The album that started my Jazz Newsletter and interest in the music of John Coltrane leading to the book Spirit Catcher. Sometimes a piece of music offers a gateway to a new world.

Great Plains / The Stryker-Slagle Band (Hit the play button in the bottom video before starting to read this blog) In our nervous, narcisstic culture, nothing seems permanent. There is the Tweet of the day or the hour. Or the news about some celebrity. All quickly forgotten and replaced by the latest Tweet or news. […]

Hoppy’s Black & White Palm Desert Home The screenplay The Once & Future Cowboy was written after the nonfiction article “The Black Knight” and the story “Boots McKenzie.” It imagines a famous cowboy star (like Hopalong Cassidy) has retired to a town in the desert where he has run out of money and is forced […]

Hopalong Cassidy  The Black Night is the nonfiction version of our short story Boots McKenzie in the post before this one. It is an article on a resident of Palm Desert, California in the 50s through the 70s named William Boyd or Hopalong Cassidy. It is about his early career and his trials and errors […]

Boots McKenzie = Hopalong Cassidy This is what they call narrative fiction based on the retirement years of television actor William Boyd (AKA Hopalong Cassidy) to the desert town of Palm Desert. My family lived in Palm Desert from the early 60s and remembered him in town and his various antics in his later years. They […]

Trouble is my Business / Raymond Chandler  In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Raymond Chandler became a writer of detective fiction after losing his job as an oil company executive in LA during the Great Depression. Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is considered to be a founder of the […]

“Boys will be boys … even in the robot apocalypse.” _____________________________________________________ A lot of fathers and mothers have engaged their children to make a short film. But few have ever made one that looks like it came from a major studio. That is, until Canadian Brian Vowles decided to make a short science fiction film […]

El Capitan in Yosemite Consider the movies up for Oscars. The key films are in the major film genres like drama, thriller, comedy and romance. The genre of documentary film is never considered one of the big, important genres by the movie industry. But for me, the greatest film in the current Oscar crop is […]