Lawrence C. Connolly's Blog, page 4

The Pub Shall Rise Again

I read the news today, oh boy.

Last Thursday, the texts started arriving.

My daughter got the first one. It was from Liam Macik, a playwright, director, and podcaster who was a frequent special guest at Riley’s Storytelling Nights a few years back.

The second text came to me. It was from Christopher Laughrey, my long-time musical collaborator and bandmate in The Laughrey Connolly Band. Chris and I performed regularly at Riley’s back when it was Paddy’s Pour House.

After that, the...

They Live … again.

Movies don’t change. We do.

As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus proclaimed long ago, “You cannot step into the same river twice.” The reason is simple. Both you and the river change with time.

But experiencing art is different.

Take movies. The original Star Wars trilogy notwithstanding, the films you see in your teens are the same when you share them with your kids and grandkids. And yet, your experience of them can be profoundly different.

That’s how it was for me a couple of ...

More from Milford Fest: Live and In Person.

In an age when professional magazines are inundated with computer-generated submissions and screen actors can be replaced by CG doppelgangers, there are still activities that remain exclusively in the human domain.

I’m referring to in-person events. You can try and simulate them with Zoom and Facetime, but there’s nothing like the real thing, and I saw proof of that yet again while taking part in a series of real-world panels, book signings, and readings at this year’s Milford Readers & W...

Milford: Authors, The Anchorage, and Arrowhead

(Left to right) Bill DeSmedt, Michael Libling, Lawrence C. Connolly, Vaughne Hansen, and Christine Cohen unpack Milford’s place in the sf universe.

Around the world, the town of Milford in eastern Pennsylvania is famous for its role in the development of science fiction.

Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison, Gene Wolfe, James Blish, Virginia Kidd, and Anne McCaffrey are just a few of the luminaries who have traveled to Milford to be part of the scene.

What brought...

Forward into the Past: Milford Writers Festival

Eliot … crashed a convention of science-fiction writers in a motel in Milford, Pennsylvania …. “I love you sons of bitches,” Eliot said …. “You’re all I read any more. You’re the only ones who’ll talk about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one either, but one that’ll last for billions of years.

—from Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Since 1956, when authors Frederik Pohl, Judith Merrill, J...

Ten Years After: The Veins Cycle

[image error] The Veins Cycle:
three novels and ambient music CD. Out of the Past

Today’s throwback post revisits a blog tour from September 2014.

Promoting the upcoming release of Vortex, the third book in the Veins Cycle, the tour featured posts written for other websites.

The first installment was a Proustian interview with the Veins Cycle’s central protagonist–a troubled young man with strange dreams and conflicted ambitions.

Reposted below, the interview follows a format that Vanity Fair ...

The Virtual Real

Bending reality.

I am inspired by the curvature of space. Not necessarily by the physics that Einstein postulated early in the 20th century, but in a more personal way.

There is something in each of us that allows (and sometimes forces) us to bend the hard-edged realities that make up our daily lives.

Surely you’ve experienced this. Fall in love, and the world seems brighter. Smells intensify. The most mundane things become wondrous, and the world’s ugliness melts away. This is the...

Out of the Past

Since this blog site underwent a redesign last summer, I’ve meant to go back through its 1000+ entries to check for broken links and configuration errors.

I finally got around to it this week, working chronologically through a decade of past entries in a process akin to time travel.

Turns out, things are in pretty good shape, but along the way, I’ve come across several broken links to posts that appeared on websites that no longer exist.

So, in addition to tweaking layouts, I’ve b...

Mystery Theatre has Moved

Find PSMT at its new domain.

Launched during the height of the first COVID wave, Prime Stage Mystery Theatre was initially designed to fill a gap left by live theatre performances during those dark months of social distancing. Thus, the theatre company known for “bringing theatre to life” took on the new mission of “bringing theatre to your home.”

Debuting in October 2020 with “A Knavish Piece of Mystery,” the podcast quickly developed a following, so much so that when COVID restrictio...

Origins of Body Horror

Did it begin in the 1980s? A detail from the one-sheet movie poster of Society (1989).

In the decade before computer-generated animation gave us morphing faces in Michael Jackson’s Black or White and the fluid flesh of James Cameron’s Terminator 2, cinema’s masters of practical effects were busily corrupting the human form.

Dick Smith gave us rippling flesh in Altered States (1980); Tom Sullivan, the melting corpse in The Evil Dead (1981); Rob Botin, the spiderhead in The Thing (1982); ...