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When The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” hit the airwaves (yes, we still had radio back then) in 1997, it became an instant classic, and no one knew why. A rock song with an orchestra and virtually no electric guitar, it sounded utterly different from anything else in the rock world at that time. In fact,
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Like a lot of people, my first exposure to Walter Mosely was when I saw the 1995 film adaptation of his novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington. It’s a good movie, with fine performances by Washington and Don Cheadle, but it didn’t inspire me to seek out Mosely’s fiction. As far as
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Even now, forty-plus years after its inception, the musical genre known as “goth rock” still bewitches me. Great bands like Bauhaus and Joy Division and Echo and the Bunnymen and Siouxie and the Banshees all seemed to break out when I was in high school. In other words, when I needed them most. I was
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Recently, I stumbled upon the Wikipedia page for panspermia—a concept I was already familiar with, relating to the theory that life on Earth might have originated from an external source. Specifically, a primitive microorganism might have landed here on a meteorite (or, in some versions of the theory, on an alien probe). While reading about
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A few weeks ago, I’d never had any review (good, bad, or indifferent). Now, the fine people at @ALA_Booklist have given my debut novel, Twice the Trouble, a starred review! WHOOOO!!! I’m stoked.
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My great friend Margaret Luongo and I just released the premier episode of our new YouTube Channel, Read a Classic Novel…Together. In this series, we tackle classic novels that we’ve been meaning to read forever, and we invite the viewer to read each chunk along with us. (We try not to read ahead, but do anyway
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Anyone who follows this blog knows that my two primary obsessions are movies and history. So, you can imagine my excitement whenever I encounter that rare intersection of these two interests: a well-written film history book. And, still further within this category, there is the vaunted production-of-a-classic-movie book, which is a special favorite. The supreme
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Yeah, I know. Picking U2’s “New Year’s Day” as my Friday-Night Rock-Out three days before New Year’s Day is a very, very obvious choice. But the truth is that I still listen to this song all the time. It came out when I in high school, and it marked the first time I really became
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Like millions of others, my family and I have spent part of this year’s Christmas holiday watching some version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Actually, we watched two, starting with Bill Murray’s mad-cap Scrooged and following-up with a much darker made-for-TV film from 1999, starring Patrick Stewart. The production was inspired, in part, by
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Ash Clifton, Writer 