In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle was done with Sherlock Holmes, the literary “consulting detective” he had created in 1886, whose appearances in two novels and 23 short stories had made Doyle wealthy and famous (and who is currently considered the most popular fictional character in history). “I think of slaying Holmes in the last [of [...]
Category: Writing
There’s a scene in Stephen King’s 1978 apocalyptic epic The Stand (in the 1990 extended edition, with the wonderful Berni Wrightson drawings and the lamentable Cyndi Lauper references) in which we are able to read several of the final top-secret reports by one of the United States government scientists who are desperately trying to contain [...]
It’s strange to realize that you’re old enough to have seen the world change. The idea comes out of nowhere when you don’t expect it and aren’t looking for it but the frisson of recognition is always very strong — we grew up hearing our parents and grandparents talk this way and dismissing it as [...]
Reading Michael Tomasky’s new piece on Obama in the February 7 New York Review of Books, I noticed what I assumed to be a particularly good David Levine caricature of John Boehner — and then I suddenly remembered that Levine died (as far as I could remember) some time in the past five years. The [...]
“There is one man — and only one! — who is so old, drunk, ruined, hopeless, self-destructive, sick, failed, and bitter (and yet who yet once had promise and potential to rival anyone whom you wish to compare him to); who is so estranged from all loved ones, family and former friends, who has sunk [...]
In 1965, during the planning stages of Star Trek, creator Gene Roddenberry was concerned about how to portray planetary exploration on his new show — not because of the (projected) limited resources of space travel, but because of the (very real) limited resources of television. Would Roddenberry’s spacefarers actually need to land their “Starship Enterprise” every [...]
So “The Beatles” (a business entity consisting of Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, Olivia Harrison, George Martin, George Martin’s son Giles Martin* and a raft of attorneys and corporate infrastructure) have released a “new” digital-only album called “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which is a collection of fourteen tracks from the Beatles’ back catalog. All [...]
On my desk in front of me is a receipt from Supreme Hardware on West 73rd Street from 10:30 this morning for $8, which I spent on a 1/4″ masonry drillbit that I used to mount bookshelves in my apartment. The new shelves, which I finished today, let me finally put away an enormous stack [...]
I had a dream that I was shopping for laptops, and that the salesperson was demonstrating how each of them had an “OH-HELLYEAH” key that, when pressed, emitted a really loud accordion chord. (It was somewhere near the “K” on the right hand side.) I was just going to permanently drop this subject, but it [...]
There’s more to Bullitt than just that car chase, even if there doesn’t need to be — the famous 110-mile-per-hour Charger vs. Mustang duel (where the shocks blow out and the cars bounce over the hilltops like skateboarders) comes at you like the stargate in 2001 earlier that year. Bullitt is so 1968 it hurts, [...]
[Obviously, Spoiler Warning up to and including the most recent episode (Season 5 Episode 7, "At The Codfish Ball")] At the beginning of the season — i.e. before the Madchen Amick dream sequence, before Heinz (ironically, “Some Things Never Change”) and before the bordello sequence — I predicted that 1) Don will be 100% faithful [...]
This is the M. Night Shayamalan film in which people’s heads are falling off. You see people sitting around on park benches, in offices, driving etc. and their heads fall off. Pause and then a spurt of blood etc; they fall over. More people’s heads fall off. M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN (dressed as priest): “My entire [...]
Not “trailers” as in “Coming Attractions” (or, the three-minute-no-second ads for movies that are a burgeoning art form in themselves) (I made one myself for my favorite movie). I’m talking about actual trailers, or “mobile homes” or “ten-wides” or “single-wides” depending on what sort of construction or zoning nomenclature you’re using. Would you ever want [...]
MOONS WAXED AND WANED, gibbous and crescent, locked in their eternal mechanisms over the centuries as Man expanded his reach, erecting spires and bridges on a narrow isle on the coast of a landmass that would come to be known as America. When Man built his towers of Manhattan, surely he strived toward a state [...]
