Noo Yawk.
Where the girls wear miniskirts through the week of Christmas.
Where pizza costs seven dollars a slice.
Where you have time to snap precisely ONE picture before your train leaves.
Where there’s no train to Manassas, but there is a train to Manhasset.
Where a walk down the street reminds you of “Blade Runner.”
“Writing is…. being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.”
— Mary Gaitskill
Photo credit: By David Shankbone (David Shankbone) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
Cover to the Saturday Evening Post, December 4th, 1920.
… when I travel through Union Station this week, I’ll damn sure scope out the locations where “Manhunter” (1986) and Ridley Scott’s “Hannibal” (2000) were filmed. Because I’m a different kind of nerd.
Not gonna ride the carousel and touch some girl’s hair, though. That would be taking things too far.
Photo credit: “Altar in the church of Val-de-Grâce, Paris 5th 008” by Moonik – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
I might not be quite as into Star Wars as everyone else, but I hope that all of my hard-core SW fan friends have a BLAST with the new movie. Your ardent fandom affords me a really interesting experience — it lets me feel as though I am a mainstream guy, while everyone else is a nerd!!
You guys waited a long time for this — especially if you weren’t thrilled with the prequels. I hope this trip into your favorite fictional universe is frikkin’ awesome!
Children today cannot truly comprehend the meaning of the term “Christmas special.” Netflix, Hulu and Youtube (not to mention pirated movie sites) now make “specials” available at leisure. There was a time, kids, when the program you see below was an event unto itself. It aired once a year. If you missed it, then you missed it. (I never did.)
I remember loving most of this, and being allowed a bowl of either chocolate or coffee ice cream from the box in the freezer. (Did anybody else grow up with coffee ice cream?)
You know what would be a very marketable idea? Making a toy line that reproduces the “Misfit Toys.” People would buy those.
That’s so stupid it sounds like a joke.
Actually … it WAS a joke, dating all the way back to 1997, in Kevin Smith’s outstanding “Chasing Amy.” (For those who haven’t seen Smith’s comedy, the black character and the two white characters are all friends, and are in on the staged “shooting” together. It’s a publicity stunt to sell comic books.)
Hey, if you haven’t seen it, “Chasing Amy” is a fantastic movie. It’s one of my all-time favorites, and I think it far better captured “Generation X” than “Clerks” (1994) did.
Then consider giving them “Ujaali,” Laura Enright’s sequel novel to her widely praised “To Touch the Sun.”
“Ujaali” is the second book in Laura’s “Chicago Vampire Series,” and it’s been eagerly awaited ever since the inaugural book won fans over to the story of Narain Khan, the vampire chef. Take a look at the uniformly glowing reader reviews for both “Ujaali” and “To Touch the Sun.” Why not make a gift of both books?
“To Touch The Sun” at Amazon.com
And check out the book trailer for “Ujaali” below!
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 