I’ve been notified that the Cemetery Dance limited edition of The Dark Tower Companion has been sent to the printer and should ship to customers sometime in July. Furthermore, this is the last week to order and get free shipping within the US.
I went up to Brooklyn on Tuesday for the round-table discussion featuring Stephen & Owen King, and Peter & Emma Straub at St. Francis College. Any time I’ve gone to NY before, I’ve always taken a taxi from the airport, but this time, since I had plenty of spare time, I decided to give public transportation a go. I was very pleased by the results. I took the M60 train from the airport to the subway station, where I picked up the Q train that took me to within 0.2 miles of my hotel in Brooklyn, all for a mere $5.75. Then I took a few wrong turns and it took me almost another half hour to actually find my hotel, so there’s that. I had better luck on the return trip—it only took five minutes to get from the hotel to the Q station.
I met up with a few people who I know virtually from a Dark Tower message board before the event. Saw Peter and Susan Straub get accused of jumping the line when they went into the lecture hall! (I hear Emma Straub had a hard time getting into the building, too.) I sat with Nick Kaufmann and his wife and a friend of theirs, saw Gina & Jane Osnavich, and met up with Jordan Hahn, King’s webmaster, after the event for drinks. I’ll write more about the event itself at News from the Dead Zone either today or tomorrow, but it was fun. Video from the event should be available soon, but here are the official photographs. You can see me near the top right in #101.
On the return flight, I watched Birdman, which was an interesting experience. My flight had free WiFi for the entertainment system, so I watched it on my iPad. But I didn’t bring any earphones, so I watched it with closed-captioning. It’s an interesting film, with it’s long dolly tracking shots and occasional flights of fancy. Lindsay Duncan was great as the theater critic who resents Hollywood types breathing the lofty Broadway air. It’s dark and gloomy, intense, a little depressing, but worth seeing nonetheless. Great, great cast.
Quite impressed with the season finale of The Americans. The theme seemed to be the burden that constantly telling lies takes on a person. Philip—who seems to be having a crisis of “faith”—felt it, as did their daughter, Paige, whose actions at the end could throw everything into a spin, assuming Pastor Tim doesn’t just laugh her off. Reagan’s “evil empire” speech was the soundtrack of the episode’s closing moments, and the cold war just got a whole lot chillier.
And Grey’s Anatomy. Holy cow. I did not see that coming. Talk about a game changer.
