as what He is up to most of time is a mystery to him.) PENNY DREADFUL is always a surprise for me -- usually a welcome one. PENNY DREADFUL is certainly visually transporting. The new Victorian Gothic drama on Showtime is a triumph of production design, from the elegantly wallpapered and laddered library of a wealthy lord to the overcrowded, grubby streets of London, where newspaper hawkers herald the return of Jack the Ripper. The ladies’ richly colored dress fabrics glow purple and turquoise against the cool gray cobblestones, off of which you’ll find a dim, stench-filled opium den with a slaughterhouse in the basement. Tonight is the last show -- The previews hint it will not be a happy ending for Ethan or for the prostitute, dying of consumption, that he loves. HELL IS EMPTY -- One of the best Walt Longmire books is routinely savaged by critics who berate Johnson for his Indian mysticism and for his hero, driven by wry humor and a strong sense of justice -- (Much like Robert B. Parker's Spenser) Apparently, a decent man, though flawed as we all are, cannot be accepted by modern audiences. No.  The only acceptable heroes are anti-heroes. There is no longer room for TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD ... or HELL IS EMPTY. I hope tonight's PENNY DREADFUL breaks tradition and not my raised hopes. Faith is a concept not honored any more I know.   What concepts do you find lacking in today's novels and other entertainment? What genre seems to be lacking in today's novels and movies? Speaking of anti-heroes:

Or perhaps we should just think of what it means to walk the true path:

HELL IS EMPTY

“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!”

- Shakespeare, THE TEMPEST

 

 

 

Keith Wynn  (Optimistic Existentialist)

http://keithawynn2011.blogspot.com/

 

Wrote an interesting post Friday, telling about his favorite book of all time and asking what was ours?

 

His was MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY by the way.

 

And no, mine is not HELL IS EMPTY (a Walt Longmire novel) though it is one of the better novels I have read in a long time.

 

Also it shares a motif with what could be my favorite novel of all time:
 

INFERNO
 

 

 

"A dazzling tour de force."--Poul Anderson on Inferno
 

"A fast, amusing and vivid book, by a writing team noted for intelligence and imagination."--Roger Zelazny on Inferno
 

 

Both HELL IS EMPTY and INFERNO incorporate Dante's Inferno in their work.

 

First, INFERNO --
 

 

After his sudden, needless death, science fiction writer Allen Carpentier finds himself along the shores of Hell, with a strange guide who wishes only to be known as Benito,

 

a Hell visited once before by Dante Alighieri.

 

This Hell has changed some, and Carpentier visits some places Dante missed, but where Dante mocked the denizens of Hell, and meekly followed as he was led,

 

Carpentier shows pity and mercy to those he meets, and he's determined to take control of the situation he finds himself in.

 

As a science fiction author, he refuses to believe he is in the literal Hell and tries to match his new reality to his old mind-set. 

 

We're treated to a delightful cast of characters, some from history

(such as Billy the Kid and the man who ordered the raid on Dresden), and others from an imagined future world.

 

  This is an unusual book:


easy to read, with a compelling story line. But it requires you to examine yourself and your actions in life.

Above all it discusses the big moral issues:

what is right or wrong, and how these things vary with circumstance and motivation.
 

I've forgotten how many times I've re-read this.  For over a decade, it was not in print.  Get it while it still is.

 

This is a masterwork from the pen of two great authors, and it is not to be missed.
 

 

Now, onto HELL IS EMPTY -

"AS LONG AS HE WALKED IN MY COUNTY, HE WOULD WALK IN CHAINS."


Harsh?  Not so much.  The prisoner in question is a brilliant sociopath who murders children for fun and adults to sell their body parts.

What begins as a harrowing chase to recapture convicts at large becomes an exercise in survival, the voices of Indian spirits swirling within the snow flurries

as Sheriff Walt Longmire climbs ever higher up Wyoming's Big Horn Mountains where child-killer and sociopath Raynaud Shade,

a Crow-adopted Canadian Indian, has engineered an escape into the wilderness with four fellow convicts, an entourage of FBI agents.

Walt:

"I’d never given up on anything in my life when I was alive. I hadn’t always won, I hadn’t always been right, but I’d never given up. Not till now. Now that I was dead."


Virgil White Buffalo:

“Life is like that.” He flipped through a few more limp pages of Dante's INFERNO.

“You collect things as you go—the things you think are important—

and soon they weigh you down until you realize that these things you cared so much about mean nothing at all.

Our natures are our natures.” He grunted. “And they are all we are left with.”


Walt:

“We must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.”


Walt:

I applied the simple rule that allowed me to make stupid decisions in these types of situations: If I was down there, would I want someone coming after me? Yep.

 

Along the way, Walt runs in to Virgil White Buffalo, a Crow lost soul he first met in ANOTHER MAN'S MOCCASINS. 
 
His talks with the Crow are both existential and amusing. At one point, each of them try to convince the other is dead.

Depressingly for Walt, Virgil White Buffalo makes a better case than Walt.

The great thing about Craig Johnson's novels is that each one is different.

Walt begins the novel ignoring his own deeply spiritual side, then not knowing what to think,

and settles finally on something he can't really prove even though he knows it is true.

That in and of itself is hard for some folks to grasp,

 but I think that's one of the things that makes Walt so real and Johnson such a genuine storyteller.

Johnson's writing and dialogue are effective and peppered with wry humor.

Walt, in a particularly perilous moment, thinks "I couldn't die--I had too many women who would kill me."
 

Just when you think you know where the plot is going,

Johnson changes direction and, sometimes, your perceptions of events.

Do you have a favorite book? 

What is it?

 

REMEMBER?

REMEMBER when motherhood meant being more concerned about your child than your sexiness?

But I am not going to criticize Kim Kardashian here as she is too easy a target.

But it got me to thinking what other things are also dying in our society --

LIBRARIES --

Keith Wynn (Optimistic Existentialist)

http://keithawynn2011.blogspot.com/

He wrote how libraries had been magical places when a child.  Me, too. 

I remember when I sat in a darkened corner of a library and saw in my mind when Triton rose up out of a wine-dark sea, blowing death from his spiral horn.

Edith Hamilton's MYTHOLOGY was tucked happily under my arm that day.

But the Day of the Library may be nearing its end:

 Library patrons want more e-book choices, but libraries can’t afford to purchase e-books at the inflated prices.

Effectively, libraries are leeching money by purchasing fewer e-books at higher prices to keep patrons happy.

Where will we take our future children to discover and enjoy reading if libraries are gone? Where can I go to browse the shelves for weird books?

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”
― Mark Twain

“I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.”
― Roger Zelazny

Have you lost any favorite comic strips lately?

The print industry is dying. Newspapers were the first to sink with magazines following close behind. Now print books are dying as well.

One problem with the dying newspaper industry is that comic strips are disappearing as well.

In the old days, every newspaper had a comics page so every newspaper was a potential market for a new comic strip.

CALVIN & HOBBES and PEANUTS were the last strips I daily read.

I've just bought a collection of the first year of ALLY OOP strips

to bring back the wistful dreams of childhood when I read the last of his strips as a young boy.

Do you look forward to reading any comic strips daily?

The Fading Art of Letter Writing

Letter-writing is among our most ancient of arts.

Think of letters and the mind falls on Paul of Tarsus, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Austen, Mark Twain;

OR love letters written during the American Civil War, or letters written to a parent by a frightened soldier at the battlefront.

      

A good handwritten letter is a creative act, and not just because it is a visual and tactile pleasure.

It is a deliberate act of exposure, a form of vulnerability,

because handwriting opens a window on the soul in a way that cyber communication can never do.

You savor their arrival and later take care to place them in a box for safe keeping.

      

Yes, e-mail is a wonderful invention.

It links people across the world, destroying in an instant the hurdle of geography that confronts snail mail.

Yet it is by its nature ephemeral and lacks the spark of character that only handwriting can provide.

When you get an e-mail, you can never be sure that you are the only recipient — or even that it’s original.

We have always liked to pore over the letters of great figures like Winston Churchill and Abigail Adams for the insight this offers into their lives:

the writing, the crossings-out, the very feel of history on paper.

I MISS WRITING THAT CONTAINS EMOTIONS RATHER THAN EMOTICONS.

WHAT ABOUT YOU?       

Have You Met LONGMIRE?

http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Dish-Longmire-Mystery-ebook/dp/B0023SDPS6/

“A writer, like a sheriff, is the embodiment of a group of people and without their support both are in a tight spot.”
― Craig Johnson, Another Man's Moccasins


Waiting for the latest X-Men movie, I watched the previews for an A&E series, LONGMIRE.  It intrigued me.

I later saw the first season at Wal-Mart for $14.95 and decided to take a gamble and wound up really liking the series.

Longmire:
a sheriff with an unquiet mind, haunted by his losses and driven not to let anyone else down.

I knew that it sprang from a series of 11 mysteries, so I decided to buy the first one, THE COLD DISH. 


And it surprised me with how good it was, not going where I thought it would.


Going on the Cheyenne Reservation where he has no jurisdiction but is more respected by the Cheyenne than their own police force,

Longmire is given the legendary Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead, which was used in the Battle of the Little Bighorn and,

it's implied, killed General Custer.

The rifle is haunted by the Old Cheyenne who sometimes use it to call people to the land of the dead.

Intriguing, right?

Then things get really exciting because more hated young people are murdered.

From that time on, Longmire is haunted by the Old Cheyenne spirits throughout the books.

Here is is one of many typical exchanges between Walt and his dispatcher, Ruby (love her):

“Anything you need from me?
“Like where you are?”
“Yep, like that.”
“No, we don’t care.”
I thought I heard someone laughing in the background but I wasn’t sure. (page 90)

THE COLD DISH takes its time and many who prefer fast cars and hot women will chaff, but stick with it, for the ending will hand you your heart.


“I thought about Maggie and how passion was a difficult thing to sustain, but that friendship had a pace that could go on forever.”
― Craig Johnson, Death Without Company



Johnson is beyond belief with how he details relationships. 

Lucien, Walt's frontier-mentality mentor, is now in the Durant Home for Assisted Living. 

The two play chess every Tuesday.  And if the books were just about those games, you would read them:


"We looked at each other like we had for decades, a blind man talking to a deaf one.

There was a line that neither of us was able to cross;

his sneering at my supposed weakness and my righteous indignation at his immorality." -- Death Without Company

Johnson dares to tug at your heart.

In ANOTHER MAN'S MOCCASINS, Walt's only daughter is struggling to recover from severe injuries that initially put her into a coma.

Take this scene -

Walt is standing in an empty ballroom with his daughter, and she asks him to dance even though there is no music playing:


"After a full sweep of the dance floor, I bent down to kiss the U-shaped scar at her hairline and attempted to keep time to the counting of my blessings."


Johnson says he’s sometimes asked if he ever suspected that his mysteries would be as popular as they’ve become.

“The honest answer is no, I didn’t. When I started a string of novels that took place in the least populated county in the least populated state in the U.S.,

I kind of figured the following for such a series might be relatively limited.

But I always remember a piece of advice [best-selling author] Tony Hillerman gave me when I first met him:

‘Follow your heart and write what you enjoy.’

“So I continued to write about a sadder but wiser sheriff, a detective for the disenfranchised,

a little over-aged, a little overweight, but with a considerable amount of miles left in him.

It would appear that there are a lot of us out there like that,

folks who look at themselves in the mirror every morning and aren’t completely satisfied with what they see — but we try,

 and in that there’s a certain, worn-to-perfection dignity.”

The audio books are read by George Guidall, who has read them all. 

It is a treat to listen to Guidall read a Walt Longmire novel. So, go ahead, sample one!

The poetry of Johnson's prose envelopes the reader, blocking the rest of the world out.

And when the reader turns that last page,

and Johnson releases him/her,

a small part of that world goes along in their head and heart  until the reader can return once again.