brendan halpin

Ah, Christmastime! Santa! Reindeer! People bleeding out in the snow!

I am in Cincinnati so I decided to take a free evening to see Lez Zeppelin at the historic Ludlow Garage.

The Boston Globe is re-investigating the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart. Apparently the Marky Mark song wasn’t the last word on the case, and after all these years, there is still new information to uncover.

I have no objection to this except for the way the Globe, and for that matter the entire Boston Media, treats the deaths of people who are not wealthy white women from the suburbs.

So here’s what I know about one such case with a lot of unanswered questions. I’ve been pestering journalists to look into this for years, but since it concerns the death of a Black man with a criminal record who lived in public housing, nobody seems to care. I’ve given up hope that the Globe or HBO or anybody with resources will ever bother to try to get to the bottom of this case. I’m presenting it here because Burrell Ramsey-White was a real person I knew, and while I have no hope he’ll ever get justice, I don’t want the official story of his death, riddled with holes and inconsistencies, to be the one we remember.

I’ve recently decided to give away all of my writing that’s not currently under contract to a publisher. Novels, short stories, whatever. If I write it, I’m making it available for free. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’d like to share my personal and political rationale for this.

Old friend Seamus Cooper, author of The Mall of Cthulhu, stopped by yesterday and dropped off a story in manuscript form. “A little break from my arcane studies!” he said before disappearing into the night. I present it here for your amusement.

I had a three-hour solo drive to do, so I went to the ol’ Libby app to grab an audio book. Ah, here’s Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song! With narration by a passel of respected celebrities!

I’m not a Dylan cultist, but I do know he’s got an encyclopedic knowledge of (American, at least) popular music, and he has written some great songs, so I thought it would be entertaining to hear a well-informed master of the craft give some insights into various songs.

WOW, was I ever wrong.

Everybody else in my house is sick, which means horror movies on the big TV for me! This week’s selections go from the sublime to the ridiculous, and if you think you can tell which is which just by the title, you’re absolutely right!

The Netflix show, not the anti-reproductive-freedom Sex Pistols song. (How did John Lydon end up a fascist? Real head-scratcher!)

Anyway, Bodies actually concerns one body that is found in four different time periods and investigated by four different detectives. The performances are top notch, the script is smart and convoluted and features a number of those WTF twists we expect in a time-travel show. (Yes, Futurama fans, a character in this show does in fact do the nasty in the pasty and thereby become their own ancestor, just like Fred Ward in Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann).

But what I’d really like to talk about is the moral courage this show displays. This is gonna involve some spoilers, so…

Oh, wow, this is a gloriously awful movie. Christopher Atkins (star of The Blue Lagoon, A Night in Heaven, and The Pirate Movie) and Michelle Johnson (of the execrable Blame it on Rio as well as Waxwork and Death Becomes Her) star as a TV reporter and her cameraman who investigate a series of bird attacks.

So I read Schrader’s Chord by Scott Leeds over the weekend. It’s a horror novel about cursed records that open a portal to the land of the dead. I’m a music nerd with a soft spot for stories about forbidden texts (or, in this case, records) filled with dangerous arcane knowledge. So this should be right up my alley.