Writing/Editing/Reading Update, February Edition

Even with an extra day, February went by too fast. I didn't get enough stuff done even though I had little freelance work on my plate, which is an ongoing problem, as technical glitches had resulted in queries from potential clients coming to a near standstill. I seem to have gotten everything sorted, so I …

My Jessica Lange Story (guest starring Charles Durning but not Sam Shepard)

It was the fall of 1987, and I was working in a Mr. Movies—VHS rentals!—in Duluth, Minnesota. The film Far North, starring Jessica Lange, was being shot in the area. In honor of this, I was playing a lot of her movies on the monitor—a big ol' CRT!—behind the counter in the store, namely Tootsie, …

Hammer Time: Frankenstein Edition, Pt. 1 —The Curse of Frankenstein

It’s time for me to rewatch—actually, in most cases, watch for the first time—the series of Frankenstein movies produced by Hammer Films from the late fifties through the mid-seventies. There are six films starring Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein: The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) Frankenstein Created …

Space Next—My Entry into the Movie Biz

Back in 2011 I was an acquisitions editor at Zenith Press. That year I had the pleasure of working on two books about the space shuttle. The first was the NASA Space Shuttle Owners’ Workshop Manual by David Baker. That was simply the U.S. printing of the newest Haynes manual, so I didn’t have any …

A Tolkien Fanatic Ramble

I first read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the late seventies—wow, that’s thirty-five years ago. I was immediately entranced and read them once a year for several years following, then sporadically throughout the intervening years. One of the times was while I was a stay-at-home parent. They say it’s good for …

What a Weeks

Anyone who works freelance can put together a list like I’m about to rattle off, and this is far from as crazy as it can get, but I’m still trying to keep my head from spinning. Much of this also invokes those buzzwords that hover around writers like gnats: “online presence” and “platform.” These are …

My Peter O’Toole Story

Posting about Patrick Stewart last week made me think of other celebrity stories where I actually met the celebrity. Way back in 1992 Peter O’Toole had published the first volume of his memoirs, Loitering with Intent. I attended a signing appearance here in St. Paul at a bookstore that no longer exists. Peter was running …

Weird Mofo Cinema, Episode A: Beware! The Blob

[Okay, here’s the deal with the title of this post. I’d like to do Weird Mofo Cinema as a podcast or vlog, but I don’t have the time right now to make that happen, so it’s debuting as an occasional post on my regular blog. On with the show, but be warned: I will spoil …

Return to Darkness: Re-Viewing Star Trek Into Darkness

I just watched Star Trek Into Darkness for the second time courtesy of the newly released DVD. (Side note: because we’re still rocking DVD instead of Blu-ray, we shrugged off the controversial marketing ploy of spreading the extras across multiple vendor-specific Blu-ray releases and just bought the cheap DVD.) Being hardcore Trek geeks, my daughter …

Theremin, A Fascinating Life Clumsily Told

I recently watched the documentary Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey about the life of Leon Theremin, pioneer of electronic music. If you don’t recognize the name, I guarantee you’d recognize the sound of his most famous invention, the theremin, a musical instrument which is played without touching it. Its unearthly tones have been used in music …