I get interested in things . . .
and I write about them. I focus on movies, TV, and music, sometimes through a personal lens, always with a connection to broader cultural currents.
If you look around, you can see I've enjoyed the rare fortune of a widely varied career, in film, TV, playwriting, and academia. Combined with long-ago study as a philosophy major, they've given me a broad perspective, and a good perch from which to write.
With a dozen scholarly presentations and a small raft of publications to date, my goal is to expand a few of my projects into books for publication, and, as always, to follow the next thing as far as it will take me.
Three Easy Pieces
The Lost Rolling Thunder Show
The Dylan Review
A personal essay recapturing the strange, chaotic vibe of the mi-70s, through my misadventures in the front row at Dylan's circus-like Rolling Thunder Revue. AKA, "The Goat, The Rapture, Bob Dylan and Me."
A Technicolor Key to Trump's Desires
Los Angeles Review of Books
I became obsessed with the seemingly anodyne 1950's family film, Houseboat, and found within it a deep connection to today's political predicament.
Messing With Maps: David Foster Wallace's Boston
Los Angeles Review of Books
A deep dive into the ways that Wallace used his real-life Boston haunts to create Infinite Jest, in much the same way that Joyce used Dublin in Ulysses.
Current Projects
ON DANCE IN FILM
Increasingly, today's major filmmakers are using dance sequences to advance narrative, deepen characters, and engage their audiences on a visceral level. I've made a study of over 200 dance sequences to create a new understanding of how and why these sequences work. An initial presentation at the 2026 Pop Culture Association Conference will be followed by expansion into a book-length project.
ON MICHELANGELO
ANTONIONI'S BLOW-UP
Fifty years after its debut, Blow-Up now appears both as the essential film of the 1960s, and as a harbinger of today's fractured world, one where everyone is invited to make their own reality. "Technology will one day shape all our actions," Antonioni predicted. A book-length essay on the movie, technology, cultural change, and political effects.
ON WHATEVER SHOWS
UP AROUND THE CORNER
I am open to input.