The Voices in Frank's Head

I was talking with my friend Joe the other day. He asked me why I had never posted that photo of me with the ladies from Hell's Belles . My first inclination was to think that Joe had lost his mind. I mean, obviously I had to have posted a photo that was that cool, right? Well - I went back through the archives for this blog and it turns out that I didn't post it. Without futher ado, here are the ladies from Hell's Belles and I at the Main Art Theatre in Royal Oak. Joe: Thanks for reminding me about this one. And I'm sorry for thinking disparaging thoughts about you, even though it only last a few seconds.

It's almost the 4th of July weekend. That means lots and lots of holiday trips to the beach and so on. Since I am a published author, it seemed only appropriate for me to mention a few books ( other than my own ) that I think would be great to take to the beach or on vaction with you. With that in mind, here is Frank's Summer Reading List for 2006 . My first pick is The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst. This novel is set in the late 1930s is about a journalist who fights the Mussolini regime by working for an underground newspaper. When his editor is killed by the Italian secret police, he tries to keep the newspaper going while also trying to stay alive as the secret police turn their attention to him. Alan Furst is, without a doubt, one of the best novelists writing today. If you haven't picked up any of his work before, this a great one to start with. My second pick is Lost & Found by Carolyn Parkhurst. This modern tale focuses on a series of characters who are ...

It has finally happened. The redevelopment of the Book-Cadillac Hotel - that landmark subject of my documentary - is finally moving forward again. I was at the announcement yesterday at the Detroit Athletic Club and I was impressed by every aspect of it. I was shooting pictures from behind the TV camera men and newspaper photographers. Still, it was great to see Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and Governor Jennifer Granholm take the stage and praise this project. George Jackson, president of the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, took a swipe at some of the preservation groups around town when he said, "The folks standing on this stage are the real preservationists." Yeah, well - as long as he's doing what I want him to do and is redeveloping historic properties instead of knocking them down for another vacant lot (*cough, cough* - Madison-Lenox and Statler Hotels) - he can talk as much trash about me at the other members of the FoBC as he darn well wants to. It was also grea...

Last Friday, was the first 4th Friday Film Festival. I hosted it in conjunction with the 4th Fridays project that the Detroit Metro Visitors & Convention Bureau is doing. The turnout for the films was a bit lower than I was hoping for (a concert with the Chicago Blues Reunion in Campus Martius Park ran over) but it was still an amazing event. Of course, the real star of the event was the films. (Yes, I'm biased and possibly deluding myself. Everyone needs a hobby.) The folks from Model D were there to celebrate their one-year anniversay. I went on the air with WWJ-AM to talk about my documentary on the Book-Cadillac Hotel as well as the other three films that I showed that evening. It was a mildly nerve-wracking experience to go on the air. Actually, that's not entirely true. Being on the air was a blast. The nerve-wracking part was the moments leading up to my interview, where I was waiting for them to get ready. The only down-side to the whole thing really was th...

I was driving along Ford Road the other day, when I noticed a sign that really grabbed my attention. It was at the Toy Chest (a topless bar near where I live) and it advertised "Topless Mondays". I can't help but wonder: how are "Topless Mondays" different from every other day of the week?

I screened my documentary, Checking In: The Story of the Book-Cadillac Hotel , at the Detroit Film Center on Saturday evening. There was a moment where I was a little worried about what attendance was going to be like, because a rather nasty thunderstorm rolled through the area about an hour or so beforehand. There were reports of some sections of the freeways being flooded and I saw one rather nasty traffic accident on my way to the DFC. (No fatalities, thankfully, but one of the cars started to hydroplane and got knocked up pretty bad). Anyway, in spite of it all, the screening had a rather impressive crowd after all. It was near capacity, in fact. I think the DFC only had a handful of vacant seats, which was great to see. My next screening is tomorrow (June 6) at the Historic Trinity Lutheran Church at 7 p.m. (Hey, what better way to spend 6/6/06 than in a church?). The Church is at 1345 Gratiot Avenue in Detroit (on-line at http://www.HistoricTrinity.org/ ) Anyway, if you haven...

Sometimes it is simply amazing how many twists and turns my life can go threw in a few short hours. Last Friday (May 19) was one of those days for me. Quite frankly, it's taken me this long to write about it all. My day started with meeting the gang from Thought Collide at the Motor City Comic Con . We went there to promote a new sci-fi series that we're working on called InZer0 . The whole comic con experience started out pretty much as one would expect. We set up our table, had a chance to meet with the other vendors and artists as well as check out some of the stuff that was there before the fans came in to see everything. They had a reproduction of the Batmobile... As well as K.I.T.T. , (the car from Knight Rider )... It all started out as a really cool experience that pretty much made me forget about the stuff that was worrying about earlier (more on that part later). Life got a bit more complicated when I went out to my car to grab something. It was at that point that ...

I went out to Bookies Tarvern with the whole crew after the monthly Detroit Synergy meeting on Thursday. I didn't know this when I walked in the door, but Bookies now has a mechanical bull that you can ride - all you have to do is buy a shot and ask the bartender for a ticket. After a little bit of encouragement, and a couple of rounds, I couldn't help but ride the thing. Dang! Look at me on that thing. Do I have cowboy style or what? Thanks to Paula Turner for snapping that photo. She also grabbed a shot of me falling off the thing a couple of seconds later, but for some reason, I really don't feel like posting that shot on the internet.

Well, it's finally over. The final episode of The West Wing aired this evening. It's been a great 7 years, with it being one of the best dramas to ever hit the airwaves. I'm sad to see the show come to an end. However, I think the writers and producers did an amazing job of bringing the show to a great conclusion. The story arc, for the episode, season and series, really was perfect. Quite frankly, at this moment, I'm not really sure what I'm going to do on my Sunday evenings anymore. I might have to buy the entire series on DVD and watch them all over again.

Thomas Bray wrote a column for this morning's Detroit News in which he argued that there were some significant paralells between President Abraham Lincoln's handling of the Civil War and President George W. Bush's prosecution of the War in Iraq. You can read his column here . I wrote the following response to Mr. Bray: Dear Mr. Bray: I read your piece in this morning’s Detroit News in which you compared President George W. Bush’s experience in Iraq with President Abraham Lincoln’s prosecution of the Civil War. Your argument was, in my opinion, one of the stupidest pieces of commentary in the entire history of the English language. You simply ignored one of the most fundamental differences between Lincoln in the Civil War and Bush in Iraq . Lincoln had a fairly well-defined reason for going to war in the first place. Yes, he originally stated that he wanted to keep slavery from spreading only to emancipate all slaves two years later as you pointed...

I recently learned a bit more about what Easter is like in my ancestral homeland of the Czech Republic. It turns out that one of their customs is that, on Easter Monday, young boys and men would run around their village; whipping girls and women with whip made of branches from willow tree. http://www.radio.cz/en/html/easter05.html The girls, in turn, would present the boys with a painted egg and sometimes serve them alcohol. Something tells me that if I tried this anywhere in Michigan, it wouldn't be an egg or booze that I was served in response. Oh, well - every culture has their own unique mating rituals that seem odd to everyone from the outside. I suppose this is no different. Anyway, I have to say one thing for the Czechs. Their Easter eggs make the ones that I used to make as a kid look very, very sad in comparison. I don't think I could ever bring myself to actually eat anything that looked this cool and ornate. http://www.radio.cz/en/html/fotogalerie_vejce1.html

I had a chance to go through what is commonly known as the AAA Building (139 Bagley) in downtown Detroit last month. At first, I wasn't going to do an entry on it - but there have been a couple of people asking about it over on the Detroit Yes forum that I figured I had to share a little narrative as well as the photos that I have from it. I went through this building with the owner's son, Matt Pieroni. I hate to admit, but as soon I reached the ugly side of 30, crawling into a building through a window or something like that really lost its appeal. As a result, I'm grateful to the Pieroni family for allowing me the chance to go through their building. For those not familiar with 139 Bagley, it's the only building that is still standing on the block previously occupided by the former Statler Hilton Hotel . It also the building that mysteriously caught fire while the Statler was being demolished. The Pieroni's allege that materials dropped by welders working on...

Shortly after 1 a.m. tomorrow morning, the time will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. I think I'm going to stay up just to experience that one second of perfect time alignment. (Of course, I am completely weird).

Okay - so technology has been used to accomplish some amazing things. Science put a man on the moon and it treats illnesses that just a few years ago would've been hopeless. We've learned to break the sound barrier and communicate with one another across the not-so-vast distance that has become cyberspace. But some technological advances just make me wonder what the heck the inventor was thinking. I can't believe it, but someone has actually managed to take the concept of wearable computing and used it to create shirts that enable their wearers to send "hugs" to one another remotely. With this shirt on , you would actually feel it if someone send you a "hug". The shirt itself is Bluetooth enabled. The orange ovals on the shirt are actuators where you would feel the warmth, pressure and heartbeat of the person who sent you this "hug." This idea seems both cute and scary at the same time. Now that we've reach this point, you know it's on...

I finished reading The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer over the weekend. It's an amazing book, written by a reporter who supported the War in Iraq. His writing his very compelling. I learned a lot about Iraq and America's involvement in region by reading this book. In fact, this is one of those books that I deliberately took my time reading - and read with a highlighter in hand. I highly recommend this book to everyone who wants to know anything about the War in Iraq.

Today is the three year annivesary of America's invasion of Iraq. That was the beginning of a war that everyone in Washington seemed confident would be over by August 2003, but now seems likely to drag on for several more years, end up costing the U.S. taxpayers more than $1 trillion and bring even more Americans home in a body bag. We continue to occupy Iraq, in spite of the fact that public opinion polls show that roughly 80% of Iraqis want us out of their country, under the claim that we're spreading democracy and freedom. ( I've always thought democracy means that the people decide what is going to happen; not foreign leaders.) In spite of that, the Republicans in Washington continue to argue that any change of course in Iraq is tantamount to treason and the Democrats are bubbling around like idiots, with no clue of what they want to do. There's an election this year and, for the first time in my life, I'm voting for nothing but the third-party candidates. The...

I published another article in Model D. This time it was about indie filmmaking in Detroit and entitled, "Making Movies in Motown." It featured interviews with several Detroit-area filmmakers and talked about why they are working in Detroit instead of any other city. You can read it on-line at http://modeldmedia.com/features/detroitfilm.aspx I will probably have another article published at Model D in a few weeks.

My friend, Jessica Marie Jones , sent this one to me via email. I laughed so hard that I knew I had to repost it here - along with my editorial comments in blue. Life in 2006 #1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave. (Okay, I haven't done this one but I can imagine myself doing it if I was tired enough.) #2. You haven't played solitaire with real cards in years. (Bingo!) #3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers for your family of 3. (Nah, most of my family now has their cell phone as their only phone number.) #4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you. (Been there, done that.) #5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don't have e-mail addresses. (Guilty as charged.) #6. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries. (Yeppers. Cell phones have replaced honking the car horn.) #7. Every commercial on television has a ...

According to an article in this month's issue of Science , large animals such as humans would not have been able to evolve if it weren't for clay first appearing in the Earth during the Neoproterozoic Era (roughly one billion to 542 million years ago). Details about this are available at http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060206/clay_pla.html?source=rss This is one more thing for me to think about when I see a work of pottery.

This blog is now 2 year's old and this is my 140th post to it. (70 posts per year - 1 or 2 per week - yeah, that sounds about right.) Anyway, I'm just glad that in those 2 years, no one has tried to collect on "Frank's Blog Guarantee."