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The great B-Movie director Roger Corman has died. As a kind of tribute, I’m reposting an essay I wrote some years ago on my old blog. Enjoy! Ever since I turned forty, I find myself going to see fewer and fewer movies. It’s only natural, I suppose. The less time you have left, the less…
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When U2’s Achtung Baby came out in 1991, critics joked that it was the album that saved the band from itself. After the enormous success of 1987’s The Joshua Tree, U2 too fell into an abyss of self-indulgence and ego with their follow-up album-and-movie extravaganza Rattle and Hum, which alienated some of their fans. Fortunately,…
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It’s hard to believe that 32 years have passed since Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash was published. Not only is it one of the best books of the 1990s, it’s also one of the definitive novels of the cyberpunk genre. In retrospect, one of the most surprising things about Snow Crash is that it’s not really…
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The good people at Shepherd.com invited me to post a “5 best” list on their site. I had a lot of fun with it. Thanks to Ben Shepherd for making this happen. Here’s my list. Check it out… https://shepherd.com/best-books/literary-novels-masquerading-as-crime-novels
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Back in the 1980s, I took a Humanities class during my freshman year of college. The professor was really good, and she supplemented her lectures by showing up a few episodes of Robert Hughes‘s BBC series Shock of the New, which covered the history of Modern Art as seen through Hughes’s own discerning, sardonic lens. …
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When “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” came out in 1983, I was a junior in high school. Being a bit of a music snob, not to mention a budding wannabe intellectual, I was pretty well versed in the New Wave music of the era, bands like the Talking Heads and Gary Numan and Devo,…
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Okay, it’s a been a few days since the solar eclipse, but I’m still gonna go for the low-hanging fruit; this week’s Friday Night Rock-Out is Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.” When this song came out in 1994, it was the first time I really became aware of Soundgarden as a band (and, more directly, Chris…
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I am very honored to have received such a generous review in the Sun Sentinel, penned by Ms. Oline Cogdill. https://tinyurl.com/5t4zzw92
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I think I am losing my mind. A few years ago, I was reading yet another popular science book—I think it was Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe—when I came across a reference to one of those barroom brain teasers. It goes like this: if your image in a mirror is reversed with regard to right/left…
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Big shout-out and many thanks to Jeff Circle for making one of his famous dossiers on me. I had a blast. He’s one of the smartest and funniest guys I’ve met in a long time. Check it out…
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Ash Clifton, Writer 