When I first started writing with aspirations of professional publication, Ray Bradbury was one of the quiet giants who always captured my imagination. If I learned anything from him, it is that the poetry of an idea is more important than all the words used to execute it. He happened to be both an idea…
The difference between an entertaining story and a great one is the difference between predictability and inevitability. A predictable conclusion is one where you guess with a fair amount of accuracy what’s going to happen at each milestone leading to the conclusion. An inevitable story is one where you know the outcome will be positive…
I have mixed feelings about Prometheus. Great direction. Expected. Beautiful to look at. Expected. We get to figure out one of the great mysteries of Alien. Thumbs up. But hiring Damen Lindeloff, one of the heinous masterminds behind the heinous Lost TV show to co-write the script, was not a wise idea. Lindeloff is no Ronald…
The ways in which Tarsem’s Immortals is superior to the Clash of the Titans remake and, in some ways, 300 are almost innumerable. Certainly, 300 paved the way for Immortals. You see that in almost every fight scene in which a combination of bullet-time/normal-time/bullet-time is used. 300‘s indisputably homoerotic obsession with perfect male physiques is…
I often observe that H.P. Lovecraft is the single largest influence on my writing, but I don’t talk or write as much about Charles Baudelaire, specifically how his collection of prose poems, Le Spleen de Paris, completely changed the way I thought about story telling. Although famous for the lovely and wicked Les Fleurs du…
I quite like this comparison of the two novels by author and critic Neil Postman: What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive…
I have several problems with Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and I’m just going to clear my head of them. 1) Nolan’s work is 100% cerebral testosterone. He and Guy Ritchie are cast from the same cloth, with the key exception that Nolan is actually a visionary, a superior director, and doesn’t irritate. More on this…
When people ask me why I moved to New Zealand, I have all sorts of canned answers. Today, I have a very concrete and unique one: because the scale of things here allows thinkers to wrap their heads around complexity at the level of society. American society, especially when you get into urban planning, regulatory…
My backyard compost is now 6 weeks old. It’s dead of winter right now, so the bin doesn’t reach the very hot internal temperatures that accelerate composting. Something proper, however, is happening because the waste is breaking down at a surprisingly rapid rate. My guess is that it’s still 6-8 weeks away from rich, sweet…