Ash Clifton, Writer

Ten Things I Love About “It’s a Wonderful Life”

1.) Alternate Realities One of the great things about living in a university town is that you get to hear some great lectures by famous people—for free. Back in the 80s, I attended a lecture on the subject of evolution by the late, great Stephen Jay Gould. He talked about how incredibly subtle mutations in the gene pool can, over time, create titanic changes in the history of earth. He called this the Phenomenon of Contingency. To illustrate his point, he mentioned two movies that deal primarily with the subject of an individual’s impact on the course of history—the way small choices can resonate through the future. The movies he sited were It’s a Wonderful Life and Back To The Future. He might have mentioned a dozen or so works of modern science fiction, or the Hindu concept of the Net of Jewels. Or all of Buddhism, for that matter. But he was right on the money with It’s a Wonderful Life. The movie is about keeping your eye on the Cosmic View, rather on selfish or ego-centric desires. George has forgotten how much good he had done in Bedford Falls because the effects of his actions have been blurred by time. Clarence the Angel reveals (or re-reveals) it to him.

“Dracula” Isn’t About What You Think It’s About

I’ve been seeing a lot of on-line ads for the new Nosferatu movie directed by Dave Eggers. It looks like a pretty good movie, although, judging by the trailers, it seems to be emphasizing the horror (e.g., slasher) elements of the classic Nosferatu/Dracula story over the erotic angle (which most film adaptations have veered toward).

Or does it? Looking at the poster, the hook line poster reads “Succumb to the Darkness.” It’s a seductive line, which doesn’t quite seem to go with the image portrayed—that of a beautiful young woman in a nightgown lying on her back with her mouth open, while a skeletal, monstrously taloned hand reaches for her face.

Erotic? Not really. Gross? Yeah, kinda. This thematic confusion between the film’s trailer and its poster reflects, I think, the difficulty in adapting the Dracula story to the screen. (Yes, I know that Nosferatu is not the same as Dracula, but close enough.) The difficulty is made worse in our present time, the 21^st Century, when porn is only a few clicks away and the idea of truly transgressive sexual activity is more and more difficult to imagine.

My Thriller 101 Interview with David Gwin

Somebody shared an old post on Facebook today regarding my interview with David Gwyn back in March on his Thriller101 podcast. It got me thinking about how much I enjoyed that particular talk, and what great questions David asks.

So, I thought I’d repost the link. What the heck…

Friday-Night Rock Out: “Any Way You Want It”

E.L. Doctorow once said that Edgar Allen Poe was the best bad writer in American history. I would suggest that Journey was the best bad band in rock history. Blessed with a classic rock pairing of a great singer and a great lead guitarist—Steve Perry and Neil Schon, respectively—Journey was a hit-machine all through the 1980s. In a sea of turgid, flat corporate rock, Journey’s unusual combination of Perry’s crooning lyrics and Schon’s clean-yet-virtuosic guitar licks was a winner. It stood out a mile on F.M. radio. Also, the band had a great work ethic. They played out-of-the-way venues in the midwest and the deep south that many other bands shunned, which won the band the eternal devotion of countless rural and working-class kids, to whom Journey’s sentimental and often maudlin songs appealed.

It was this sentimental and overblown quality that made Journey a bit of a drag. There was something cloying and yet self-aggrandizing about much of their work. Every other song sounded like an “anthem.” One was always tempted to flick a lighter and wave it in the air whenever one of them came on the radio.

Still, when Journey was on its game and at its most pure, they could create a really great, down-and-dirty rock song. My favorite of theirs—the only one that truly feels like a rock song, to me—is their unapologetic ode to sex, “Any Way You Want It”.

Rock on…

(Yet Another) Shameless Plug

Hey, it’s been DAYS since I plugged my book, so obviously it’s time for yet another shameless plug! Just in time for Christmas!

Amazon is running a sale on my book, Twice the Trouble. It’s 60% off! In hardcover! It would make a heck of a Christmas gift. I’m just sayin…

What I’m Reading: “I am Spartacus”

(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.) I don’t want to jinx the man, but the fact that Kirk Douglas still lives is an unmitigated source of joy for me. If you believe, as I do, that movie stars become movie stars because of some internal life-force, whose aura is palpable even when projected onto a silver screen, then Kirk Douglas seems like the best proof of this theory.

At 101, Douglas is a living bridge to Hollywood’s second Golden Age—the 1940s to late 1950s. A bone fide movie start by 1949, Douglas was, along with other mavericks like Burt Lancaster, one of the first major actors to become a power-player in his own right. In an era when the Hollywood studio system traded actors like cattle, he formed his own studio and made his own films. He fostered young writers and directors—most notably, a brilliant, aloof young filmmaker named Stanley Kubrick.

R.I.P. Earl Holliman

Last month, I reran an old post about how much I love the classic sci-fi film Forbidden Planet. Then, just over a week later in a striking and somewhat sad example of synchroncity, the last suriving cast member of that film, Earl Holliman, passed away at the age of 94.

Holliman’s brief performance as the boozing, womanizing cook in Forbidden Planet was a highlight of the movie. This is not surprising; Holliman was one of the best character actors of his generation, performing in countless movies and TV shows. These ran the gamut from Westerns, cop dramas, thrillers, and (of course) science fiction.

Physically, Holliman had the kind of rugged, Southern-style good looks that were a requirement for tough-guy roles back in the day. Actually, he looked a bit like another great TV actor, James Garner (not to mention my dad). The picture above shows him in all his 1970s-era glory.

Forbes Magazine has a nice tribute article about him here.

Let’s Deconstruct an Ad: “Hello Apple Vision Pro”

The ad starts with a thirty-something blond man standing in the kitchen of what appears to be an expensive, post-modern home, spacious and bright, with some well-manicured trees visible through the bay windows. Dressed in a tasteful-yet-generic linen shirt, the man is vaguely handsome yet nerdy. With his Germanic features, beard, and shoulder-length blond hair, he looks a bit like Thor, if Thor were retired and had become a web designer. In other words, he seems to represent the best-case scenario for a lot of aging tech-bros. Sure, your features might have sagged a little, and you might have a bit of a paunch, but you’re still a stud.

The opening shot shows the man slipping on what appears to be an extra-large set of ski goggles, with some strange, high-tech Whangdoodles on the side. This is, we instantly realize, the product that the ad is hawking—Apple latest virtual reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro. Meanwhile, the soundtrack is taken up by the opening ostinato of Supertramp’s “Dreamer,” a song once beloved by the late 70s, post-Vietnam counterculture but which has now been co-opted by the Apple Corporation. Indeed, the song sets the theme for the entire ad. The man we are looking at is the “dreamer,” but we, the viewers, are too. We are all, the ad suggests, preparing to enter a world of high-technology magic, where our entire lives will be transformed (for the better, as in a dream) by this newest gizmo.

Shameless Plug

Christmas came early for me this year! Many thanks to Ms. Oline Cogdill and the good folks at the Sun-Sentinel for putting Twice the Trouble on their Best Mystery Fiction Books of 2024 list! I am very honored.

Just How Freakin Big is the (Whole) Freakin Universe, for Freak’s Sake?

One of the coolest classes I took at U.F. was Intro To Astronomy, taught by a funny old German guy named Heinrich Eichorn who, I later learned, was Chair of the Astronomy Department. (Yes, this was back in those quaint old days when top-notch professors had to actually, you know, teach class. And not just to grad students!) While Professor Eichorn’s lectures tended to meander a bit, he had a genuine enthusiasm for the subject that students, myself included, could sense and respond to. I remember one particular class when, in one of his usual, off-topic asides, he said, “We know the universe is not infinite. If it were, then every point in the sky above us would always be as bright as a star.”

For me, this was one of those mind-blowing moments when one is exposed to the wisdom of the ages. In this case, it was that of another German astronomer, Johannes Kepler, who in 1610 realized that if the universe really were infinitely large, and infinitely old, then every line-of-sight direction one looks at in the sky should eventually hit a star. Thus, the entire sky should be as bright as (and, worse still, as hot as) the surface of a star. Nevermind the fact that most of these stars would be very, very far away. Their light would still have an infinite amount of time to reach us, and there would be an infinite number of them shining down on us.

We should all be broiling alive right about now.