Transmissions
A continuous signal on any and all frequencies about any number of topics. The aim is to be interesting and engaging, without ranting or screeching. If you’re looking for a glimpse of what’s percolating in one writer’s gray matter on any given day, you’ve come to the right place.
Short Report
I’m back home and still unpacking – physically and mentally – from ShortCon, the annual one-day writing conference in Alexandria, Virginia, for writers of short crime fiction. Launched in 2024, ShortCon focuses primarily on the writing craft, but also serves as a...
Chinatown Revisited
Sometime in the early 2000s, after reading a boatload of American and British literature in high school and college, and an even bigger boatload of crime novels and thrillers in the years after college, I caught the pulp fiction bug. Maybe it started with the Tarzan...
100 Miles
On the centennial of trumpeter and composer Miles Davis’ birth, there’s nothing I can say about him that hasn’t already been said by writers and historians far more knowledgeable about his music – and about jazz in general – than I will ever be. But I can remember the...
Requiem for a Pup
We let Wendel go yesterday. He was a 13-year-old collie-shepherd mix who joined our family in the fall of 2013. He was just ten weeks old at the time, and our kids were twelve and ten years old. Several months ago, he started having trouble getting up and down the...
Roger Corman’s “X” Factor
Somewhere during my middle school years in the mid-1970s, I started dialing in to the late-night sci-fi/horror movie of the week that the CBS affiliate in Cleveland (WJW, Channel 8) aired every Friday night after the eleven o’clock news. I was probably twelve or...
A Shadow Takes Shape
The Shadow, the star of his own pulp magazine and a popular radio drama during the 1930s and ‘40s, takes another incremental step closer to his 100th birthday this month. We can be fairly certain that he’s figured out in that stretch of time what evil lurks in the...
Suspended Programming
"Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew When I bit off more than I could chew…" I was going to start this post with an explanation of the lyrics above, and how they come from a song that originated in 1967 with a French pop singer and songwriter named Claude...
In Memory of Gus McCrae
Since the silent era in the early years of the 20th century, Hollywood has generated a seemingly endless parade of leading men and leading ladies, many of whom have become iconic in the decades since their passing. In parallel to this procession is an even longer line...
The Long Goodbye
No songwriter consciously sets out to write a standard. A song becomes a standard on its own over time, after it’s been recorded and re-recorded and re-interpreted by numerous artists specializing in various styles over the course of several decades or even...
Hornet on the Air
Last summer I wrote in this space about my first encounter with vinyl LP recordings of the Superman radio program of the 1940s and early ‘50s. I was only about ten years old at the time of my discovery, but I’d already had an understanding what the golden age of radio...