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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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Ever since I read her famous short story “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” in college, I have loved Joyce Carol Oates. I continued to read her short stories through the 1980s and 90s, and my admiration only grew. She seemed to combine the style and critical eye of other great practitioners of…
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Yeah, I know. Calling this song “rock” is a bit of a stretch. Like all of Bryan Ferry’s solo work, as well as all his hits with Roxy Music, “Don’t Stop the Dance” is a brilliant and elegant pop song. Emphasis on brilliant. What William Faulkner is to literature, Bryan Ferry is to pop music.…
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I am a perpetual student of the writing craft and, as such, I am an avid consumer of books about writing. Here is a list of my favorites, from great to greatest… 10. Aspects of the Novel Kindle Edition — E. M. Forster Forster is one of my all-time favorite novelists, a capital-G Great Writer…
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Back in the late 1980s, INXS bestrode the rock world like a colossus. Their most successful album, Kick, came out in 1987 and included such minor classics as “Never Tear Us Apart” and “Need You Tonight”. But I had already been a fan for years by that time, having gone through high school listening to…
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One of the first books I ever checked out by myself from the library was Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. I was a tween-aged sci-fi nerd at the time (as opposed to a middle-aged sci-fi nerd now), and this book started my life-long love affair with Bradbury’s fiction. More magical realism than actual sci-fi, his…
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Years ago, my son Connor and I went on a hiking trip with my dad. At some point along the trail, we stopped to rest, and he told us about something from his past that he’d never talked about before. Namely, that in high school, he once had a part-time job delivering ice. Not those…
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Ever since the first publicly available AI SaaS offerings (that’s Software-as-a-Service for all you non-geeks) like ChatGTP hit the market, the media ecosystem has been in love with the subject of AI as a major disruptive force. Disruptive, that is, in the creative industries hitherto regarded as safe from any kind of automation: illustration, film-making,…
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One summer in the early 1990s, I drove across the country with a beautiful, brilliant girl named Susan. We drove from Manhattan, New York all the way to Tucson, Arizona, and by the time we reached the desert southwest, we had driven each other a bit crazy, to the point that it pretty much marked…
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Ash Clifton, Writer 