What I’m Reading: “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record”

Author’s Note: There has a been a lot of really cool UFO news lately (especially this article), so I thought I would re-share an old post I wrote some years ago regarding a fine book on the subject. Enjoy!

UFOs

From 1989 to 1992 I went to graduate school at the University of Arizona. This was around the same time that Fife Symington was elected governor of that fine state. I don’t remember having any opinion of Symington at the time, except that he seemed a man very much in the mold of Arizona politicians: a conservative, folksy cowboy.

So it was probably not that big of a surprise when, six years later, Symington handled an unusual political crisis in what many saw as a callous, flippant way. The crisis in question was a UFO—literally, an unidentified flying object—that was spotted by hundreds of people in the Phoenix area on the night of March 13th, 1997. The incident, which has since become known as The Phoenix Lights UFO Incident, resulted in dozens of 911 calls and hundreds of letters being written to the governor. Eventually, Symington was forced to hold a press conference about the event, in which he essentially laughed-off the whole affair. (One of his aides came to conference dressed as a green alien. Hilarity ensued.)

Continue reading “What I’m Reading: “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record””

Shameless Plug Saturday

Ever since the paperback edition of my mystery thriller book, Twice the Trouble, came out in August, the price of the hard-cover edition has dropped through the basement. That’s bad for me but good for you (assuming you like hard-cover mysteries). It’s currently on sale for $6.00. Yes, that’s six Ameroes. Cheap!

It would make a great Christmas gift. I’m just sayin…

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Boilermaker”

There have been a lot of great rock duos over the years—Hall and Oates, Tears for Fears, The White Stripes, David and David—but there haven’t been that many hard rock duos. I’m guessing this because you typically need a minimum of three musicians to form a hard rock band: a drummer, a bassist, and a lead guitarist. (One of those folks has to sing, too, obviously.)

The great British duo Royal Blood gets around this minimum by ditching the lead guitarist and having their bassist, Mike Kerr, do double-duty. On this little gem, which has become one of my favorites, he is actually playing a distorted bass that sounds like a lead guitar. (Jack White does the same thing on “Seven Nation Army“.)

Anyway, rock on…!

The Coolest Discovery You’ve Never Heard Of

I recently learned that this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics went to a team of scientists who conducted experiments on quantum tunneling. Their experiments were conducted in the 1980s, which is typical of how the Nobel committees work—it takes around thirty years for a scientific consensus to build that a body of work was truly worthy of a Nobel Prize. 

I was interested in this news because, like most sci-fi nerds, I have an unflagging fascination with quantum mechanics. Heck, I even have a passing understanding of the fundamentals. (No, not just from Star Trek; I’ve read a few actual books! With facts, and stuff!)  A few years ago, I even tried to write a non-fiction book about Bell’s Theorem, which is a famous consent in Quantum Mechanics, albeit one that  you’ve probably never heard of (unless you’re a physicist or a science teacher or a sci-fi nerd). 

John Stewart Bell (copyright CERN)

To be frank, I had never heard of it either, until I read about it in a science book and then ventured to the Wikipedia page, where I learned that the theorem was written by an Anglo-Irish physicist named John Stewart Bell in the 1960s, and it hit the scientific community like a hurricane. Later, in 1975, another physicist Henry Stapp called it “the most profound discovery of science.”

When I read this quote, I thought, “Whoa, dude! If it’s really the most ‘profound discovery of science’,” I should probably learn something about it.” 

And I did. Sort of.

Obviously, I will never really understand the underlying math, or even the root concepts that the math represents (which is one reason I abandoned the aforementioned book project). But the theorem itself is pretty easy to understand….

Continue reading “The Coolest Discovery You’ve Never Heard Of”

Perfect Films: Tár

Author’s Note: I first posted this essay a few years ago. I’ve decided to repost it now due to some recent interest.

When I finally watched Todd Field’s 2022 movie Tár, starring Cate Blanchett. I really didn’t know much about the film, except that it had been well received (Blanchett received an Oscar nomination) and that it was about a female orchestra conductor named Lydia Tár. From this scant information, I assumed it would be a worthy but standard drama about a woman artist’s struggle to thrive in a male-dominated world.

Boy, was I wrong! Tár is a great movie. So great, in fact, that I became temporarily obsessed with it, so much so that I tried to figure out what the name Tár means. I ran it through Google translate and got a hit: tár is Icelandic for tear (the verb, as in “to tear to shreds”). I don’t know if this was Field’s intention, but it fits well—Lydia rips everything and everyone around her to shreds. And in the last part of the film, she faces an almost literal tear in the fabric of reality.

Put simply, Tár is a monster movie. Lydia is the monster.

French intellectual Charlotte Aïssé is credited with saying, “No man is a hero to his valet.” This is certainly true for the character of Francesca (Noémie Merlant), Lydia’s apprentice conductor, personal assistant, a general factotem. As one would expect, Francesca knows all the skeletons in Lydia’s closet. And there are a lot of them. Lydia Tár, we soon learn, is a bit of a sexual predator, in the Harvey Weinstein model. She uses her influence and fame to seduce young women in her orchestra, then keeps them silent with threats. When one of her former conquests, Krista, commits suicide (she was depressed because she couldn’t get another orchestra job; Lydia made sure of this by writing bad recommendations for her), Lydia orders Francesca to delete all their emails regarding the matter. Thus begins the intrigue that will constitute the main action of the film.

But Tár is not just a clever twist on the #MeToo movement narrative, or a meditation on the corrosive effects of fame. Rather, it’s more like a descent into hell, albeit a coldly beautiful version. Filmed in desaturated grays and blues, the first two acts reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, in its brutal, almost clinical exploration of intellectual high culture (transposed from Manhattan in Kubrick’s movie to Berlin in this one). Lydia is shown as an ultimately tragic character, a female MacBeth—brilliant, gifted, and strong but hopelessly in thrall to her ambition and darker impulses.

In other words, she is a nasty piece of work, sadistic to her enemies and overbearing to her friends. (And that’s without even considering her sexual predations.)

But it’s in the final act that the movie really becomes something otherworldly. When Lydia’s misdeeds finally catch up to her, and her carefully controlled world of power and influence begins to unravel (to tear apart, as it were), the film’s tone and pacing becomes less like Eyes Wide Shut and more like Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Both films climax when the main character locks eyes with an even greater monster (literal, in Roeg’s horror masterpiece; metaphorical in Tár), one that manifests the hitherto unseen evil of the story.

In fact, the last third of the film can be read as a supernatural horror tale, complete with ghosts, as Dan Kois does in his excellent essay for Slate. I would go even further and suggest that the entire move is best interpreted as a David Lynch-style surrealist nightmare. A descent into hell.

I’ve often thought that if hell exists, it’s probably not eternal, and it’s probably not a lake of fire. My bet is that hell looks almost exactly like earth, and the people trapped there do not know they’re in hell. Instead, they are forced to re-commit their sins over and over, but with a twist: this time, the victims get revenge.

Regardless of how you interpret it, Tár is a great movie. Check it out, if you dare…

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “A Clockwork Orange”

The most important novel in the dystopian science fiction sub-genre is George Orwell’s 1984. The second most important is Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. I would go so far to argue that Burgess’s book has, in some ways, been even more influential and culturally significant than Orwell’s, especially for those generations that grew up in the 1970s and later. 

It was in 1971 that Stanley Kubrick adapted the book into a landmark film, which was how I first discovered the novel. By the time I was a teenager, in the early 80s, Kubrick’s movie had taken on cult status—almost as much as 2001: A Space Odyssey. My friends and I all loved the movie. And I, being a particularly bookish kid, decided to check the novel out, too.

The secret to A Clockwork Orange’s success, topping that of almost all other dystopian novels, is that it has a great, exciting twist. Its protagonist, a fifteen-year-old delinquent named Alex, seems more like a villain than a hero. He is, after all, a thug, a thief, a gang-member, a rapist, a drug user, and a lover of all things violent (“ultraviolence,” as he and his gang friends call it). Yet, in comparison to the oppressive, authoritarian, end-stage-Capitalist society in which he lives, he is a kind of hero. Against that iron-grey backdrop, his better, human qualities come to the fore—his intelligence, his ferocious courage, and his absolute dedication to personal pleasure, the state-be-damned.

This twist is one of the greatest, central ironies in modern literature, and it’s the reason teenage boys (and probably a few girls, too) continue to find themselves drawn to the book, just as they have been for sixty years. Conversely, this is also the reason that social conservatives have hated the book for just as long. In fact, as I recently learned from openculture.com, A Clockwork Orange was the most banned book of the 2024-25 school year. 

I have no doubt that Burgess would have been very, very proud.

Kubrick’s film version was so powerful that it influenced the cover-design for most subsequent editions of the book. Many of these covers were thinly-veiled riffs on the movie poster or on Malcolm McDowell’s brilliant performance, wearing his singularly perverse, false-eyelash. I really like this cover from 1995 by Robert Longo because it bucked that trend and did something new. 

Also, I think it really captures the madness of the book—the ferocity of Alex’s character as he rages against the machine. Yes, he’s an evil character, but that’s sort of the point of the whole book. Alex has a God-given right to be evil, if that’s his choice. Evil is an implied, but not a  necessary, product of his free will, and he fights valiantly against being “programmed” by the cold authority figures of the story.

Just like most teenagers. Even the ones that aren’t psychopaths.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Rock n’Roll All Night”

The great comedian George Burns once attended an Alice Cooper concert, and he was impressed by all the crazy costumes, make-up, special effects, and over-the-top acting that made that artist famous. Later, he saw Cooper back-stage and told him “You’re the last vaudeville act.” He was right! Cooper was one the first artists to realize that great rock-and-roll can be…well…theater. Especially in its stadium-arena-sized version.

Another band that was quick to pick-up on the theater aspect of rock was Kiss, who hit the cultural pop-scene of 1970s like an earthquake. Yes, they were the silliest rock band of that era (perhaps of any era). Kind of like Spinal Tap, but even dumber. However, if you ignored the make-up and the pleather sci-fi costumes, you realized that Kiss was just a kick-ass, New York City rock-band, with tough-guy lyrics and hard-hitting musicianship. 

Ace Frehley, their great guitarist, passed away yesterday. I thought I would dedicate this episode of my Friday Night Rock-Out series to him by posting my favorite Kiss song. 

Rock on…

R.I.P. Diane Keaton

One indication of Diane Keaton’s greatness is the simple fact that two of the most iconic of the 1970s end with her face. That is, with her face literally filling their final frames, as she looks straight at the viewer. These films are, of course, The Godfather (1972) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). In the former, her character, Kay, gives a stricken expression as she watches her young husband, Michael Corleone, go over to the Dark Side of the Force to become, at last, the new godfather of his crime family. In the Looking for Mr. Goodbar, her character, Theresa, lies on the floor in her darkened apartment, dying. She has just been fatally stabbed by a psycho guy she picked up at a bar. The guy runs off, and the camera stays fixed on her face as she breathes her last breath, alone.

I’m not sure which ending is more disturbing. In both cases, her character dies a kind of death (spiritual, in The Godfather; literal in Looking for Mr. Goodbar). And this death is brought on, directly or indirectly, by a man’s act of evil. This might seem ironic, given the fact that Keaton, more than other female star, best embodied the spirit of the New Woman, especially the second-wave version that swept the culture in the 60s and 70s. In fact, it’s not ironic at all. In both films, she becomes a kind of casualty-of-war, defiant but ultimately destroyed by a male-centered (if not actually misogynistic) culture. 

No, I am not trying to define Keaton’s long, brilliant career through the single lens of feminism-vs-toxic-masculinity. But you can’t talk about Diane Keaton without considering how important a symbol she was for both boys and girls watching movies when I was growing up. From the moment she appeared on-screen at the titular character in Woody Allen’s masterpiece, Annie Hall, she captured the heart of a generation. Dressed in men’s clothing, she was beautiful, elegant, and breath-takingly feminine. With her goofy demeanor, mixed with her sharp-as-a-whip intellect, she was the gawky, A-student who all the smart, gawky, A-student girls in the audience could look up to (and who all the A-student guys secretly fell in love with.)

As with any movie star of any gender, it is impossible to separate Keaton’s appeal from her physiognomy. She was, of course, beautiful, but in a more muted, subtle way than someone like Jacqueline Bisset, Britt Ekland, Jill St. John, or any other of the “off-the-charts-sexy” actresses of her generation. (On my list of 15 Hollywood Archetypes, Keaton would sit firmly in the “Goddess Next Door” bucket.) To me, the most remarkable thing about Keaton was the way she always seemed to glow. She was literally luminous, in all her films, an attribute that a cynic might write-off as a testament to good genetics (i.e., good skin), or perhaps expert lighting.

Being a bit of mystical, woo-hoo type, I would call it the emanation of her sublime, inner being, filtering out into our mortal plane… 

She carried this luminous quality into old age. Alas, though she was 79, she left us too soon. 

Godspeed, Ms. Keaton!