Stuff

Carol and her sister Christy are on an eleven day vacation on the east coast. They've spent yesterday and today at a Cape Cod hotel so they can hang around with our friends Kevin and Kate McCarthy. Carol says even at 93 Kevin is as dashing and courtly as ever. Nobody tells showbiz stories than Kevin. The vacation cultimates in three days with our son in CT. Granddaughter Kate is having her fourth birthday.

--------William Castle

There's an excellent article on Wlliam Castle on the Time Out London website. Thanks to John Betancourt I have excellent copies of Castle's first three films. They were based on the popular 1940s radio series The Whistler and they are hard-core noir. In fact two of the storylines are based on Cornell Woolrich stories.

---------Roger Ebert

Roger says goodbye to the tv show he helped create. And that made him famous. A melancholy piece that choked me up a few times. Brought back so many memories. As I've said before Roger and I were friends in the Fifties and eary Sixties because of science fiction fandom. (Look in the Amazing Stories of that time and you'll see the name of a certain Bill Crider in there, too.) But at my age and in my health the memoir reminded me of how god damned strange life is.

The people back then. Dick Lupoff, who still writes some of the most unique and memorable fiction of our time. Kent Moomaw, who maybe had more raw talent than any of us, dead by his own hand at seventeen. An excited post card from Marion Zimmer Bradley telling me about selling her novel The Door Through Space to Ace Books. Ron Haydock the most dashing of us all fronting a really good Chicago rock band and then heading to California where nothing went right and he ended up buried in soft corn porn and getting killed by a truck while hitchhiking. One of three sweetest women on the planet Juanita Coulson, and a gifted wonderful writer she is. And her husband Buck who loved playing the curmudgeon. Their fanzine Yandro able to brighten my bluest day. The guy who ended up joning the American Nazi party. The guy who tried to murder his wife. The guy who always had the finest grass an earthling ever partook of--and happy he was to hand it out. Seeing Roger again in the mid-Sixties when I was producing commercials in Chicago (man, Chicago had a lot of bars). For the most part still the finest and most interesting group of people I've ever known.

for the rest go here:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/07/the-balcony-is-closed.html