 Red Room Writer Profile
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Bob David Calhoun's Blog
November 11, 2009
- Roland Emmerich has built a career by putting the event in the event movie. His most famous film, Independence Day (1996), set the pattern by giving us Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith thwarting an alien invasion with a Mac laptop (presumably running OS 7) on the Fourth of July. With the exception of an anorexic Godzilla in 1998 and the Mel Gibson colonial gorefest The Patriot in 2000, it’s been ...
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July 29, 2009
- First book missteps. Oh where do I begin with this one? The phone woke me up on 7am on a Saturday morning. It was Fiaz Rafiq. He was calling from Bolton, England. He wanted me to ghostwrite The Toughest Man Alive, the autobiography of martial arts and Hollywood stunt legend “Judo” Gene LeBell. I didn’t really know Gene all that well, having only talked to him on the phone a couple of times. ...
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July 14, 2009
- I work for a major California public university. My pay is probably going to be cut by eight percent next month. I’m one of the lucky ones. My fellow state workers at the DMV and other state agencies have been eating an eight per cent pay cut for months already. Now they are told they have to up their sacrifice to 15%. But those of us with jobs, no matter how devalued, are luckier still. At ...
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June 24, 2009
- AUTHOR’S NOTE: Today marks the two year anniversary of the suicide and crimes of pro wrestling star Chris Benoit, the most bleak tragedy in a segment of the entertainment industry that is unusually prone to them. A few days after the incident, I wrote the following essay in an attempt to get my thoughts straight on something that was both staggering and surreal. Although I sent this piece to ...
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April 13, 2009
- I wonder when the overlords of Amazon.com (or maybe mere hackers) will realize that my punk wrestling memoir, Beer, Blood and Cornmeal, deals with GLBT themes? I mean it has gay characters and parodies of gay characters. It also has a pic of a man’s wiener reproduced in full color (IE: He Who Cannot Be Named of the Dwarves in all of his public and pubic glory). As of right now my bestselling ...
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April 6, 2009
- According to Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann and other rabid right wingers, the Obama Administration is in the midst of planning Maoist style reeducation camps plucked right out of Joe McCarthy and Jack Webb’s cold war fevered imaginations. Now what about these reeducation camps? Will financial aid be available for them? Can you pay for their tuition with Pell Grants? What about scholarships? For ...
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March 6, 2009
- THE WATCHMEN WERE EVERYWHERE and nowhere at last weekend’s Wondercon. At least half of the vendor booths on the main floor were pushing some form of Watchmen memorabilia but surprisingly none of the rabid fanboys and gals dressed up as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ dark, depressing and nearly washed up post modern heroes. I saw several platoons of stormtroopers, all presumably being told that ...
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February 24, 2009
- JAKE AUSTEN DON’T TAKE NO MESS. While such zines as Psychotronic and Punk Planet have folded in their tents due to the corporate rape of their distribution system, Austen still grinds out hard copy of his Chicago based music and pop culture zine Roctober, has them printed on pulpy newsprint that deposits a healthy amount of ink on your hands, stuffs them into envelopes and mails the mags to ...
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January 29, 2009
- THE EDINBURGH CASTLE on Geary Street has been dubbed "a literary fortress in the Tenderloin,” but rumors that the Castle would no longer host lit readings have been swirling around for a while now. While these rumors are not true (Alan Black is planning a reading series and the next Bond night will actually feature readings of Ian Flemming’s prose) this beleaguered atmosphere made last ...
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January 7, 2009
- My review of the new Mickey Rourke movie The Wrestler was an editor's pick on Open Salon this morning.I wrestled for and emceed the San Francisco punk rock/lucha extravanganza Incredibly Strange Wrestling for seven years and wrote the review with an insider's take on the indie wrestling subculture depicted in the film. Here's the link...http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=76453# If you're a ...
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December 5, 2008
- IT'S HARD to come up with words right now. The AP just reported that Forry Ackerman, editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and pretty much the father of all science fiction fandom, died yesterday of heart failure at the age of 92. Ackerman was a big influence on me as a writer. Although I never adopted his use of bad puns, I cannot escape the flair for alliteration that I gleaned from ...
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October 30, 2008
- Please Lorne Michaels, give George W. Bush a job on SNL before he does something! You owe the man! George W. Bush is finally going to be out of a job soon. He will return to his estate in Crawford Texas but may actually grow tired of clearing away brush when there aren’t so many TV cameras around to capture his attempt at regular guy charm. And besides, even for W, clearing away brush can get ...
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October 17, 2008
- After criminal suspects were apprehended and crazed party girls were ejected, I read the blood match segment from Beer, Blood and Cornmeal at this year's Litquake. I thought they were prostitutes. Now I’m not the kind of guy who thinks that every gal in revealing clothing is out there turning tricks. No, these gals were dirty and drugged out looking. The way they were randomly yet ...
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October 2, 2008
- Nothing quite says the death of capitalism like the arrival of the Spirit Halloween Superstores. Every Fall, when things are dying, the seasonal retailer possesses the space of recently the recently deceased, giving them a temporary yet tortured afterlife. Not really alive but not quite dead, the Spirit Halloween Superstore is the George Romero flesh-eating zombie of the retail world. Or maybe ...
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September 17, 2008
- Butter Cat, that housecat that will sit one heartbeat away from the presidency should John McCain be elected in November, dispassionately lounges on a pile of Rom Spaceknight comic books. As John McCain shocked the political establishment by choosing Butter Cat to be his Vice Presidential pick, news organizations and the gossip hungry American public have been scrambling to learn more about the ...
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