Authors Electric

 Dooley Wilson, Ingrid Bergman, "Play it, Sam." 1942 I turn 87 on the 16th of this month. That means I was five years old when Ilsa Lund asked Sam to play As Time Goes By . No wonder I've been a lifelong romantic (who writes about time travel a lot.) I vaguely remember first seeing Casablanca at a theatre with my mother. She elbowed me from a Hershey-bar stupor to see one of her Hollywood bit-actor friends, Frank Puglia, as a Moroccan vendor selling Ingrid Bergman a scarf. I posted about Puglia here in 2020. (See " The Phantom of Dream Streets .") It was 1943. I was a precocious kid who could read the funnies and the headlines of newspapers delivered to our front steps every day. I hid under a marble-topped coffee table during air raid drills, laughing at the game of sirens, closed drapes and wardens waving hooded flashlights.  My mother, wth my Nonna Rosa, c. 1960 My Rome-born Nonna Rosa, still kept milk in an "ice-a-box." She didn't own an elec...

"I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it," wrote Paul Theroux welcoming us succinctly aboard The Great Railway Bazaa r.    "Trains sing bewitchment," Theroux added at the start of a four-month rail journey from London through Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, returning via the Trans-Siberian Railway. His 1975 armchair classic depicts people, history, and cultures, more than trains and never complains about difficult accommodations. "If a train is large and comfortable you don't even need a destination." ...I concur.  I've set a few of my stories on trains, including Onion Station (published in Chicago Quarterly Review and in my anthology, Sometimes Ridiculous ). The tale is told from the perspective of a boy on a 1940s transcontinental train trip stopover with his warring mother and father in Chicago. It's taken from life --  an episode in a forthcoming novella largely set on rocking ra...

I should have anticipated the 21st century's demented clown show in 1999 on the rainy November night that I saw Being John Malkovich at a multiplex theatre in San Francisco. The harbinger wasn't so much Spike Jonze's brilliant, surreal comedy itself, but what happened in the theatre that night. I had dropped off my youngest kid after a daddy weekend that Sunday night and felt too awake to go straight back to my apartment. I diverted to catch the late showing of this well-reviewed, bizarre film, which more than lived up to expectations.   About halfway through, when I had finished off my popcorn, the screen went dark, followed by a canned slideshow advertising snack bar treats. There was little reaction from the two dozen-or-so in the theatre. So I waited. And waited. And waited. I checked my watch (This was before our cell phones became smart.) Twenty minutes! Then thirty! The sparse late night audience settled into soft murmuring. Nothing from management. No apparent activ...

What questions do you wish you had asked long-ago loved ones? I don't know how perceptive my questions or illuminating their responses would have been, I would have liked to find out. Having been a journalist for many years, I learned that interviewing is a demanding but unreliable art that requires repetition as well as unabashed perception. Tougher yet if it's of someone close.  I interviewed my paternal grandfather over a week's time when he visited my home in Los Angeles at age 92. I wrote a family memoir based upon that. I wish I had asked him so many more follow-up questions before he flew off to Italy where he passed away several years later.  Nowadays I query my fictional characters to add to their dossier, and still there are unanswered questions. No matter the homework, characters remain as much a mystery as real people. If we're lucky, one way or another, we develop a sense of what's true for a character and what's not. I've always been fond of fa...

It's getting so there's no future in futurism. The future nips at our heels faster than we can predict it. Take the latest chatter about ChatGPT. Professors say it's the end of the world. Standard fare for Scici writers - warning of misuse, while speculating on our replacement by the instant proliferation of this AI phenomenon.  ChatGPT explains itself succinctly as any human: "ChatGPT is a large language model developed by  OpenAI  that can be used for natural language processing tasks such as text generation and language translation. It is based on the GPT-3.5 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3.5) model, which is one of the largest and most advanced language models currently available. All this is free of charge, mind you. (Or course, nothing is truly "free" in tech world.) Free means getting billions of users to provide content for free - content in quality and quantity promising to be worth trillions of dollars in return. Data is to Internet enterpr...

"I know. Just what we need; another Christmas story," I joked to my cousin, Broadway satirist, lyricist and playwright Gerard Alessandrini on the phone the other day about my latest holiday offerings. "You can never have too many Christmas stories," he reassured me. Good ones that is, but you can't have the best without putting up with some of the worst. Christmas and the holidays take a beating every year as we endeavour to survive being inundated with canned mercantile sentimentality.  Cousin Gerard, like my four grown daughters, however, keeps his eyes on the brightest ornaments on the tree--   albeit with tongue planted in cheek. Gerard and I grew in an extended family that celebrated the holidays as joyfully as circumstances would allow. Our festivities included transcontinental reunions and week-long Italian feasts-- that included Christmas Eve crab cioppino in San Francisco and Maine lobster in Boston in days gone by. The feasting is more fictional thes...