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Joe
Joe added a status update
I've been quiet on Goodreads getting my blog Video Days off the ground. I devoted May to cop movies of the '80s. June is for treehouse adventures, my latest a big article on The Lost Boys. I've had fun reliving those days, with production history for each film plus commentary. Substack asks for an email address, but subscriptions are free and you can opt out anytime.
Jun 11, 2025 05:20PM Add a comment

Joe
Joe added a status update
I've been scarce on Goodreads getting my blog Video Days off the ground. I devoted May to cop movies of the '80s. June is for treehouse adventures, my latest a big article on The Lost Boys. I've had fun reliving those days, with production history for each film plus commentary. Substack asks for an email address, but subscriptions are free and you can opt out anytime.
Jun 10, 2025 02:03PM 2 comments

Joe
Joe added a status update
I've been scarce on Goodreads getting my blog Video Days off the ground. I dedicated May to cops and robbers thrillers, and my latest article marks the 40th anniversary of a summer adventure classic. I've enjoyed reliving the '80s with production history of each film, plus commentary. Substack asks for an email address, but subscriptions are free, and you can opt out anytime.
Jun 07, 2025 01:31PM Add a comment

Joe
Joe is on page 23 of 336 of The Last Songbird
People who fantasize about living on the beach--this was what they never figured. After a while, the ocean view, the salt air, even the thunderous ocean song disappears, and you are left with yourself, your place in the scheme of things. All that you reach for and all you can't hold runs up before you like the tide and reaches for you. It takes a very strong soul to keep from getting swept away.
Jun 01, 2025 07:20PM Add a comment
The Last Songbird

Joe
Joe is on page 3 of 336 of The Last Songbird
The night Annie Linden disappeared, my world spun out with double-time speed.
Jun 01, 2025 06:16PM Add a comment
The Last Songbird

Joe
Joe is on page 3 of 304 of Your House Will Pay
”Well, this is it,” said Ava. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to find these fools.”
May 21, 2025 04:32PM Add a comment
Your House Will Pay

Joe
Joe is on page 135 of 280 of Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight
"All right, then," the professor said. "Here's your case: Who are you?"

Cynthia started to laugh, thinking Professor Gold was joking. Of course Cynthia knew who she was! She was a teen detective, an orphan, and the best student at Rapid Falls Junior College. She lived with her beloved housekeeper, Mrs. McShane, and had passionate almost-sex with her fiancé, Dick, every Friday night.
May 19, 2025 02:07PM 1 comment
Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight

Joe
Joe is on page 63 of 280 of Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight
I used every trick I knew to find the episode of Bewitched. I thought maybe if I could watch it again, some memory of insight of how to help people would be shaken loose. But I never found it, and if the best detective in the world couldn’t find it, it probably never existed at all, and no further insight came.

The crime was solved, but I knew the case wasn’t closed.
May 19, 2025 07:35AM Add a comment
Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight

Joe
Joe is on page 51 of 280 of Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight
The problem was money. I was just about thirty. I’d been a working detective since I was twelve. I didn’t need a lot of money, but I needed some, and I didn’t have any. Fees from the last few jobs had gone, variably, to a guy I was sleeping with who didn’t have a car and a girl I knew who was trying to keep her mother in a nursing home and a trip to Mexico City that had lasted too long and cocaine.
May 19, 2025 06:24AM Add a comment
Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight

Joe
Joe is on page 35 of 280 of Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight
You are Claire DeWitt, the greatest teen detective in the world. You are standing on the corner of Rivington and Ludlow Streets on the Lower East Side of New York City. It has been a long night of nightclubs and bars and minor crimes; early in the evening, maybe, you were on a case, but you’ve forgotten that case now. The Case of the Silver … What was it exactly? Something about metals.
May 17, 2025 08:31AM Add a comment
Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight

Joe
Joe is on page 27 of 280 of Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight
"The mystery," I said, "is the situation or fact or lack or feeling or patch of existence that no one wants to look at. And in that spot, where no one wanted to look, there was an opportunity for a crime."

"Oh," Helena said. "Oh."

She understood.
May 11, 2025 07:38PM Add a comment
Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight

Joe
Joe is on page 4 of 280 of Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight
Alcoholism makes detecting hard! So Cynthia Silverton, the best teen detective in the world, was called to the case. Cynthia pulled up in her canary-yellow Cadillac, matching yellow-framed sunglasses on her face, in a charming white sundress and white kitten heels. In her yellow handbag was a Saturday night special, a deck of tarot cards, and a cyanide pill for worst-cast scenarios.
May 11, 2025 07:09PM Add a comment
Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight

Joe
Joe is on page 113 of 181 of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
Dear Amanda, I like how grounded this seemed compared to your other stories. This kind of thing may be something you keep working on, even if you end up going back to that meta-stuff you like. I am a big believer of learning the rules before you break them. And I think you may be taking steps toward learning the rules here.
May 06, 2025 06:14PM Add a comment
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil

Joe
Joe is on page 3 of 181 of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
You probably couldn't tell by looking at her, but once, back in her twenties, the writer had slept with the Devil. They met at a Halloween party in a pop-up art space in 1999. She wore a red dress and pillbox hat, like Nancy Reagan. Though the way the dress cling to her curves mocked the First Lady's performance of propriety. No one got it; the closest she got was "naughty Jackie O.?" But the Devil would get it.
May 05, 2025 04:31PM Add a comment
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil

Joe
Joe is on page 179 of 400 of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius
"I was much smarter twenty years ago," Elaine said that night. "I was much smarter in my first movie than in my second. I was much smarter in my first play than in my second. The only thing I think experience teaches you is what you can't do. When you start, you think you can do anything. And then you start to get a little tired."

It would be eleven years before she directed again.
May 04, 2025 06:01PM Add a comment
Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius

Joe
Joe is on page 177 of 400 of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius
Elaine, years later, thought it better to stick to the not-nice routine from the start. "I think the real trick is, for women, start out tough. They don't start out tough. They start by saying, 'Don't be afraid of me. I'm only a woman.' And they're not only women, they're just as tough as guys. In that way, I think I did have trouble. But only because I seemed so pleasant."
May 03, 2025 09:15PM Add a comment
Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius

Joe
Joe is on page 162 of 400 of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius
"There's a big technical side which she could never master," Paul Sylbert, the film's production designer, explained. "She can't light a cigarette without burning her hand. She works on impulses, intuitions. It's easy to do on a typewriter, but impossible to do when you have other people standing around." Elaine herself would go along with that. "I'm not a pro as a director. I'm a pro at thinking about movies."
May 03, 2025 08:50PM Add a comment
Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius

Joe
Joe is on page 118 of 400 of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius
Though Elaine's capacity for self-editing was limited, when it came to others, she was a scalpel, killing darlings with precise reasoning. Plays operated with the same rules she and Mike had established for their sketches. Never go for the easy laugh, she taught McNally: "When characters deal in gags and jokes, you pay a terrible price for them. You're left without characters, and you're left without a play."
May 03, 2025 07:57PM Add a comment
Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius

Joe
Joe is on page 69 of 400 of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius
The audience would laugh--though only sort of, the lines blurred to the point where they weren't quite sure what was part of the sketch and what was reality, where the onstage action warranted amusement and where it warranted genuine concern. "The nice thing," Elaine said, "is to make an audience laugh and laugh and laugh, and shudder later."
Apr 30, 2025 06:58PM Add a comment
Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius

Joe
Joe is on page 68 of 400 of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius
On the album jacket of Improvisations to Music, she and Mike wrote their own biographies: "Mike Nichols is not a member of the Actors Studio, which has produced such stars as Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Ben Gazzara, Eva Marie Saint, Carroll Baker, and others too numerous to mention," Mike wrote. Elaine's said simply, "Miss May does not exist."
Apr 29, 2025 06:16PM Add a comment
Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius

Joe
Joe is on page 53 of 400 of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius
The Village Vanguard was perfect for them, casual and the charming kind of crappy, just like the bars they had played back in Chicago. Doing their act in front of relative peers would be a comfortable wade into the New York scene. There they would open for Mort Sahl, a stand-up who presented himself as the antithesis of the slick comic. Mike and Elaine, meanwhile, weren't getting onstage and telling jokes.
Apr 29, 2025 05:52PM Add a comment
Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius

Joe
Joe is on page 34 of 400 of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius
"It was the University of Chicago--we talked about everything that was wrong. We did not speak about anything that worked," Elaine explained. "You don't have a scene if you do that. People don't have a comedy act if they do that. You are in some way, one way or another, criticizing."
Apr 28, 2025 06:13PM Add a comment
Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius

Joe
Joe is on page 22 of 400 of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius
"She knew everything about the theatre and psychoanalysis," one of her suitors said. "She didn't know about anything else."
Apr 28, 2025 05:52PM Add a comment
Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius

Joe
Joe is on page 359 of 451 of The Unseen World
Being alone with ELIXIR reminded Ada, in an odd way, of being alone with David, at the end of his life. It was the uncertainty about what he was going to say: whether he was going to make sense, whether he was even going to speak. It was also the feeling of being reunited with someone who knew a great deal about her, for better or worse--the comfortable feeling of not having to explain much, or anything at all.
Apr 25, 2025 05:50PM Add a comment
The Unseen World

Joe
Joe is on page 316 of 451 of The Unseen World
Later, Ada would remember these afternoons as some of the pleasantest ones of her life; it was the quiet of the library, its calmness (she breathed more deeply; her heart rate slowed); the smell of it, must and mildew and paper, like the smell of David's house; the echoing footfalls of students and librarians and researchers, which gave the place the feeling of a pool or spa.
Apr 25, 2025 04:45PM Add a comment
The Unseen World

Joe
Joe is on page 289 of 451 of The Unseen World
Miss Holmes's apartment was not unlike how Ada had pictured it. Oriental carpets crisscrossed one another on top of hardwood floors, and the furniture was mismatched and comfortable. Not surprisingly, all of the walls were lined with bookshelves, and all of the bookshelves were filled with books. There was a Christmas tree in the corner, already decorated, with little colored lights strung around it in three loops
Apr 25, 2025 04:09PM Add a comment
The Unseen World

Joe
Joe is on page 222 of 451 of The Unseen World
David always got off the highway early to drive through Lake George Village, which had a main street lined with kitsch of various kinds: giant, friendly lumberjack statues made out of papier-mâché; outsized teepees with arrow-signs pointing inward, advertising AUTHENTIC INDIAN APPAREL; Viking-themed miniature golf courses; a wax museum with a window display featuring Frankenstein playing the organ.
Apr 24, 2025 05:32PM Add a comment
The Unseen World

Joe
Joe is on page 168 of 451 of The Unseen World
What more she longed for, she could not say, certainly it was nothing so terrifying as sex, nor any activity that required being unclothed. She was vaguely embarrassed by her body, certain that, though it was changing in wild and unpredictable ways, it could offer nothing of value to anyone else; to Ada it was simply the thing below her head, which bore inside it her brain--her only worthy attribute, she thought.
Apr 23, 2025 05:09PM Add a comment
The Unseen World

Joe
Joe is on page 144 of 451 of The Unseen World
It was something she had never truly considered, about adults. She had always somehow imagined that the loss of a loved one would hurt less for them: that it would feel like something natural; that they would be calm and practiced and dulled to death. But something in Liston's voice, as she spoke of her mother, made Ada realize that she had been incorrect in this assumption.
Apr 22, 2025 06:02PM Add a comment
The Unseen World

Joe
Joe is on page 88 of 451 of The Unseen World
Ever since learning about neurotransmitters from David, she had imagined her brain as a water park, a maze of waterslides down which various chemicals were released. Charcoal and smoke and fresh-cut grass usually sent rivers of serotonin down the slides in Ada's head. But that night the scents only served to remind her of David's absence. Warm summer evenings, he always said, were his favorites too.
Apr 21, 2025 05:51PM Add a comment
The Unseen World

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