5 November 2020 — I published this collection of 124 of my non-fiction writings from over the years. It’s on Amazon as a paperback and ebook.
This is a light book from a very personal perspective, with short pieces written over a period of a decade or so. I hope it may prove stimulating.
You can also view the full table of contents on my site here.
I have a lot more to share soon and have been meaning to write a big update post here for a while now about all my activities over the last few months.
If you read this book, please remember that reviews are always super welcome, whether you loved or hated it. I read and appreciate all comments.
More works coming before the year is out. But more about everything next time.
I just uploaded podcast episode NX1.1: “Pilot”, which is wholly made up of excerpts from Chapter 1 of this 6-volume book series.
These excerpts are just a small selection from the more than 20,000 words for this chapter. These excerpts may give some sense of the scope and my approach. The episode is up in the places listed below.
I also updated my site a bit to give a better impression of my current activities.
The “table of contents” summary for this episode from RSS.com.
In this 10-minute episode, 2.6: “A Way to Learn, Screenwriting Gym, and Dashing Through”, I talk for the first time almost only about writing and a couple of things I’ve personally found helpful to grow as a writer and produce good work.
Title card with appropriate “digital clock” typeface.
SEPTEMBER 20th 2018 — Ray Bradbury loved cinema and cinematic storytelling all his life.
From trips to the movies with a beloved family member when he was a boy, he fell in love with the form and it never ended.
Two characteristics permeate all his writing: all of it is lyrical — he had the soul of a poet and that’s why he’s one of my favorite writers — and much of it is powerfully sensual. It engages all the senses.
He said one could film any of his stories by simply turning each sentence or paragraph into a shot. All the information was there, he said, in his writing: what to show and when and how.
From 1985 to 1992 the world enjoyed his TV series THE RAY BRADBURY THEATER. It was filmed on location in many countries: Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and France.
Ray personally scripted every episode and proved his profound and natural understanding of how to tell a story in this form. His work for the series is a model of what to do and not do in scripting film and television.
(I prefer saying just “film” from now on. These are mini-movies in all but name.)
Scenes are allowed to unfold without drowning everything under too much dialogue. Just enough is said and not said. Sights, sounds, and yes, through the power of his work and that of his collaborators, also smells, tastes, and tactile experiences come through.
Iceland is to me Bradbury country and more like the remembered land of my childhood than anywhere else I have been as an adult. Magic is still possible here. The elements have power, like in his stories. The wind has a presence unlike anywhere else. There is the sea, there are mountains and waterfalls, and dark nights and summer cottages in pristine nature.
Stories live here and are respected. As is poetry. As is music. I write this in a snug bedroom with a great big bed and a slanting ceiling of the kind that through some geometrical alchemy seems to fire the imaginations of all creative people. I wish more than anything that I could really share all this.
In any case, Iceland is a great place to watch THE RAY BRADBURY THEATER. I also did so in Paris last winter, and before that in Finland. As an adult, and long ago, first in childhood.
“Marionettes, Inc.” (1985), directed by Paul Lynch (who also directed many episodes of the STAR TREK spin-offs), is not among my favorite episodes. I felt casting James Coco (1930–1987) as the protagonist was not the best choice.
But like all these episodes, this one too affords many incidental delights. Here are some of them.
Eggs,
shake,
toast
(slightly burned),
orange,
tea,
coffee,
tinned dried prunes,
Canadian wall clock:
breakfast.
A Mac
with a message.
A printer much like one we had at home for our Commodore 64,
minus the creepy, recurring message.
Lovely, tactile
spam before email.
Classier for sure.
The staff at Computer Junction
are interestingly “marionette”-like as well.
In this very first episode, Ray and his collaborators found a way to tell potential censors what to do.
A sophisticated laptop for this time.
Another detail Ray probably enjoyed as much as the staff at Computer Junction.
Kenneth Welsh in a role I prefer to his turn as Windom Earle in TWIN PEAKS.
Rather than a villain with a “talent” for disguise as convincing as a threadbare pantomime horse, here he plays just a regular guy.
Marionettes, Inc.
The exterior
shows this is no small company.
The interior is
not humbler.
Leslie Nielsen (1926–2010) was obviously an actor of many talents, but his appearance as Fantoccini is hampered by a supremely unconvincing attempt at an “Italian”(?) accent.
Blue light will also feature later in the episode.
Comfortably flared trousers as Fantoccini leads the protagonist to witness the early training stages of new “marionettes”.
This sequence features some great physical acting, with genuinely creepy jerky movements
as the marionettes try to learn to mimic human behavior convincingly.
This guy takes halting, stiff steps, occasionally reversing his movements before continuing forward.
Sensitively filmed “ordinary” locations can hold more magic for me than any excess of special effects.
A storage room full of knickknacks.
Into the basement, and blue light again.
I need nothing more than this to be immersed: light and smoke are enough in the right hands.
The last scenes
play out at night
and hold some possibly deserved
surprises for the none too admirable characters.
A final climb up the stairs as we wonder whether either one of the married couple is human anymore.
This and every other episode of THE RAY BRADBURY THEATER is available as part of a DVD box set. Despite nearly VHS-quality video, it comes with my warmest recommendation.
SEPTEMBER 14th 2018 — Our minds work in mysterious ways. Why are we sometimes suddenly reminded of something long in the past, with no obvious trigger for that particular memory? Things just find their own time to happen.
Today for some reason I was reminded of Garibaldi’s alcoholism storyline in BABYLON 5. The actor who portrayed him, Jerry Doyle, passed away in 2016 at the age of 60.
Along with those of G’Kar (the wonderful Andreas Katsulas) and Londo (the equally wonderful Peter Jurasik), his was one of my favorite storylines in this series that for many these days seems to have fallen between the cracks between the latter-day STAR TREKs and Ron Moore’s reimagined BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, which went darker than any popular TV SF series ever.
I just think there was particularly much truthfulness and emotional resonance to Garibaldi’s story, including the story thread of his struggles with alcohol. It was introduced in the first-season episode “Survivors” — still one of the early episodes I remember liking best — and came to play a bigger part later on.
I let my complete VHS collection go many years ago and haven’t repurchased the series since, as I rewatched all of it so many times in my earlier years that I still remember most of it nearly photographically.
From “Survivors”, for example, Garibaldi’s sad, regretful, softly spoken lines about how, long in the past, after a tragic event he crawled inside a bottle and didn’t come out for a long time.
I guess characters with regrets, and the numerous ways they cope or fail to cope with them, will be around, and relatable, as long as we human beings continue to fail so spectacularly and so often at being kind to one another.
Googling some of this today, I also noticed something interesting. In a much later episode, he sings “SHOW ME THE WAY TO GO HOME”, which became one of my favorite songs long after BABYLON 5 — so I didn’t remember it had featured on the show. (More of the interesting workings of our minds.)
Specifically, I came to feel very fondly about this song after a friend posted a few years ago that scene from JAWS with the main characters singing it, badly (that’s why it’s so good), in the little boat at night. I’ve since gone back to watch it again a few times.
One of those rare songs that can bring you up when you really need it.
Beauty, Poetry, & Music 