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. 

I have many things about which I feel thankful this year.  I’m thankful for the love of my wife, for the gift of my two children, for the continued health of my family through some trying times, for my circle of close friends, cohorts and cronies, for an interest in something that has sustained me [...]

In the spring of 1993, I spent ten very happy days in Rome.  It was my first trip abroad and I was the guest of a friend of a friend, an architect who owned a sprawling apartment in the heart of Old Rome.  Walking out of the door of his place on the Piazza Aracoeli, [...]

When I was a kid in wool knickers and a collarless shirt, hitching rides on the trolley and selling “papes” with my fellow newsies… wait a minute, why is Morlock Jeff’s life flashing before my eyes?  That was weird.

Anyway, when I was a kid, a child of the 70s during the trouble-free days of the [...]

I could never imagine actually being beaten up by Robert Ryan and yet I’ve always been a little afraid of him – and never more so than when he smiles. 

With All Hallows Eve just a day away, I thought I’d reverse the bitter tone of last week’s post and embrace my inner MonsterKid… and talk about the things that put the Happy back in Happy Halloween.  Better than talking, I’m going to sing about them, to the tune of that immortal Richard Rogers classic [...]

I sometimes wonder why I’m a horror fan.  Can I be the only MonsterKid, the only TerrorGeek, the only FrightFreak who thinks 95% of every title included in the genre is crap?  That’s how it seems on some days, invariably after I’ve watched something new.  My wife and I were very excited to get Sam [...]