Steve Szilagyi is the author of the novel “Photographing Fairies”, which was short-listed for the World Fantasy Award, and made into the feature film of the same name, produced by Mike Newell and starring Ben Kingsley. He worked in public relations and marketing at HBO for eight years, and went on to write for a large academic medical center, where he produced articles, speeches, books, and edited publications. He has written magazine journalism and more than 80 book reviews for the daily press. A graduate of Columbia University, he won that school’s Bennet Cerf Award for Writing. Email: szilags [at] gmail.com
by Steve Szilagyi Edgar Watson (E.W.) Howe (1853–1937) was a small-town newspaperman who became nationally known for his plainspoken wit, tart epigrams, and relentless skepticism. “I must make everything so simple that people will see the truth,” he once said. His sayings—blunt, dry, and often astringent—were the fruit of decades spent editorializing in the Atchison…
by Steve Szilagyi Those first eight thunderous notes—”Oh Fortuna, velut Luna”—delivered by a massive choir of a hundred voices, have become as instantly recognizable as Beethoven’s da-dah-dah-DUM or the opening of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra. Since John Boorman first deployed O Fortuna in his 1981 film Excalibur, this choral juggernaut has stampeded through many horror films,…
by Steve Szilagyi June 1846 was the hottest month ever recorded in London at that time. For 22 sweltering days, temperatures soared between the 85 and 105 degrees Fahrenheit. The city’s literary luminaries—Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Thomas Carlyle among them—mopped their brows and grumbled about the oppressive heat like common mortals.…
by Steve Szilagyi Andreas Grüntzig’s plane blew a 38-foot-wide crater in the Georgia dirt where it crashed. Investigators needed several days to collect and identify the remains of the famous physician, his second wife, Margaret, and their two Irish setters, Gin and Tonic. People who write about Grüntzig after his death compare him to a…
by Steve Szilagyi The Naked Gun trilogy was a series of three film comedies released between 1988 and 1994. They were directed by David Zucker, who founded a new school of parody with his breakthrough movie, Airplane! (1980). Part of Zucker’s genius was casting grim-visaged actors from serious films and letting them loose in a…
by Steve Szilagyi My favorite place on Earth is Niagara Falls. I refresh my spirit there. Standing on the very brink, my chest pummeled by the roar of millions of gallons of fresh water plunging into the abyss, I feel at one with figures like Margaret Fuller, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain, each of whom…
by Steve Szilagyi My friend Ian worked hard all his life. In his seventies, he bought a big house and moved his son’s family in with him. It’s the classic multigenerational setup, and it seems to be working out. Only one thing bothers him—the zombies. “My son and his kids love the whole zombie thing,”…
by Steve Szilagyi Herb Gobel opened Trophy Recording in downtown Boston in 1948. It was a state-of-the-art studio. Perfect for the artists Herb idolized. Big bands like Artie Shaw and Stan Kenton. Vocalists like Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee. An era of composers, arrangers and sight-reading musicians. By the time I saw Trophy Recording in…
by Steve Szilagyi “Body and spirit are twins. God only knows which is which” –Algernon Swinburne When I was ten or eleven, the Great Geauga County Fair still displayed what it called human oddities (the term Freak Show had fallen from use by that time). These included the Lizard Man, the Human Pincushion, and the…
by Steve Szilagyi An air of the erotic hangs over “Norman Rockwell: The Scouting Collection” – a show of 65 paintings by America’s master illustrator currently on display at the Medici Museum of Art in Warren, Ohio. The pictures came to the Medici Museum after a Los Angeles Times article revealed that the Boy Scouts…
by Steve Szilagyi After eight years writing publicity for a cable television network, I was let go. Just in time. I was hankering to get out of Manhattan, go back to my hometown, and marry a girl I knew in high school. Once I’d gotten all that out of the way, I found myself in…