Thomas Wictor

Posts Tagged ‘Ghosts and Ballyhoo’

A crank responds

I posted about watching for patterns on Talkbass.com, the site that spawned Ghosts and Ballyhoo. A Scottish fellow didn’t like it. Here’s how it went. kohntarkosz: There is already a good thread on Ray Shulman on here. I guess Arthritic_Tom is the forum’s resident crank or something with his weird post-Abrahamic pseudo-religious chatter about synchronicity…

 

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No context for male beauty

Our popular culture is very cruel. I know, because I spent ten years in the factory that creates it. This cruelty bleeds over into the rest of our culture, which is deeply unhealthy. We hear on a daily basis about the stresses women are under to be beautiful. Although I have a certain amount of…

 

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Lip servicing ourselves into hell

I recently joined Facebook. Against my will. Alas, it’s turned out to be what I feared: a place where uninformed opinions based entirely on emotions are hurled around like…like…this. “It began with a food fight between children.” That’s what Facebook is like, unfortunately. Today the Horror That Must Be Stopped was the bill that Democratic…

 

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Stereotyping and making assumptions do not help

When actress Ellen Page announced that she’s gay, social media went wild, pro and con. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve seen Page only in Juno, a movie that I wasn’t able to finish. I’ve known too many people whose shtick is endless one-liners. My own father, in fact, hid behind puns, jokes, and…

 

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The bacon saver

On September 16, 2000, I visited Scott and Georgia Thunes in the Bay Area to collect photos for In Cold Sweat: Interviews with Really Scary Musicians. We had a really nice time. I took a few photos. Here’s Scott’s one-woman Praetorian Guard, his wife Georgia. I’d won her over by then. She designed my Website,…

 

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Excised Snippet Number Four

This is the fourth passage from my novel Invisible Idiot, which became Chasing the Last Whale, Volume Two of the Ghosts Trilogy. It was necessary to remove these scenes, but since I like them, I’m publishing them here when I get the urge. Mike Albee and Lura Dold of Sandpiper Publicity—who defrauded me of $40,000…

 

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Mike Albee heads for the hills

UPDATE: Now Sandpiper Publicity’s Website is back up. Since this was a fun post to write, I’ll leave it up too. *          *          * Mike Albee has taken down the website for Sandpiper Publicity. When things get too hot for Mike and his lovely wife Lura Dold, they close up shop. But he’ll be back….

 

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An age of wonderment

Scott Thunes is in the hospital. His situation isn’t to be minimized. However, he picked one of the best times in history to have a significant health issue. We live in an age of wonderment. In the last two decades, the global poverty rate had been cut in half. It appears that the trend will…

 

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Reconstruction

Today I began the reconstruction of my ruined literary career. I’m not doing it in the hopes of achieving success but rather to tie up loose ends and not leave Mike and Albee and Lura Dold with the last word. Mike and Lura of Sandpiper Publicity defrauded me of $40,000 by exploiting the suicides of…

 

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Ghost rediscovered

The Second Ghost is “Jennifer,” an American girl I knew in Stavanger, Norway. I played a part in her downfall, which you can read on pages 15 to 17 of Ghosts and Ballyhoo. I still have a few notes she wrote me, two photos I snagged from a box of rejects left over from the…

 

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