Warren Bluhm's Blog, page 5

The joy of Godzilla

A ranking of the Godzilla movies made me curious about how many of the big guy’s films I actually own. It turns out I have 17 of the 33 flicks on DVD or Blu-Ray here, not far from the shores of Green Bay.

I’m in the process of making it 19, because as soon as I saw that I don’t have Matthew Chernov’s #2 movie — Godzilla vs. Destoroyah — I made arrangements for Amazon to deliver it Tuesday — and it comes with a second film that’s lower on the list.

The list got my attention in part beca...

A vision of smoke and mirrors

© Alain Lacroix | Dreamstime.com

I opened my eyes and saw a vast plain of people climbing over each other, scratching and clawing and seeking approval and validation, looking for love in all the wrong places, people talking without speaking and hearing without listening, a crowd lost in their loneliness, and a monolith in the middle that they struggled to touch, to worship, to — what’s that word where you follow blindly without realizing you’re following anything? They made a great din of abs...

All the pretty toys so shiny

I had other stuff to do on Friday, but something snapped.

For a long time I identified myself as a “journalist, wordsmith and podcaster,” but somewhere over the past five years I stopped saying that last word. 

After all, the last segment of Uncle Warren’s 78 revolutions per minute was sent into the ether more than five years ago now. How dare I call myself a podcaster?

OK, if you sniff around the interwebs, you can still find The Imaginary Bomb, Wildflower Man, 80 episodes of Uncl...

W.B.’s Book Report: The Shadow

When the library delivered the audiobook of The Shadow by James Patterson and Brian Sitts, I thought, uh oh, I don’t want this to be the precedent-setting 100th book I read this year. I’ll wait to finish Several small sentences about writing until after I listen to the widely panned reboot of the iconic 1930s and ’40s pulp hero.

But no, Verlyn Klinkenborg had to hook me with the second half of his clinic about writing brilliant sentences, and the next thing I knew, it was the 99th.

And...

The puppy, freedom, and music

Summer bristles at limits, which makes her a dog after my own heart.

The limits are our way of keeping her safe, but who are we to assume we know what’s good for her? Maybe she is capable of fending for herself.

I see a similarity in the way government looks after us — as if we are dogs who need a guiding hand and limits — and so I empathize when Summer chews at her leash, refuses to acknowledge my call, or pulls at the leash to say, “No, I’m going this way and you can’t stop me, excep...

In the moment

I was singing a nonsense song I’d written, which had a line about a stream of consciousness, when I mis-sang the line and made it even more nonsensical.

But then I had a further thought: What would a scream of consciousness be, if there was such a thing?

And I realized it was the perfect phrase to describe those moments when you’re so caught up in the moment that you scream, “Holy cow, I’m alive! This is real life, and it’s pretty fabulous!” or some such.

I started expanding on that...

Artichokes and roses

One last thing I loved about Michael Nesmith was his quirky habit of giving songs names that never appear in the lyrics.

My favorite group, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, covered two Nesmith tunes in their masterpiece album, Uncle Charlie and His Dog Teddy. The LP begins with “Some of Shelley’s Blues,” which has the refrain “You settle down and stay with the boy who loves you.” No one named Shelley is mentioned in the song, which is country rock, not blues. Also on that album is “Propinquity...

He traveled to the beat of a different drum

“I have no more than I did before, but now I’ve got all that I need, for I love you and I know you love me.”

It was clear from the start that Mike Nesmith was the most talented of the Monkees. For one thing, he was a songwriter, not just a musician, and he wrote some of the band’s best songs, like “Papa Gene’s Blues” on their first album (quoted above), and “Mary Mary” and “The Kind of Girl I Could Love” on More of the Monkees, and my personal favorite, “You Just May Be The One,” and lots...

An election party where nobody came

(Dipping way into the archives for this one, originally posted July 7, 2008.)

Well, it’s been a quiet week in Freedomville, my hometown … I sense a disturbance in the Force, or something. It’s an uneasiness in a soul that has chosen not to participate in the charade we call a “presidential election.” Or the anxiety, if that’s the right word, is something other than that.

The discomfort must be something more than resigning myself to the fact that the two branches of the Party have presente...

It was a Wonderful Life before public domain changed

The story of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life is a heartwarming one that can’t be repeated, “thanks” to changes enacted in copyright law not long after its surge in popularity.

You’ve probably heard the story: The film was a disappointment at the box office in 1946, and its copyright under the old law was allowed to expire 28 years later, in 1974. (It could have been renewed for another 28 years, but never was.) That allowed the film to enter the public domain.

Cash-strapped local TV st...