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No self-respecting cinephile could live with themselves if they failed to mark the passing of a great movie star like Sam Neill. Yes, Neill was a movie star. He seldom played the lead in big-budget films—Jurassic Park was a lucky exception, and even that film was more of an ensemble piece—yet whenever he was on-screen,…
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Once again, I’ve been too slammed to finish a new blog entry, so I’m re-running an oldie-but-goodie (I hope). Enjoy…!!!! A few months ago, I wrote a post about M. R. Carey’s excellent sci-fi novel, The Girl with All the Gifts. I recounted how incredibly impressed I was by the way Carey took an exhausted genre—the zombie…
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For this latest entry in my Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers series, I’ve chosen a fairly recent (2004) edition of Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley. The book is a great, sci-fi action yarn about a post-WWIII America in which most of the heartland is scarred by nuclear radiation. Gale-force winds above 500 feet prevent any kind of…
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Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, America’s birthday. So, for tonight’s Friday Night Rock-Out, I was going to share Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” which is my favorite “patriotic” song ever. I love it because the narrator seems genuinely proud to be an American while at the same time lamenting our country’s many, many flaws.…
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I’ve written a lot about the liminal space aesthetic recently, and especially its importance in a brand of speculative fiction that I call Vortex. So, I was pleased to learn that it has a thriving following on Youtube. Specifically, The Backrooms channel. I learned this from another Youtube channel that I really like, Monstrum. Here…
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Incredibly, forty years have passed since David Lynch’s masterpiece, Blue Velvet, was released to theaters. Actually, “released” isn’t quite the right word; it detonated, hitting the cultural consciousness with the force of an H-bomb. Although not a huge commercial hit compared to other films that came out that year (including such juggernauts as Top Gun,…
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In the latest episode of our Read a Classic Novel…Together! channel, my great friend Margaret Luongo and I reveal the books we have been cheating with while we were SUPPOSED to be reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Books (briefly) discussed in this episode: Check it out…!
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Happy Juneteenth everyone! It’s a holiday about freedom. So, I am devoting this installment of my Friday Night Rock-Out series to one of the iconic songs of my youth, by one of my heroes, Lenny Kravitz, whose music feels like freedom. Rock on….
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If you enjoyed my essay on Michael Mann’s great movie Manhunter, you might be interested to learn that a new, remastered, 4K cut of the film has been made. Called Manhunter: The Final Cut, the film will have a limited release in cinemas starting on July 4, 2026 in the U.S. and on September 25…
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The annual Wine, Dine & Death party returns October 10 at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. It’s a literary murder mystery dinner with wine service and a silent auction, all benefiting the Little Theatre of Walla Walla, a community theater running since 1944. The silent auction will include two signed, hard-back copies of Twice…
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Ash Clifton, Writer 