E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

I have been silent for a while, as (being high-spectrum autistic) I sometimes am. I am waiting for my Earth Day (more or less) release announcement for my first new eco-thriller in 17 years, Red Tide (stay tuned). (Full disclosure: like all of my books, it will be controversial. But more on that later. (My pen name is E.C. Ayres).) For now I am driven to write by world news: nothing new, mind you, just increasingly intensified. More and more, of late, I have been thinking--and wondering--if reason even actually exists in our world, or ever did, as a principle upon which people actually acted. I know there to be reasonable people (I like to think of myself as one) and always have been. But how many, and what do they actually control? A few small countries in Europe, I think, at most. Congress? The Military Industrial Complex? The Middle East? If ever there was a place where reason takes a back seat, it is there, where, for whatever historical reasons however historically justifie...

I know it's hard to believe, but Hollywood once made good films. Even great ones. The one that the blowhards in North Korea apparently blew their tops over would not have qualified as either, but that, it seems, is about as good as it gets any more in that self-absorbed town that still fancies itself as the entertainment capital of the world. What Hollywood still has--Sony Studios or no--is an archive, a repertoire if you will, of great films, from over the last century. And believe it or not, as I witnessed first hand and played my own small part in making it happen, it was those films that carried out the real revolution in China: the post-Maoist, post-Communist revolution that made the people (if not yet the government) of China want to join the rest of the world--really for the first time in it's 7,000 year history. It wasn't intentional--far from it. And Hollywood moguls still fret about how the Chinese 'stole' all their movies. But the point they miss is t...