E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

Last Friday evening I attended a concert at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, where I live, and as I occasionally am wont to do. It was an old favorite, a Romantic paen, the ultimate Classical performance piece: Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. The guest conductor was a young Spaniard, Pablo Heras-Casado, and the performer was an Englishman, multi-award winner, named Stephen Hough. It was a perfect performance, and as always, powerful experience. But I am not a music critic, per se, other than at my own personal level. But I come from a musical family, have grown up with and lived with music all of my life, been a musician of sorts myself, and music remains my first love. As an author, I am best gifted, for better or worse, at composing with words. Words are a wonderful tool and thing, however often disparaged by the linguistically challenged (George W. Bush and Sarah Palin come to mind),and the English language is the compendium of all languages. But the spoken language still cannot st...

We've all had it up to our ears and beyond: all of the half-truths, exaggerations, misrepresentations, lies, and distortions on television. And that's just the news! Then there are the ads, that make the good old fashioned lie almost virtuous, by comparison. Which of course leads to those so-called 'public announcements' that are political ads. Which are every bit as truthful as say, Hitler announcing his new humanitarian child care program at Auschwitz. Still, there is nothing new about all this, and these practices have been around for a long time. Most of us probably are too young to have read it, but back in 1960 there was a bestseller by a Madison Avenue guru named David Ogilvy called Confessions of an Advertising Man , in which, even then, the founding partner of the premier New York and London ad agency Ogilvy and Mather and inventor of modern advertising complained that “political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of adver...

My first Tony Lowell Mystery and award winner was Hour of the Manatee (St. Martin's 1994), set on the West Coast of Florida. There, years after I wrote that book, I experienced just such an hour, actually closer to two hours, swimming in the Gulf with some of the last of the manatees this past week, as August turned to September in this, the Year of the Tea Bag, 2010. My sculptor/artist friends Kevin Brady and Susan Super and I were heading for the beach at Ft. DeSoto, on the tip of a cluster of small sandbar and mangrove barrier islands at the mouth of Tampa Bay. It's a county park, and a beauty, often voted America's #1 Beach, with an old fort, a lighthouse, sawgrass dunes and lagoons, pure white sand, mostly clear water (once gin clear), and one helluva lot of mosquitos. They were mini-monsters out of a horror movie or eco-disaster 2012, the worst I had ever seen except for Canada. Skeeters to the left of us, skeeters to the right of us, pouring out of the soggy marshes ...

I just finished reading a book by one of my favorite authors, the Scottish eminence Alexander McCall Smith's Unbearable Lightness of Scones (latest of the 44 Scotland Street series). Smith described, in one chapter, a fanciful encounter between one of the characters, Matthew, while bathing, ever so briefly, in the warm ocean waters off Perth, Australia during his honeymoon. Seems he dipped his toe in a little too far, it's well after sundown, and everyone in the world except him, it seems, has seen Steven Spielberg's Jaws epic, and knows what happens next. Except it doesn't. Despite being repeatedly forewarned by cafe waittresses and the like that Great White Sharks lurk in these here waters, Matthew just can't wait to get his feet wet. And so, despite protests from his about to be (correctly, she thinks) widowed bride, Matthew ventures into said seas, gets immediately knocked off his feet by a rogue rip tide (about which he has also been warned) and swept out to s...

It always amazes me about how quickly we humans, or at least we American humans, can be manipulated into fits of righteous rage against things that are absolutely in our best interests, but we don't know it. The reason we don't know it, of course, is because loud, shouting bloggerheads, tea baggers and Repugs keep telling us the opposite of what's true, thus rewriting history, logic, economic theory, and the basic principles of right and wrong. It can be confusing, I must admit. What really gets me, though, is how poor and working people can be so adamantly opposed to the very notion of taxation. It's become an evil plot, certainly a dirty word, the very utterance of which has come to be the real-world equivalent to Harry Potter shouting: "Voldemort!" in a crowded dining hall. It seems that for pretty much the same kind of reasoning that can send people who depend on Medicare, for example, into a foam-frothing rage about a "government takeover" of th...

Dear God (or Allah) Since I think nobody reads these posts except you and me anyway, I hope you don't mind a bit of frank discussion here, and I do have a few questions. First off, are you two the same Deity, or like, brothers or something? Possibly even twins? I ask, because both your (God's) Son's followers and those of your (Allah's) Prophet Mohammed all insist there is only one God, so which one of you would that be, or are you maybe Siamese Twins? That could explain a lot. I'm also wondering about Jehovah. Where did he go? Is he maybe way over in the far side of the Universe busy making new galaxies and stuff? That is a long trip, which may be why we haven't heard from him for a while. (If you hear from Him, tell Him I do love those Hubble pictures, by the way.) Was that your idea? And speaking of Jehovah, is He your Father, by any chance? That would make sense. Like Jupiter and Apollo and stuff. I think he is older than you two, according to your Old Test...

I know, I know. I haven't posted since my eulogy to Dominick Dunne back in January. My apologies, and mea culpa. But the cells have not been dormant. I've been thinking. Three a.m. toss and turn kind of thinking, even as a beautiful woman lies peacefully and blissfully unaware at my side. I've been thinking about why I've had so many near misses, so many close calls, so many Almost Famous moments, dancing with stars, even my own Fifteen Minutes of Fame, personally bestowed by Andy Warhol himself, yet always felt like an impostor, like I didn't belong. What's up with that? Well, for starters, it was extraordinarily reassuring to learn, even so many years later and too late to thank the man personally, that Nick Dunne had always felt the same way. We were opposites, of course, in some ways: he grew up rich, I didn't. He was famous. I wasn't. He was hugely successful. I wasn't. And yet, and yet: we felt the same way about ourselves, and our lives. Stran...