A Happy Easter and Ramadan to you, plus belated Ostara and Purim to those communities.

Whether you’re dipping eggs, gnawing the ears off chocolate bunnies, steppin’ out with your baby in vibrant technicolor, cheering on the home team at the ol’ ballgame or reflecting in reverence, may the holiday provide you release, recharge, introspection and balance.

For those heading off to church in their Sunday best, check out this wayback advertisement from 1949 for Kodak film (you know, those spool-wound reels called “rollfilm” you can still get and send off for processing development at Wal Mart and Walgreens in the day and age of digital cameras and cell phone selfies). Here, a vintage top-down view finder camera pointed by a post-World War II, suit-clad dad at his colorful ladies (synchronized twins, no less), all the norm of the day. Flower-crowned hats and leather buckle shoes. Sterile to see today. Absolutely “swell,” the vernacular of the times would call it. Also a time when a woman called be called “dollface” without being pulled into the fires of “woke.”

Mom’s possibly humming echoes of “Beautiful Faces Need Beautiful Clothes” from the song and dance classic, Easter Parade, starring Judy Garland and Fred Astaire released in theaters only one year before this magazine pitch. Today, Easter dress is still something of a fashionista sport as much as those wide-brimmed derby couture hats, throwbacks to posh elegance when “Meet Me in St. Louis” was as popular a song as anything today by Rihanna.

Nowadays it’s alright (at least in some Christian denominations) to show for church on Sunday wearing jeans and football jerseys. Not that I would ever impose sanctions upon those schlumping in slacker gear at any place of worship. Worship as you worship, if you’re so inclined. Judge not and not be judged. I say this as a one-time Catholic who remembers strapping on a size-too-big navy suit and tie to attend church with my grandmother, the slacks, button-down shirt, blazer variation with my parents and later in my adult life. Vibrant colored solid or check patterned Van Heusen shirts specifically for Easter. All until switching to cargo pants and polos with the loosening of the dress code, even if the ushers took exception to my flat cap inside church while letting pass kids wearing Tupac Shakur thug life tees.

You know what Vonnegut would say pushing click upon a Kodak Instamatic to such a scene. So it goes.

I was sooooo on the fence about Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, especially with so many Godzilla fans crying foul over his sidekick role. Being a big fan as y’all know, I pushed myself to go with the kiddo but for the first time, I didn’t G-gear up for it.

So much of this thing is cringeworthy. Zero the emotional impact of Minus One (long may it reign as the definitive Godzilla movie). Not even on the same level as the very good Monarch series on Apple TV. However, GxK is no dumber than all which preceded Shin Godzilla and the 2014 American Godzilla (two high amidst the upper echelon) kicking off the entire MonsterVerse series. Humans begone from this film with its rotten story, flagrant lack of continuity and just let the Kaiju kick ass. 

On the latter level, I got my money’s worth, since the monster mash is the reason to show up. Godzilla may be relegated to Kong, or as I called him, Optimus Primal Kong, but when the moments count, they COUNT. Hilarious seeing the Big G curled like a cat inside the Roman Coliseum. See it on the biggest screen and loudest sound system, leave your brain in the cup holder and you’ll have a fun time.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Thank you to Alli and Backwater Books in beautiful downtown Ellicott City, Maryland for hosting us at Wednesday night’s Local Author event. TJ’s and my second co-author book signing event, what a blast! Great people and we killed it on sales.

Speaking for myself, I was finally able to relax some in pitch mode but better yet, went into my old music interviewer mode getting to know my visitors who were so fun to talk with and share. TJ was the commanding presence she always is. The local beers and wines were stellar as well!

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

My wife’s a good sport. Thank you, TJ!

If you’ve read my short story anthology, Coming of Rage, released through Raw Earth Ink, you may have caught a nod to heavy metal icons Iron Maiden (my favorite band of the genre) in the title story, specifically their 1983 epic, “Flight of Icarus.”

The title story of my compendium is a near-verbatim recreation of true events which happened to me between ages 12 and 13. The 1983 album featuring “Icarus” was, of course, Maiden’s masterwork Piece of Mind, but MTV, when it was still a 24-hour all music station, had begun spinning the video for “Flight of Icarus” well before the album’s release in May.

Keeping in mind only months prior, I had been indoctrinated into heavy metal music from a cousin-by-marriage, Andy, who’d sat me down in his room, knowing I was such a music hound. My rites of passage into metal music were Iron Maiden’s Killers and Ozzy Osbourne’s Diary of a Madman. Suffice it to say, a game-changing moment of my life.

I’d also been played the first side of Maiden’s halcyon classic, The Number of the Beast, forgetting down the road when “Flight of Icarus” stormed my ears and ears, Iron Maiden had changed vocalists from Paul DiAnno to Bruce Dickinson. Hence, my first contact with “Icarus” had me thinking, of all things, the 1960s and 70s rock and soul band, Three Dog Night. Laughing out loud here and feel free to join me. Face palm to follow.

Imagine the look on my face, weeks from turning age 13, to find out “Flight of Icarus” was Iron Maiden! Let me tell you something; only “Icarus” and Devo’s “Whip It” could stir and give voice to my rising anger at having been bullied to a boiling over point. I was an MTV junkie then and I couldn’t wait for “Flight of Icarus” to come again. Heavy metal still being a relative oddity then, the wait for a replay was sometimes long before “Icarus” disappeared from MTV’s regular rotation and we had to wait until such a thing as Headbangers Ball to be created for us metal freaks.

By the time I started fighting back in middle school, the timeline begins in my story “Coming of Rage.” Those sick and sour events served as a linchpin. The way my story ends (and I’ll leave you to read it) closes with my turning on MTV at such a horrible finish to a friendship that never really was, a joyous dishing of “Flight of Icarus” on MTV giving me hope.

I am a man who believes in signs from the divine. I found a christening effect with “Icarus'” emergence right after experiencing betrayal of the highest measure to a persecuted 12-year-old boy in love. “Flight of Icarus” told me I could fly as high as the sun. I wasn’t going to take it anymore. I sang the soaring chorus of “Flight of Icarus” inside my head and in the privacy of my bedroom. I soon retaliated against my aggressors, even if it took me many moments of getting my butt kicked before I had any effect against my peers. Middle school is worse than high school, and those little shits back in the day did their damnedest to break me. They almost did.

It took a point of no return moment where five boys surrounded me and said something nasty about my mom. I lost full control. I crushed all five of them, unleashed, finally. I was brutal in my actions. I nearly went too far. All I can say is that it took the assistant principal who was the size and look of Mr. Weatherbee from the Archie comics to stop me and he had to push his weight down against me as I left those five boys bleeding on the floor.

Later at home after the brawl and immediate three-day suspension, I sang “Flight of Icarus” to myself like a mantra. It soothed me, yes, but moreover, it empowered me. I saw the video for the last time in a prime-time slot before we moved away from the area which had given me such terror and comeuppance. I saved my allowance for two months after our move, skipping comic books all that time so I could snag the Piece of Mind album. The day I had enough money, I begged my mom to take me to the mall so I could buy the vinyl LP.

“You don’t know much this means to me,” I told her when she’d obliged and I’d sat in the passenger seat of her raggedy old Chevy Malibu, in awe of Iron Eddie, the band’s mascot, chained up in a padded room of a garish mental asylum. That level of outrage on Eddie’s hellish face spoke as much to who I was at the time, flailing, kicking, ramming those bullies’ heads into lockers. Yeah, Iron Maiden and “Flight of Icarus” and the entire Piece of Mind album meant everything in its time and place.

Later, it would fuel the first story of my eventual published work, Coming of Rage.

Coming of Rage and my new novel, Revolution Calling, are available at Amazon, Wal Mart.com, Barnes and Noble.com, Lulu, Kindle, Nook and Kobo.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Ahh, the 1970s, decade of my childhood. Star Wars and Soul Train, both a big part of my world then. I’ve been having a lot of bittersweet fun hanging on Sirius XM Channel 74, Smokey’s Soul Town, bringing the funk, the soul, the boogie, all that smooth jive from the 1960s through the early 1980s. The sounds of Motown, Stax, Atlantic, Hi, Westbound and King Records which filled my ears heavily as a child. My mom used to shake her butt on Saturday afternoons to Don Cornelius’ power hour of funk and R&B gold, and it left an impact upon me. Same as the exotic “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?” spooling from a transistor radio as Mom got ready for work. I’m talking the true soul sista shove by Labelle, not that atrocity “Lady Marmalade” remade by Christina Aguilera and company in 2001.

Guitars wrenched by foot-tappity wah-pedals, bass guitar being KING of all genres of the Seventies, especially. You wanted to get down, you wanted to groove. Morgan Freeman was just beginning a decades-long tenure of swagger on the original inception of the classic kids’ education show, The Electric Company. For me, the G.O.A.T. of such programming made immortal by the entire ensemble, but Freeman’s recurring characters Easy Reader and Mel Mounds were the epitome of cool along with Rita Moreno’s trademark holler, “Heyyyyy youuuuuu guyyyyyyyysssss!”

To this day, I still say “Right on,” no less then 50 times a week. “Rad” at least 10, but different era, different path of life. It’s part of my DNA, spoken by some white kid in Maryland farmland who, like most of his generation of kids, found the funk. Funk music being an all-time favorite genre, I still marvel how pop culture of the decade assimilated to the new hip factor of Shaft, Superfly, Foxy Brown, Coffy and Cleopatra Jones. So much the comic books I read back then strove not only to introduce more characters of color, but to shift the dialect of most stories set in urban settings to funkadelic speak.

So it didn’t surprise me when I scoured through a bunch of ads for Burger King and McDonald’s from the Seventies most of them tried to huckster forced jive talk that’s comical to see today. Some may call it latent racism. Exploitation to be certain. There was such a term back in the day as “Blacksploitation,” some of it empowering, some of it embarrassing.

McDonald’s had an angle and a jingle for everyone back then. One being “We do it all for you.” Another being “You deserve a break today.” For all of us kids, the fast-food chain’s targeted demographic, we were too busy grinning at the famous clown and the “Rubble rubbles” thumb bitten by his Hamburglar nemesis to care about anything else. Other than we could rely on McDonald’s ads to run with Mounds/Almond Joy commercials during Charlie Brown t.v. specials.

Maurice and his lady here in this ad I’m sure even the McDonald’s corporate honchos shake their heads at, gettin’ down with some cheapo cheeseburgers with the implied suggestion they’ll be gettin’ busy after-the-fact. “Celebrating just being together?” Come on, man. Can I feel where they’re coming from? Gawd, hell no. This is some ancient jive turkey crap if I ever saw it.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

Nobody cares about CDs anymore, I know, but when I write, it’s either in silence or with movie scores and soundtracks going. When you see this spread in my writing zone, you know I’m deep diving on a horror project and catching fire. This is a small portion of just the horror section to my film score collection. I constantly write with scores and soundtracks to all genres.

And lest we forget the deliciously creepy metronome of this horror masterpiece. Bom bommmm…bom bommm…bom bommmm… As my friend John Boden would call it, a holy grail out of print film score find I waited a long time for a decent price to snag. I always think back to 1982 and Carpenter’s version of The Thing and reports of people puking from it or walking out of the theaters altogether. Sure, everyone expected an upgraded 50s B-movie. Instead, one of the goriest yet smartly savage sci-fi horror classics anyone ever attempted.

Extra special to me as I was 12 back then and grounded from everything (banished to my bedroom with no t.v., Atari or outdoor fun) for poor grades due a long stretch of bullying followed by weeks of fighting back. I brought home a B on a math test when The Thing came to HBO for the first time back then and my parents knew I needed to see this as a lifelong horror nut. A one-night reprieve to see it and it blew me out of my mind.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

It’s St. Patty’s Day and having a lineage to Clan McDermott, some of the beers I’m keenest on are, naturally, Guinness, Murphy’s, Harp and Kilkenny.

Yet Smithwick’s red ale (its actual finishing palette resting somewhere between maroon and brown) remains dear to my hops-loving heart, one of my go-tos in any American Irish pub. Particularly mashed with a Guinness stout, the combo pint known as a Blacksmith. Cue the old Guinness t.v. spot: “Brilliant!”

Smithwicks has been around since 1710, originally brewed on the grounds of a Franciscan abbey, later coming together under the same brewing umbrella with Guinness in 1965. Originally manufactured in Kilkenny until 2013, it’s now brewed on Guinness turf in Dublin at St. James Gate. Ironically, Smithwicks these days is shipped internationally by the British alcohol distributor, Diageo.

Make sure you get the name right if you order one of these amber gems, lest the Irish true laugh you straight into the Atlantic. Or make good on this ad’s whimsical threat to put heat to our collective outsider arses. It’s pronounced “Smitticks,” not the way it reads, and this hysterical old pitch for the beer has such savory smarm it has me pouring my own pint as I write this.

I have friends with whom I’ve shared these glorious pints (especially on many memorable St. Patty’s pub sprees) and our glass-clinging call-to-arms was once “Up the Smitticks!” No doubt to many a private invitation around us to “feck off.” There was a time during COVID when “Smitticks” disappeared from U.S. beer retailers, making me wonder when we’d ever see it stateside again. Luckily, it wasn’t another 300 year wait for its return. I can’t imagine what we Yanks could send the Smithwick estate in gratitude, other than a plethora of IPA recipes which they already fused in 2011 for their own pale ale.

Slainte, my friends.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

I may be driving TJ out of her skull with Godzilla shenanigans, but not only did she push me to buy this hilarious car decal, she insisted on mounting in there herself, giggling the entire time. Good wife!

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.