Musings from the basement...

I have recorded 15 years of noisy, droning, m2 music

October 14, 2013 0 Comments

For 15 years, I have recorded noisy, droning music under the name m2. Okay, it’s actually been longer than that. Recording music of this sort long pre-dated the m2 project. It even pre-dated owning a four-track recorder. I used to own one of those old twin-deck cassette stereos with a turntable on top. One day I discovered that if you plugged headphones into the mic jack and dubbed a tape from one deck to the other, you could kinda sorta play with the tape and have it record layers on top of one another. It was messy and ugly, but it worked. You could layer music. So I promptly took a cassette I had — I remember what it was, too; a dub of R.E.M….
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Music, Random Musings

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LAKEHURST: The Facebook Page

July 18, 2013 0 Comments

Hey, not fer nuthin’, but my favorite little Pine Barrens town happens to have a Facebook page, and it happens to have been started by yours truly, and it happens to have all sorts of awesome pictures and facts from this great book about Lakehurst. In fact, the page has been going for some time now, and it’s full of AWESOME memories and pictures and general stuff from in and around Lakehurst, like airships, the Hindenburg disaster, life in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, places to drink great New Jersey beer, and loads more. So hey, be cool and click on over and give the page a “like.” I’d be awful appreciative. I might even smile about it or something. And hey, it’d be spiffy…
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Uncategorized, Works by Eric

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My new book comes out soon…

July 15, 2013 0 Comments

Hitchcock's Villains

… so that’s kind of cool. The follow-up to A Year of Hitchcock is due out in, damn, just a few weeks! Called Hitchcock’s Villains: Murders, Maniacs and Mother Issues, this collaboration with Jim McDevitt is a full exploration of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest villains, what makes them tick, the themes that drive the darkness in his movies, and of Hitchcock’s own psyche. I think it’s pretty great. This will be my fifth book, collaborative or otherwise, with a sixth hopefully coming out next year in ebook form via the Philadelphia Weekly. (That project is still up in the air.) The project has actually been in gestation for some time now, practically since A Year of Hitchcock was finished. Basking in the glow of finishing such…
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Alfred Hitchcock, Films, Works by Eric, Writing

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I think I’m a beer writer now…

July 5, 2013 0 Comments

Way back when I first wrote Stuff Every Husband Should Know and contributed to Geek Wisdom, I pitched the idea of doing a beer book to my editor at Quirk Books. I can kinda write, and I like beer, so why not bring the two together for a beer book? I was given a dose of reality. You have no history of beer writing, he said, so pitching a beer book would be difficult. Made sense. I may write, but that doesn’t mean I could suddenly do a great book on growing great tulips. (I could.) I needed experience. So I started blogging about beer. It was a way to get my feet wet and start building cred in the beer world. To be honest,…
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Craft Beer, Works by Eric, Writing

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Re-Watching the Sopranos – Season 5

July 1, 2013 0 Comments

I put my Sopranos series on hold for a while simply because I got busy, but with the recent death of James Gandolfini, it seems appropriate to pick up where I left off. So here are my thoughts on revisiting The Sopranos season 5 many years later. As always, this is written assuming you have watched the season, so SPOILERS ALERTS apply. At the time I first watched this, I felt this was one of the stronger seasons. I still think so. In a way it’s more fragmented than previous seasons, with many short arcs rather than several large arcs (though those are present, too). The mafia side of the drama is compelling despite the main conflict being marital, i.e. Tony and Carmella’s split, which is the big story…
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Television

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