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.
Fifty-Year Run
Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen’s third studio album, turns fifty this week. A half-century after the fact, most rock critics and historians consider it a monumental recording. At the time, though, it was a struggling musician’s Hail Mary. By the end of 1973, the...
Third-Floor Noir
Film noir is like any other creative aesthetic or artistic movement. The closer the examination, the more difficult if not impossible it becomes to define exactly what it is or exactly when or where it started. I’ve said the same about music in the past. Fill a room...
War Is Over
The surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945, marked the beginning of the end of World War II, but VJ Day – shorthand for victory in Japan – was the end of it all. Eighty years ago this week, after U.S. planes dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on...
Pulpfest Cometh!
Pulpfest 2025 is less than a week away, beginning on Thursday, August 7, and continuing through mid-day Sunday, August 10. For the uninitiated, Pulpfest is an annual convention of pulp fiction collectors and dealers, as well as writers and publishers of modern-day...
Fantastic: First and Final
A couple weeks ago in this space I mentioned that the animated Superman cartoons produced by Filmation Studios for Saturday morning TV in the late '60s were my gateway drug to comic books a couple years later when I started reading. But there was another animated...
Lipstick Traces
A couple months ago I watched Ken Burns’ 2011 documentary series, Prohibition. As he does with all his subjects, Burns crafted an engaging and enlightening retrospective – not only an examination of Prohibition itself, but also the political and social climate of the...
Steel on Vinyl
I found Superman on the back of a Corn Flakes box. Okay, that’s not exactly true. Actually, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Superman. My first exposure to the Man of Steel was the animated cartoons produced by Filmation Studios in the late 1960s...
All Around in the Dark
On this particular Independence Day at this particular moment in history, I’m thinking about The Grapes of Wrath, the 1939 novel by John Steinbeck. It’s the story of a Dust Bowl family from Oklahoma heading west on a roll of the dice, in search of a better life that...
America’s Mom
Veteran actress June Lockhart turns 100 this week, which frankly makes me feel kind of old myself. Born June 25, 1925, she got an early start and eventually compiled a resume that encompassed stage, screen and television over the course of almost nine (nine!) decades....
Honorable Menschen
I grew up Catholic, in a neighborhood with only one Jewish family that I can recall, so I didn’t have much exposure to Jewish culture or traditions until after college. But I did read a lot of comics during those early years, and I read a lot of books about the...