I grew up singing and listening to my family sing.  We weren’t show folk or carnies.  My parents were ex-military (they had in fact met and married in the Air Force) and worked for the better part of my formative years as school teachers.  I was the only actor in the family tree but I [...]

While watching Universal’s hopelessly misconceived (but still enjoyable) THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. RX (1942) the other night, I was struck by how valuable an asset was Mantan Moreland. 

Universal Studios was the headquarters for horror during the 1930s and 40s, following the one-two punch of Tod Browning’s DRACULA and James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN in 1931.  The rival studios didn’t try to beat Universal at cranking out the monster pictures but most of them gave the genre a shot once horror became, in the eyes [...]

We all have our seminal texts.  These are the books that made us who we are, that are hard-wired to our psyches, whose very pages float like paper sailboats in the salty brine of our DNA.  At the far end of my life, I’d rate Don Whitehead’s THE FBI STORY (a sanitized “adapted for young [...]

Look deep into the heart of a true cinephile and you’ll find not only a long list of movies he or she is dying to see and hasn’t but another equally long, if not longer, list of movies he or she is dying to see that were never made. 

The great thing about Christmas is that it’s yours to do with whatever you like.  Some people just can’t abide the holidays and my heart goes out to them.  I understand.  I’m an atheist, a secular humanist, a realist, at times even a cynic.  I get how galling the prefab mirth [...]

There are a sackful of ways to celebrate, or at least appreciate, Christmas but as I grow older and less dependent on the acquisitive bells and whistles of the Yuletide I grow more interested in the holiday as a popular meditation on the challenges presented to our collective sense of perception.  Hymns and carols through [...]

I’m not talking about real hippies because I never knew any.  By the time I was of an age to identify and disparage lifestyle choices, all the good hippies, the real hippies, were gone… off to their ashrams or their turnip farms or serving life sentences for murder, and all that was left was a [...]

Have you ever looked at a word with which you’ve been familiar all your life as if you were seeing it suddenly with new eyes… and it just looks weird?  I had that experience yesterday with the word “thing.”  Isn’t the word thing… well, a thing?  It says nothing, and yet it says it all.