Suicide Squeeze

The second novel in the Detective Clay Hart Series, Suicide Squeeze, is now available. It is currently on sale at Amazon. The first novel in the series, Double Play, is currently on sale at Amazon, Smashwords, and Apple’s iBooks. It sells for $2.99.

Book Description: It’s spring training, and investigator Clay Hart is spending his time as the hitting coach for the local Single-A Braves. He hasn’t worked a case for over a year, and his Fiancée, Maggie, would like to keep it that way. But when he gets a call from Stella, a woman from his past, he reluctantly agrees to meet her about a potential case. Her husband, John Rutherford, has recently died. The police have ruled his death a suicide, but she’s unconvinced. Rutherford worked as the Finance Director for the state of California, and he had been taking a lot of heat from Lionel Trilling, owner of a local oil company, to vote for an upcoming lease renewal for Trilling’s property on public land. Since Trilling had violated the terms of his lease, Rutherford kept telling him no. Trilling wasn’t taking no for an answer.

As Clay asks around about Trilling, he hears a lot of warnings to watch out for the young hothead. The more people Clay asks about Trilling, the more he hears about Trilling’s penchant for corruption. As for Trilling, he doesn’t seem to like the idea of Clay asking questions about Rutherford’s death, and he makes it plain that Clay should drop the case. Clay does his best to reassure Maggie that he’ll be able to keep the danger of the case at bay, but he learns the hard way that the more you uncover, the messier things get.

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Between Yonder and You

Between Yonder and You: Collected Love Poems of Paul Hina 2017-2020 is now available. It is currently on sale at Amazon, Smashwords, Apple Books and Barnes & Noble.

Book Description: Between Yonder and You is Paul Hina’s fifth installment in his continuing Collected Love Poems series. In his follow-up to 2017’s Music Only We Know, Hina uses his unique, impressionistic voice to take the reader on his journey to harness the whimsy, joy and longing inherent in man’s desire.

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Mr. Vanish and the Thin Air

Mr. Vanish and the Thin Air is now available. It is currently on sale at Amazon,  Smashwords, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble.

Book Description: In MR. VANISH AND THE THIN AIR, Jeremy works at the nation’s leading cloud service provider, Rabblr, and he’s heading home after failing to land a huge contract. He’s drowning his sorrows at the airport bar when a colorful businessman tells Jeremy the story of a bar near the Denver Airport called the Thin Air. He claims the bar’s bathroom has metaphysical properties. After you’ve been to the Thin Air’s bathroom, life, somehow, becomes inexplicably effortless.

Upon returning home, Jeremy’s job is hanging by a thread, and he discovers his wife is having an affair. With his life falling apart around him, Jeremy can’t deny the appeal of the businessman’s odd story about the bathroom at the Thin Air. So, he goes to Denver, and, sure enough, after going to the bar’s bathroom, he’s whisked away in a private jet with a corporate attorney and the attorney’s beautiful assistant. Turns out, though, it wasn’t just a coincidence that he ran into the attorney. He wants Jeremy to steal some software from Rabblr’s research lab. There’s an upcoming project that could forever endanger our ideas about personal privacy, and Jeremy might be the one person who can stop it. Jeremy begins to realize that the businessman’s story, the Thin Air, his wife’s affair, meeting the corporate attorney—it was all an orchestrated scheme to get him to this moment. At first, Jeremy is resistant to the attorney’s invitation into corporate espionage, but once he sees evidence that Rabblr has betrayed him, he reconsiders.

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The Golden Boat

The Golden Boat is now available. It is currently on sale at Amazon, Smashwords, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble.

Book Description: M wakes up in a field with no signs of life around him. He has no memory of where he is or who he is, and there are no clues anywhere in sight. By experiencing his memories— uncovered a little at a time—he starts to make sense of his life. Visitors from his past, including a mystery woman in a dress made of golden light, guide him through this afterlife, show him how his dying consciousness designed this world to help him come to terms with the life he lived and the person he would become. Through these visions and visitors, particularly through the memories of his past loves, M uncovers the life he lived. Now, he must choose where this life tells him to go next.

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The Lavender Haze

The Lavender Haze: Three Stories of Flirting with an Affair is now available. It is currently on sale at Amazon, Smashwords, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble.

Book Description: In the title story of The Lavender Haze: Three Stories of Flirting with an Affair, Micheal comes home to find Kelly, his wife’s best friend, has come for a visit. Through the evening, we learn that he and Kelly had a brief affair before the wedding that, to Michael’s surprise, still lingers.
In our second story, Lost to the Lake, Ray is going through a life crisis that he can’t shake. When he returns to work from a vacation that wasn’t as restorative as he hoped, he sees Regina, a new employee, and experiences a lovesickness he’s never known. He finds himself caught between the allure of love at first sight and his established life with his family.
On the Terrace, the final story, offers a window to a tantalizing conversation between a poet and his muse after she confronts him one morning.

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The Greatest Films of All Time

The preeminent British film publication, Sight & Sound, recently released their top 100 films of all-time. This list is released every ten years, and it’s a pretty big deal in the film world. This is a strange list that I think perplexes most filmgoers. Many movie lovers are confused and frustrated that there are so few movies they recognize on the list. This has much to do with who’s invited to take the poll (critics and filmmakers), how the poll is worded (“greatest of all time”), and how the poll is compiled.

Sight & Sound asks each participant to list what they believe to be the top ten greatest movies of all time. Then they just use the raw numbers to compile the list. For example, this year, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was mentioned more often in critics’ top ten lists than any other film, hence its number one position in the list. If you try and make a top ten list of your own, it becomes much easier to see how so many directors and films did not make the cut. Many people have pointed out that Spielberg doesn’t make the list. There’s a lot of great Spielberg movies, but which one would you pick: Jaws? Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Schindler’s List? Some directors have so many great movies that their films cancel each other out. For example, one might have added Jaws out of deference for Spielberg’s body of work. Whereas, another critic that wanted to do the same thing voted for Schindler’s List instead. You can see how the work of prolific directors might get lost in the shuffle this way. I’d say this could’ve easily have happened to Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, Wes Anderson, and the Coen brothers.

It’s also important to note that these films are supposed to be the “greatest” films of all time and not necessarily your “favorite” films. It’s easy to confuse the two, and I think it’s the absence of this distinction that explains much of the backlash around this list.

Some of the backlash has been about the list being a so-called “woke” list. This is mostly just silly politicking, though there are certainly movies that might be there because individual critics wanted to diversify their lists. I’m not sure why that’s a problem. These are all great movies. The list isn’t written in stone. It’ll change again in ten years and, when it does, we’ll all have another opportunity to find things to debate about. And so it goes.

The top ten films I would’ve picked for the Sight & Sound Poll:

1. Pather Panchali (1955) Directed by Satyajit Ray

2. Stalker (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky

3. Wild Strawberries (1955) by Ingmar Bergman

4. Night and Fog (1956) by Alain Resnais

5. Killer of Sheep (1977) by Charles Burnett

6. A Man Escaped (1956) by Robert Bresson

7. In the Mood for Love (2000) by Wong Kar Wai

8. Apocalypse Now (1979) by Francis Ford Coppola

9. Paths of Glory (1957) by Stanley Kubrick

10. Raging Bull (1980) by Martin Scorsese

The next fifteen are films that I couldn’t go without mentioning:

11. Winter Light (1963) Directed by Ingmar Bergman

12. Tokyo Story (1953) by Yasujirō Ozu

13. Rififi (1955) by Jules Dassin

14. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) Directed by Stanley Kubrick

15. The Hustler (1961) by Robert Rossen

16. The Godfather Part II (1974) by Francis Ford Coppola

17. Two Women (1960) by Vittorio de Sica

18. Come and See (1985) by Elim Klimov

19. Ivan’s Childhood (1962) by Andrei Tarkovsky

20. Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) by Agnès Varda

21. Orpheus (1950) by Jean Cocteau

22. Last Year at Mareinbad (1961) by Alain Resnais

23. Confidentially Yours (1983) by François Truffaut

24. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

25. Son of Saul (2015) by László Nemes

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Music Only We Know

Music Only We Know: Collected Love Poems of Paul Hina 2013-2016 is now available. It is currently on sale at AmazonSmashwords, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Noble.

Book Description: Music Only We Know is Paul Hina’s fourth installment in his continuing Collected Love Poems series. In his follow-up to 2015’s Origami Moonlight, Hina uses his unique, impressionistic voice to take the reader on his journey to harness the whimsy, joy and frustration of man’s desire.

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The Other Shore

The Other Shore: Two Stories of Love and Death is now available. It is currently on sale at AmazonSmashwords, and Apple’s iBooks. Update(3/31/16): Now Available at Barnes & Noble.

Book Description: In The Other Shore, Simon’s life isn’t what he hoped it would be. And when he learns that his father is dying, he returns to his hometown for goodbyes. Though he has been estranged from his father since his mother’s untimely death six years ago, Simon rediscovers the power of parental influence. This leads him to some uncomfortable truths he’s spent years avoiding, but also leads him to Laura, who gives him hope for a future less damaged by the past.

In From the Boathouse, John, an aged man suffering from dementia, struggles to keep hold of his most precious memories—particularly how he met his wife—before they all slip away.

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Origami Moonlight

Origami Moonlight is the third installment of my continuing Collected Poems series. In this follow-up to Such Deliberate Loveliness (2007) and Of Wanting and Rain(2011), I’ve tried to use unique, whimsical language to create an impressionistic, labyrinthine landscape of man’s desire.

Currently available at Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble and Apple’s iBooks.

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Double Play

Double Play, the first novel in the Detective Clay Hart Series, is available. It is currently on sale at Amazon, Smashwords, and Apple’s iBooks. It currently sells for $2.99.

Book Description: After Brett Lattimore, a hot baseball prospect, and his wife are killed in a car crash, an attorney hires investigator Clay Hart to look into the accident. The attorney believes he’s seen Brett’s wife, Emma, alive and well, since the accident. And, though she may be missing, that doesn’t mean she’s dead. But the sheriff’s department has closed the case and believes the accident, though fatal, was routine.
As Clay tries to figure out what happened that night, he discovers that Emma isn’t the only one who might be hiding something. Brett was mixed up with Ramsey, a notorious local gambler who runs underground card games. And, when Ramsey gets wind that Clay is poking around and asking questions about the accident, he quickly lets Clay know that he should move on to other business.

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