-
Musical Mondays: Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Let me start with a confession. I shamefully admit to having not been a Beatles fan growing up. I pledged my allegiance to a different monumentally influential singer-songwriter, and refused to consider any other artist on the same level. If pressed, I would reluctantly agree that the Beatles were alright, especially George. I knew their ...
-
Non-Fiction Sundays: Letting Go
It was, I later thought, as if I’d been carrying a bouquet and he’d asked me for a single daisy. He loved flowers, I loved flowers, and wasn’t it beautiful that our mutual appreciation could transcend our various differences, and somehow bring us together? I must have thought, too, that had the situation been reversed ...
-
Photographic Saturdays: Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White was possibly the most pioneering American female photographer in the 20th century.
-
Poetic Friday: “Phoenix,” D.H. Lawrence
Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change. The phoenix renews her youth only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down to hot and flocculent ash. Then the small stirring of a ...
-
Screenwriting Thursday: Inverted Scene Order
Most storylines are comprised of a clear beginning, strong middle, and definitive end. But as long as this has been the standard, writers have been reworking it. The typical arch has been reworked to great effect by novelists, short story writers, playwrights, and now screenwriters. Film as an art form is a relatively new field, ...
-
MLK Jr. on Music
Asked to “find a few minutes in your busy day to write a few paragraphs which could serve as a foreword in the program book,” Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote the following for the inaugural Berlin Jazz Fest in 1964. The music selections are from artists who performed at the festival. God had wrought many ...
-
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour… booming through the Treasure Island tunnel ...
-
Kodachrome
“Kodachrome You give us those nice bright colors You give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah! I got a Nikon camera I love to take a photograph So Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away….”
-
“The Hollow Men,” T.S. Eliot
Mistah Kurtz — he dead. A penny for the Old Guy I We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry ...
-
Let’s Interact
Instead of my talking about screenwriting, I want to hear your thoughts. While no one really watches the Golden Globes or the Oscars they way they used to, we still hold stock by these two awards. Let’s look at the list for Best Picture (both Comedy and Drama categories) and Best Screenwriting, and you tell me ...
-
Edmund Dulac
“None sing so wildly well, as the angel Israfel.” Another throwback to the golden age of illustration! Edmund Dulac has worked on some of literature’s best, including works by Omar Khayyam, Edgar Allen Poe (above), Hans Christian Andersen, and Shakespeare. Excited yet?
-
Less Than Zero
I don’t want to care. If I care about things, it’ll just be worse, it’ll just be another thing to worry about. It’s less painful if I don’t care. – Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero Named after the Elvis Costello song of the same title, Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero is the story ...