Month: March 2016

I meant to take the day off yesterday to see 10 Cloverfield Lane, but more things continued to go wrong with Echo. It’s insane how many things are messed up. Right now AOL is refusing the accept our email, saying that our new IP is not our IP, except it is.

Maybe I’ll try to see it today.

The room where I research the archives of the Supreme Court, at the Division of Old Records in the Surrogate’s Court building at 31 Chambers Street. I’ve only been able to work on my book in very small spurts for the past few weeks.

I was recently reminded of a book I loved, A Manhattan Ghost Story. I read it because I’d given permission to use my name for one of the characters, but I adored this book. It portrayed ghosts as being as clueless and lost about being dead as some of us are about being alive. I wrote a very gushing fan letter to the author and he signed his next book for me!

So I googled him to see what he is up to only to learn that he’d died fairly recently, on October 31, 2015. I think I already knew and had blocked it. It’s just too sad. There was always something so vulnerable about him.

A Manhattan Ghost Story was first optioned to be made into a movie in 1991 and according to Wikipedia, “As of 2015, the film is in development at Touchstone Pictures.” It would make such a great movie, damnit. Make it already. I just wish it had been made in Terry’s lifetime.

I’m going to be a guest at Mitch Horowitz’s Morbid Academy on March 16th at 7pm, if you’re going to be around that night. The Morbid Academy is:

“A monthly series of provocative and useful dialogues with artists, writers, filmmakers, and scholars who broaden our understanding of the ill-considered and the unknown, hosted by PEN Award-winning historian Mitch Horowitz.”

The Academy events are held at the Morbid Anatomy Museum, and you should definitely come early so you can explore the Museum before the panel starts. We’re going to talk about what I learned when I researched the Parapsychology Laboratory of Duke University.

The picture below is one my my favorite shots from the collection that is now at the Rhine Research Center. It pictures three of the scientists working at the lab: Bill Davidson, Betty McMahan and Betty Humphrey.

On February 23, 2016 I participated in a show on WYPR titled: 50 Years of Choral Arts. From their website: “A retrospective look and listen as Choral Arts gets ready for its 50th Anniversary Concert (March 20, 2016). Tom talks to chorus members and special guests who have played an important role in the story of Baltimore Choral Arts, as well as Stacy Horn ….”

Choral Arts Classics is hosted by Tom Hall, who also hosts Maryland Morning on WYPR Radio. In addition to being a well known radio personality, and an Emmy award winner, Tom is the Music Director of the Baltimore Choral Arts Society.

If you like you can listen to the show I was on here.

They’ve got some great shows coming up as well. This one speaks to me the most.

May 3, 2016 9:00 pm
Quest for Peace: On April 26, 2015, one day after the large protest against the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody, and one day before the violence that erupted after Mr. Gray’s funeral, Choral Arts presented a concert entitled Quest for Peace. We’ll hear music from that concert by the Baltic composers Arvo Pärt and Peteris Vasks, and Tom welcomes Chic Dambach, a peace-builder who has worked to end conflict around the world to talk about music’s special role in peace building.

My brother Douglas has always been a generous supporter of my choir, the Choral Society of Grace Church, and that’s him in the audience at one of our concerts. Oh God, so many people have demon eyes in this photograph!

I’m sitting on my couch, trying to relax. Bleecker wasn’t tormenting Finney for a moment, but that just ended. He’s had a snack and now he’s trying to entice Finney to play.

Update: Bleeck chased Finney out of the spot to my left, and now he is napping beside me. (That smoke is my humidifer, which operates 24 hours a day all through the winter. I think the fact that I’ve always used a humidifer in the winter is one of the reasons I have good skin.)

It’s so unfair to Finney. I will have to make it up to him.