Christmas 2016

Hello dear reader,
I’m posting because I’m sick of seeing my dead blog stare me in the face each time I open my browser. I am spending Christmas this year in Colorado. Next Christmas I will have completed the novel I am working on and will have it available for sale.

When you write something on your blog, you are committing to doing something in front of the entire world. So here I am, committing to publishing a novel in the next 364 days!

Changes

I am embarking on an overhaul of this website. The goal is to make it about my writing (fiction and non-fiction) in general rather than strictly advertising my services as a freelance writer. I have a couple of stories that are in various stages of production, and there are a few Doctor Who-related blog posts that I have been meaning to write.

I have been watching “Trial of a Timelord” for the first time in 20 years and it has been a revelation. I have been meaning to do a 6th Doctor retrospective, so this is a great place to start.

I will share more about the fiction I am writing as well.

In the meantime, I wanted to put the blog back on the front page where it belongs.
Thanks,
-Brian

Ora et Labora

My article about Our Lady of the Rock Monastery, a community of Benedictine nuns was the cover story in the July/August 2015 print edition.

Here’s a link to the online version of the story- Ora et Labora: On Shaw Island, Benedictine nuns share lives of work, prayer and hospitality

When I first contacted Northwest Catholic about writing for them, I pitched this story idea. After writing a bunch of online articles for them, they decided to let me write the story.

I had came across the monastery a couple of years ago when searching for Benedictine communities in Washington state. They sounded really interesting, but I never really had a reason to go to Shaw Island. My wife, daughter and I went for an afternoon visit last summer as part of a vacation to the San Juan Islands and I returned earlier this year to get more background for my article. It is a beautiful, holy place. I was glad to hear that the Mothers liked my article and I hope to visit them again soon.

New Batch of Articles for Northwest Catholic

NWCatholicLogo2

This week two new articles were posted on the recently updated Northwest Catholic website:
Organist honored for fifty years of liturgical music-making: A parish in Federal Way, WA celebrated the amazing milestone of their wonderful organist.
Evangelizing ‘green:’ Our Lady of Guadalupe parish adds solar panels: A parish in West Seattle is way ahead of the curve when it comes to saving energy- and money.

I now have a pretty decent group of articles for Northwest Catholic. Check out my Portfolio page for the complete list.

I have been having a great time writing these articles as well. The people who I have been interviewing are all committed Catholics who are out there in the world trying to make a difference. Hearing their stories is really inspiring and made me think long and hard about what I could be doing to help. Perhaps writing is my vocation…

Site Redesign Complete + Future Plans

Greetings and salutations! If you have been a regular reader of this blog or at least a regular visitor to this site, you may have noticed that it has been completely redesigned.
My main goals for the remodel were to:
1) Make the site about my writing, and
2) Pick a WordPress theme that was mobile-friendly. It’s pretty simple as far as whiz-bangery goes, but the focus of the site is the content not the graphics. There will be slight tweaks as I create more content, but I expect to keep this theme for a while.

As for this blog, I promise to post on a regular basis when I have an interesting idea for an article. Most of my blogging focus in the near term is going to be on the Infogration Consulting blog where I am going to expound upon and define the idea of “infogration.”

Let me know what you think of the redesign- thanks!

Last of the Projectionists: “The Wolf of Wall Street” is Not the End of 35mm Film

A few days ago, a story from the L.A. Times announced Paramount Pictures had become the first Hollywood movie studio to release a film in an all-digital format. No 35mm copies were produced. What is even more interesting was that the film- “The Wolf of Wall Street-” was directed by Martin Scorsese, one of the highest-profile proponents of film preservation. Has the “end of film” arrived? While it certainly looks grim for film, I believe that it will survive.

I am a film buff and a filmmaker. I have also been a film archivist and a projectionist during the last decade when 35mm was the main format for commercially releasing films in movie theatres.

The way films are going to be released, and the public is going to see them has completely changed in the last five years, and not always for the better. Sure you can see live events in movie theatres but the sound and picture quality are not the same as 35mm. I am certain that just as records nearly died but did not because there were aficionados who kept the format alive long enough for a new generation to discover it, so will film.

I will continue to write about the topic of the transition of 35mm to digital in movie theatres in this space. In particular, I will look for stories from the perspective of the projectionists and the theatres on the margins that may not be able to/don’t want to make the transition, the aesthetics of film and moviegoing, and why this matters in the 21st century.

Adventures of an American Whovian, Part 4: “…And then I was you!”

Spring 2005, Koreatown, Los Angeles, California

After 9 years of waiting, the moment had arrived- a brand new episode- an entire series (!) of Doctor Who was waiting to be watched. I pressed play and was blown away. I knew right after watching it that the New Series could actually be a hit, but little did I know what was going to happen, but that was way in the future. That day, all I knew was that I would never again have to pine for the return of Doctor Who- I just had to wait for the next season. The curmudgeonly American Whovian was full of hope once again…

The Fox Doctor Who Movie may have not been a success at the time, but it is a critical bridge- Doctor Who was never “rebooted;” it kept the historical continuity, showed what Doctor Who could be like with good American-level special effects, and introduced the possibility of a younger, more handsome Doctor who could find romance (or at least his companions could have an unrequited love crush on the Doctor). It was a test case, and ultimately was probably a key component in both the series not getting picked up by Fox in America in 1996 and getting the new series green-lighted in 2003.

The New Series of Doctor Who while billed as being a different series, is nonetheless understood to be a continuation of the Classic Series. From the first episode of Series One, you know it is the Doctor, and we haven’t seen him in a long time, and big things happened while he was gone. The Ninth Doctor was, in terms of keeping the series going, as important as the Second Doctor. In both instances, they turned to great actors who had to re-invent the role. Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor ensured that the series would continue after “The Doctor” (now referred to as the First Doctor) left the series. Christopher Eccleston had to update the role for the 21st century and create a character that a new viewer would find intriguing yet still satisfy the fanboys.

The Ninth Doctor was fantastic indeed. Eccleston played the part like none of the other actors before or after him. Russell T. Davies, the producer (who was a huge fan and became a famous TV writer/producer in England) and the guy responsible for bringing Doctor Who back, created a perfect story arc for the first season. It introduces new viewers to the big Doctor Who universe without overwhelming them, basically telling the entire story of the Doctor through one particular Doctor over 13 episodes. People may beg to differ, but I think this was intended from the beginning- it’s the only way I see Eccleston agreeing to take the role. Not to take away anything from Russell T. Davies’ vision or the writing, but without the performances and chemistry from Eccleston and the unexpectedly fantastic Billie Piper, the show would have been a one and done.

I knew something was different when other people watched it. My girlfriend at the time, who had politely watched “The Ark in Space” one time with me, was riveted as we watched each episode of the new series every week. A dear old friend of mine who had seen more than a few episodes of the classic series told me that I had been right all along about Doctor Who. After the series premiered in England, the ratings were huge- the general public was clamoring for more. The only question was- would it catch on in the US?

January 2006- Gallifrey One Convention, the Marriott Hotel near LAX, Los Angeles, California

After a long and strange trip to Northern California, I found myself newly single and back in Hollywood. It just so happened that the day after I arrived back in town, there was going to be a Doctor Who Convention. Free to set my own schedule once more, and seeing what a great lineup they had (no Doctors, unfortunately) I decided to finally attend my first-ever sci-fi convention of any kind- Gallifrey One (in the Seventeenth (and a half) Century).

While there were unfortunately no Doctors in attendance, there were two companions from the classic series, Mary Tamm (RIP) and Louise Jameson. The big attraction was that there were a lot of the people who had worked on Series One, including Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, Nicholas Briggs, and Noel Clarke.

My first day at the convention was something of a massive letdown. Whereas I had hoped to enter a crowded convention and meet a bunch of new friends and a hot female Doctor Who fan or three, I was shocked to see not a whole lot of people. I chalked this up to it being a bridge year- even with the new series, nearly all the people who attended this year were old-school hardcore fans and since it hadn’t even officially been shown or released in the US yet, there were no new ones in attendance. Since it was all old fans, the audience skewed much older and I was one of the youngest people there. Despite repeated attempts to deliberately strike up conversations, I did not really hang out with anybody.

After dinner, most of the fans, who seemed to have all known each other for a long time, retreated up to their hotel rooms to do whatever serious con-goers do in their rooms. I was about to leave for the evening, but I decided on a whim to get a nightcap at the hotel bar. Much to my surprise, a big contingent of the convention guests- specifically Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, and Noel Clarke were hanging out at the bar as there really wasn’t anywhere else for them to drink. The crazy thing was that none of the other convention goers were in the bar. I went up and introduced myself and spent the weekend drinking with them.

I ended up drinking with Moffat, Gatiss and Clarke every night for the rest of the weekend. It was one of those experiences that I’m pretty sure you don’t usually get to have at a sci-fi convention. Now, remember, none of these guys was as famous in America as they are now, but Gatiss and Moffat were, at least in Doctor Who circles. I think they were appreciative of the fact that I had no ulterior motive except to shoot the breeze, give them tips on stuff to do in LA, and talk Doctor Who- but not too much. I remember Mark Gatiss in particular being really cool- he politely listened as I explained my theory of how the Doctor Who Movie was so important and how Russell T. Davies had taken so much from it, and he made fun of this Doctor Who button that I had picked up:”Oh, I bet you pick up lots of girls with that one!” My only regret is I didn’t come out and ask either Moffat and Gatiss how I could become a writer for Doctor Who, which has been a lifelong dream of mine and one I am still actively pursuing.

The next 2 days during the sparsely attended convention were less exciting than the evenings. I couldn’t go and hang out with those guys during the day as they were being carefully shepherded around by con staff. The panels, however, more than made up for it, especially the one where we watched “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances” with Steven Moffat doing live commentary. I just checked and the 2014 Gallifrey One convention is already sold out months in advance, but I bought a ticket the day of and was one of maybe 20 people in the room for this panel.

Another thing that I got to do was be one of the first Americans to see “The Christmas Invasion” with David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor. I thought he gave a solid performance and was looking forward to see where he took the role.

Little did I know that David Tennant would become THE Doctor and create a whole new generation of fans, which I have always been happy about, as he grew up as a fan.

While I enjoyed him as the Doctor, I still can’t believe how popular he became. While the Ninth Doctor made Doctor Who a critical and ratings success in England and ensured there would be at least another season, the Tenth Doctor is the one who turned the show into the phenomenon it has become today. In the minds of most casual viewers as well, David Tennant is “The Doctor” of the New Series as Tom Baker is for the Classic Series. I’m sure it has a lot to do with the fact that he is also a great actor and a handsome man. It seems that injecting some sex appeal and a dollop of romantic tension into Doctor Who was the golden ticket to widespread popularity.

Another big factor was the fact that the New Series came out 8 years P.B.T.V.S (Post-Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Buffy was, in my mind, the moment when geek culture finally became part of the mainstream. The CGI special effects coming into their maturity in the late 1990s-early 2000s helped quite a lot as well, but after the rapid-fire dialogue and non-stop action of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sci-fi in general has never been the same. The New Series of Doctor Who has the same frenetic pacing popularized in Buffy. The Doctor Who Movie was one of the last bits of sci-fi TV before the new pacing kicked in. At least the New Series was able to capture this; by contrast, the Star Trek franchise was in the same boat Doctor Who was in the ‘90s until they put out the new “rebooted” J.J. Abrams movies.

Something about David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor really captured the zeitgeist and it became a huge hit through word of mouth in the geek community. I was delighted to hear that Steven Moffat was going to become the producer of Doctor Who after Russell T. Davies left. With Moffat as the producer and Matt Smith nailing it as the Eleventh Doctor, the show started to really crack into the mainstream in the US, making the cover of mainstream magazines like Entertainment Weekly.

Whereas the 40th Anniversary of Doctor Who in 2003 wasn’t really celebrated at all, the 50th Anniversary is a worldwide media phenomenon. The 50th Anniversary show will be shown live at the same time all across the world on Saturday, November 23rd, 2013. On Monday, November 25th, the episode, which was shot in 3D, will be shown worldwide in movie theatres (of course I have a ticket).

These days, I will be at the grocery store and see a mother with a Doctor Who t-shirt or on the road and see a car with a “My other car is a TARDIS” bumper sticker. I even went into a drugstore in Seattle the other day and there were all sorts of licensed Doctor Who merchandise for kids to buy. The Eleventh Doctor has proven, in America at least, to be the most popular of all. For most of my life, I felt like the keeper of a flame and had to zealously guard lest its memory be snuffed out forever. Now, I think it is safe to say that Doctor Who isn’t going to go anywhere for a long time- and I couldn’t be happier.

Remembering John F. Kennedy: Friday, November 22, 2013

For the past week, I have been doing a series about the 50th anniversary of a television program. I would be remiss to let today pass by without acknowledging another more important and somber anniversary of an event that occurred 50 years ago today- the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

As the son of the daughter of two Irish Catholics who immigrated to America and moved to the Boston area,
John F. Kennedy has always been a towering mythological figure in my life. Here was this man, who was an Irish Catholic like us, who was born less than 5 miles away from our house; he had become the President of the United States and then died. Streets, schools and parks all over the Boston area were renamed in his honor. Pictures of him were all over my grandparents’ house, including a plate commemorating the lives of John and his brother, Robert. The only other people to get their pictures hung on the wall were either family or Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary.

Once I got a little older, my parents told me that John and Robert hadn’t just died, they had been assassinated. It was this terrible moment in their lives that both of my parents remembered vividly. Now I knew who did it, but not why.

My mother took me to visit the house where he was born, and to the JFK Museum. She showed me a silver Kennedy half-dollar coin in a special case that she got shortly after his death. When my family went on vacation to Washington D.C., we paid our respects at John’s grave with the Eternal Flame.

Recently, my mother gave me my grandmother’s missal. Inside were treasured mementos and mass cards of loved ones, including John Kennedy’s.

The front of  mass card for President Kennedy kept by my grandmother.

The front of a mass card for President Kennedy kept by my grandmother.

The back of a mass card for President Kennedy kept by my grandmother.

The back of the mass card.

Over the years, my interest in John F. Kennedy has never waned. As I learned more about his private conduct I became angry at him, as it tarnished my heroic mental portrait. In the past few years, however, I have come to see him as a man, and his heroic acts, along with the not-so-admirable things made me appreciate him once more. Listening to his speeches and learning more about his policies, I began to admire him once again as a political figure. Seeing his mass card treated so reverently by my grandmother reaffirmed the almost-personal relationship this man had with my family as well as other Catholics.

Yet the big question- why he died- still remains unanswered. As no satisfactory answer has ever been found, it has given me the lifelong feeling that something is not quite right in America.

Now, 50 years on, he’s no longer John F. Kennedy but “JFK,” which has nearly become a proper noun unto itself and shorthand for many other things. Seeing the mass card again this morning reminded me that, in the end, he was just a man. Now, however, I can look back at this tragic day through the lens of a husband and a father. The country lost their President, but a wife sat next to her husband as his life was taken away by evil, and two children lost their father. Today, let us remember the death of a man named John F. Kennedy.

Adventures of an American Whovian, Part 3:The Wilderness Years, or Chillin’ With The Shobogans (1989-2005)

It is late 1989. I’m in eighth grade, and my adolescence is beginning to unfold. There are lots of changes happening in my life, but two constants were the Boston Red Sox and Doctor Who. In fact, with all the frustration and heartache involved being a Doctor Who fan during this time and being a Red Sox fan had a lot in common. Not only that, Doctor Who was changing as well. With Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor, the show was a lot edgier than it had ever been. Apparently the people in charge at the BBC didn’t get the memo about how great it was and, while not exactly cancelling Doctor Who, did not bring it back for another season.

Doctor Who was never officially cancelled but there was always the hope, at least for the first year or so after the announcement that it would come back like it had a few years before. But it didn’t- not for a while. At that point, there was no way of knowing- for all I knew that was the end of Doctor Who. It was time for me to regenerate into the longest- and loneliest- phase of my Doctor Who fandom…

The non-cancellation of Doctor Who was a grievous, unforgivable outrage that I was powerless to do anything about and had like the ending anything else and move on. The blow had been softened a little by the fact that I discovered a new friend who was a fellow Whovian that had cable. We talked shop, traded Target books and watched Doctor Who (and Red Dwarf, which turns 25 this year!) over at his house Saturday afternoons on New Hampshire Public Television. Eventually my parents got cable too and I soon amassed a formidable collection of Doctor Who on VHS.

Not only that, but about a year after the non-cancellation, a new range of Doctor Who novels put out by Virgin Books appeared. The old Target/Pinnacle books were just novelizations of old stories and they were written for kids. These new Virgin Doctor Who novels were full-length novels that were literally “New Adventures” of the Doctor and Ace. The last two seasons of the Seventh Doctor had seen the show go into a more adult direction. The Doctor seemed to know a lot more about things than he did before and was openly manipulating events to the point of being almost, well- he wasn’t always the clear-cut good guy he had been for nearly the entire series. The British TV viewing audience apparently wasn’t ready for such a shift in the Doctor’s personality. These more adult themes were able to be explored in the New Adventures. A big shout out to Tyler at Pandemonium Books and Games in Cambridge, MA for always keeping Doctor Who books in stock!

Back cover of a dog-eared "New Adventures"

Back cover of a dog-eared “New Adventures”

The writers of the New Adventure books were Doctor Who fans who were older than I was but were new writers. It sounded as if I had a good story idea, I could submit it to Virgin. I came up with quite a few good ideas but never sent anything in, but it gave me a peek into the publishing world that I have found useful now that I am a writer.

High school happened. Girls, music, homework, sports, and a thousand other things vied for my attention, yet if I needed to unwind I would throw in a Doctor Who video. College happened. My freshman year, I got internet for the first time, and by internet, I mean the old school e-mail (my email handle was “matrix”), newsgroups and Telnet version. I soon discovered rec.arts.doctorwho, a newsgroup featuring a lot of posts by some of the guys who actually wrote the New Adventures. While it was cool to know that there were apparently millions of other Doctor Who fans out there, I was completely isolated from them. Nobody in my life I liked Doctor Who, and if I eventually brought it up to a new friend or potential girlfriend, I would get some strange looks. “Oh, you mean the weird old English show they used to show on PBS with the afro guy who had the scarf and the weird theme song? Woo-eee-ooo! You still watch that?”

During my sophomore year of college, wonderful rumors began to fly around and eventually coalesced into some sort of fact. They were finally going to bring Doctor Who back as a TV Movie of the Week on Fox. After I came back from Christmas Break in early 1996, the UMass Amherst computer science department announced that they were giving out floppy disks with one of those “web browser” programs we had been hearing so much about that allowed you to look at “web pages” and “surf” “the Internet.” Of course I used my new web browser to look “online” for information about the new Doctor Who film. One of the first things I ever watched on the modern Internet was the Fox trailer for the movie.

Here are the Doctor Who Movie promos in all their cheesy 1990s Fox commerical-style glory:

Fox Promo #1:

FOX Promo #2:

FOX Promo #3:

As the date of the Doctor Who Movie premiere- Tuesday, March 14, 1996- neared, I knew I had to do something. I reserved the TV in my dorm common room for that evening and started to put up flyers all over campus urging people to come and watch Doctor Who. That night, about 20 people showed up. How many of them were actually there because of the flyer or just wandered in, I don’t know, but it was so exciting to see it on TV once again. I have a special place in my heart for the Doctor Who movie- I always thought Paul McGann, if given a proper chance, could have been one of the best Doctors, but the Fox executives didn’t see it the same way. The movie was up against the final episode of Roseanne or something, and got blown out of the water in the ratings in America. Despite good ratings in England, no series was commissioned.

This looked like it was truly the end of Doctor Who.

Life continued on, however. College graduation, real world, jobs, girlfriends, other interests, but Doctor Who was always a part of my life. Throughout the 1990s, however, nearly every episode of Doctor Who was put on video and the trend continued on DVD and quite a few made it into my collection. An interest in the missing episodes of Doctor Who turned into a job and nearly a career as a film archivist.

Every so often, I would try to introduce someone who I thought might get it to the wonders of Doctor Who, and they would politely watch an episode or maybe soldier on through a whole story but that usually was as far as it went. Anyone who knew me knew that it was this huge thing in my life but weren’t interested in talking about it with me. I had all this knowledge now about Doctor Who, but no outlet or anyone to share it with.

In 1999, there was a brief glimmer of light. A BBC-produced parody called Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death was made for the Comic Relief telethon. Rowan Atkinson (!) played the Doctor along with many other famous guest stars. It was a funny, loving valentine to the series, was written by none other that Steven Moffat, and proved there was still a lot of love out there for the Doctor. As this was the pre-youtube days, the only way I was going to see it was to pledge to New Hampshire Public Television to keep Doctor Who on the air and received a VHS copy as my gift. Here it is in all its glory:

Fast forward to 2003. My friends and I started a news website called the Athenaeum. One of my first stories was about the unthinkable happening: Doctor Who was returning to TV!

Every scrap of news about the potential new series was a treasure. I was skeptical of the casting of Billie Piper, a former teen pop star as the assistant but thrilled when I heard Christopher Eccleston was cast as the Ninth Doctor. I moved across the country from Boston to Los Angeles in the summer of 2004. That fall, the Red Sox won the World Series and my friend and I celebrated by screaming our heads off in our Koreatown apartment. A few months later in the Spring of 2005, another cathartic moment happened when I saw the first episode of the new Doctor Who series.

Like the Red Sox winning the World Series a few months before, it was such a cathartic moment, it forced this Doctor Who fan to “regenerate” once more…